by Barbara Daly
On the way to the elevator he saw a card lying on the floor of the hallway. Instinctively, he bent down to pick it up. And because he had to wait a couple of minutes for the elevator, he read it.
"M. Ewing. ImageMakers. A new you in—"
In no time flat?
The imagemaker could use a new ad agency. But then the concept sank in. Image. His image. The image he wanted to change. People like these tended to be quacks. He guessed some weren't. Important public figures paid big money for the services of imagemakers.
He'd never know if this one was legitimate or quack. He didn't need anybody to help him. He just needed to—
Or maybe he did. Need help. Wouldn't hurt to keep the card around. The elevator arrived. He put the card in his pocket and went downstairs to have breakfast with Mallory, and this morning he was going back to eggs. To hell with his heart. He needed all the energy he could get.
* * *
9
« ^ »
"Did the green spots give the baby any discomfort?"
"No, no thanks to your hair dye," McGregor Ross huffed. Carter worried the fountain pen between his index and middle fingers. He thought she might be a very pretty woman without that shrewish expression on her face. "I wiped the dye off immediately and put lotion on her chest."
"How long did the spots persist?"
"Long enough for her to miss out on a very important audition, one that might have launched her modeling career."
"But she's able to make auditions now." Carter smiled encouragingly.
"She's growing up! She's lost six crucial months of opportunity!"
"Did she have any assignments in the months before the dye incident?"
"No, but…" Mrs. Ross ruffled like an angry chicken.
"Did she have assignments after the green spots went away?"
"Well, no, but…"
"I object to this line of questioning," Phoebe broke in.
He needed a break, a break from the avaricious Ms. Ross, a break from Phoebe's come-hither eyes and the way they contrasted with her sharp comments and objections, and most of all a break from the pressure of Mallory sitting beside him, so close he could almost feel the heat of their bodies combining in an explosive chemical reaction.
He got his chance in the form of a telephone call. Excusing himself, he followed the paralegal who'd brought the message and picked up the phone in an empty office.
"Carter. Bill Decker."
"Hey. Bill. What's up?" Between them, he and Mallory had checked in with the boss three times a day, so Bill must have had an idea good enough that he couldn't wait to hear from one of them.
"I've been thinking." And he came to a halt.
"Thinking…" Carter said, using the same encouraging tone he'd used on McGregor Ross.
"Well, I sort of hate to bring it up."
Carter controlled his impatience. It was quiet in the empty room, no greedy moms, no Phoebe, no Mallory. Of course, he had no idea what they were up to in the conference room, and he really should get back.
"How are you and Phoebe Angell getting along?"
That brought back his focus. "Fine, I think. Did she complain about something I said or did?"
"No, no." Bill sounded as if his mind was off on another tangent. "Well, just that she inquired about what sort of relationship you had with Mallory, and I wondered…"
Now Carter just waited. He had a bad feeling he knew what was coming.
"I assured her that you and Mallory were merely colleagues, I mean, Mallory is Mallory."
Not anymore. Carter ground his pen between his fingers. Without considering the alternatives, Bill was dismissing any possibility that he might have a physical interest in Mallory. "My relationship to Mallory is none of Phoebe's business," he said, sounding as uptight as he felt.
"Of course not," Bill said quickly, "but…"
Carter sighed. "But what, Bill? Spit it out."
"I was just wondering if a little personal attention to Phoebe might pave the way, soften the atmosphere, re-channel her interests. You understand what I'm saying?"
How could I not understand? You explained it three ways.
"Is that why you put me on the case?" he asked. It was blunt and not the right thing to say to a man who was, at the moment, his boss, but he had to know. "You want me to prostitute myself to get Sensuous off the hook?"
"Of course not." Bill sounded so shocked that it confirmed Carter's suspicion that it was, in fact, precisely why he'd gotten this case. Then Bill went on, sounding smooth as tofu, "I wanted you on this case because I felt sure you could bring it to settlement—" he hesitated "—using all the means at your disposal."
There it was, the challenge, out in the open. "I feel just as sure I can reach settlement, Bill," Carter said, deciding that outrage wouldn't do him any good. "I'd prefer to handle it in a more straightforward way, though."
"Have you come up with a straightforward idea?" Bill's tone was dry.
"Mallory and I are full of ideas," Carter lied. "It's only a matter of choosing the one that will work best."
They ended the call on good terms, but Carter wasn't on good terms with himself. That call had been the straw that broke the camel's back. For the last five minutes he'd been fingering the ImageMakers card in his pocket and now he pulled it out. He needed to change his image—not merely to qualify for Mallory, but to approve of himself. He'd use a fake name, pay cash, no one would ever know that the up-and-coming Carter Compton was, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, having a crisis of confidence.
A male voice answered the ImageMakers number. "I'd like to make an appointment," Carter said.
"Yes," the voice purred. "Your name?"
Carter hesitated. "Jack Wright."
"Mr. Wright."
I'd like to be. Was that what this was all about? Being Mallory's Mr. Right?
As that thought shot through his head it startled him so badly he dropped his pen and was about to grind it out under his shoe before he remembered it was a Mont Blanc pen and not a lighted cigarette.
He bent his knees to pick it up. "Um, maybe this isn't such a good idea," he muttered, feeling perspiration pop out on his forehead.
"When our clients say that," said the voice, "it usually indicates an emergency. Can you come in right now?"
"Right now?" He actually squeaked the words. "No, no, I can't. I'm working."
"Lunch hour?"
Just as he'd thought. A quack. No clients. Not even enough sophistication to pretend that M. Ewing was very busy but perhaps they could sneak him in somewhere. But he was starting to think it might be an emergency, just like the man said, and he'd never get an appointment with a psychiatrist this fast. Maybe he just needed somebody to talk to and almost anybody would do.
"I could make it by twelve-thirty," he said slowly.
"She'll see you then."
She? "She?" he said aloud.
The voice turned frosty. "You have a problem consulting a woman about your image?"
"No, no, no," he hastened to say, feeling his current image slipping right down through all twenty-four floors of the building that lay beneath his feet. "I just, you know, with the name 'M. Ewing' I thought…" He pulled himself together. "I'll be there at twelve-thirty," he said, using a firm tone of voice and knowing he needed someone to use a firm hand on him in this situation. It was time for Carter Compton, the talker, the negotiator, the one always in the lead, to do some listening.
First he had to listen to a woman who was determined to thrust her infant daughter into the modeling game. Poor kid.
At twelve twenty-five, having left Mallory and Phoebe back at the law offices staring oddly at him when he deserted them, he gazed with grudging approval at the mansion which apparently lodged ImageMakers. This place would sell for three or four times the value of his parents' house in suburban Chicago, but it was less flagrantly ostentatious. He liked that.
He went up the cleanly shoveled sidewalk to the front door, where his positive feeli
ngs took a rapid downturn. He stared at the doorknocker. No way was he picking up that thing and banging it on its balls. It gave him a cramp in the groin just to think about it. So he knocked with his knuckles. A moment later the door opened.
"Mr. Wright," the man at the door said, but his eyes went directly to the doorknocker. "Oh, thank goodness, I thought it had been stolen."
"Ever think of getting a doorbell?" Carter growled.
The man smiled. "I'm Richard," he said. "Maybelle's ready to see you."
"Maybelle?" Carter said, but followed him across the marble foyer, anyway. He took in the office of this Maybelle person in one swift scan, observed that it was unusual, then gave the woman behind the nonstandard desk a once-over and decided her hair must have gone through repeated shock treatment. He sat down, glared at her and said, "Your knocker is obscene. You being interested in other people's images, I'm surprised you're not more careful about your own."
The woman had been looking him over, too, but now she narrowed her focus to his face. "What y'all talkin' about?"
Carter winced just hearing her voice. A quack all right, and he was getting out of here just as soon as he made his point about the knocker.
"The doorknocker," he said.
"Oh, that. I tole Dickie to pick one out. I don't never use the front door, so I don't know what he got. You don't like it? It sure bangs good."
He stood up. "You'd better take a look at it, decide for yourself."
If she said, "Hey, that's awesome," or whatever she'd say in that Texas accent of hers, he'd know he had no business being here. Instead, as they stepped outside together and she got a look at the door, she screamed, "Dickie."
The scream echoed off the elegant facades that lined the quiet, winterbound street. "Ma'am?" Richard appeared, wearing a sheepish expression.
"What is that?" Maybelle pointed with a shaking finger.
"Well, it's a—"
"Don't say it," Maybelle snapped. "You tryin' to ruin me? What are people gonna think? I'll tell you what—that I'm runnin' a male-escort service here."
Dickie drew himself up to his full, extremely muscular height. "To me, it said 'We have a sense of humor here.'"
"Way-ell, that ain't what it says to me. Get rid of it. Get me some nice antique thing that don't look like nuthin' but a doorknocker, you hear?"
"Okay," Dickie, or Richard, said with a long-suffering sigh.
"And make us some coffee. You like regular or dee-caf." She turned an assessing gaze on Carter, who was getting pretty cold out there on the stoop, while this skinny little woman in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a panther printed on it didn't seem to notice.
"Regular, but I don't—" He was leaving, was what he'd decided, just as soon as he got his overcoat back.
The gaze turned approving. "I'll be danged. He likes regular. Y'all hear that, Dickie? Brew us up a pot of real strong stuff." She turned to Carter, and her expression turned wistful. "Y'all don't happen to like it percolated, do you? Kindly muddy-like?"
"No, but you have what you like, because I—"
"He don't," Maybelle told Dickie. "So drip it. Nobody's perfect," she added before she marched Carter back across the foyer. He had his mouth open to ask for his coat when she said, "That's not all you come here for, was it? To yell at me about the doorknocker?"
Instead of asking for his coat, he looked at her, looked into big blue eyes that offered to listen to whatever he had to say. "No," he admitted. "The doorknocker thing was a sidebar."
"Then sit down," she said, marching toward the chair behind the desk that looked like the fossilized nest of some long-gone pterodactyl.
"Now that we've done the doorknob," she said, "tell me what y'all think of this here desk. Mebbe I'd better take a minute to work on my own image."
She'd done everything Maybelle had told her to do and still he'd taken somebody else out to lunch. It wasn't Phoebe Angell, either. At least Phoebe was a known quantity.
She'd refused Phoebe's halfhearted invitation to have lunch. The woman's expression had said, "I'd rather be a waitress on roller skates than have lunch with you." Instead, she went back to the hotel, netted a table for one in the restaurant, ordered a salad and darted up to the suite. She needed to take a look at herself in the full-length mirror, figure out what she might have done wrong.
She flung open the door of the room, and the first thing she saw was the tiny Christmas tree—wearing the ornament Carter had bought at Bloomingdale's their first night here.
The nonverbal message in that single ornament stunned her. She was too verbal to know what it meant, but she was certain it was meant to tell her something. "Glad you bought the mistletoe"—something like that. She became aware of the heavy weight that had settled in the lower half of her body, realizing it was nothing new, it was there every second she was with Carter, but it seemed to be getting heavier, harder to ignore.
While she gazed at the ornament, a certainty settled in her bones. Tonight or never.
Carter came back to Phoebe's conference room looking like raw skin. Shaken and vulnerable, those were the words that came to Mallory's mind. Also, he was late.
"Are you all right?" she said, then realized she'd looked at her watch. Scolding him about his lateness was hardly the path to seduction.
"Is anyone all right after a root canal?" he growled.
"Oh, sorry," she said lamely. He hadn't complained of a toothache. She hadn't noticed any swelling. He'd had crunchy bacon with his breakfast. It must have come on quite suddenly.
Or he was lying.
Apparently he wasn't feeling too bad, because he wound up the session with McGregor Ross at five-thirty promptly, and then said he had to leave.
At that point, she hoped it was a dentist he was running off to. Her resolve flagged as she stomped her way through a light snow to the hotel, her new snow boots the only bright spot in her cloudy sky. How could she ever have thought of wearing plastic thingies over her Soft 'N' Comfys?
With a desolate hour to spare before meeting Maybelle at Bergdorf's, she decided to check her e-mail.
It surprised her so much to see Macon's address in the Sender column that she ignored all her business messages and opened his. It was perfunctory as usual, but the message was not at all usual.
"mallory do you think anybody brought up like we were can relax enough to fall in love macon"
Macon? Asking about love? Was the earth still turning? Had the moon escaped?
She wrote back, "I don't know, but I think we have to give it a try to find out." Her fingers slowed on the keyboard, then she typed rapidly, "What exactly is it that you're doing in Pennsylvania?"
She got up from the computer. The suite seemed empty without Carter. She felt as if her life had been empty without Carter, would continue to be empty without him. That was pretty good advice she'd given Macon, now that she thought about it. She'd never know until she gave it a try.
"Tonight we go for underwear," she informed Maybelle when they met in Bergdorf's first floor Fine Jewelry. She looked her imagemaker straight in the eye.
"Oh, hon, this is startin' to sound good," Maybelle crooned. "I was thinkin' fingernails with stars on 'em tonight and save the underwear for the weekend, but if you're ready, let's go for it. Anything intrestin' happen today?"
They started up the escalator toward Lingerie. "Carter's out with somebody," Mallory said, feeling despondent. "Not Phoebe, and he didn't mention Athena or Brie, so this one's an entirely new challenge." She could bet her name began with a C, unless the Cs were all unavailable. "He might even have taken her out to lunch," she told Maybelle. "He said he'd had a root canal. He might have been lying, but he did look awful when he came back."
Maybelle let out a bark of laughter. "I consulted with a man today who acted like tawkin' to me was worse than havin' a root canal," she said, shaking her head.
"Men," Mallory said. "They just hate opening up, don't they?"
"Yep, jes' like oysters," Maybelle said. Her eyes g
leamed with victory. "I knew jes' by lookin' at this one that pryin' wouldn't do no good. I had to smash his shell with a sledge hammer. I made him come back a second time in the same day. That's a record."
Mallory felt a certain sympathy for the guy. "What was his problem, since we're not mentioning names?" she asked.
"Oh, one of the old standards," Maybelle said offhandedly. "He's always had a way with the ladies, but now he wants 'em to look at him in a different way. If you ask me, he's in love with one gal and don't know it yet, and even if he did know it, he wouldn't have no idea how to tell her."
Turned around backward, that could describe me. But they'd arrived in lingerie, and Maybelle vanished into the foam of silk and nylon, pastels, blacks and leopard prints. While she circled, grabbing things up, chatting with yet another obsequious salesperson, Mallory stood transfixed, staring at a mannequin in a hot-pink gown and robe. The robe was kimono-style with wide, flowing sleeves and a sash. It was short, and the gown was shorter, lace-trimmed, a simple shift with spaghetti straps.
Maybelle zoomed by toward a dressing room. "I want this," Mallory said.
Maybelle screeched to a halt. "That's real purty." She said to the salesperson. "Get her one to try on, will you, hon?"
In the dressing room Mallory reached first for the hot pink ensemble. She had a feeling about it, pure intuition, and the feeling intensified when she stepped into the tiny gown. She was naked beneath it, and it brushed her body like a caress. She wriggled with pleasure. The familiar ache of wanting deepened until she thought her knees might buckle under her. If Carter had been in the dressing room with her—