Father of Two

by Judith Arnold

  “Okay,” Dennis had agreed. “I’ll come over.”

  “Great,” Jamie had said. “Would you mind bringing some muffins with you? Assorted—but nothing with raisins in them. Sammy doesn’t like raisins. I’ll make coffee and we’ll call it breakfast.”

  Still glowering dubiously at his muffin, Dennis wasn’t sure he’d call it breakfast. A pre-indigestion experience might be more accurate. Samantha, the baby, seemed ecstatic, though, nibbling muffin crumbs and babbling in some odd dialect that sounded like Latvian.

  “All right,” Dennis said, reaching for his coffee. “Tell me how I can get this libel suit to go away.”

  “I’m not a lawyer,” Jamie remarked, leaning back in his chair and gazing through the screened walls of the porch, which overlooked the rambling, wooded hills behind his house. “But even I know the answer to that question: money. Pay the guy’s price.”

  “His price is one million dollars.”

  “Oh.” Jamie’s eyebrows shot up. Then he laughed. “Now why didn’t I think of accusing the Gazette of libel? I could use a spare million.”

  “The guy isn’t going to get a million dollars. What has me stumped is, I think he could be paid off very cheaply if the Gazette were willing to publish an article clearing his name. But Bob Hammond won’t do that.”

  “Why not?” Jamie popped a chunk of apple-nut muffin into his mouth. “Perhaps the question should be, why are you asking me instead of him?”

  “He dumped this case on me and then left town for a week. And anyway, he seems to be living in fear of the reporter who wrote the original article. The reporter says his story is true, and he told Hammond that if the paper printed any sort of retraction, he’d walk. I was hoping that as an occasional kibitzer over at the paper, you could explain this to me.”

  “Who’s the reporter?”

  Dennis pulled a piece of note paper out of an inner pocket of his blazer and read the name he’d jotted down. “Will Rodriguez.”

  “Oh.” Jamie nodded knowingly. His daughter squeaked. “The scuttlebutt is, Rodriguez is being heavily courted by the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. He’s good. Harvard grad, Rhodes Scholar, and the son of Salvadoran refugees. You don’t let a reporter like him slip away, if you can help it.”

  “Is he worth a six-figure settlement to Hammond?”

  “Six figures? You’re giving this guy who’s suing the paper six figures?” Jamie shook his head. “Man, did I pick the wrong line of work. Extortion pays better.”

  “If I tell Hammond to settle for six figures, he’s going to blow a gasket—unless I know that that’s the price of holding onto Rodriguez. If he doesn’t want Rodriguez that much, I can noodle around with this complaint a bit. I can string along his attorney, make her squirm, make her go down.”

  “Go down?” Jamie’s eyebrows rose again. “First squirm, then go down? That sounds like fun.”

  “I’m talking about negotiating a settlement,” Dennis snapped, refusing to consider why he’d chosen those particular words—and why they made his temperature jolt a few degrees higher. The last time he’d seen Gail Saunders, she’d been sitting like a Sister of Mercy in the corner of the play area, stoical and somber, as if protecting her little clay pots were a sacred mission. He should have yanked off her bandanna and rubbed his clay-covered fingers through her silky blond hair and down to the nape of her neck, and if there’d been any clay left on his fingers he could have brought them around to her face, stroking and...

  Forget it.

  He broke his muffin in half, then in quarters, and hoisted one quarter to his mouth. Taking a bite, he glanced at the baby. She was really cute—well, not as cute as Erin, but then, Erin was to girls in the universe what Dennis was to lawyers: the best. “Things working out with her?” he asked, angling his head toward the child, who had stopped eating long enough to sing a little ditty, the lyrics of which were, “ah-dee, ah-dee, ah-dee.”

  “Things are working out great,” Jamie reported. “Except for those mornings when my lawyer asks me out for breakfast and I have to turn him down because I can’t find a sitter.”

  Dennis had handled Jamie’s custody situation, and he was going to handle the baby’s adoption by Jamie’s fiancée, right after she and Jamie tied the knot in June. He knew Jamie was crazy about his baby, and thrilled to be a father. But Dennis couldn’t help wondering how the Ultimate Guy handled both child-rearing and, well, satisfying his fiancée.

  Or, more accurately, satisfying himself.

  “I want a social life,” Dennis blurted out. “I had one before my kids moved in with me. Now I don’t see how I can manage it.”

  “Are you kidding?” Jamie threw back his head and laughed. “Ladies love men with kids. They think it’s sexy. The smell of baby puke on your shoulder is like an aphrodisiac to them.”

  “I’m sure.” Dennis lowered the piece of muffin in his hand. Jamie’s comment was enough to make him lose what little appetite he’d had for the lump-o-lead bran muffin on his plate.

  “I’m not kidding. A woman sees you slapping a diaper on a kid, and she thinks, ‘Wow, is that man competent! I wonder what else he can do with those hands.’”

  “My kids aren’t in diapers,” Dennis reminded Jamie, not bothering to add that the woman he wanted to have a social life with was the last person in the world to be impressed by a man’s fathering skills. She hated children.

  Wait a minute. Who said Dennis wanted to have a social life with Gail Saunders? He wanted to conquer her in court, yes—and he wouldn’t mind conquering her in bed, as long as she didn’t slip back into her martyred Sister of Mercy persona. But litigation and sex were not the same thing as a social life.

  Then again, litigation and sex were two of Dennis’s greatest joys. Who needed a social life when you had those?

  “Picnics,” Jamie suggested. “Take the kids and a lady on a picnic. Or to the circus. An outing where the kids will have a ton of fun and she’ll get in touch with her inner child.”

  “She doesn’t have an inner child,” Dennis muttered.

  Once again Jamie’s eyebrows performed acrobatics. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Nobody. Some idiot whose idea of getting in touch with her inner child is to smash clay into my face. Don’t ask,” he cut Jamie off. “It’s too ridiculous. Listen, I’ve got to run. But thanks for the insights about Rodriguez. I guess a first-generation American Rhodes Scholar doesn’t join the Gazette staff every day.”

  “Nah. They usually get stuck hiring clowns like me,” Jamie agreed good-naturedly. He stood with Dennis and accompanied him back into the house and down the hall to the front door. Unshaven and barefoot, wearing gray sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt reading “Arlington Ten-K Road Race—Run Till You Drop,” he looked like an overaged frat boy the morning after. But his eyes were happy. Life was treating him well, and it showed.

  Dennis might be better dressed and groomed, but his own eyes were undoubtedly bleary from the past two restless nights. Both Saturday and Sunday, he’d lain awake, thinking about Gail Saunders, thinking about the energy radiating from her when she’d jammed her clay into his nose, the brilliance of her eyes, the unfettered ecstasy of her smile. He wanted to see her smile like that, and he wanted to be the cause of her ecstasy. But not by offering his nose as a clay mold.

  There was no reason he should want her. No reason at all. He ought to be training his sights on the kind of woman who, like Jamie’s fiancée, got turned on by baby-puke. Or, at the very least, by whining and obscene rock and roll songs and lectures on Barbie’s private parts. Gail was obviously not the woman for Dennis.

  All of which made it very surprising when, a few minutes later, he called his office from his car phone to get his messages, learned from Velda that Gail wanted to speak to him, and felt a strange exhilaration in his gut. Gail wanted to speak to him. To tell him to drop dead, probably, but still...

  She wanted to speak to him.

  Instead of dialing her number, he steered toward the do
wntown neighborhood of the Public Defender’s office, figuring that if she wanted to speak to him, she could damn well look him in the eye while she said her piece.

  ***

  “HONEST TO PETE,” Gail grumbled, peering up from the Body-Odor Maniac’s file and finding Dennis Murphy on the opposite side of her desk. If that receptionist didn’t start screening Gail’s visitors soon, she was going to demand that the woman be fired for failing to do her job.

  Of course, if the receptionist got fired, the office would go without a receptionist for a long time. If it was going to take them a year to replace Nola, it would surely take them at least twice that long to hire a receptionist.

  Gail craned her neck to peer up at him. He looked awfully tall when he was standing and she was sitting. He had no trouble gazing over the Great Wall of Files at her. “What are you doing here?” she asked none too graciously.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, easing into a lazy smile. “My secretary said you wanted to talk to me, so I figured I’d drop by.”

  “Well, I’m busy,” she said, willing to jeopardize a quick settlement for Leo just because she was angry at Murphy for failing to return her call by phone. But as satisfying as it was to be angry with Murphy, she did have to settle Leo’s case—and ignoring Murphy when he was looming above her desk wasn’t going to settle anything. “All right,” she relented. “If you’d like to talk business, I’ll find another chair and we’ll talk.”

  Murphy’s gaze circled her small, cluttered office. “You really think you could fit another chair in here?”

  She could fit a chair—but fitting Murphy was another thing altogether. He was too tall. Too lanky. Too downright handsome. Perhaps he could take a seat in Nola’s office across the hall, and they could shout their negotiations through open doors.

  But she wasn’t going to let him get away with snide remarks about the inferiority of her working environment. “Some people think having a fancy office is important,” she remarked loftily. “Others believe it’s the work that matters, not the decor.”

  He scanned the room, the overburdened stacks of metal shelves on one wall, the four-drawer file cabinet with one drawer open an inch because she’d jammed one file too many into it, the indoor-outdoor brown carpeting, the bulletin board dappled with notes and memos and calendars, and finally the mounds of paperwork on her desk. “I never would have guessed you for a slob, Gail,” he needled her.

  “I’m not a slob,” she answered, refusing to let anger into her voice. “If I had an extra file cabinet and about eight square feet of extra floor space, I’d be able to store these files properly. But I know where everything is. I know which file is in each stack, which case is in each file. There’s a logic in all this.”

  “I’m sure.” He fingered a file at the bottom of one of her stacks. “I don’t suppose this one is Mr. Kopoluski’s, is it?”

  “Hey! Don’t you touch my files!” She reached across the table to slap his hand away. He immediately pulled his arm back, but one of his fingers snagged on the bottom file. He yanked it, unbalancing all the files above it and on either side. As Gail watched in horror, file after file slid toward her, flipping open and releasing their pages. She let out a small scream and reflexively tried to stop the flow, but pushing back the files jostled other files, which tumbled this way and that, spilling pages here and there, into the air, onto the floor, across Gail’s lap.

  “Oh, no,” Murphy murmured, sounding less contrite that he ought to.

  Gail was too infuriated to speak. All the papers were labeled, but as she looked at the hundreds of sheets cascading across her desk, onto the floor, under her chair and against the shelves, what she saw was a clean-up job that was going to take time she didn’t have to spare.

  She wanted to cry, but she wasn’t going to—not in front of Murphy. He’d probably caused this disaster on purpose, just to make her life miserable. She wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of watching her fall to pieces.

  She glared up at him. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” she muttered, then pushed away from her desk and bent to lift a few of the empty folders.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said, this time almost sounding as if he meant it. He gathered the papers that had fallen on his side of the desk and carried them around to her. “Here, these say ‘Josephson’ on them. Which folder do they go in?”

  “The Josephson folder,” she said tightly. If he helped her she might not be able to hate him quite as much as she wanted to. But she really could use his assistance. “Here—” she rummaged through the few folders still left on her desk and unearthed the now-empty Josephson file. “They go there.”

  Murphy slid the pages into the folder, then went on a paper safari around her room, gathering up the far-flung stray pages and bringing them back to her while she collected the pages closer to the desk. “Morton. Romero. Claver.” He read the headers and labels on each document. If she indicated with a nod that she had that folder handy, he passed the document to her. If not, he placed it in a neat pile on the side. “What are all these cases?”

  “What do you think?” she asked, resenting his help yet immeasurably grateful for it. “Two-bit criminal cases. A few three-bit cases mixed in. Five drug cases. One aggravated assault. Two attempted murders. A car-jacking. I have a really high-class clientele.”

  “How can you stand defending such sleaze-buckets?” he asked, dropping gracefully onto his knees and scooping up a stack of disorganized pages.

  “Ever hear of innocent until proven guilty? Or were you absent from law school that day?”

  “You’re going to tell me all these car-jackers and attempted murderers are innocent?”

  “They aren’t car-jackers and attempted murderers. They’re people charged with crimes, and a lot of them didn’t do those crimes. Others might have mitigating circumstances. And I’m going to defend them in court. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Better you than me,” he conceded. “Here’s another Josephson.”

  She slid the paper into the Josephson file, then glanced under the well of her desk. At least six file folders and a fifty or sixty pages of documentation spread like a swamp of paper across the floor.

  Sighing, she lowered herself to the floor, carefully arranging her skirt over her knees. “I’ll get those,” Murphy offered chivalrously, just as she leaned into the well. He leaned in at the same time, and his shoulder slammed into hers.

  “Ow!”

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded truly sorry this time. Gravely sorry. Abjectly sorry.

  “It’s all right.” She tried to twist around, but he was in her way. His foot had somehow gotten hooked around one of the caster-tipped legs of her chair, which had wheeled up against his leg, making it difficult for him to back out of the well.

  “I’m—just—give me a second here,” he said, trying to kick free of the chair.

  His face was too close to hers. She pressed against the vertical metal surface of the well, but she had no place to put her hand except his arm. The wool of his sleeve was as soft as flannel. The arm beneath it was hard with muscle.

  He kicked at the chair again. The movement of his leg caused his torso to recoil slightly, jamming him against the other vertical wall. He pushed away, and lost his balance, barely catching himself on one arm before he fell on top of her.

  His face was even closer. In the shadows under the desk, she felt as if they were in some secret place—a cave, a grotto, a quiet, enclosed darkness where nothing existed but Murphy and her, and a few dozen sheets of paper. The paper didn’t matter. All that mattered was his eyes, glinting with laughter and hunger, and the smooth plane of his cheek, and the strong shape of his nose, and his mouth. His mouth nearing hers, closing in on hers. Covering hers.

  She meant to tell him to cut it out, to back off and behave himself, to help her reassemble the Romero and Doulonet files. But once his lips took hers, she couldn’t tell him anything. Not without breaking the kiss.

  Whic
h she definitely did intend to do, in just a few seconds. But first...first she had to figure out why this felt so good, why she felt so much hot desire in the caress of his mouth, so much feverish need in the pit of her stomach. She wasn’t a highly sensual person. She didn’t crave body contact with men. She had never enjoyed sex, and she certainly wasn’t going to start enjoying it with someone like Murphy.

  And yet...

  He angled his head slightly. The movement should have been impossible in such a cramped space—but then, everything about this was impossible. He seemed too powerful, sprawled half in and half out of her desk well, his feet still tangled in the legs of her chair, his torso propped on one arm while he freed his other from the papers layering the floor and lifted his hand to her cheek. His palm molded to the curve of her face; his thumb slid down to her chin and tipped it, somehow easing her mouth open before she could think about how to stop him.

  His tongue filled her mouth, and she heard herself protest. Or maybe it was more a sigh than a protest. Maybe it was a soul-deep moan, the sound of her heart wrenching free, the sound of her entire body softening, her soul liquefying.

  His tongue stroked her. His fingertips traced her skin. His chest leaned into hers until she was sinking down to the floor, under him. He rose above her, using both hands to cradle her face, resting his body lightly against hers. Her breasts hurt, but not from his weight, not from him. From something else, something inside.

  His tongue surged again, and she closed her eyes. Something was happening to her, something frightening and lovely and altogether peculiar. Something that made her slide her hands up his arms to his shoulders and hold on tight.

  “Gail?” A woman’s voice echoed miles away. “Where are you, girl? I need that Body-Odor Maniac’s file back. His arraignment’s been moved up and I didn’t get outta here in time. Gail?”

  Gail heard Nola’s footsteps approaching from the hall, pausing in the doorway, and then stalking off again. She probably hadn’t seen anything, Gail assured herself, pulling back as Murphy did. Panic seized her as she gazed up at him in the gloom under the desk. He seemed extremely amused.