A Long Hot Christmas

“Dan. The…”

“My client. The boy wonder of software.”

“Oh.” Lana’s leather jacket. “Well, I agree it’s a crazy idea,” Hope said tightly. No other way she could say it. The masque was hardening rapidly. “Maybe we could just tell whatzisname we talked and decided against it.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it some.”

“I guess I have, too,” Hope said, “but I can’t see you tonight. I’m wearing a masque.”

Sam stopped himself just in time to keep from saying, “Hey, kinky.” When his intelligence kicked in, he realized she wasn’t talking a Little Bo Peep mask but that stuff women put on their faces—why, he didn’t know. The masque explained the change in her voice. Now she sounded uptight.

“It has to stay on for forty-five minutes,” she went on. “Otherwise, I might consider at least discussing an arrangement with you. Briefly.”

So she was thinking about it. They must both be desperate. “Don’t worry about how you look,” he said. It was going to make him crazy if he couldn’t fit this obligation into the free time that had dropped into his lap. “She already told me you were presentable.”

“My sister described me as ‘presentable’?” The voice dripped ice.

Sam cursed himself. He was a lawyer. He was supposed to know how to choose his words, and if he couldn’t choose the right ones, to keep his mouth shut. “No, I didn’t talk to your sister. I asked Dan’s girlfriend if you were presentable and she said sure. She said it in a positive way,” he added for good measure. “Not like, ‘sure she is.’ More like ‘she sure is!’” He winced just listening to himself. Come on, Hope Sumner, say yes. We’re wasting time.

“We’re wasting time.”

Sam dropped his brand-new phone. Sweeping it up off the icy pavement, he heard Hope’s, “Hello? Hello?”

“Sorry about that,” he muttered.

“I was just saying, we might as well get this taken care of one way or the other.”

“My thoughts exactly. I’ll see you in—” He looked up at the number on the canopy that sheltered the entrance to a large, modern Westside apartment building “—a couple of minutes.”

HOPE OPENED the door and peered out. What she wanted to do next was slam the door in his face and lean against it until her knees stopped trembling.

She’d been prepared for an attractive man. Good clothes and neat grooming had to be just as important in the legal world as they were in the corporate world, and this man had told Leather Dan right up front that he was aiming for the top. She’d expected him to be smart, well-educated and career-driven. What she was not prepared for was six two or three or four of bone and muscle, of shoulders and long legs, of sheer male power in a black overcoat. For short, thick dark hair, the kind of rich, deep tan she couldn’t get even if she did throw skin health to the four winds and give it a try, and a pair of very blue eyes that examined her with thinly veiled curiosity.

It would be so, so wonderful if her face weren’t green.

On second thought, she was grateful to have the masque to hide behind. His masculinity was overpowering. This was a man a woman could actually want to be with. And that wasn’t the deal at all.

In fact, they didn’t have a deal yet, and they weren’t going to make a deal. A man like this could affect her attention span.

But she couldn’t slam the door, and she couldn’t take time to recover. “Sam?” she said briskly, hoping somehow he wouldn’t be, that he was a totally different man who’d come to the wrong door. “Alias ‘The Shark’?”

“That’s me,” he admitted.

With a strong feeling that she was doing the wrong thing, she opened the door wider and waved him in. “I’m sorry about the mudpack,” she said. “If I’d known…”

“No problem,” Sam said, shrugging out of his overcoat and revealing a dark pinstriped suit. “I’ve got sisters. I’ve seen them with green faces and cucumbers on their eyes.”

He smiled. His smile wasn’t anything like the calculating curve of a shark’s grin. It was warm and compelling. It sent out powerful vibes, although she had a feeling he had no idea his testosterone had sprung a potentially explosive leak. Hope’s knees buckled again, but she locked them in place and said, “I’ll take your coat. Please sit down. Would you like a glass of wine? I’m afraid I can’t join you, because I still have…”

“No, thanks,” he said simultaneously. “I still have…”

“…work to do,” they finished together, and Hope couldn’t resist the temptation to smile back at him. Feeling her face crack sobered her up at once, but it didn’t slow down her pulse rate, still the pounding of her heart or lessen her sudden awareness that under the sexless terrycloth robe she was wearing—nothing.

She didn’t need her Palm Pilot to tell her it was time, definitely time, to pull herself together and direct her thoughts to a higher plane.

“That’s our problem.” She let out a rounded sigh that settled the masque back into place. “At least my sisters think it’s a problem.”

“Liking your work?” Sam The Shark took a look around the room. “Great view,” he murmured. Then he aimed himself half-heartedly at one of her plump, velvety armchairs, seemed to give up on that goal, glanced at her deeply cushioned taupe sofa and finally slid onto it, carefully bypassing the knife-sharp corners of her smart glass coffee table.

“Loving it,” Hope said. She couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t look any more comfortable on the expensive Italian design statement than she felt. She’d paid extra to have it stuffed with down. How much more comfortable could you get?

She made a mental note to ask the interior designer what the problem might be. For the first time, she thought she actually needed a decorator.

If she wasn’t careful, she’d start thinking she needed a man. Noticing that she was still milling around her own living room, she took the armchair that sat at a right angle to Sam Sharkey. That way she could get another look at his profile, his long, elegant nose and his to-die-for lashes.

“I don’t even know if I love my work,” Sam said, looking thoughtful. “I don’t have time to think about it. All I know is that I’m determined to succeed at it.”

“Well. Me, too,” said Hope. The words “vice president” lit up in her mind like a Times Square theater marquee. She gave Sam a closer look, wondering if “partner” had just lit up for him.

“Tell me about your job,” he said, and turned the full force of his riveting dark-blue gaze on her.

The “vice president” sign faded as another, quite disturbing message lit up inside her. The impact was powerful enough that she had to dig deep for the name of her company, but it finally surfaced. “I’m at Palmer. In Marketing.”

“Palmer. It rings a bell. I should know what Palmer does, but…”

She’d just drifted into a vision of Sam parting her robe to move his hands sinuously across her breasts when it all came back to her, her job, her true love, the real object of her deepest desire.

“Pipe,” she said.

SHE SAID the word the way another woman might say pearls or Pashmina, pâté or Porsche. She all but licked her lips.

“Pipes? Meerschaums? Briars? Hookahs?”

“Pipe. Copper, plastic, cast iron, galvanized steel. Life flows through pipe. Pipe runs the world, and Palmer Pipe runs it better.”

He gazed at her, feeling stunned. “Is that original with you? That ‘Pipe runs the world’ line?”

“Of course not,” she said. “It came from the ad agency.” She paused. “I picked the ad agency.”

She looked at him so expectantly she reminded him all of a sudden of one of his sisters’ kids wanting approval for a dive he’d just done or a basket he’d just made. And he did his best to make them feel good about each small victory.

He’d been lying about seeing his sisters in mudpacks and cucumbers. He’d seen them in curlers, no makeup and one of Dad’s wornout shirts, but his sisters didn’t have the time or the money to take care of themselves the way a woman like Hope did. They considered it a major victory to get their hair washed and their kids in shoes.

It was up to him to change all that, change their hand-to-mouth existences, turn them into upwardly mobile middle-class citizens, educate those kids—

He’d assigned his family a compartment in his mind that he visited when he needed to, but he never enjoyed the visits. Right now wasn’t the time to go there.

“It’s a good slogan,” he said in an approving tone. If it had been one of his nephews, he’d have said, “You did good.”