Mistletoe Over Manhattan

“Where do you live?” Carter said.

It was the last question she’d expected. “Ah. I, um, I live, ah…” Surely she could remember her address. Finally she managed to spit it out.

“I was thinking we could drive to O’Hare together, but I’m too far out of your way. Okay if we meet at the gate? My secretary made the reservations. Your aide can call her, take it from there.”

“Gate,” Mallory stammered, nodding. “Ticket.”

A quick goodbye to Bill, a flashing smile in Mallory’s direction and he was gone. Mallory sank back into her chair.

Bill was wearing a satisfied expression. “I knew you were the right person to do this job.”

“Why?” It came out like a sigh.

He beamed at her. “You’re immune to Carter Compton’s manly charms. I can trust you. Anywhere. With anyone.” He leaned forward, his expression shining with sincerity. “I can read a person like a book, and I saw it, just now, while you were chatting with Compton. Your colleagues think of you as a lawyer, not as a woman.”

On another day Mallory might have taken Bill’s backhanded compliment in stride. All he meant was that she was a trusted colleague, a woman who didn’t use her sexuality to her professional advantage. But seeing Carter had set off something weird in her mind. Her fingers fumbled with the PalmPilot she usually handled with such dexterity. “High praise indeed,” she mumbled through lips that felt cold and numb. “Thanks again, Bill.” She stood up. “I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow.”

On her way back to her office she thought, Bill saw it, too. Carter doesn’t see me as a woman.

Suddenly overheated from frustration, she quickened her step and opened the door to her office suite, where she found Hilda, Cassie and Ned waiting like circled wagons.

“What happened?” they said in chorus.

“Did he fire you?” Ned added an appropriately lugubrious expression to his thick southern drawl.

“Did you find out what he’s doing in the building?” Cassie’s interest was no longer a mystery now that Mallory knew who he was.

“Should I order boxes for clearing out your office?” Hilda sounded anxious.

Still feeling dazed, Mallory let her eyes drift from one to the other. “No, Hilda, you should call Carter Compton’s secretary and get me a plane ticket.”

She heard Cassie’s gasp, but forged on.

“He’s taking on the Green case. Bill has assigned me to go to New York with him to depose the plaintiffs’ witnesses.”

In the thunderous silence, Cassie’s eyes widened while her mouth thinned out into a vicious line. “I hate you!” she yelled. “I was dying, dying, for that assignment.” She stomped into her office, from which immediately came the sounds of objects hitting the wall.

“Pack enough condoms to last a couple of days,” Ned suggested, his mild, owlish gaze swinging back from Cassie’s closed door to Mallory’s face. “Carter’s the Casanova of the twenty-first century, a legend in his time. Are you on the Pill?”

“Keep your knees locked together,” Hilda said, wincing as the crashing sounds increased in volume.

Still in slow motion, Mallory stared at Ned, then at Hilda. “But you see,” she said in the calm manner of the totally shocked, “that’s why Bill’s sending me. Because I don’t need the Pill and I won’t need the condoms. My knees are already permanently locked together. I am not a woman. I am a lawyer.”

She drifted into her own office and closed the door just in time to see her framed diploma from the University of Chicago School of Law jump off its hook from the impact of whatever Cassie had just thrown against the dividing wall. A thin ray of sunlight broke through the uncertain winter sky to illuminate its glass as it shattered into a million glittering shards.

It seemed significant, somehow.

Mallory opened her PalmPilot to her to-do list. “Have diploma reframed,” she wrote with the slim plastic stylus.

CARTER RETURNED TO THE legal department library in a thoughtful mood. He was very glad Mallory was going with him to New York. Good old Mallory. With her on the job, he wouldn’t have to spend half his time in sexual fencing: the way he’d have to with most women.

He was getting tired of it, starting to want something real, starting to think about settling down.

With Paige, maybe. Well, no, not Paige. Not for the long run. Even a long weekend was sort of a stretch.

He’d eliminated Diana last weekend.

Andrea, then. Uh-uh. He never quite connected with Andrea, never felt they were talking about the same thing.

What about Marcie? Marcie was smart and sexy, and had made no secret of the fact that she’d like their relationship to grow, blossom and produce an engagement ring set with a diamond of substantial size. He didn’t know why, after he’d been with her, he sometimes felt a little—empty.

An unprecedented mood of dissatisfaction settled over him. He dated dozens of girls, and dozens more wished he’d ask them out or accept their thinly veiled invitations. One of them had to be just right.

In the meantime, he loved his work, and this was the craziest case he’d ever lucked into. Just thinking about it dispelled his bad mood. Its proper name was Kevin Knightson et al. v. Sensuous. Informally, they referred to it as the Green case, because last March a hundred or so women plus a few men had attempted to dye their hair Sensuous Flaming Red, and instead, had dyed their hair—and everything else the solution had touched—pea-green, as the brief described it.

They didn’t think it was funny. He’d better make sure he didn’t let on he thought it was funny. Mallory sure wouldn’t think it was funny. He’d be able to count on her to keep his face straight.

He could count on her for everything, just as he had in law school. That time they’d studied all night—something in his head had gone click and he’d finally gotten it together. It had taken a lot of hard work, but that one night had turned his law school record around.

He’d been sorely tempted to end the night with Mallory in his bed, at least to hold that tall, slim woman in his arms and give her a kiss that said, “Thanks, and let’s get together sometime.” A kiss that would make her want to get together sometime.

Why hadn’t he?

He’d gotten himself together was what had happened, had gotten the second highest grade on that exam. Mallory, of course, had gotten the highest.

Funny, he’d forgotten how pretty she was with her pale, blue-green eyes and that incredible silvery-blond hair.

He realized he was worrying his pen between his index and middle fingers, a nervous habit he’d been trying to break. His time was too valuable to waste it like this. He’d been thinking about the case, which was all he could afford to think about until he negotiated a settlement. Sensuous had recalled that entire lot of dye upon getting the first complaint, of course, and had sent lawyers out to negotiate generous settlements to the first fifteen or twenty of those hundred plus complainants. Unfortunately, a couple of the complainants had found an ambitious lawyer—or she had found them, which happened sometimes—who got all of them together and filed suit. They weren’t going to settle for hair therapy, weekly manicures, new sinks, re-painted walls and regrouted tile floors anymore. They were after everything Sensuous was worth.

And all because a bored assembly line man had decided it would be fun to add a permanent green dye to a batch of hair color in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

Carter’s first priority was to keep the case from going to trial, which was one of the ironies of being a trial lawyer. He’d do his best to convince these pea-green plaintiffs that weekly manicures and new sinks were all the payback they needed.

He hoped Sensuous had hired him for his professional reputation, not his personal one. He hoped they didn’t think he could seduce the plaintiffs and their lawyer—a woman—into settling.

“Mr. Compton?” He looked up to see one of the department’s paralegals at the library door. “I know you have permission to access the Green case files on our network, but I made you a CD as backup in case you’re somewhere without a network connection.” The girl’s hands trembled as she handed him the packaged disk.

“Thanks,” he said, standing up, giving her a smile. For a second he was afraid she was going to faint. Then what would he do? But she mustered up some poise, returned his smile, batted her lashes and swung her hips provocatively as she made her way out of the library. At the door she paused, struck a sexy pose, gave him some more eyelash action and said, “I’m Lisa, and if there’s anything else I can do to help, like if you need clerical or paralegal backup in New York…”

It was the story of his life. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t anything he did deliberately. Some chemical in his body—well, testosterone was what it was—must have sprung a leak at birth and had been oozing out of him ever since, attracting women like beer attracted slugs.

If he intended to settle down, he had to plug that leak. He had to become irresistible to just one woman. And he had to stop attracting every unattached female who came into view. There was no better time than right now to give it a try. He wondered what he could say that would leave no doubt in Lisa’s mind that he wouldn’t be calling her for a wild weekend in New York. And while he wondered and Lisa waited, a bright idea popped into his mind.

“Thanks, Lisa,” he said. “I’ll pass that on to Mallory Trent. She’s going to need plenty of support from the department.”

He was relieved to hear the smoky tone clear from Lisa’s voice. “Of course,” she said, releasing her body from the arched-back position that made her breasts and butt stick out at the same time. “I’m happy to give Mallory any help she needs.”

When she slammed the library door, Carter felt he’d made some progress. He’d discovered, he ruminated as he made his way back to his own handsome office at Rendell and Renfro, that it paid to have a woman on his team who could run interference for him with other women.