Mistletoe Over Manhattan

CARTER DRUMMED ON HIS desktop with the pen he held the same way he used to hold a cigarette. He’d thought the pea-green query had been a good question for Mallory, but he could tell from her hesitation that she’d thought it was a damned silly question and she would probably have said so if she weren’t such a well-brought-up girl.

She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was all woman.

Feeling as if he’d regressed ten years, he threw everything into his briefcase and went home to his Lake Shore Drive apartment. It was a mess. He was glad to be leaving it, and his cleaning service would deal with it before he got back. He’d forgotten to pick up the pizza and had to order one in. It didn’t arrive until he’d finished packing, so he ate it in bed while he watched the news. He reflected that he still had that spoiled rich kid inside him, and every now and then, he had to let him out.

Feeling that the smell of pepperoni might follow him all the days of his life, he picked a thread of mozzarella cheese off his favorite pillow, pounded it into a comfortable configuration and tried very hard to get a good night’s sleep.

Good luck. But exhaustion took over, and next thing he knew, he was at the airport waiting for Mallory.

So where the hell was she?

He’d arrived at the gate at a time he thought was a polite compromise between the airline’s ridiculous demands and the reality of the situation, but he’d been there fifteen minutes now with no sign of the woman.

Maybe she was there and ignoring him, the way she did at work parties where he’d caught an occasional glimpse of her but could never seem to catch up with her.

With more relief than he wanted to admit to, he saw her aiming toward him, tall, elegant, dressed all in black with that silver-blond hair swinging forward on her shoulders.

As far as he knew, it was her natural hair color, and he assumed that as she grew older, it would go gently from silver-blond to silver-gray. You would hardly notice. Especially since you hardly noticed Mallory in the first place.

He stood up, started to smile at her, then felt his eyebrows drawing together in a frown as he wondered why his heart had speeded up a little. He really had to cut down on the caffeine. He had so much adrenaline pumping through him all the time he didn’t need caffeine at all.

She was, in fact, a great-looking woman. The man across from him was giving her an appreciative gaze as she moved between them, pulling a roll-on briefcase behind her.

Damn. She’d checked her luggage. Collecting it would take an extra thirty minutes at LaGuardia. His frown deepened, but whether it was because of the luggage or the appreciative male he was suddenly unsure.

“Hi,” was all she said.

The word came through full lips of the palest pink, and her voice was rich and throaty. Something about it, or maybe it was the look that man across from him was giving her, made him put his arm around her, nothing more than a cocktail party-type hug, but his heart did an even more violent flip-flop. This was absurd. He removed his arm in a hurry and said, “Mallory. What kept you?”

He was thinking about talking to his doctor about that little aortic thing when she said, “You’re here so early! How can you work here? You must be able to focus better than I can. I always wait until the very last second to get to the gate, because…”

As the appreciative man finally dropped his gaze to his newspaper, Carter had a cooling memory of the reason he hadn’t tried to make love to her during their law school years. It was clear she didn’t want him to. Although her voice sounded a little breathless, it was probably from hurrying, because everything else about her said, “Don’t touch.”

“I just got here myself,” he said, and this time he managed a smile. “I guess you got held up checking bags.”

“No,” Mallory assured him. “This is it.” She gestured toward the roll-on, and her ice-pale hair swung forward on her shoulders in a perfect, shining arc.

Carter gazed at the bag with new curiosity. What did she have in there, freeze-dried outfits that expanded when dipped in water? He’d taken Diana to Acapulco last weekend—Diana and four matched pieces of tapestry-covered luggage—where he’d discovered that looking at beautifully dressed Diana was all he would ever care to do. A wasted weekend, and he had so few free ones.

“Planning a shopping spree?” he asked Mallory.

With a single glance through blue-green eyes as ice-pale as her hair and lipstick, she made him feel like the worst and most odious of male chauvinists. “Of course not. I’m going to New York to work, not shop.”

Was she always that way? Or just with him? That made her the only woman in the world who was like that with him.

“Welcome to United Airlines flight four-oh-three,” an agent piped up. “We are now boarding First Class and Premier members.”

Carter chewed on his lower lip while they joined the line to board. He was afraid he knew why Mallory acted this way with him, and it didn’t bode well for their working relationship, which, he could easily see, was the only kind of relationship she cared to have with him.

But with so many other women in the world, why should he care?

3

AS SOON AS THEY were settled on the plane, she was going to let herself breathe. As soon as they were settled side by side in the generous first-class seats, she began to fear she might never breathe again.

One little hug and the lectures she’d given herself the night before had flown from her mind. All these years she’d done the right thing to hide on the other side of the room when she glimpsed him at professional meetings. At a cocktail party he might have kissed her! The kiss wouldn’t have been any more passionate than the hug had been, but her libido didn’t seem to care what state his was in. One kiss and she would have poured herself over him like a spilled Cosmopolitan. That first touch of his hand had brought back all the young, yearning feelings in full force—way too full, way too forceful.

His eyes, so darkly blue they were almost black, still advertised the passion in his body and soul—a passion for women, for life, for the law. Those eyes, and the expressive brows above them, were the key to his magnetism. Without those eyes he’d be a mere mortal—a tall, magnificently built mortal whose hair commanded you to touch it. If possible, while sitting on his lap. Straddling him. A heavy ache settled between her thighs. Not possible. Never would be possible, because…

“Something to drink before takeoff, sir?” asked the flight attendant. Her liquid hazel eyes slid smoothly over the entire and considerable length of Carter.

“Mallory?” Carter turned his gaze on Mallory rather than on the flight attendant with the roaming eyes.

“Hemlock.” It came out like a soft moan. Carter and the flight attendant both stared at her. “Hazelnut,” she said hastily. “Hazelnut coffee if you have it.”

“No hazelnut,” said the attendant.

“Plain is fine,” Mallory conceded. “Decaffeinated.” She couldn’t take another jolt. Of anything.

“Orange juice,” Carter said after a brief pause. “No, make it tomato.”

You can make it with this tomato anytime, the attendant’s eyes answered back.

Mallory spied on Carter out of the corner of her eye, waiting to see his flashing smile, his unspoken promise that he found the woman beautiful, and if things worked out, well, maybe. There it was, the start of a smile, followed amazingly by a frown.

That was new, Carter frowning at a flirtatious woman. And it didn’t bear thinking about, because it might get her hopes up, and she had no hope of having a personal relationship with Carter. She’d just have to be content with relating to him in the one area in which she felt secure—the Green case.

“Could we use the flight time to talk about the case?” she asked him, knowing she sounded prim and stodgy next to the sexpot in uniform. “I’ll boot up my laptop as soon as we’re in the air so we can refer to the interrogatories.”

“Oh, sure,” Carter said, “the sooner we get to work the better.”

Truer words had never been spoken, he thought. The plane took off smoothly, but he felt as if he’d been sucked into a tornado funnel. He only hoped the funnel would drop him somewhere safe. He had an odd feeling he wasn’t safe with Mallory anymore.

He sneaked a sidelong glance at her. It wasn’t her clothes. Her pantsuit looked like a good one, but it was definitely a working suit, prim and proper. Wasn’t her makeup, either, even though at Sensuous, he suspected, makeup samples were among the perks of the job. Not that he knew much about makeup, but it looked as if all she’d done was darken her brows and lashes a little, put a smudge of powder on her nose and the shiny pink lipstick on her mouth and let it go at that.

They were long. Her eyelashes. He’d never noticed before. She hadn’t darkened them in law school, or he hadn’t been looking at anything but her grade point average. She’d gotten him through Constitutional Law, that was for sure. But now he couldn’t imagine how she’d done it without his noticing her eyelashes.

“Do you think that’s an approach we could use? I know it’s a little unorthodox, but it might work in this particular case.”

What the hell had she been saying while he was admiring her eyelashes? “Ah…um…I’ll have to think it over,” Carter said, tumbling out of the tornado cloud into extremely dangerous territory.

Directly onto solid ice, in fact. The ice of her blue eyes as she glared at him. “You weren’t listening.”

“Mallory, Mallory.” He assumed the hurt, bassett hound look that had always worked when he was supposed to be romancing a woman and was instead thinking about a case. Except this time it was the other way around. “When have I ever not listened to you?”

“Just now,” Mallory said, looking at him as if he were a bit of dog poop on her sturdy, sensible-looking black pump.

He guessed she’d never forget that without her help, he would have failed that Con Law exam and probably flunked out of law school. The night he studied with her had started him off on the road to respectability, but she would never be able to respect his intellect. That’s why she’d never come on to him. Mallory would have to respect a man in order to feel an attraction to him.