Mr. Hall Takes A Bride

Eric sat down on the sofa’s arm again and kissed the top of his wife’s head. “You know, Jordan and I have been friends just about forever and I never knew he was this malleable.”

Cole curled up in the space next to Jenny. She tucked her arm around the boy, so grateful for the way her life had turned out. And Jordan was right, she did owe a great deal of it to him. But that admission was for another time.

“You have to know what buttons to press,” she told Eric. “Beneath that devil-may-care, playboy exterior there really is a good guy.”

Eric laughed under his breath. In his experience, Jordan could stand his ground with the best of them. This was a side he was unaccustomed to. “Lucky for you.”

It wasn’t herself she was thinking of. “No, lucky for Advocate Aid.”

From what Jenny had told Eric about what went on in the small office, it sounded like five times the work for none of the pay. And there were no law clerks to pick up the slack or do any of the research. Something, he knew, Jordan took completely for granted. “Think he can handle it?”

She smiled fondly, thinking of the dynamo who ran the office and oversaw every detail with a keen, discerning eye. “Sarajane will make him handle it.”

Eric was acquainted with the office assistant only by reputation, secondhand information he’d gleaned from what his wife had told him in passing. Still, what he knew was impressive. And might have been intimidating to a man of lesser confidence than Jordan. Maybe even intimidating to Jordan.

“I kind of feel sorry for him.”

Jenny didn’t see it that way. “Jordan survived our mother.” Although loving, there was no denying that Elaine Winthrop Hall was a very opinionated woman who saw life only in her own terms. “After that, he can handle anything,” she replied with certainty.

At least, Jenny added silently, she sincerely hoped so.

When she woke up Monday morning, Sarajane Gerrity knew it wasn’t going to be a good day.

The March sky outside her window was an unusually brilliant shade of blue without a cloud in the sky, but she still sensed that something was off kilter in the universe, or going to go off kilter before the day was over. It was pure instinct, some innate way of being able to tell that all was not right with her world.

Not that, she thought as she slapped down the alarm button and dragged herself out of bed, it ever was a hundred percent right. Not with the poverty and the shattered lives that she witnessed parading through the tiny storefront office of Advocate Aid, Inc., five days a week. But at the end of the day, she liked to think, she made a difference in at least a few lives.

Her title was secretary, but that was an archaic term for what she really was: the person who kept track of everything. The person who, at any given moment, knew where to find Jenny Logan, Harry Reed, Sheldon Myers or any one of the myriad forms that were used in the office on an irregular basis.

In the old days, in one of those old movies she loved so much, Sarajane mused, she might very well have been referred to as a Girl Friday. Except that life had gotten a great deal more hectic since those days and now she could be thought of as a Girl Monday through Friday—and then some. There certainly was enough work to fill eighteen hours of each day.

She didn’t mind. At twenty-five, she had the energy for it, had the dedication for it. And it made her feel as if her life actually counted for something. It kept her going.

Sarajane had a need to help others, because doing so was her atonement to the two people who had mattered most to her and who she’d watched slip away, little by little, one to the world of alcohol and self-loathing, the other to the destructive oblivion of drugs.

The first had been her mother, the second, her older brother. When they’d died, leaving her on her own, she’d felt incredibly abandoned. Alone, she was able to understand how her mother had felt. Hopeless. Afraid. But she was determined not to let those feelings overwhelm her. Determined not to be swept away into a world of apathy or drowned by hopelessness. Hers was not to be the battle of the bottle, but it was an uphill fight, one that eventually would lead to her triumphing over her circumstances and making something of herself.

These people who trooped through Advocate Aid, Inc., looking lost and hopeless, reminded her so much of her mother, her brother. If she could somehow be instrumental in helping these strangers, then the pain of not being able to do anything to prevent the deaths of the two people who comprised the only family she’d ever known lessened. At least for a little while.

But today wasn’t about anything nearly so personal to her. Today, because of the late-evening phone call she’d taken from Jenny, was about battling an awful sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had too much to do to play den mother, but that was what it was going to amount to. She was going to have to take a newbie by the hand and lead him onto the right path. Since this newbie was Jordan Hall, she anticipated the job of acclimating the man to office procedures as being more difficult than wrestling alligators on a slick Everglades bank.

She’d never met Jordan Hall, but she’d dealt with him on the phone a couple of times when he’d called looking for his sister. And she’d seen a picture of him on the society page once. Dark-brown hair, deep-brown eyes, wicked smile. Movie-star handsome would best describe him. Movie-star handsome and born with a silver spoon in his mouth. That definitely did not make him a person who could even remotely relate to the kinds of people who came to Advocate Aid seeking help.

Be fair. Jenny comes from exactly the same background.

Yes, but Jenny, Sarajane thought as she hurried through her shower, praying that the hot water would last long enough for her to finish, was a saint. There was no doubt in her mind that Jenny Logan was in a class all by herself. It was too much to hope for that her brother was cast from the same mold.

Sarajane laughed shortly. If he had been, Jordan Hall would have shown up at the office in person a lot sooner, instead of being some disembodied voice on the phone who called once in a blue moon when he was being consulted.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she told her reflection as she quickly passed a blow dryer over her auburn hair. She longed for straight hair as she watched the shoulder-length mass curl in several directions. With Sheldon gone for the next one to two weeks because of some sort of family emergency and now Jenny down for the count—for at least for three months—that left only Harry Reed and her to hold down the fort. She was good and she was quick, but she was not a lawyer. Being sympathetic to a person’s plight only went so far. It didn’t begin to untangle whatever legal web they found themselves in.

A legal web such as the one that had brought her mother down, forcing her to sell the small house that was all she had after her husband, a driver for the transit authority, had been killed in a freak bus accident. She’d been forced to sell because the relatives of the people who had died in that accident had sued not only the transit authority, but the family of the man they felt was responsible for the accident.

She was going to be late, Sarajane thought, annoyed at the minutes that had somehow managed to disappear. Grabbing her purse, she hurried out the door, heading to the parking garage where she kept her car. It seemed ironic to her that, after having grown up hating all lawyers, she found herself voluntarily working for them. Someday, when she had the time, she was going to have her head examined.

Someday. But not today.

Chapter Two

You win some, you lose some.

The old adage echoed in Jordan’s head as he made his way down the streets of a section of Portland he rarely, if ever, passed through.

The problem was, he didn’t like losing. Ever. Granted, it wasn’t something he was accustomed to doing, certainly not in the courtroom. And not in the bedroom, either.

But he’d kept his cool and said, “Perhaps another time,” when he’d broken the news to Gina over the phone after he’d left Jenny and Eric’s house yesterday. Gina Rivers, the model whose face graced a hundred magazine covers and whose body was considered near-perfect by every breathing male between the ages of ten and a hundred, was the woman who was to meet him in Hawaii. The woman he had intended to take his now-aborted vacation with. When he’d called her about the change in plans, she’d made a few sympathetic noises about how charitable he was being to his little sister, then coolly told him not to be concerned about ruining her plans.

Apparently she’d had someone waiting in the wings all along. There was a prince from one of those tiny principalities no one outside of Jeopardy paid much attention to who’d been after her to rendezvous with him for quite some time now. Since he was available at a moment’s notice, she saw no reason not to have him “fill in” as she’d put it.

Obviously all men were merely interchangeable bodies to her. Jordan didn’t particularly like being replaced so effortlessly. Granted there was no huge romance in the offing with this woman, no future, really, but he had anticipated sharing a good time with the supermodel for the space of three weeks.

For just a second, as he continued driving, the shallowness of his social life stared him in the face. He admitted, in the privacy of his mind, that he was just the slightest bit weary of beautiful, vapid women. Yes, a good many of them were experts at setting the sheets on fire, but once they were in a vertical position, there was not much to go on. Certainly not much in common with him. He found himself a little envious of Eric. Jenny was pretty and she had a soul, not the easiest combination to come across.

Still, he did enjoy himself, and he had been looking forward to this vacation, to shedding the responsibilities that he took very seriously and to just having a little mindless fun and relaxation for twenty-one days.

“You really do owe me big-time, Jen,” he murmured under his breath as he craned his neck to make out the faded addresses that graced the fronts of less than half the stores and buildings he passed.

It was hard to imagine, the way the streets were now, that this area had ever been new. The buildings looked as if they had been standing, enduring the less-than-clement Portland weather, for the last century or so.

Here and there Jordan saw half-hearted attempts at renovations, seemingly doomed before they were begun. Cheap paint was slapped onto surfaces to make them look newer than they were and to hide the multitude of flaws.

Oh well, he wasn’t here for the view or a tour, he was here for Jenny.

Jenny, the pure of heart, he thought with a smile.

He supposed his sister was right when she insisted that this was their duty. Growing up, they had both always had so much, had never wanted for anything. The best education, the best of everything, really. It only seemed right to try to pay some of it back.

This, Jordan decided, would fill his pro bono quota for the next year.

Maybe longer, he amended, slowing his car down even more as he realized that he was looking at the storefront office where he’d agreed to spend the next three weeks, shepherding the lost and the confused through the maze known as their legal system.

The sign in the window, which Jenny told him had once displayed the wares of an independent clothing store, brightly proclaimed: Advocate Aid, Inc., in bold black letters on gleaming white poster board. It only made the surrounding area appear that much more dingy and forlorn.

To Jenny’s credit—at least, he assumed as much—the display window was dust-free and clean, unlike the displays belonging to the businesses on either side of the legal aid office. To the right, ironically enough, he thought, was a pawn shop. The window was crammed with all sorts of things that had once been precious to someone, and that were now being sold in an effort to keep body and soul together. From the amount of dust that had accumulated, Jordan guessed that the items had last seen anything remotely close to a good cleaning somewhere during the Eisenhower era.

To the left of the office was a smaller store front which displayed an anemic blue light. The fixture was fashioned to proclaim that a seer of the future was domiciled just beyond the threshold. For a nominal fee, the secrets of the future could be shared.

Jordan paused, his sports car idling. He shook his head in disbelief. His sister had graduated near the top of her class. She could have had an office next to his at Morrison and Treherne.