Текст книги "Mistletoe over Manhattan"
Автор книги: Barbara Daly
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 11 страниц)
She moaned, tangling her fingers in his hair, leaning on him for support and pressing him tighter into that crevice all at the same time. He was in heaven, not even minding the increasing urgency in his own body, and was distraught to feel her suddenly grow still.
“What?” His voice was hoarse.
“It’s the doorbell.”
“Ignore it.” He resumed his exploration with his tongue.
“It’s the waiter. We have to-”
“Don’t have to do anything.” He was undistractable. “He’ll let himself in, leave breakfast-”
She was pushing him away, but she was laughing, a delicious, throaty laugh. “I’m not that sophisticated. Let him in and keep him out of here.”
With great reluctance he got up off his knees, then almost returned there at the sight of her heavy-lidded eyes, the pout of her desire-swollen mouth. “Go,” she whispered.
He put on the hotel robe without drying himself off and pulled her tight against him. “So much I didn’t know about you,” he murmured.
“Like what?”
“Didn’t know you ever kidded anybody, for one thing. Didn’t know you could make love and laugh at the same time. Didn’t know…”
Didn’t know you could want me so much, or make me feel this way.
The depth of the emotion he felt scared him. “Didn’t know you could wait this long for your morning coffee,” he said, gave her bottom a little spank, and went to receive breakfast.
In a very short time they were propped up in bed devouring eggs and bacon, English muffins and sweet rolls, juice and coffee. “Um-yum,” Mallory said, slathering ginger marmalade on a piece of muffin.
When he figured she’d had enough food to subsist on for a while, he let his arm drop casually around her shoulders, then tightened it and pressed her against his stubborn erection.
“You can’t possibly want more,” she moaned.
“Why stop now?” he said reasonably, because he did want more, as soon as possible, “The damage is done. We came to New York to work together and found out it was fun to play together, too.”
“I guess you could look at it that way.” She moved a little closer to him, but he sensed something different in her and wondered if he’d said the wrong thing.
Not knowing what he might have said wrong, he went on in the same cheerful vein. “That’s the fine line between a solicitor, which you are, and a barrister, which I am, if I may use the English system as an example,” he lectured. “We barristers can rationalize anything.”
“Do we have to rationalize this?” True, her face was buried in his shoulder, but her voice sounded so faint that he was increasingly sure he’d hurt her in some way. Not knowing what to do about it, he tried tenderness.
“Again, that’s what makes a solicitor,” he said, dropping little kisses on the parts of her he could reach. “Always with the questions, always after the facts.”
Yes, he did need to rationalize this, but he didn’t want to explain that he was too awed by her organized, retentive mind to feel worthy of her. So what? It was fun just being her boy toy. He kissed her a little more purposefully, feeling her respond, wondering if sex was the only way he could reach her.
“Don’t tip over the tray,” she said, already sounding breathless. “We’ll get butter and crumbs all over us.”
“Breaded for frying,” he agreed, ignoring the precarious tray and blowing the words onto her neck, that spot just below her ear that seemed to turn her on.
She shivered. “Buttered for eating,” she said, and then, “Forget I said that.”
“I can’t,” he said regretfully. “It’s given me ideas. Not butter exactly, but… how about marmalade?” He grabbed the spoon, dunked it in the marmalade dish and plopped the spoonful directly onto that enchanting puff of golden hair.
“Carter! I just showered! Now look at me! I’m all sticky!”
“Yum,” Carter growled, embarking on the delightful task of licking her clean.
He’d apparently restored her good mood. He had just one more problem to deal with. He had no desire to do anything today but stay in bed with Mallory, but he had to sneak away somehow for his third appointment with Maybelle Ewing. The woman was crazy, definitely. Anybody with seventeen diplomas on the wall had to be crazy, but what she’d been saying to him made sense.
He wasn’t a bad kid anymore, hadn’t been for years, and it was possible nobody thought of him that way except himself. It wasn’t his image he needed to change,Maybelle had declared after talking to him about three minutes yesterday, it was his attitude.
She’d also told him that what he had to deal with was easy compared with the changes another client of hers was having to make. “That girl,” Maybelle said, “don’t know she’s a doll, don’t know she’s sexy as all get-out, don’t unnerstand that anybody in the world’d give his right… arm to have her. You think you aren’t smart. She thinks smart’s all she is. Like I said, you’ve got it easy.”
He was sure he could think up an excuse to get away for that three o’clock appointment. After a little more caffeine and a little more love-in-the-morning.
Her appointment with Maybelle was at four that afternoon, and Maybelle had announced they’d be having tea at Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon in New York’s GramercyPark. Mallory had thought several times of telling Maybelle that she wasn’t that put off by the horned desk, and now that they’d outfitted her they could resume the meetings in Maybelle’s office, but Maybelle hadn’t given her a chance. Tea on a wintry afternoon sounded wonderful, anyway. She hoped Lady Mendl’s offered an extensive tea with scones and sandwiches, éclairs and butter cookies. She had to come up with a plausible reason to separate her body from Carter’s, and she’d finally hit upon one.
“I have an appointment to have my hair trimmed this afternoon,” she told him over the clam chowder and crabcakes they had for lunch at the little round table in the sitting room. “I may be gone a couple of hours. I need a few things, panty hose…” She trailed off. Was it her imagination, or had a look of relief crossed Carter’s face? She could hardly blame him. She was exhausted. And ravenous. She rarely ate more than a salad for lunch, and she was attacking these crabcakes as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
Carter had asked for two orders for himself and had offered her the same option. “They’re small,” he’d explained. “That would be a good idea for me, too,” he said. “I could use a haircut, and I’m out of shaving cream.”
“I couldn’t tell.” She sent him a secret smile.
“You’d be able to by tomorrow.”
So he wasn’t bored yet. That was good news. “Okay, then, we can take off at-”
“I’d like to leave at about two-thirty,” he interrupted her. “I might catch the end of the football game if I get an early start.”
“I’ll hang around a little while longer and get my clothes in order for next week. I should be home by five-thirty.”
She eyed him, noticing that he seemed to be eyeing her in the same way, the way people look at each other when they haven’t told the whole truth.
Her lie, of course, was perfectly innocent. She’d pick up some panty hose at Saks and dart into one of those no-appointment places that were all over New York for a trim, all before tea. She just wasn’t mentioning her appointment with Maybelle, that was all. Carter’s plan, she had a feeling, wasn’t quite so innocent.
Maybe he had to tell somebody goodbye. Forever.
Maybe he had to keep somebody on the string until he got bored with Mallory.
Maybe he needed a haircut and shaving cream, but his hair looked fine to her. And everywhere his face had touched her, it had felt wonderfully smooth. She shivered.
“What I think, Jack,” Maybelle said to Carter, “is that you’ve fallen for somebody and you’re afraid you’re not good enough for her.”
“I don’t know-fallen might be going too far. Or maybe not. I sure have been obsessing about her. As for good enough, well, maybe I’m good enough, just not smart enough. Or maybe I’m even smart enough. I just can’t get anybody to see me that way.” He felt dazed from too much breakfast, too much lunch, too much arousal, not enough sleep and not enough information about where the hell Mallory had to go this afternoon. There’d been something evasive in the way she’d mentioned her haircut. He knew enough about women to know haircuts didn’t take two hours.
Of course, he hadn’t been telling the truth, either, but he knew what he was lying about and it was perfectly innocent.
“Way-ell, tell me about your girl,” Maybelle said. “How y’all met. Mebbesomethin’ll click in my mind.”
“I’ve known her a long time. We were in law school together.”
“Y’all are both lawyers?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a coincidence,” Maybelle said, more to herself than to him.
“Not really,” Carter said. “People do meet in law school. We did. We studied together.”
“Studied together? Nuthin’ else?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t think she was pretty?
“Yes, I thought she was pretty.”
“Just not sexy.”
“She didn’t act very, um, accessible,” Carter admitted.
“Okay, so y’all have known each other awhile without doin’ nuthin’ about it and suddenly you want to do something about it. What changed?”
“She did,” Carter blurted out. “I mean, she didn’t really. Just sort of.”
“What’d she change? Her hair? Her clothes?”
“Not her hair,” he said very fast. “She’d better not ever change her hair. Her hair…” He was getting aroused thinking about her damned hair. “It’s like corn silk, but even lighter colored than corn silk… and not as slimy,” he finished up.
Maybelle’s expression changed. It was an infinitesimal change, but Carter had spent too much time in the courtroom not to notice the nuances in people’s faces. He gazed at her closely.
“Anybody ever tell y’all you had the soul of a poet?” was what she said.
“No.”
“They was right not to. So she didn’t change her hair. What about her clothes?”
“She always looked nice,” Carter said, turning his pen between his fingers. “It was just that her clothes didn’t make you think there was a body under them.”
“And they do now?”
Carter frowned. “Well, after I ruined her black suit…”
Maybelle jolted visibly in her chair. “You okay?” he said.
“Jes’ a twinge of arthuritis, hon. Go on. How’d y’all ruin the suit?”
“I sprayed mustard on it. Then she showed up in this red jacket…” He paused because Maybelle had flipped her ubiquitous coffee cup straight up in the air.
“Oh, shoot,” she said, but she sounded really nervous. “Dickie!” she shrieked. “Come here and bring me some a them paper towels.”
Yep, she was crazy. Here he was, facing the most important passage of his life, and he’d put himself in the hands of a certified nutcase.
That’s how smart he was. Pick up a card in a hotel hallway and sure! Dial the number! If Mallory knew, he could kiss goodbye to any notion of gaining her respect.
11
Maybelle was never late, so Mallory had a right to notice when, this time, she was. She whooshed in like a blue norther, wearing a coat that had once been a patchwork quilt, the kind made of different-size patches in a multitude of colors.
“Sorry, hon,” she said as she ignored the coat-check woman and instead used the back of her chair to hold the coat, where its arms flopped down to the floor like lobster claws. “Have I ever had me a day.” Under the coat she was dressed in her usual good taste-jeans, of course, with a top that seemed to be made of tiny skins stitched together.
Dozens of defenseless mice had died in the making of that top, Mallory decided. Or perhaps newts left over from witches’ spells.
Maybelle saw her looking at it. “It’s that fake suede stuff,” she said. “I designed it myself. I like an animal theme to my clothes. Kindly iss-stablishes a bond with ‘em, y’know?”
“It’s lovely,” Mallory said politely. “I’m sorry you had a bad day. Are you having a problem, or is it one of your clients?”
She was surprised to see Maybelle tighten her lips. “I’m not sayin’ another word about any of my clients. Dickie’s always tellin’ me I’m too loose-lipped. I thought if I didn’t mention names-I mean, I don’t mean nobody no harm, I just think they’re all so intrestin’. But not anymore. I’m straightnin’ up and flyin’ straight.” She frowned deeply to indicate how serious she was, and her face collapsed into a million fine wrinkles.
“I sense that something happened to make you feel this way,” Mallory said.
“It didn’t happen yet,” Maybelle said darkly, “but it might. Now, hon, your turn. Did y’all’s plan work last night?”
Mallory nodded. “We had a breakthrough,” was all she said, since she didn’t intend to discuss her sex life with anybody. For one thing, she so rarely had a sex life to discuss that she hadn’t gotten in the habit.
“Way-ell, good.” Maybelle peered at her. “Y’all think it was all them clothes and shoes, all that makeup?”
“What else could it have been?” Mallory asked, puzzled by the question.
“It coulda been just you,” Maybelle said wistfully, “finally havin’ a chance ta catch the man you always wanted.”
Mallory drew in a sharp breath. Maybelle was too close to the truth. “And the way you did it was you finally veered.”
“You’ve been reading my mother’s book.”
“Ever’ word of it.”
“What did you think?”
Maybelle sighed. “You was right, hon. Me readin’ it saved us a world of time. Yore mamma and yore daddy made you the way you are, a real sweet thing, but y’all got your priorities all mixed up.”
Now Mallory really felt stunned. “My priorities are not all mixed up,” she protested. “An orderly life has to come first! It’s the only way to keep your head straight.”
“And your heart under lock and key waitin’ for you to get finished cleanin’ up yore house,” Maybelle said, a bit too loudly for Mallory’s comfort. She dived into a handbag that was a kangaroo with a zipper across the front, whipped out Ellen Trent’s book and slammed it on the table. Everyone in the small, elegant tearoom looked up. “This is a real good book,” Maybelle said, “but it’s not a real good life for anybody but yore sainted mother, pardon my French.”
“Would you ladies like tea, or did you come here merely to break up the furniture?” A haughty waiter stared down at them with the purest disgust.
As Maybelle sent a similar look back up at him, her eyes widened. “Dee-wayne, is that you?”
The man took another look at her and his face lit up. “Maybelle, as I live and breathe. Yes, indeed, it is I. And how are you, dear lady?”
“Doin’ real good,” Maybelle said, then added with a brief glower, “most days, anyways.” Her face cleared, became all sunshine again. “And look at y’all!” she said conspiratorially. “All spiffied up and workin’ in this ritzy place.”
“Thanks to you.” He practically genuflected. “Incidentally, Maybelle, it’s been a year now and you still haven’t sent me a bill I was wondering…”
Maybelle did that diamond-crusted wave of the hand that was her signature mannerism. “Yeah, I gotta get around to that one of these days. But we can’t tawkbidness now. We’re ready for tea. Bring us everything, and heavy on that there Devonshire cream.”
Mallory held up a hand to signal a cab to take her back to the St. Regis. Maybelle had a way of leaving her with sound bites instead of actual advice. And the sound bite sticking with her now was “This is a real good book, but it’s not a real good life for anybody but yore sainted mother.”
Hadn’t the last week told her that? That the happiest moment of her life was waking up in chaos with Carter this morning? That the best Christmas tree she’d ever had was the tiny tree in the suite that was even now dropping needles all over the table? That the best man she’d ever known was Carter Compton, who waited there for her now with his possessions scattered over every flat surface? And that she’d had to give up a lot of herself to get to this point in her life? She hadn’t merely veered, she’d spun and twisted and thrashed and…
“Taxi!” Waving wildly, she shouted the word so vehemently that a cab half a block away, a cab which, furthermore, had an Off Duty sign flashing on its roof, changed its trajectory and screeched to a halt with the door handle directly ahead of her outstretched hand.
She found Carter hunched in front of the sitting room television set, his shoulders moving along with the Northwestern quarterback’s, shouting words of encouragement to his favorite team. He was wearing black jeans with a black turtleneck and looked absolutely heavenly. The jeans hugged his thighs and the heavy muscles there flexed as his shoulders moved, his biceps rose and fell, his teeth clenched and relaxed. Scattered around him were the sofa pillows, a newspaper, a soft drink can, an open bag of microwave-popcorn, the remote control, his shoes, his overshoes, his scarf, gloves, overcoat-There was some hope for him. He’d apparently brought just one coat with him to New York. She smiled.
“Hey,” he said when he caught sight of her. “We’re only behind fourteen points. It’s a moral victory!”
Football hadn’t been on her family’s weekend schedule. Her father preferred war movies. Her mother wouldn’t attend or watch anything she didn’t consider to be culturally uplifting and therefore worth an efficient woman’s time. Macon played football on the computer occasionally. Stepping toward Carter, intending to join him, perhaps attack and distract him, even learn about football if that was what it took, she saw that the tiny Christmas tree was circled with a string of old-fashioned bubble lights. Her heart pounded with something that went deeper than desire-honest affection.
She slid onto the sofa beside him, dropping her Saks bag to the floor. “Come on, baby, light my tree,” she sang.
“Just a minute, just a minute… Defense!” he shouted, nearly sending her sailing off the cushion. “Sorry,” he said immediately. “What did you say?”
“It can wait,” she said, snuggling back in beside him and wishing she knew how to purr.
He’d had a haircut. He’d bought shaving cream and lights for their Christmas tree. She was in love.
They celebrated Northwestern’s moral victory with a bottle of champagne. They made love on the sofa, sitting up, Mallory straddling him, enveloping him, her body and her heart zinging with lust and love and an overwhelming desire to be with him forever. Her clothes, she observed later, were scattered from the kitchen, where the lovemaking had begun, to the front door, where Carter’s football-throwing arm had propelled her new red lace bra. The new black suit from Bergdorf’s was mainly wool with a smidgen of Lycra and the wrinkles steamed out beautifully while they lay together in a bubble bath.
Mallory felt it was pure good luck that her bathroom was equipped with a bathtub and a separate shower, European-style. Carter had resisted the notion of bathing in the tub, insisting that real men didn’t take bubble baths, that he’d never had a bubble bath and wasn’t about to start now, but once she was ensconced in the tub, hidden by bubbles except for her toes, which she wriggled enticingly at him, he changed his mind. They could call it her bubble bath, he said. He was just visiting.
He rinsed her hair with the leftover champagne. The bath led them inevitably back to bed. Dinner was pâté, cheese, crusty Italian bread, fruit and Napoleons from room service. While they ate, they watched the Christmas episode of Carter’s favorite network series, a police drama.
It was a heartwarming story about a passerby finding a young couple and their new baby huddled in a Dumpster under a streetlamp near the police station. Three top-ranked mounted police rode their horses to the scene, bearing an envelope filled with cash contributed by the guys at the station, a basket of baby powders, oils and diapers and a gift certificate for a week’s stay in a motel in New Jersey. The plot was a timeworn one, but the emotional level was high and Mallory couldn’t help shedding a tear or two.
They were cuddled together on the sofa, Mallory in a short black nightgown, Carter in preppy plaid boxers, when he said, “As you were saying…”
She raised her head from his shoulder. “When?”
He held her a little tighter. “Last night when you bopped into my room. You said you’d had an idea that might work with Phoebe and her plaintiffs.”
She sighed, sinking down on his chest. “I can’t imagine I ever had an idea. Oh, wait, it’s coming back.”
It had been a crazy, pop-psychology idea she’d dreamed up as an excuse to seduce Carter in her new pink gown and robe, but she could hardly tell him that. “I was just thinking that everybody wants something really badly. Like, for example, we know from his testimony that Kevin Knightson wants to break into show business, and McGregor Ross wants her daughter to be a child model.”
“She ought to be prepping the kid for college,” Carter said.
“I know,” Mallory said, “but she doesn’t want what you and I would want.” She paused, feeling somewhat embarrassed. “I mean what you would want or I would want.”
“I get your point.”
“Once upon a time,” Mallory went on, relieved that he hadn’t read anything possessive into her words, “the plaintiffs seemed satisfied to have themselves and their bathrooms back to normal. Phoebe convinced them they wanted more.”
“Money.”
“Yes, and everybody wants money, but I’m suggesting we try to find out what they want more than money.”
“Hmm,” Carter said.
Mallory persisted. “There’s probably something you want more than money, right?”
Right. I want to settle this case just to hear you tell me I’m a brilliant lawyer.
And that you’d like nothing more than to add a brilliant lawyer to your life, maybe even have a brilliant kid or two.
Okay, I know I’m not brilliant, but I am smarter than people imagine, and I really hope I never get another call like that call from Bill Decker, because I want to lose the Casanova image and settle down with…
A jolt of electricity ran through Carter’s body, but it was more like a security alarm than the electricity Mallory generated in him. These were serious thoughts. Maybe too serious for a man who’d seen a woman change from good old Mallory to the object of his desire in the course of an extremely tense week.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Mallory was saying, “but I don’t have the faintest idea how to implement it. We can’t get Kevin a role on Broadway. I don’t know any Broadway producers or directors. Do you?” She yawned.
He smiled into her hair. Even without the yawn he would have known she was getting sleepy. She wasn’t usually such a chatterbox. “We take it one step at a time,” he said. “First we find out what they want.”
“How?”
“Ask them.”
“What a great idea.” Her eyes drooped, and then she said, “Our tree needs more ornaments.”
“We’ll buy some tomorrow.”
“I’ll buy some. You bought the lights.”
“You don’t think we can charge it all to our expense accounts?”
“No.”
“I was afraid you’d feel that way,” Carter said.
“And so do you.”
She was right. He’d never cheat on an expense account. But how did she know that?
“We should call Bill before we leave this morning,” Mallory said on Monday. She was wearing one of those longish skirts with the jacket that matched her eyes, and Carter got hot all over remembering the sheer tank she’d worn underneath the week before. Tonight when they got home, he’d get her out of the jacket fast, explore her through that tank top. He growled. “What?”
“Ah. Right. Call Bill. We can run your idea by him, see if he thinks we can do something with it.”
But a half hour later, Mallory said, “He didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic, did he?”
“He doesn’t have your imagination. I’m still adding that question to my spiel-‘What do you really want?’ We can see if a pattern emerges, something we can work with.”
What he couldn’t tell Mallory was that Bill had his own idea about settling the case, that Carter take Phoebe up on one of her none-too-subtle suggestions that they have dinner, catch a show, watch a television special. At her place.
That second week of depositions, she intensified her pursuit. All Mallory had to do was take a break to powder her nose between sessions with the witnesses and Phoebe was on his case in a flash.
“Just because we’re professional opponents,” she usually ended up saying, “doesn’t mean we can’t be personal friends.”
He pled busyness, prior engagements, tiredness, which was the truth. Because he lived for the nights, when he and Mallory could drop their cool daytime exteriors and give in to the consuming heat of their lovemaking.
Friday night, after another long week of deposing witnesses, Mallory produced a copy of the court reporter’s transcript and suggested they start weeding through it for clues to the special desires of the witnesses.
Carter had other ideas as to how they might spend their time, which he freely shared with her.
“We can work in bed,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes at him.
“Oh, okay,” he said, giving in.
He brushed his teeth, did a touch-up shave and went to her room, where she’d begun setting things up for the job they were going to do. He found her wearing a Santa Claus hat. Just a Santa Claus hat, he was pretty sure, although she’d drawn the covers up modestly beneath her chin.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he said, and climbed into the other side. He’d hoped his flipping up the covers would answer his question about what she was or was not wearing, but was foiled by the computer on her lap and the stacks of papers that surrounded her.
“I thought we’d get into the spirit,” she said, and smashed an identical hat down on his head. “I’m calling this the All-I-Want-for-Christmas project.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Carter muttered.
“You look like one, too,” Mallory said, “but those of us on the inside track know you’re not.” She turned to face him directly, and she smiled. “You are masterful at interrogating those witnesses. You’re pleasant and polite, but you don’t give an inch. And you always seem to have the right question at your fingertips. I am so impressed. It’s a special talent.”
The words sang in his ears. This was what he’d wanted most to hear from her. It made everything all right where Mallory was concerned. He still had to convince Bill, but Mallory’s opinion was the only one that really mattered. His heart zinging with joy, he scaled the stack of printout and the laptop and gave her a thorough kiss.
“There, we got that out of the way,” he said after he was able to talk himself into letting her go. “Now I can return to my favorite activity, which is working on Friday night. Straighten your hat,” he ordered her. “It looks too sexy tilted like that.”
“Yes, dear.” She tugged the hat down over her hair. He loved the breathless sound of her voice.
But she buckled right down to work. Methodically they read through the transcript and highlighted the responses from the witnesses that might indicate their deepest wishes. On the laptop, Mallory listed the witness’s name, the page on which the response appeared and a brief summary of the response.
“Do you have to be so organized?” he complained.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay.” He shrugged. Whatever it took to make her happy, he felt he could handle it. He went back to work with his green highlighter.
An hour later, they’d already assembled this much information:
Kevin Knightson: One good part in a production, stage or screen.
Tammy Sue Teezer: I want to be in a commercial and make tons of money and buy a house in the country and a great big dog.
McGregor Ross: I want everybody in the world to know I have the most beautiful baby ever born. Trent: I’m sure she is. Compton: I’m sure she is.
McGregor Ross: And I want her to win the Wiggles Diapers Poster Baby contest. Compton: (Inaudible) Trent: (Inaudible)
“You didn’t have to type the whole conversation,” Carter said, complaining again, because he really felt like moving on to Phases Two, Three, Four and perhaps Five of the evening.
“It was too funny not to,” Mallory said, pursing her pretty pink lips.
They worked awhile longer. “There’s a strong showbiz theme here, Carter,” she observed.
“And it’s a pretty logical assumption,” Carter said. “People who dye their hair this carroty-red color, or try to,” he added with a wince, “are making a statement.”
“Trying to get noticed,” Mallory agreed.
“Doing something so different that it catches the eye.”
Mallory sighed. “Sounds like we’re going to have to put on a show in daddy’s barn.”
“What are you talking about?”
She turned to him. “Didn’t you ever watch those old black-and-white movies with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney?”
“You mean the ones about putting on a show?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Judy and Mickey were going to put on a show to raise money for the school or the band or a field trip?”
“Yes, those.”
“No, I never watched them.”
She punched him gently in the arm. He caught her fist and brought it to his lips, unclenched it, put her index finger in his mouth and circled it with his tongue.
“Let’s sleep on it,” she said in a dreamy voice.
“Or not.” He zeroed in on her. “Will you puh-leez get rid of that laptop?”
“Will you puh-leez get rid of that hat,” she said.
“Delighted to.” He tossed it off. “Do you keep a shopping list?”
“Of course.” She was folding her hat, laying it out on the nightstand.
“Put condoms on it.”
12
Carter stalked into Maybelle’s office Tuesday night and caught her going through what appeared to be a college catalog and wearing a speculative expression.
“Hey, Jack,” she said, hastily stuffing the catalog into a drawer.
He glanced at the array of diplomas, took a second to wonder if she could possibly be thinking of an additional educational experience, then sat down and started talking. The first thing he talked about was Mallory’s idea to determine what each plaintiff wanted and try to get it for them as a way of settling the case.
“She does sound like a real bright woman,” Maybelle said.
She had that odd look on her face he’d noticed several times before. He’d given up trying to figure out what it meant. “She is,” he said. “And I think she’s starting to think I’m pretty bright, too.” He ducked his head.
“What’d she say?” Maybelle sounded thrilled.
Carter paraphrased the compliment Mallory had given him about handling the witnesses well. He didn’t want to sound like he was bragging.
“Hooray!” Maybelle shrieked when he’d finished. “Y’all wanted to make that little shift in your image and you jes’ did it!” A relieved look crossed her face. “You don’t need me no more.”