Mistletoe Over Manhattan

7

Carter stood at the bar, not drinking, just leaning his elbow on it for support while he watched the door and ticked off the minutes, eight-twelve, eight-thirteen, eight-fourteen…

There she was, looking at the sign on the window, probably wondering why the JUdson Grill capitalized both the I and the U and wishing she were somewhere else besides here. She stepped in, and even as his pulse speeded up and his heart started directing all his blood south, he observed that she didn't look especially happy to see him. In fact, he had to say she was looking frantic.

"Hi," she said, looking at the room rather than at him. "Been waiting long?"

"Four minutes," he lied. He'd been there since eight, just in case the man she'd gone to see escorted her back to the restaurant, perhaps to see whom she was having dinner with. But she was alone. He examined her closely. "Our table's ready."

A very New York-looking woman, severely polished and self-assured, divested Mallory of her coat, and Carter steered her up to the headwaiter, another New York-looking woman who sent them off with a waiter-male, with a ponytail-to the table. Carter moved along behind Mallory. She was obviously upset. This was bad news. Her pants were the good news.

They weren't the loose-fitting, pleated ones she'd worn on the plane. These were so tight she'd have to call the fire department to help her get out of them. But what a lot of trouble to call the fire department when he'd be right there in the suite and happy to come to her rescue.

This delightful daydream faded when it occurred to him that she'd left the St. Regis wearing a skirt. What did a change in clothes indicate, a change of clothes that hadn't happened in the privacy of her bedroom?

They sat down. She leaned forward. Carter closed his eyes, and when he opened them, she was fiddling with the silverware. Her date must have given her a hard time, must have been mad that she wasn't going out with him, after all. So the man really liked her, or was really turned on by her, or both. Or maybe he was just a jerk with a bad temper, but Carter didn't think Mallory would go out with a jerk. So he liked her or was turned on by her and maybe she was turned on by him, too, and upset that Carter had sabotaged her plans for the evening. Damn. What had her plans for the evening been? Besides changing clothes.

The answer hit him in the stomach. The guy had ripped the skirt off her. She'd had to put on the pants, which she must keep in his apartment because Carter hadn't seen her in them before. Any fool could figure out what that meant.

The guy with the ponytail was back. "Would you like to start with a cocktail before dinner?"

"No," said Mallory.

"Menus?"

"Yes," Carter said.

"And a wine list?"

"You bet," Carter said.

He'd have to find out what her relationship was to this guy. Better to know. "You're all wound up about something," he said after he'd taken a cursory glance at the menu and another at the wine list. "I hope your date didn't go ballistic when you told him you had to work."

"Who?" She looked up from her menu. "Oh. No." At last she seemed actually to see him. "I was thinking you were all wound up about something. Was Brie mad?"

"She was okay about it," Carter said. In fact, Brie had said she needed to work, too, that stocks were down and bonds were up and she needed to strike while the iron was hot. Those were her actual words, and she'd added that she had some bonds she wanted to get him interested in.

"Is that Regis Philbin over there?" Mallory said next.

"It wouldn't surprise me," Carter said. "This is a media mogul hangout. Now, back to your date. If he didn't upset you, what did? Anything to do with Santa Claus?" He projected the words, noticing with satisfaction that she jumped, and with longing that her breasts undulated. The sudden emphasis on a couple of words was a technique he'd used in the courtroom, but it had never made anyone's breasts roll like that.

"What on earth do you mean?"

She was regaining her poise, but if he'd ever seen a guilty party he was seeing one now. "I mean," he said, "that you and Santa did a lot of whispering while he was holding you on his lap-" he projected that word, too "-and if a department store Santa came on to you, he should be reported."

"Are you crazy?" Openmouthed, she stared at him.

"Are you ready to order?" The waiter hovered above them looking a lot like the referee in a boxing match. Carter realized his voice must have projected farther than he'd intended it to. He had to calm down before he got Regis Philbin's attention.

"Yes, we are," he said. "Mallory?"

She spoke to the waiter while still staring at him. "I'd like the pear and Roquefort salad and the sweetbreads."

He stared back. "I'll have the mussels and the steak. We'll share an order of your onion rings. And a bottle of…" He'd forgotten which wine and had to break eye contact to find it again on the list.

This couldn't be jealousy eating at him. He had no claim on Mallory. He felt responsible for her, though, a need to protect her from wolves and other predatory types.

Responsible for her in the big city. Yes, that was how he felt. "I just don't want anything unpleasant to happen to you," he said. "I made you go up there, and if he-"

"Made me go up where?"

"To sit on Santa's lap."

"Oh. There."

Where else? "So if he did anything like come on to you, or ask you out-"

"He didn't."

"Then does it have anything to do with that Kevin person?"

This time she didn't tell him he was crazy. Carter almost wished she had. Instead, she was pink with embarrassment and guiltier-looking than ever.

"Your wine, sir," said the wine steward, proffering the bottle for Carter's inspection.

"It's fine," he said without looking at it. "No, I don't want to taste it. Just pour it."

Mallory had walked the distance from Bergdorf's to the restaurant hoping her sexy new snow boots would fail their first test. She'd slip on the icy sidewalk and fall down. As good as she was at not being noticed, she could lie there quietly on the cold concrete until she froze to death, which seemed infinitely preferable to telling Carter she'd sat on Kevin's lap and spilled out her soul to him.

She'd told the opposition's witness she wanted the lawyer for the defense for Christmas. Kevin could blackmail her. How far would she go to keep him from telling Carter how she felt about him? Worse, what if Kevin were, even now, telling Phoebe they had one of the defense lawyers in a bad spot? She groaned.

"Pardon?" Carter said, his eyebrows lifted.

"I'm dreading to tell you what I have to tell you." There. That was a start.

He seemed to tense up a little. "Always better to do it and get it over with."

She sighed. "It does have something to do with Kevin and with Santa Claus," she answered him.

"I knew it!"

Now they had everyone's attention. Even Regis Philbin looked up from the intense conversation going on at his table. "Carter," she said in an urgent whisper, "Kevin was Santa Claus."

His eyes widened. His mouth, which had been fixed in a thin line, began to quirk up at the corners. "That's his seasonal work?" Carter said. "Being a department store Santa Claus?" His smile broke through, followed by a snort of laughter.

Mallory fixed him with a stern glare. "I sat on the lap of a witness for the prosecution." While it was a great pleasure to see him smile, this was no laughing matter, and he didn't know the half of it, nor would he ever if she was lucky.

He stopped laughing almost as quickly as he had begun, and before her very eyes, Mallory could see the legal part of his mind kick in. "How do you know Kevin was Santa Claus?" His voice had cooled off.

Now she'd have to lie, which had been the best reason for not telling him anything. "I'd rather not tell you that." She set her jaw, knowing he wouldn't settle for that answer, but it would give her a second to think of another one.

"I'd rather you did." He set his jaw, too.

"A Roquefort-PearTower for the lady," their waiter droned above them. "Curried Mussels for you, sir, and an order of our famous onion rings."

Mallory could imagine the conversation going on in the kitchen. "Will you hurry up with the orders for that pair at table nineteen before they draw blood?"

She attacked her salad with feigned gusto, but even with her gaze downcast she could feel him boring a hole through her forehead.

"I guessed," she said suddenly.

"You guessed."

"Yes."

"How?"

"Oh, his voice. Or something."

"So this is just a guess on your part."

"No, then I asked."

"When did you ask him?"

"At a time when you… weren't there."

He frowned, probably trying to remember a point in the afternoon that she and Kevin might have been alone, and she hoped he didn't put too much pressure on himself. He wasn't going to remember one because there hadn't been one.

"I see," he said at last. "Well, now that that's out of the way, maybe we can get back to work. How do you think we ought to handle the woman with green teeth we're deposing tomorrow?"

Carter figured he could talk and brood at the same time. He didn't believe she'd asked Kevin. He didn't think there'd been a time he'd been out of the room when she and Kevin were still in it. She was still keeping secrets from him. And if her dates last night and tonight hadn't been with Santa Claus or Kevin, because they were one and the same, they'd been with somebody or bodies else and who the hell was he or they?

Damn! It really mattered to him. That was the problem. The time wasn't right for their relationship to turn physical, but there she sat, so beautiful, so desirable with her marshmallow-cream breasts peeping out at him, her pale hair swinging and her eyes the color of a freezer pack looking so wide and innocent. He could have slept with this woman five years ago if he'd turned on his charm when he'd had a chance, and the fact that he hadn't grabbed at that chance was killing him.

He had to get her off his mind-although it wasn't his mind that was giving him a problem-until he'd successfully settled this case and she was swooning with admiration. So he'd take Brie out tomorrow night and somebody else Friday night and then figure out how to get through the weekend.

She was arguing with him even now, and he couldn't blame her, because he'd been daydreaming and had said something stupid. No more stupidity. His life depended on it.

It was the following morning that Mallory felt the full impact of her recent veering-veering? careening!-from the beaten path to order and serenity.

By the time Carter came out of his room looking ready for breakfast-and a lot more coffee, judging from those bags under his eyes-she was dressed in her new tight pants, blue-green jacket, outrageous sheer tank top Maybelle had thrust into her bag at the last minute and high-heeled Pradas and was methodically dumping the entire contents of her handbag on the desk.

"What are you doing?"

"I can't find my credit card."

"Call and ask them to FedEx you another one."

She gave him a look that would have made her mother proud-until her mother saw her wearing aqua to the office.

"Okay," he muttered. "When did you use it last?"

She tried to focus on the lost card instead of on Carter's mouth. "Bloomingdale's, I think, when we went up to buy socks. You volunteered to handle our meals together and file for the reimbursement, so I think, yes, it must have been Bloomingdale's."

"You probably stuck it in some weird place."

"I never, as you put it, stick my credit card in some weird place. It has its place and that's where I put it."

"I might have known." She heard the sarcasm in his tone. "But this time-" he pointed a triumphant finger at her "-you didn't."

Her mouth tightened. "I hardly need you, who packed no socks, to point that out to me."

"No, I guess you don't. You never forget anything, right?" He moved closer to the desk, his gaze scanning the objects scattered over it. "Let's see what we've got here." His smile was not what you'd call friendly.

"Stay out of my handbag," she ordered him.

"I'm just looking for your credit card, not touching anything," he said. "A baggie full of first aid stuff isn't all that private, is it? Oh, my. Look what we've got here. A tiny tool kit. A tube of superglue. Do you have a foldaway crane in here somewhere? And where's the duct tape?"

Her face flamed with heat. She did, in fact, have small rolls of scotch tape and electrician's tape with her at all times, as well as a pair of scissors, two needles, one threaded with black and one with white, two small brass safety pins, self-sticking Velcro discs…

"It's good to be prepared in an emergency."

"How often do you have an emergency?" he asked, zeroing in on her sewing kit.

"I pull out a hem from time to time."

He raised his face to the ceiling. "Oh… my… God, it's a crisis. Throw that woman out of this meeting. Her hem's hanging."

"If you look your best, you work your best," Mallory said, but it sounded pretty lame even to her.

"Not necessarily," he said, suddenly shifting gears and becoming just Carter again, Carter without the attitude. "For example, I look great." He began helping her take things out of the handbag. When he ran onto the box that that held exactly twelve aspirin tablets, he opened it, shook four out into his hand and swallowed them dry. "And now I'm going to work better. Hey! Here's your credit card." He pulled it out of an inner pocket of the handbag and held it up triumphantly.

"Thank you," she said, feeling wilted. "I would never have looked for it there. That's my PalmPilot pocket, not my credit card pocket. No wonder I couldn't find it."

"I think it works out better never to know where anything is," he said as she repacked her handbag. "That way, when you lose it, you know you'll have to look everywhere for it."

"I see a flaw in your reasoning," she muttered.

"We can talk about it at breakfast," he said. "Ready to go? I'm going to have pancakes this morning. All those eggs are giving me too much energy."

I know a really great way you could use it up.

"Goon into the conference room," she said when they'd breakfasted and arrived at Angell and Angell. "I'm going to talk to Phoebe about speeding up the photographic evidence."

"Good luck," he muttered.

She left her briefcase in the hall outside the conference room door and stepped down to Phoebe's office, where she heard voices through the not-quite-closed door. Just one voice, actually, Phoebe's.

"I'm doing my best, Father," she was saying. "I don't like it, though. It's not ethical, and I-"

Mallory could just barely see Phoebe as she paced her office, a phone to her ear and her hand clasped to her forehead.

"I know," Phoebe said after a long listen. She sounded beaten.

"Yes, Father, I know. Tough and practical," she said a moment later. "I'll keep trying, of course."

Mallory slipped away. Alphonse Angell was controlling Phoebe's decisions from Minneapolis. She just wondered what he wanted his daughter to do that she considered unethical.

"Did she agree?" Carter asked when she returned to the conference room.

"I'll talk to her later," Mallory said. "She was busy."

"You chickened out." His eyes glittered devilishly.

"Did not!"

"Bet you did."

"If I did, may my teeth turn green," Mallory said, "and hush. Here's our witness."

"What I don't unnerstand," Maybelle said, "is why that woman don't just have her teeth whitened."

"What I don't understand," said the makeup artist, "is why she opened her mouth to the max and flung her head back in the middle of dyeing her hair."

Mallory stifled an impatient breath. She stifled it to keep from blowing the makeup artist in the eye. Maybelle had decreed they would meet at Bergdorf's at seven, and Mallory had arrived nearly in tears, wanting to tell Maybelle that in spite of the red jacket, pants she could hardly sit down in and flirty snow boots, nothing whatever had happened last night. In fact, the first thing Carter had done when they'd gotten home was call Brie and remake their date for tonight.

She had actually wept a little as she took the tags off her new clothes and hung them up, had wept for Carter and had wept at the money she'd spent. Or not spent, since she hadn't actually paid for them yet. And then, to top everything off, Carter had taken Phoebe Angell out to lunch.

Here she was in her darkest hour and all Maybelle could do was obsess on the woman with green teeth, that is, after telling Mallory her next step was to jazz up her makeup a little. So while Maybelle extolled the wonders of whitening, Mallory sat on a high stool at the Trish McEvoy counter in Bergdorf's Level of Beauty-a fancy name for a fancy basement-getting stuff brushed on her eyelids, her cheeks, her nose, along with a steady stream of instructions from a woman so elegant, so perfectly groomed that Mallory wondered how she ever got anything else done. Later, she'd get to spend a few hundred dollars more on makeup. Tonight, Maybelle had assured her, she wouldn't have to spend a dime, just had to sit still, be quiet and she'd have a whole new image in no time flat.

"I mean, those whitnin' jobs are incredible," Maybelle was saying now. "I talked the president into one."

The makeup artist came to a halt with the lip pencil. "The president?"

"Not ours," Mallory said, proud to be able to add something to this conversation. "The president of an emerging nation who needs to change his image to get reelected."

"Yay-yuh," Maybelle drawled. "And there was somethin' a little threatnin' about these here teeth." She parted her lips to grasp tiny white incisors. "We had 'em filed down some. I told him if he looked less vicious he might act less vicious." And then she was right back to her obsession. "Course, I realize this woman you're talkin' about would be waitin' 'til after the trial-"

"There's not going to be a trial," Mallory cut in.

"Hold still," said the makeup artist.

"Course there's not gonna be a trial, but jes' supposin' there was a trial, she'd want to wait 'til after, but Kevin's tellin' me she says it's permanent."

"She has caps," Mallory said through closed lips. "That's the problem."

"But why'd she open her mouth and throw back her head?" the makeup artist persisted.

"Because," Mallory whistled through her teeth, "she was dyeing her hair red-"

"You can open your mouth now."

"-dyeing her hair red for the part of Annie Ado in a community theater production of Oklahoma, and she took a sudden notion to rehearse 'I Can't Say No.'"

"Thanks. I feel better knowing."

"What about the caps?" Maybelle was sticking to the topic.

"You can whiten teeth but you can't whiten porcelain caps," Mallory said.

"Way-ell, I'll be danged," Maybelle said. "Sure am glad the president has all his own teeth."

"There," said the makeup artist, "look at yourself."

Mallory had to admit the colors were subtle. The Be Prepared Pink kit had instantly struck a chord with her. The only thing she minded was that a lot of the kit had been transferred to her face, layered on top of moisturizer, concealer and brush-on foundation. She felt filled and frosted like a cake.

Buying them-she would hate that, too, when the time came to reimburse Maybelle. But her eyelashes were the worst blow. "People will think they're fake," she hissed to Maybelle, not wanting to hurt the makeup artist's feelings.

Maybelle sighed. "Oh, hon, you are nearly hopeless. You really are. But if you think I'm giving up on you, forget it. We're going to hit on something that makes you feel sexy, and that's all there is to it."

Mallory turned slowly to face her instead of the mirror. "What did you say?"

"Why, that's all this is about. You're as cute and feminine as you can be. I'm just lookin' for something that will make y'all feel that way."

"But I-"

"How'd y'all get to be like this anyhow?" Maybelle went from exasperated fellow-woman to counselor in a split second. "I don't usually get into the Freudian stuff, but I'm thinkin' in your case it might be intrestin' to know how you got your idea of what a woman was s'posed to be."

It stunned Mallory. Slowly she reached deep into her voluminous handbag, the handbag of an efficient woman who believes in Being Prepared. Carter had found her credit card before he'd gotten down to the bottom, where for some reason she'd been carrying her mother's latest book. In case she needed it, she supposed, and she needed it now. She pulled it out and thrust it at Maybelle.

"Read this," she said. "It will save us a world of time."

"Goody, bedtime readin'. Who wrote it?" Maybelle said, holding the book away from her, apparently to see it better.

"My mother."

"That should be intrestin'. Thanks, hon, I'll read it for sure. Here's your makeup." Although Mallory hadn't seen money or plastic change hands, the salesperson had produced a bag filled with makeup, which Maybelle handed to Mallory. "Go home and hit this guy with your new face. See what happens. Let's meet here again tomorrow night. We seem to be doin' better here than we do at the office." She frowned. "It maybe them horns. The president looked a little scared when he saw 'em, too. Maybe I need me a less fancy desk."

And she was gone. She hadn't worn the llama coat tonight. The coat that was slowly receding up the escalator looked more like panda bears sewn together. Mallory watched until the last sliver of pansy-tooled boot vanished, then turned back to the makeup artist. "Don't I need to pay you for these?"

"Oh, no. It's taken care of."

"I can't let her go on buying things I'll have to pay for later," Mallory said, losing her natural need for discretion in the panic that set in. "I don't know the price of anything I've bought in the last two days. I could be bankrupt and not even realize it."

"Oh," the girl said, dismissing this idea with a wave of a perfect frosted-copper-tipped hand, "don't worry about it. Let Maybelle have her fun."

"I can't help liking her," Mallory said even more desperately, "but there's a limit to how much fun I can afford to let her have."

Now the girl actually laughed. "You may end up not paying for anything," she said.

"What?"

"You don't know about Maybelle, do you?"

"She has many, many diplomas," Mallory said grimly.

"She has many, many sections of Texas land, too," the girl said. "She inherited them when her husband died."

"How big's a section?"

"How would I know?" the girl said. "But it's a lot of acres, and some of them are right outside of town. In fact, they kind of sneak into the town. Pretty far into the town." Her grin was widening, and now she was just a cute, nice girl who was really, really good with makeup.

"Which town?"

"Dallas."

"Ah-h-h."

"Yeah, and the ones out in West Texas where Maybelle actually lived were so full of oil they weren't good for much else." She giggled.

"Oil," Mallory breathed out another "ah-h-h."

"I'm talking a lot of oil. Maybelle said it got 'right depressin' livin' with the smell.'" The girl laughed outright. "I told her that was the kind of depression I didn't need Wellbutrin for."

"So… I guess she has a charge account here, and she just…"

"The salespeople get a little orientation session on Maybelle when they start working at Bergdorf's," the girl said. "Maybelle takes, we add it up and send it up to bookkeeping, bookkeeping talks to her accountant and her accountant sends money. Everybody's happy."

Mallory was reduced to muttering inanities like, "I see. Uh-huh. Umm." She thanked the girl for the information and was pulling herself together to drift away when the girl said, "I put some instructions in the bag. I'm not sure you were paying attention while I was doing your face."

"Thank you," Mallory said. "I wasn't."

"Well, don't worry. Any problems, come back to me. I can fix the little stuff,Maybelle can fix the big stuff."

"You really think so?"

A mysterious expression settled over the girl's face. "I'll bet you a Pink Pearl lip gloss when that president she's counseling gets reelected."