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One-Night Mistress...Convenient Wife
Anne McAllister
She should look away. Step back. Close the door. Lock it.
Instead she stood there, a doe trapped in headlights. “Christo.” His name on her lips was barely more than a whisper. She paused and ran her tongue over them. The very air seemed to shimmer between them.
“Send me away.” His voice was harsh.
She frowned at the tone. “What?”
His jaw tightened. “You heard me, Nat. Tell me to go.”
She hesitated, then drew a breath, steadying herself. She knew what he was demanding. And she knew the wisdom of it. But she couldn’t do it.
Award-winning author Anne McAllister was once given a blueprint for happiness that included a nice, literate husband, a ramshackle Victorian house, a horde of mischievous children, a bunch of big, friendly dogs, and a life spent writing stories about tall, dark and handsome heroes. �Where do I sign up?’ she asked, and promptly did. Lots of years later, she’s happy to report the blueprint was a success. She’s always happy to share the latest news with readers at her website, www.annemcallister.com, and welcomes their letters there, or at PO Box 3904, Bozeman, Montana 59772, USA (SASE appreciated).
ONE-NIGHT
MISTRESS…
CONVENIENT
WIFE
BY
ANNE McALLISTER
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
CHAPTER ONE
NATALIE pulled her car into the garage below her mother’s apartment, shut off the engine—and felt a panic unlike anything she’d felt in the last three years.
“Wholly unnecessary,” she told herself firmly out loud because the truth of the assertion stood a better chance of making it past her nerves if she heard the spoken words. If she heard them, she thought, she might even believe them.
Actually, in her mind she did believe them.
But what she believed logically and what her guts were telling her was not even close to the same thing.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “It is absolutely no big deal.”
And it wasn’t. She was cat-sitting, for goodness’ sake! She was watering a few plants and living in her mother’s apartment for two or three weeks because her mother had to go to Iowa to take care of her own mother after a hip-replacement operation. And while the cat was portable, the seven-foot rubber-tree plant was not.
“Harry was supposed to do it,” Laura Ross had explained apologetically on the phone very early this morning. “You know, the boy across the way? But he broke his leg skateboarding last night. Spiral fracture, his mother said. Not even a walking cast yet. I’m sorry to have to ask you—”
“No. It’s all right,” Natalie had made herself say. “Of course I’ll do it. I’ll be glad to,” she’d lied.
So here she was.
All she had to do was get out of the car, go around the building, up the steps to her mother’s apartment, open the door and go in.
She’d done it once already today. She’d come to pick her mother up to take her to the airport late this morning and it had been perfectly straightforward. No worries at all.
Because there had been no danger of running into Christo Savas then.
Chances were, Natalie assured herself, she wouldn’t run into him now, either.
What was the possibility, after all, that she would be rounding the building to go up the stairs at the very moment her mother’s landlord—and boss—was coming up the walk to his house or stepping out on his back porch?
Slim, she decided. None was preferable, of course. Please God she would not see him at all these next two or three weeks.
But even if she did, she reminded herself, she was an adult. She could smile at him politely and go her own way. And it didn’t matter what he would be thinking. It didn’t matter at all!
“Right,” she said now in the no-nonsense tone her mother had used all the time Natalie was growing up. “Grass never gets cut by looking at the mower,” she would say when Natalie or her brother Dan balked at doing the chore. It had since become a family slogan applied to any reluctance to get the job done. Laura would be saying it now.
Of course her mother had no idea why Natalie had spent the last three years avoiding Christo Savas—and she never would.
Taking one last deep breath, Natalie got out of the car, being careful not to let the door bump against Christo’s Jaguar next to it. It was the same one he’d had three years ago.
Once she’d ridden in that car with the top down, had tipped her head back and felt the wind in her hair, had laughed and slanted a glance at the man driving and had dared to dream ridiculous dreams.
Now she turned away and shut her own car door with a bit more firmness than absolutely necessary. Then she opened the back, grabbed her laptop case and the suitcase with the clothes she’d brought, shut it and, heart still pounding more rapidly than she wished, she opened the door to the small walled garden.
It was empty.
She breathed again. Then, with barely a glance toward Christo’s big house on the far side of what her mother had turned into the closest thing southern California probably had to an �olde English garden,’ she made a sharp right and quickly climbed the wooden stairs that led to Laura’s apartment over the garage.
Once on the porch, she had a view down the broad street that led to The Strand and the beach beyond. It was empty. She set down her suitcase and laptop and fumbled in her purse for her mother’s key.
It was nearly six. Her mother had said Christo usually went surfing right after work—“to decompress,” Laura had told her—and then came back for dinner which they ate at six-thirty.
“You eat with him?” Natalie had said when her mother imparted this surprising information. Her brows had lifted in dismay—and consternation.
Laura had gone right on packing her bags. “I don’t like cooking for one.”
“You cook for him?”
“I cook for myself,” her mother said primly in the face of Natalie’s undisguised disapproval. “And I make enough for two.”
“Well, I’m not cooking for him,” Natalie said firmly.
“Of course not.” Her mother dismissed the notion. “He wouldn’t expect it.”
No, Natalie thought, and he wouldn’t want it, either.
“He doesn’t even know you’re going to be here,” her mother had gone on, brightening Natalie’s day considerably. “He knew I had arranged for Harry to come. But when Carol, Harry’s mother called this morning, I didn’t even tell Christo because I knew he’d feel responsible. He’d think he needed to take care of Herbie and do the plants, and he couldn’t possibly. He’s much too busy for that.”
Well, perhaps the day wasn’t all that bright. But Natalie knew her mother was telling the truth. She didn’t have to be reminded how hard Christo Savas worked. She’d seen it firsthand. And if he didn’t know she was here, even better. Perhaps she could keep it that way.
Her fingers found the ring of keys. She picked out her mother’s, stuck it in the keyhole, gave it a twist, and pushed open the door. Then with one last quick glance down toward the ocean where, yes indeed, she could see silhouetted against the bright sun a muscular man with a surfboard just coming up the beach, she picked up her laptop and her suitcase, hurried inside and banged the door.
In the blessed shadowed coolness of the small entryway she dropped her bags, shut her eyes and took a deep relieved breath.
“Natalie?” The voice was gruff, masculine and sounded as shocked and disbelieving as her own ears were.
Her eyes snapped open. She blinked rapidly, trying to accustom them to the dim indoor light, to see the cool empty living room she expected, to see Herbie the cat, whom she expected.
Not to see the man who had been crouched by the fireplace and was now straightening, drawing himself up to his full six feet two inches and staring at her with narrowed suspicious eyes.
Her mouth felt as if someone had suddenly dumped a pail full of sand in it. “Christo?” She barely choked his name out. Then she frowned, too.
Their gazes met, locked. And then, in unison, “What the hell are you doing here?” they said.
“I live here. There,” he corrected, jerking his head toward the house beyond the garden. His gaze went to the suitcase by her feet. “What’s that for?”
The suspicion in his voice rankled. Natalie stood straighter. “I’m moving in,” she said, pleased at how firm her voice sounded. “Temporarily.”
Christo’s brows drew down. “What for?”
“I’m taking care of Herbie. And the plants.”
“Your mother said Harry—”
“Harry broke his leg.”
Now the brows went up. “First I’ve heard about it.” There was clear disbelief in his voice. He rested an arm against the mantel of the fireplace and regarded her doubtfully.
Natalie drew herself together. “Feel free to go over to Harry’s and ask. You might be right. Maybe this is all some great plot of my mother’s to throw me and you together.”
Christo grunted at the scorn in her tone. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“No, she wouldn’t.” Laura might well be thinking that it was a good idea for her twenty-five-year-old daughter to start looking around for a husband, but she wouldn’t meddle. Natalie was sure of that.
“I can feed the cat and water the plants.” Christo’s tone made it sound not like a suggestion. It sounded like an order.
Natalie bristled. She’d already survived the part she wanted to avoid. “I’m sure you can,” she said starchily. “But my mother didn’t ask you. She asked me. And I’m doing it.”
His teeth came together. She imagined she could hear them grinding. Well, so be it.
“So we know what I’m doing here,” she said pointedly. “What about you? You don’t just habitually wander into my mother’s apartment, I hope.”
The teeth did grind, then. “No, I don’t habitually wander into her apartment. I was measuring for bookshelves.” He held out his hand. There was a measuring tape in it.
“Bookshelves?” Natalie echoed doubtfully.
“She’s always saying to me how much she loves this room, but that it would be perfect if it had bookcases on either side of the fireplace.” He shrugged, but also jerked his head toward the space behind him and, studying the space, Natalie could see her mother’s point. His mouth twisted. “A belated birthday surprise.”
Natalie was surprised he knew her mother’s birthday had been last week. “And you were going to have them put in while she was gone?”
“No. I was going to put them in myself while she was gone.”
They stared at each other. An awareness Natalie didn’t want to acknowledge arced between them. It had been there ever since she’d heard his voice and opened her eyes to see him standing there. It was a feeling she’d felt with no one else—ever. Once she’d thought she understood it. Had cultivated it. Relished it.
Now she wanted nothing whatever to do with it at all.
“Well, you can’t,” she said and folded her arms across her chest.
His jaw worked, but he didn’t say anything. Their gazes were still locked and Natalie refused to be the one to look away first. Not this time. She was in the right this time.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “I’ll finish measuring now. I’ll order the wood. I’ll put them up when she gets back, mess up the living room while she’s here.” He turned and knelt back down, ignoring her. In effect, dismissing her.
Natalie glared at his back. Why had she ever thought she wanted to spend the rest of her life with this man? Why had she ever been in love with him?
She hadn’t, she told herself sharply. She’d been infatuated, the victim of a law-school clerk’s foolish crush on a brilliant up-and-coming litigator. She’d been dazzled by his brilliance, his extraordinary good looks, and whatever perverse sexual chemistry had always seemed to hum between them whenever he was in the room.
And the kiss, her mental memory box reminded her. Don’t forget the kiss!
No, God help her, she couldn’t forget the kiss. Try as she would she’d never been able to forget entirely the moment she and Christo Savas had locked lips. It had been the most blazingly hot kiss of her then twenty-two years. The most blazingly hot anything of her entire life—even up to this very moment.
It had been the impulse that had spurred on her unutterably foolish action that night three years ago.
Action she was not about to repeat no matter what Christo Savas thought. And it was no secret, Natalie knew, staring at him now, what he thought.
“All right,” she said abruptly. “Go ahead and put in the bookshelves.”
He was kneeling on the floor, about to measure. But he slanted her a quick glance, and in it she saw the instant wariness she expected.
She gave him a saccharine smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay completely out of your way. Won’t bother you at all. Won’t invite you to my bed and won’t turn up in yours. You’re perfectly safe.” She made her tone sound mocking.
But they both knew she wasn’t mocking him. She was mocking herself, the hopelessly naive girl who had taken a summer’s working relationship, a sense of kindredness that was, in retrospect, obviously one-sided, and a single spontaneous kiss to celebrate a triumph in the courtroom as an indication of something far deeper. A girl who had thought he must love her the way she imagined she loved him—and who had actually gone to his bed to prove it.
She made herself smile and hold his unblinking jade-green gaze, willing him to believe it because, God knew, it was the truth. There was no way on earth she would ever make a fool of herself like that again!
“If you’re sure…” Christo began.
“Of course I’m sure.” She gathered her laptop case and the suitcase up into her arms, fleetingly aware that she was probably using them as armor, even as she carried them into the room. “I was just…surprised to see you. In here,” she qualified because she didn’t want him thinking she’d been intending to avoid him—even if she had been.
She set the laptop case on her mother’s dining-room table. “I’ll just put this away.” She nodded down at the suitcase, then turned toward the bedroom. “And I’ll come back and help you measure.”
“I don’t need any help,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Which meant that, even though she’d pretty much spelled it out, he still didn’t entirely trust her not to fling herself at him even now.
“Fine. Suit yourself.” Natalie shrugged and carried the suitcase into the bedroom, only sagging down onto the bed and letting out a shuddering breath once she got there.
She could, of course, just leave the suitcase on the bed and deal with the contents later. But rushing back into a room where she clearly wasn’t wanted—and didn’t want to be—was not the best idea.
And there was a whole lot to recommend staying right where she was. She could use the time to put her clothes away—and regain her equilibrium in the process.
She hadn’t wanted to run into Christo at all. She’d done her best to avoid him for the past three years because she still writhed in mortification every time she thought about that night in his apartment.
That night she’d waited for him in his bed.
Even now her cheeks burned at the memory.
That he’d been shocked to find her there when he got home from a business dinner that night went without saying. She’d expected that.
But she’d also expected he’d be pleased. Delighted, in fact. And happy to join her.
Wrong. A hundred thousand times wrong. And if the circumstances had been mortifying, it was how badly she’d misread the situation that she still had trouble facing. She wasn’t used to being a fool.
Well, he needn’t worry, she thought as she got up and began taking her clothes out of the suitcase, hanging them in the closet, trying not to hear every sound he made as he moved in the living room.
She certainly wouldn’t be jumping into his bed again.
But it would be a whole lot easier if her earlier humiliation and subsequent hard-won maturity were complemented now by total indifference to the man in the other room.
Sadly, they weren’t.
Something about Christo Savas still had the ability to make her heart quicken in her chest. His thick dark hair perhaps? His chiseled jaw and sculpted cheekbones? His sharp straight nose and fathomless green eyes? His rangy but muscular body that looked as appealing today in faded jeans and a gray T-shirt as it had in tropical-weight wool suits, starched long-sleeved shirts and ties?
All of the above?
Unfortunately, yes.
But it was even more than that. Always had been.
If Christo’s arresting good looks had first attracted Natalie’s attention the summer she’d been a clerk in the firm where her father was a partner, it had very quickly become more than his hard body and handsome face that held her interest.
His quiet intensity, determined hard work and steel-trap mind were equally appealing. So were his incisive arguments and his way with words. She’d been dazzled by the young litigator and it hadn’t taken long to become smitten.
She’d been raised on the story of her own parents’ courtship and marriage—He was a young lawyer and I was working in the office. It was love at first sight, Laura used to tell her children. So Natalie hadn’t found it hard to believe in a variation on the same theme for herself and Christo.
Bolstered by her own family history, and aware of a certain electricity in the air every time she and Christo Savas looked at one another, Natalie had seen their relationship as fate.
And she’d done her best to make history repeat itself.
It hadn’t been easy. Christo had been consumed with work, not with the summer clerk in the securities department. They had rarely been in the same room as each other, though she did help out with extensive legal research in a securities case he was trying.
She might never have fallen into the trap of her own illusion if she hadn’t found him in the law library late one afternoon flipping through books, and scowling as he made furious notes and muttered under his breath.
“Something wrong?” she’d ventured.
“Not something,” he’d said grimly. “Everything.”
He’d just been appointed guardian ad litem for a seven-year-old boy named Jonas in the middle of a nasty billion-dollar divorce and custody case. “I don’t know anything about family law! I don’t know anything about kids! I don’t even know where to start.”
That wasn’t true, of course. He knew plenty, and certainly enough to figure out where to start. He was just frustrated, overwhelmed. Momentarily vulnerable.
And Natalie, heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings, had offered, “I could do some research if you’d like. On my own time. It would be good practice,” she added, smiling hopefully at him. And then she’d felt it again, that current of electricity arcing between them, when he met her gaze and nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “If you wouldn’t mind. I’ll tell you what I need.”
For the next three weeks, she had worked her tail off for him. Lunch hours, evenings, weekends. She’d spent every waking moment that she wasn’t being a clerk with her nose in a book or scowling at a computer screen scribbling furiously, then reporting her findings to Christo who was almost always in his office just as late.
“You’re a star,” he’d told her when she found some particularly helpful cases. And he’d been almost as grateful for the pastrami sandwiches she brought in because he never took time to eat.
He’d been willing to stop and explain things to her when she dared to ask questions. And sometimes when she found something and let out a little yelp of joy, he’d come over and bend over her shoulder so close that she could feel his breath stir the tendrils of her hair.
“Great. I can use this.” And she’d looked up to see a grin on his face and a determined light in his eye. Once more their gazes had caught and held.
And Natalie had dared to believe.
But she wouldn’t have believed without the kiss.
It came without warning the day he’d got Jonas’s formerly intractable parents to finally see the light and realize it was a child they were dealing with, not a silver service or an Oriental rug. She’d been in the parking garage, heading for her car late that afternoon when he’d got out of his, coming from a meeting about Jonas. She’d paused, waiting for him to get out, expecting yet more bad news. But the look of sheer joy on his face when he shut the door and came toward her was one she’d never forget.
Her heart kicked over. “Did they—?” she began.
The grin nearly split his face. “They did. At last.” And suddenly he was there in front of her, and what had begun as a grin and a high-five turned into a fierce exultant hug.
Instinctively she had lifted her face to smile into his—and they had kissed.
Natalie might have been only twenty-two and not the world’s most experienced woman, but she knew there were kisses and there were kisses.
This kiss might have started out as pure exultation, the shared joy of something going right. But in a second it was something very different indeed. Just as a single simple spark could become a conflagration, so it was the moment their lips touched.
She’d never felt it before.
The kiss didn’t last. Barely a second or two later he let her go and stepped back abruptly, looking around as if expecting to be shot. If anyone had seen them, she knew he could have been—not shot—but facing the wrath of the senior partners and the possible loss of his job.
“You’d better go on home,” he said hoarsely, and without a backward glance he strode off across the garage toward the elevator.
Natalie didn’t move. She’d simply stood there, her fingers pressed against her lips, holding on to the memory, the sensation, the dawning belief that there was substance to the dreams of the future she’d hoped for.
Of course, it had been only a matter of moments. But with one single kiss Christo Savas had nearly burned her to the ground. Even now, running her tongue over her lips, she could still taste—
“Er-mm.”
At the throat-clearing sound behind her, Natalie whipped around, face burning. Christo stood in the doorway to her mother’s bedroom watching her.
“What?” she snapped.
“I’m finished measuring. I’ll order the wood in the morning. Then I have to sand and stain it before I can put it in. I’ll give you plenty of warning.” He sounded very businesslike, very proper.
Exactly the way she wanted him. She gave a short curt nod. “Thank you.” Then, because she knew it was true, and she also knew that, despite her own feelings about Christo Savas, he had done her mother numerous good turns over the past three years, she added, “My mother will appreciate it.”
“I hope so. I like your mother.”
“Yes.” The feeling was mutual. Laura thought the sun rose and set on Christo Savas. She couldn’t understand why Natalie declined invitations that included him.
Still they stared at each other. And there it was again, that damned electricity, that unfortunate awareness. And still he didn’t leave.
Maybe they needed to clarify things further. “My mother said you’d water the plants in the garden.”
He nodded. “She thought it might be too much for Harry.”
“I’m sure she was right. But since Harry’s out of the picture, I can do them. I’m not currying favor—” she said awkwardly.
“Let’s leave it the way she arranged it.”
All lines neatly drawn. Everyone in their own place. “All right.”
At last he turned toward the living room, then glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Maybe.” Natalie didn’t move. Watched his back disappear, heard his footsteps recede, the door open and close, the sound of his feet on the steps outside. Only then did she breathe again, and say aloud what she was really thinking. “Not if I see you first.”
Natalie Ross.
As gorgeous and enticing as ever. Right on his bloody damn doorstep.
Christo tipped back in his desk chair, let out a sigh, rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, then leaned forward and tried to focus again.
It didn’t work. He’d been trying to focus all evening. Ordinarily that wasn’t a problem. He regularly settled down and worked well after dinner when it was quiet and there were no clients in and out, no phone calls, no papers to sign or distractions lurking and he could concentrate.
Not tonight.
Tonight every time he tried to bend his mind around where Teresa Holton’s soon-to-be-ex-husband might have secreted assets everyone knew he had, his mind—no, worse, his hormones—had other ideas.
They wanted to focus on Natalie.
It was because he’d been too absorbed with work lately, he told himself. Except for an hour or so of surfing most evenings after work, he hadn’t taken any time off in weeks. His hormones were feeling deprived as well. It had been two months since Ella, the woman who, for the past year or so, had regularly been the object of their attention, decided she wanted more than a casual no-strings affair.
As Christo didn’t—a fact that he had made crystal-clear from the beginning—he had let her go without a qualm. But he’d had neither the time nor the inclination to look for anyone else since.
He didn’t have the time now.
As for inclination, if his hormones were inclined toward Natalie Ross, too damn bad. There was no woman on earth less likely to want a no-strings affair than Natalie. She was her mother’s daughter through and through.
Though Laura and Clayton Ross were now divorced, it had never been Laura’s idea. It was Clayton who’d run off with the paralegal, leaving Laura, after twenty-five years of marriage, to fend for herself. She had, but she still believed in marriage and babies and forever. So did Natalie. Christo knew it instinctively.
He wanted nothing of the sort.
Resolutely he picked up his pencil again and beat a tattoo on the desktop, trying to stimulate brain cells. But his brain cells didn’t need stimulation. They had plenty, thank you very much. It just wasn’t focused on the Holton case. They had something—someone—else in mind.
As did another part of his anatomy.
Irritated, Christo shoved away from the desk and stood up, flexing his shoulders and pacing around the room.
His office was at the back of the house with a wide window facing Laura’s garden. It was dark now. He couldn’t see the flowers. But if he looked up, he could see the light on in Laura’s apartment. The drapes were pulled, but Natalie could, if she were so inclined, look between them directly down into his office. She could watch him pace.
Christo walked across the room and flipped the blinds shut. He wished he could as easily shut out thoughts of her.
He knew, of course, that Laura hadn’t been trying to complicate his life by asking her daughter to come and take care of the cat and the plants. Laura was as protective of his time as he was himself. More so, in this case, because if she hadn’t been she’d have asked him to take care of the cat and the plants when Harry broke his leg.
Instead she’d asked her daughter.
Of course, she had no idea about his history with Natalie.
Not that there was a history. There had very determinedly—on his part—not been any history at all.
Except for that one disastrous totally spontaneous kiss.
He scrubbed his hands over his face now, remembering it.
He had never done anything so stupid before or since. He’d always been absolutely impeccable in his workplace behavior. And if the parking garage had not been precisely part of the workplace, that was pretty much legal hairsplitting and Christo knew it. Natalie had been working at the firm, and if he wasn’t her boss he was certainly senior on the totem pole—and he damned well should have known better.
He had known better.
It had simply been a combination of joy and relief. And desire.
Time to call a spade a spade. But doing so didn’t make the desire go away. Old memories welled up. He squashed them. Memories of scant hours ago took their place. He resisted them, too.
He prowled some more. He cracked his knuckles, then pressed his palms down against the desktop, hunching his shoulders and staring blankly down at the paper he’d given up trying to make notes on. He couldn’t even see what he’d written so far. Visions of Natalie teased at the corners of his mind.
“Stop it,” he told himself sharply.
It was perverse, this desire he felt for Natalie Ross’s slender yet curvy body—as perverse now as it had been the first time.
Christo didn’t do rampant desire. He liked women—in their place. Which was not in his mind or in a relationship. Only in his bed.
He hadn’t lusted madly after any female since his teens. Now, at the age of thirty-two, he should be well over that sort of thing. He was well over it!
He’d walked away from Natalie Ross once, for God’s sake. He’d done the right thing. The sensible thing. The only thing.
Now he gave up trying to work. He went out the front door and crossed The Strand, dropping down onto the path along the beach and beginning to run.
So, fine. The words pounded in his head as he picked up the pace. He’d resisted Natalie Ross before. He’d simply do it again.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR three days Natalie didn’t see Christo at all.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. She caught a glimpse or two of him in the morning as he headed off to work while she was taking her time, deliberately not venturing out of the apartment, staying in to feed the cat and do some scheduling work on her laptop for the rent-a-wife business she ran with her cousin, while she incidentally kept one eye on the window so she could see when he had left.
In the evening of the second day she saw him down on the patio of the garden sanding the boards that had been delivered for her mother’s bookcases.
That had been more than a glimpse. In fact, she’d stood there, unable to tear her eyes away from the sight of a shirtless Christo Savas bending over a board, a sheen of sweat glinting across his bare muscular back as he sanded the wood vigorously, then straightened and smoothed his hand along the grain.
She’d lingered in the window until his cell phone rang and in answering it, he turned and his gaze lifted to meet hers.
Instantly, Natalie stepped back, face burning at being caught out ogling him. She nearly tripped over Herbie in her haste to retreat to the kitchen where she poured herself a tall glass of ice water which she drank right down.
She stayed well away from the window after that, not venturing near until the sun had set and the world was completely dark.
The next day she didn’t see him at all. She got back to the apartment shortly before suppertime, expecting that she might run into him in the patio and steeling herself for the encounter. But he was nowhere to be seen, and the boards were stacked in the garage, still awaiting stain.
The next evening she didn’t see him, either.
Her mother rang that night. “I would have called sooner,” she said, “but I didn’t want you to think I was hovering.”
Natalie smiled. “Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“So how are things going? Does Herbie miss me?”
“Of course. But things are fine. Herbie is thriving. The plants are surviving.”
“Of course they are,” her mother said with quiet satisfaction. “I knew I could count on you. How’s Christo?”
“What?” The unexpectedness of the question made Natalie’s voice crack.
“I wondered how Christo was coping,” Laura said. “I know you aren’t feeding him dinner, but I thought you might have talked to him, found out how things are going.”
“He doesn’t appear to be starving,” Natalie said drily. “So I assume he’s getting nourishment.” But then, because she knew her mother would wonder at her edgy tone, she said, “I really haven’t seen him to talk to, Mom. Only once, the day I got here.”
“Well, I hope things are going all right at work,” her mother said. “The temp who usually helps out is working elsewhere. So I had to train another woman before I left.
It should be fine,” she said, but her voice trailed off and she sounded a little worried.
Natalie steeled herself against it. “You’ll have to ask Christo about that,” she said briskly.
“I have,” Laura said. “I called him tonight. He said everything was under control.”
“Then you should believe him.”
“I know. I do.” A pause. “But he sounded—I don’t know—stressed. I hope he’d let me know if it wasn’t all right,” Laura added pensively. “Oh, drat. There’s the bell again.”
“Bell?”
Her mother let out a weary sigh. “Your grandmother has a bell. She rings it when she wants something.”
“Let me guess. She wants things often.” Natalie smiled at the thought of her imperious grandmother ringing a bell to make her mother jump. It would delight the old lady no end.
“Every other minute,” Laura concurred. “Coming, Mother. I’ll give you a call in a few days,” she said to Natalie. “Wish me luck.”
Natalie hung up and was silently wishing her mother luck when there was a knock on her front door.
She opened it to find Christo standing there, still in the dark trousers and long-sleeved dress shirt he would have worn to work. The top button was undone, his tie was askew, and he had his suit coat slung over his shoulder.
“Your mother says you run a rent-a-wife agency,” he said without preamble.
Natalie blinked in surprise. But she stopped herself before she wetted dry lips. “That’s right,” she said.
“Do you rent office personnel, too?”
“Office…”
“I need someone to take your mother’s place.” His jaw worked.
“I thought everything was under control?”
When he narrowed his gaze at her, Natalie shrugged. “I just got off the phone with my mother. She said she’d talked to you and that you said everything was fine.”
“I lied.” He dropped his jacket over the porch railing and raked fingers through already mussed hair. “They didn’t work out.”
“They?”
“The first one was bossy to the kids. Acted like she was some damn mother superior.”
Kids? It took Natalie a moment to realize what he was talking about. When she thought about Christo she generally still thought of him at her father’s firm, but of course he wasn’t there. He’d left not long after she had at the end of that summer to go off on his own—to start his own practice in which he focused on family law. Because of Jonas? She’d often wondered. But of course she’d never found that out.
Now he said, “I sent her back, and they sent me another one. One your mother hadn’t trained,” he added grimly. “And she cried.”
“She cried?” Natalie echoed.
“A lot. Every time she couldn’t find something.” He ground his teeth.
“Every time you yelled at her?” Natalie guessed.
“I didn’t yell. I was very polite.”
She bet he was. Icy politeness from Christo Savas would be far worse than being yelled at. “And she left?” Natalie guessed.
He shook his head. “I sacked her, too. And today they sent two others, but they’re hopeless. I sent them back. And the agency doesn’t have anyone else. Not until next week. Lisa can come on Thursday. She knows the office. She’s worked with your mother. She’s worked with me. But I can’t put the office on hold until Thursday. And—” he paused and rolled taut shoulders as if doing so would loosen the tension in them “—I can’t tell your mother. She’d come back.”
She would, too. Natalie knew it. “She might be glad to,” she ventured with a slight smile.
Christo’s brows raised. “She would?”
“Yes.” Natalie sighed. “But she can’t. She needs to be there. To get Grandma through this and capable of being on her own again.”
He grimaced. “That’s what I thought, why I lied. Why I don’t want to call her back. So…do you have someone? Just through Wednesday.”
“I’ll check,” Natalie said.
And there it was again, lighting his face—the heart-stopping grin that had seduced her once before—the drop-dead-gorgeous, Christo-Savas-thinks-you’re-wonderful smile.
“Terrific,” he said. “Just send her to my office tomorrow morning by eight-thirty. I’ll get her up to speed. Thanks.”
He knew it was a long shot, asking Natalie to supply a secretary. He didn’t want to ask her for anything. He’d been vaguely distracted ever since she’d taken up residence at Laura’s place.
Not that he’d seen her—except for when he’d caught a glimpse of her in the window of the apartment when he’d been sanding the bookshelves. But she’d disappeared instantly, as if she had no more desire to see him than he did to see her.
Good, he’d thought. But that had been before he’d run out of office help.
He couldn’t believe the agency didn’t have anyone else. More likely they just didn’t have anyone he wouldn’t make cry.
Laura never cried. Laura was as tough—and compassionate—as they came. There was nothing she couldn’t handle—not his most difficult clients, not cantankerous judges or demanding opposing counsels, not irate parents or Christo himself when his own mother or father breezed in to complicate his life.
If he’d thought he was doing Laura a favor, offering her the job as his secretary and office manager after her divorce, he soon discovered he was the lucky one.
She made his office run efficiently. She smoothed and soothed everyone she came into contact with. She got them to slow down, think clearly, take a deep breath.
“How do you do that?” he’d asked her more than once.
She’d laughed. “Practice. For twenty-five years I was a wife and mother. You don’t forget.”
Then she’d told him her daughter was creating an agency of temps who could do the same thing. “South Bay Rent-a-Wife, she’s calling it.” Laura had laughed and shaken her head.
“Your daughter?” The only daughter he knew was Natalie. The other child, he was sure, was a son.
She nodded. “Natalie. You must have met her the summer she was clerking at Ross and Hoy.”
Oh yeah. He’d met Natalie all right. But all he’d done was nod. “She’s a lawyer.”
“No. She dropped out of law school.”
“Dropped out?” He remembered how shocked he’d been at Laura’s words. And how guilty he’d felt. She hadn’t left because of him, had she?
“She always wanted to be a lawyer,” Laura said. “Was always her daddy’s girl. But when Clayton left—” She paused, and he’d thought she was just going to leave it there, but after a moment, she continued. “Well, Natalie decided she didn’t want to be like her father after all.” She smiled slightly. “She said she’d rather be like me—but get paid for it.”
Christo’s eyebrows went up. “Paid for it?”
Laura laughed. “She’s a savvy girl, my Natalie. She and Sophy, her cousin, tried it themselves first—worked as �wives.’ Now they run the agency and only step in when they have to. But she tells me her �wives’ can do anything I can do.”
Now rifling through the filing cabinet of his office looking for papers yesterday’s temp was supposed to have filed there, Christo hoped that was true. Otherwise the next four days were going to be a nightmare.
He glanced at his watch. It was almost eight. He started digging through the file cabinet again. He was getting a bit desperate as he wondered where the hell that blasted woman could have put the Duffy file, when he heard the door to the outer office open.
“In here,” he bellowed.
He reached the end of the drawer and banged it shut just as his office door opened. “Good,” he said without turning. “You can start looking here. I need the Duffy papers.”
“Fine.”
His head whipped around at the sound of Natalie’s voice.
He opened his mouth, but she forestalled him with a steely smile. “Don’t—” she warned “—ask me what the hell I’m doing here. You know what I’m doing here. My mother’s job.”
She shut the door and set her briefcase on the floor by the coat rack, then straightened. “Struck dumb?” she asked wryly when he didn’t speak.
Almost. “You’re planning on running my office?” he said, narrowing his gaze.
The mere sight of her in a pencil-slim navy skirt and a high-necked white blouse and a trim navy blazer should have called to mind visions of repressed Catholic schoolgirls. Instead it was playing havoc with his hormones and giving them decidedly inappropriate ideas. Inappropriate ideas were the last thing he needed right now.
“What do you know about office work?” he demanded.
“I run one,” she said. “And I’ve worked in a law office. And I know my mother. Besides, we don’t have anyone else who can do it. So unless you’ve conjured someone up in the meantime…” She let her voice trail off, inviting him to suggest an alternative.
He didn’t have one.
“And you’re right,” she said. “I don’t want you calling my mother.”
Their gazes met, clashed. There was a challenge in hers that defied him to argue. He wanted to argue. He wanted her gone, because besides the challenge, that damnable sizzle was there, too. His jaw tightened. He cracked his knuckles.
But before he could figure out an alternative, the phone on the desk rang.
Natalie was closer to it than he was, also faster off the mark. She picked it up.
“Savas Law Office,” she said, in a voice that was both warm and professional. “Yes,” she said to the caller. “I’ll be happy to. I’m with Mr. Savas right now. Give me a moment and I’ll have a look at the appointment book and we can set something up.”
She put the phone on hold, set it down, tilted her head and looked at Christo. “Unless you’d like to take over.” Even her eyebrows were challenging him.
He sucked his teeth. “Be my guest,” he said gruffly. “Just don’t cry. I’ve got a case to prepare.”
It was going to be a salutary experience. Four days of working with Christo Savas and she’d be well and truly over him.
At least that’s what Natalie had been telling herself since she hadn’t been able to come up with an alternative to Sophy’s, “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to do it,” answer to whom they were going to send to work for him this morning.
“I don’t want to do it!” she’d protested, aghast.
She’d rung Sophy just past six, having spent most of last evening going through her files looking for a suitable temp. But while there were a few who might have some of the office skills, all of them were already on other jobs. And none of them was such a standout that it made sense to juggle things around.
She’d hoped her cousin would be able to think of someone she’d overlooked who could do the job in her mother’s place. But Sophy hadn’t—besides suggesting Natalie do it herself.
“I can’t do it,” she insisted again.
Sophy yawned on the other end of the line. “Why not? Because you still have a crush on him?”
Sophy was the one person Natalie had admitted her infatuation to. And unfortunately her cousin had a memory like an elephant. Thank heavens, she’d never confessed to the mortification in Christo’s bedroom.
“I do not have a crush on him,” she said firmly. “Once I did. Yes, I admit that. But that was years ago. I was a child then.”
“So,” Sophy said airily. “No problem.”
Problem. But she wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing with Sophy. “I’ll see what I can come up with,” she’d said.
“You know what you have to do,” Sophy responded. “I won’t bother you today.” And she’d rung off.
Even after Sophy had hung up, Natalie had tried to come up with alternatives. But short of calling her mother and telling her the problem, she didn’t see one. It was an indication of how badly she didn’t want to do it that once she actually picked up the phone and began to punch in her mother’s number.
But before she finished, she hung up again. She couldn’t be that selfish.
Not that her mother wouldn’t want to come home. Her phone call had made it clear just how much of a trial Grandma Kelling was.
But Laura’s duty, as she perceived it, Natalie knew, was to be there for her no matter how irritating it was.
Just as her own duty was to step in and take over for Laura. Her sense of familial love and responsibility was, after all, one of the moral tenets Natalie most admired about her mother, one her father had turned out to be notoriously lacking. Laura never hesitated to do the right thing even when it was the hard thing—like putting up with Grandma Kelling and her bell.
Like working for Christo Savas.
And so Natalie had dragged herself off to the shower, washed and dried her hair, put on a tailored, professional navy-blue skirt and white blouse, then added a matching navy blazer for good measure. It was armor, and she knew it. But she felt as if she were heading into battle.
Then, shortly before eight, she’d rung Sophy again.
“I’m going,” she said without preamble.
“Of course.” There was the sound of satisfaction in Sophy’s voice. “I knew you would.”
Natalie had known she would, too.
And she was determined to begin as she meant to go on—as the consummate professional. So she shut the door on Christo, leaving him to the files in his office while she went out to the reception area to finish the call she’d taken and schedule the appointment required.
It wasn’t difficult to step into her mother’s shoes. She understood the way her mother did things, her work-flow pattern as it were, the process she used to get things done.
Laura had never done things haphazardly as a wife and mother. She wasn’t rigid, but in the Ross household there had always been a place for things, and things were always in their place.
So it was no trouble now for Natalie to open the middle left-hand drawer of her mother’s desk and find the appointment book right where she expected it would be. She ran her eyes down Christo’s appointments for the next week, understood quickly the general pattern of his days, picked up the phone, and offered the caller three possible times.
She wrote the client’s choice in the book, hung up the phone and realized that Christo was standing in the door to his office staring at her.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head. “Three out of four of them couldn’t find the appointment book. Two of them said it should be on the computer.”
“My mother wouldn’t keep the primary schedule on the computer.”
“I know.” He rocked back and forth on his heels. For a moment he didn’t say anything else. Then he said, “Suppose you find the Duffy file then.”
“Did my mother file it?” Natalie asked.
He shrugged. “God knows.”
Life in the office got almost instantly better—and simultaneously worse.
It was better in the sense that Christo didn’t have to quit what he was doing to rescue and detraumatize young clients whom Tuesday’s martinet had pointed to chairs, fixed with a steely stare and commanded, “Sit there and don’t move.”
Natalie found the books and puzzles and toys her mother kept in the cabinet, and if a parent with children or a child he was representing had to wait for him, she saw that they were calm and engaged until Christo could see them.
She fielded phone calls without interrupting him. She took legible notes and reported conversations accurately. It took her a while to find the Duffy file—because it hadn’t been filed at all, but had been shuffled in with another case’s pre-trial motions.
When he was terse and demanding, which admittedly he sometimes was, she didn’t take it personally and burst into tears. She simply did what needed to be done. And more. When he missed lunch to attend a meeting, for example, he found a sandwich sitting on his desk when he got back.
As far as Christo could tell, by the end of the afternoon Natalie was up to speed and every bit as capable as her mother at juggling three opposing counsels, two cranky judges, one school social worker and, for all he knew, a partridge in a pear tree.
Workwise, then, Natalie Ross was everything he could ask for—her work wasn’t a problem at all.
Seeing her was.
When he opened the door to his office that afternoon, he felt an instant punch in the gut seeing Natalie at Laura’s desk. Her mother was an attractive woman, but Natalie was beautiful. And there was a light and a vitality about Natalie that took her beauty to a whole different level. She was smiling up at Madeleine Dirksen, one of his weepier clients, while at the same time bouncing Madeleine’s two-year-old on her knee.
“You can come in now,” he said to Madeleine.
“I’ll keep Jacob for you,” Natalie offered.
Madeleine gave her a grateful smile. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” Natalie assured her and slanted a quick glance in Christo’s direction. “He can help me file.”
Christo ushered Madeleine into his office, fully expecting to hear Jacob start howling or, before long, bookcases crashing. But no untoward sounds reached his ears. And when he and Madeleine emerged an hour later it was to find Natalie with the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder while she scribbled notes with one hand and kept the other wrapped around Jacob who, thumb in his mouth, was sound asleep on her lap.
Madeleine blinked back her tears and gave her a wobbly wet smile. “Ah, wonderful.”
“He is,” Natalie agreed. “I’ll carry him out to your car if you’d like. That way he may not wake up.”
When she got back she had a question about one of the letters he’d wanted typed. “Here,” she said. “This doesn’t make sense to me.” She rattled off some of his legalese, pointing at it on the computer screen.
He crossed the room to have a look, and discovered that if the sight of Natalie rattled him, breathing in the scent of her distracted the hell out of him.
As he leaned over her shoulder to have a look at what she didn’t understand, he caught the scent of some wild-flowery sort of shampoo. Not a strong scent; it was barely evident, in fact. He stepped closer, breathed deeper. Shut his eyes.
“Did you leave a word out?” Natalie turned her head to look up at him so their faces were scant inches apart.
Christo jumped back. “What? What word?”
“I don’t know, do I?” she said with some aspersion. “You’re the one who’s writing the letter.”
“Er.” He had to step closer then to try to make sense of his words on the screen, to see what he’d been saying, to recapture his train of thought. And he caught another whiff of wildflowers. He stiffened and held his breath.
Natalie turned once more, her brows drawn together. “Are you catching a cold?”
“What?”
“You’re sniffling. Do you have allergies?”
“No, damn it. I don’t have allergies.” He spun away and stalked back into his office. “Forget it. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“We’re working tomorrow?”
“Not you. Me.” He’d need his Saturday morning in the office just to catch up from the week’s earlier disasters—not to mention from proximity to Natalie.
He shut the door, sank into his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why the hell had he ever asked her to find him a secretary?
Why the hell had she agreed to do it?
He knew the answers. Or at least the acceptable ones.
But three more days of this?
Be careful what you wish for, his Brazilian grandmother always used to tell him.
Now he really understood exactly what she meant.
“You’re still here.” The words were more accusation than question. Christo, arms braced on either side of the open doorway, collar unbuttoned, tie loose, was glowering at her as if she were doing something wrong. “It’s past six o’clock.”
Natalie shrugged. “I still had work to do.” She forbore pointing out that he was still here, too. “My mother taught me not to leave things undone.” She picked up the last of the papers she was filing and concentrated on finding the proper folder in the drawer, not allowing herself to look again at the man across the room.
The theory behind vaccinations—the one that had brought her here to work for him today—was that if you introduced a small dose of something dire into your system, you would develop antibodies that would help you resist the Big Bad Real Thing.
Good idea for resisting polio and smallpox and influenza. It didn’t help with resisting Christo Savas one bit.
A little exposure to Christo simply made her want more. And the more chance she had to look at him, the more her eyes tried to follow his every move. The more he demanded, the more she was determined to prove equal to the task. And as he shoved away from the door and came toward her, she found herself leaning toward him.
God, was gravity against her, too?
Certainly her own inclinations were. Far from getting over him, she was as attracted as ever. Possibly more, because Christo the litigator had been a brilliant incisive attractive man. But this Christo, who took time with weeping women and who had spent half an hour putting a puzzle together with a shy little girl before he ever got her to say a word—this Christo was even more appealing. He was kind, he was compassionate. He was caring. He was human.
He was everything she’d once believed him to be—except available to fall in love with.
“I’m going now,” she said, slipping the last file into the correct folder and shutting the drawer with a firm push. She plucked her blazer off the coat rack and put it on, feeling a sudden need for armor again under the intensity of his hooded gaze. “You don’t want me to come in tomorrow?”
“No.”
That was certainly clear enough. “Right.” She picked up her briefcase. “Well, I’ll see you Monday, then.” She opened the door.
“Natalie.” Her name on his lips stopped her in her tracks. She looked back.
He sucked in a breath. “Your mother would be proud.”
She smiled faintly. “I hope so.”
She left quickly, closing the door behind her. Three years ago she thought she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. Today—coming to work for Christo—she wondered if she might have made a bigger one.
Saturdays were catch-up day.
Christo didn’t work at his office every Saturday. But when things piled up during the week and he needed quiet time to work out his arguments, to think outside the box and get new perspectives on cases, he headed for his office.
There were no clients demanding attention on Saturdays. There were no judges or other attorneys calling, and there were no household chores to distract him.
Saturday at the office was, hands-down, the best day and the best place for productive, intense, focused work.
Or it had been until now.
Now, the minute he walked in the door he caught a hint of Natalie’s elusive wildflower shampoo. Her handwriting was on a note on the top of his pile of things-to-do. He found himself prowling through his file drawers looking into folders she’d filed, studying notes she’d made. Ostensibly it was because he needed the information.
But he couldn’t quite lie to himself well enough to believe it didn’t have something to do with his preoccupation with Natalie.
He shut the file drawer and went back to his desk, but he didn’t sit down. He paced the length of his office and asked himself, not for the first time, what the hell it was about Natalie that got under his skin?
Or was it simply that she was the one who’d got away?
She didn’t get away, he reminded himself irritably. She’d turned up in his bed and he’d effectively tossed her out. End of story.
Except it wasn’t the end of the story. And however hard he tried to concentrate on the argument he was trying to write, memories of Natalie kept niggling in his brain.
Instead of an annoyance it was a relief when his cell phone rang to distract him. And when he saw the number calling his mood lightened at once. “AvČ!”
“Ah, Christo. I miss you.”
The sound of his Brazilian grandmother’s voice could always make him smile. He missed her, too. “What’s up?”
She was a dynamo, his grandmother, always involved in a hundred different things. He tipped back in his chair now and put his feet on the desk, letting her voice carry him back to the place she called home. She told him about the crops—it was a farm as well as an estate of note these days. She told him all about her neighbors and the extended family and her many bridge games. She kept him up to date on where his father was.
“In Buenos Aires this week,” she said. “Last week in Paris.”
Par for the course as far as Christo was concerned. Xantiago Azevedo, whom he’d never called Dad or Papa or anything other than Xanti, the name on the back of his father’s soccer shirt, had been on the move all of Christo’s life.
He hadn’t even met his father until he was nearly six. And then it had been a surprise to both of them.
Xanti had come to play in a match in L.A., and he’d had a night to kill before his plane left for Sao Paulo the next day. At loose ends, he’d apparently decided to look up an old flame. Probably, Christo realized later, he had decided to see if Aurora Savas wanted a roll in the hay for old time’s sake.
Xanti hadn’t actually said that in so many words—not that Christo would have understood them at the time if he had—but he’d definitely blinked in surprise when the door had been opened by a boy who looked just like him.
“Who’re you?” Xanti had demanded.
Before Christo could say more than his first name, his mother had come up behind him. “Meet your son, Xanti,” she’d said to his dumbstruck father. “Want to take him home with you for the summer?”
Surprisingly enough, Xanti had.
But not before he’d married Aurora.
“Of course, we will marry,” he’d said, adding with the foolish nobility Xanti generally approached things with in the short run, “It is my duty.”
Maybe. But his commitment to it didn’t last. It was the long run Xanti was never able to handle, which is why the whirlwind marriage had lasted barely two months.
Still, it had given Christo a grandmother who loved him and a home away from home in Brazil. Widowed Lucia Azevedo had welcomed her only grandchild with open arms. With her husband deceased and Xanti, her only child, jetting around the world playing soccer and sleeping with women, this unexpected grandchild quickly became the light of her life.
And Christo, after a week of determined indifference, found his resolve undermined by Avó’s equally determined love. Her gentle smiles and calm acceptance undid his resolution to remain aloof from this new world he’d been thrust into—a world in which he didn’t even speak the language.
“No matter,” Avó had said. “We will learn each other.”
Teach, she’d meant. But “learn each other” was exactly what they’d done. Now, twenty-six years later, Christo spoke with her in the same mixture of English and Portuguese that they’d come to then.
“’Stas bem?” he asked her. “Are you okay?” because she’d had fainting spells recently.
“Sim, sim. Muito bem. Perfeita.” She dismissed his concerns. “And you? Have you met the girl yet?”
Abruptly the idyll was over and a vision of Natalie popped back into his head.
He sat up and jerked his feet off the desk. “No.”
Ordinarily he brushed off the question with a laugh. It wasn’t as if she didn’t regularly ask him.
Having given up on Xanti ever settling down—though he’d been with the same woman, Katia, for almost a year now—Lucia had made it clear she was counting on Christo to marry and settle down and give her babies to dote on.
He’d never told her he had no intention of marrying because it would upset her. She would think it was her fault, that she hadn’t taught him well enough about love and family and the value of marriage. But today he felt edgier than he usually did.
And his grandmother picked up on it. “You are looking though,sim?”
“I—”Damn it, no. And he didn’t intend to.
“I had a good marriage with your grandfather,” she reminded him. “If he had lived, maybe Xanti—” And then her voice trailed off. “No matter,” she said briskly after a moment. “Xanti is who he is. But you—you will find her, Christo,” she assured him, her voice strong again. “Or I will find her for you.”
Since he’d turned thirty, two years ago, she’d been offering to do that regularly.
“Nāo é necessário,” he assured her again now.
“Alicia, she would be good for you. She is going to be a lawyer, too,” his grandmother went on as if she hadn’t heard. “So you will have something to talk about.”
Christo let her talk. He didn’t discourage her ever. He’d tried that, but it made her despondent and led to despairing comments like, “What have I done wrong? It’s not just your father who can’t settle down. Now you, too!”
“You want to meet her?” his grandmother asked hopefully.
Not really. “I’m busy,” Christo said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back to Brazil.” He was in no hurry to go down for a visit if Avó was planning to set him up with dates when he did.
“Sim, I know.” She sounded sad now. “It has been a year.”
“I’ll get there, I promise.”
“As Xanti promises.”
He heard a weary resignation in her tone. Christo’s jaw tightened. “Yes, but I keep mine,” he reminded her.
“I know you do.” Her voice was gentle. “So you will come.”
“I will,” Christo said firmly. “Before Christmas. I’ll call you in a couple of weeks and we can talk about it.”
“Of course we can. You are my favorite grandson.” It was what she always said.
“I’m your only grandson,” he reminded her with a grin.
“That is so,” she agreed. “I love you, my Christo.”
“You, too.Tchau, ’Vó. Beijos.”
He hung up, slumped in his chair and tipped his head back. Now visions of his doting grandmother overlaid those of Natalie in his mind. AvГі would like Natalie. Natalie would like his grandmother as well.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE were no hot looks from Christo on Monday morning. No glances that lingered. No politeness even.
Well, Natalie supposed he was polite enough. But he was absolutely businesslike, curt and remote every time he spoke to her. The intense awareness she’d felt on Friday was more like a determined deep freeze today. He didn’t even meet her eyes, but looked out the window all the time he was giving her instructions.
She remembered her mother saying more than once, “Christo is such a pleasure to work for. He’s always so even-tempered.”
Even-tempered, as in his range of emotions went from stern to dour? He smiled enough at his clients. But he scarcely looked at her.
He wouldn’t even take the time after his nine-thirty appointment left to come and look at a scan of a handwritten document she had up on the computer screen.
“You can figure it out,” he said curtly and stayed at his desk, not looking up as he flipped through papers and sorted them into folders. Natalie knew he had two pre-trial conferences in L.A. in the afternoon. She supposed he was preoccupied with them.
He saw two more clients, then came out of his office shortly before one. “I won’t be back until late.” He was shrugging into his suit coat and his tie was once more neatly knotted, his hair just combed.
“Anything else I should do while you’re gone?” Natalie asked.
“Take a lunch break.”
She blinked.
“You didn’t on Friday. You went out and grabbed sandwiches.” It sounded more like an accusation than a comment. “So today, go eat. I won’t be back until late,” he went on. “So I don’t need you bringing me sandwiches.”
So the sandwich had offended him, had it? Why? Had it made him think she was making another bid for attention? As if! She had simply done what she knew her mother would have done.
But she didn’t say that. She gave a light shrug, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other to her. It didn’t. It really didn’t.
Christo opened the door, then looked back over his shoulder. “You don’t need to stay late, either.”
Natalie didn’t even deign to reply to that.
She would stay late if she had work to finish. If she didn’t, she’d leave. And he could take his handsome face and his bloodymindedness and go stuff them both where they’d do some good.
“Whatever you say, boss,” she muttered. But he was gone and didn’t hear her.
Just as well. She finished the letter she was working on, then at quarter past one, took her lunch break, as ordered. She didn’t leave the office, but ate her tuna fish sandwich sitting at her mother’s desk. She did, however, spend the time catching up on her own work for Rent-a-Wife.
Sophy had done the scheduling this week, but Natalie still had the billing to do. If Mr. Stickler Savas wanted everything in businesslike boxes from here on out, that was fine with her. She’d do her work now and start back on his after lunch.
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