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.
