old Tort Law prof, Ian Hutchins, had invited him to fly out and speak to the Law Students’ Association. Cullen hadn’t much wanted to do it; he had a full caseload and what little free time he could scrounge, he’d been spending on Nantucket, working on his boat. But he liked Hutchins a lot, respected him, so he’d accepted.
A week before Speaker’s Weekend, Hutchins had phoned to make last-minute updates to their arrangements.
“I’ve asked my best student to be your liaison while you’re here,” he’d said. “Shuttle you around, answer questions—well, you remember how that works, Cullen. You were liaison for us several times while you were a student here.”
Cullen remembered it clearly. People called it a plum assignment and, in some ways, it was. The liaison networked with the speaker and drove him or her around in a car owned by the university, which invariably meant it was in a lot better shape than the student’s.
Still, it was almost always a pain-in-the-ass job. Pick up the speaker at the airport, drive him or her here, then there, laugh at inane jokes about what it had been like when the speaker was a student on campus. When Ian added that Cullen’s liaison would be a woman, he almost groaned.
“Her name,” Ian said, “is Marissa Perez. She’s a straight-A scholarship student with a brilliant mind. I’m sure you’ll enjoy her company.”
“I’m sure I will,” Cullen had said politely.
What else could he say? Not the truth, that he’d met enough brilliant female scholarship students to know what to expect. Perez would be tall and skinny with a mass of unkempt hair and thick glasses. She’d wear a shapeless black suit and clunky black shoes. And she’d either be so determined to impress him that she’d never shut up or she’d be so awestruck at being in his presence that she’d be tongue-tied.
Wrong on all counts.
The woman standing at the arrivals gate that Friday evening, holding a discreet sign with his name printed on it, was nothing like the woman he’d anticipated. Tall, yes. Lots of hair, yes. And yes, she was wearing a black suit and black shoes.
That was where the resemblance ended.
The mass of hair was a gleaming mass of ebony waves. She’d pinned it up, or tried to, but strands kept escaping, framing a face that was classically beautiful. Gray eyes, chiseled cheekbones, a lush mouth.
Perfect. And when his gaze dropped lower, the package only got better.
Yes, she was tall. But not skinny. Definitely not skinny. The businesslike cut of the black suit couldn’t disguise the soft curves of her body. Her breasts were high, her waist slender, her hips sweetly rounded, and not even the ugliest pair of sensible black shoes he’d ever seen could dim the elegance of legs so long he found himself fantasizing about how she’d look wearing nothing but a thong and thigh-high black stockings.
Cullen felt a hot tightening in his belly and a faint sense of regret. The lady was a babe but she might as well have been a bow-wow. There were unwritten rules you followed on these weekends. He did, anyway.
He never hit on the students he met, any more than he mixed business with pleasure in his professional life back home.
Still, as he walked toward her, he liked knowing he’d spend the next couple of days being shuttled around by a woman so easy on the eyes.
“Miss Perez?” he said, his hand extended.
“Ms. Perez,” she replied politely.
She held out her hand in return. He took it and the brush of skin against skin rocked him to his toes. ZTS, he told himself. The old O’Connell brothers’ explanation for what happened when a man met a stunning woman. Zipper Think Syndrome. He looked at the lovely face turned up to his, saw her eyes flash and had the satisfaction of knowing she’d felt the female equivalent of the same thing.
Maybe not. Maybe he’d just imagined it, because an instant later, her expression was as bland as when he’d first spotted her.
“Welcome to Berkeley, Mr. O’Connell.”
After that, it was all business. She drove him to his hotel, made polite but impersonal small talk through a standard hotel meal in a crowded dining room, shook his hand at the elevator in the lobby and said good-night.
The next morning, she picked him up at eight, chauffeured him from place to place all day and never once said anything more personal than “Would you like to have lunch now?” She was courteous and pleasant, but when he opened the restaurant door for her—something he saw irritated her—and their hands brushed, it happened again.
The rush of heat. The shock of it. And now he saw it register on her face long enough for him to know damned well it really had happened, though by the time they were seated, she was once again wearing that coolly polite mask.
He watched her order a salad and iced coffee, told the waitress he’d have the same thing, and contemplated what it would take to get that mask to slip.
Minutes later, he had the answer.
When he’d had the dubious honor of shuttling Big Names from place to place, he’d boned up on their most recent cases and on things in the news that he’d figured might interest them.
His Ms. Perez had done the same thing. He could tell from the always-positive, always-polite references she made during the course of the morning. She’d read up on his own work and reached conclusions about his stance on the work of others.
What would happen if he rocked her boat? Their salads arrived and he decided to find out.
“So,” he said, with studied nonchalance, “have you been following Sullivan versus Horowitz in Chicago?”
She looked up. “The women suing that manufacturing company for sexual discrimination? Yes. It’s fascinating.”
Cullen nodded. “What’s fascinating is it’s obvious the jury’s going to find for the plaintiffs. How the defense could allow seven women on a jury hearing a case that involves trumped-up charges of corporate discrimination I’ll never—”
Score one. Those gray eyes widened with surprise.
“Trumped up? I don’t understand, Mr. O’Connell.” Maybe it was score two, or had she simply forgotten to reciprocate on the first name thing?
“It’s Cullen. And what don’t you understand, Ms. Perez?”
“You said the charges were—”
“They’re crap,” he said pleasantly. “Shall I be more specific? It’s nonsense that a company shouldn’t have the right to hire and fire for reasonable cause. The manager of that department should never have loaded it with so many women. Not that I have anything against women, you understand.”
He smiled. She didn’t. Score three.
“Don’t you,” she said coldly, and put down her fork. Oh yeah. Definitely, the mask was starting to slip.
“The only reason you believe all that claptrap about affirmative action,” he said lazily, “is because you’re going to benefit from it. No offense intended, of course.”
That
