like I don’t know what for, she’d said in her charming Italian-cum-New Jersey accent. I should have gone with my heart and hired you first. Forget my brothers and their obligations.
“Anyway, I’ve funded six grants so far, including an earth-friendly organic bakery, a program for poor kids to earn computers through good grades and another to help prostitutes turn their lives around.”
“Prostitutes?”
“Yes. It’s a career-skills program. You can see how wide-ranging our projects can be.”
“Is there a prospectus or annual report? I noticed you don’t have a Web site.”
“Just the brochure so far. Belinda, my assistant, is working on the Web site, which should be up soon. We’re doing good work, Mitch, even if we don’t have a paper trail.”
“Sorry. I’m a lawyer. If it’s not in triplicate with six signatures, it doesn’t exist.” He gave a self-mocking smile.
“Have a little faith.”
“Not in my nature.” He shrugged.
“That’s not quite true.” She’d caught flickers of a wistful optimism behind his judgmental eyes. His self-mocking humor spoke of the humility she’d remembered. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll decide to draft your own grant.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I sense some dissatisfaction in you.”
“You’re reading my mind?” He was teasing, but she answered him straight.
“Only dimly. When I know someone my gift fades.” She had picked up a muddy blue coated with gray when she first saw him, signifying emotional reluctance, guardedness and suspicion. Not at all the openhearted guy she’d met that star-streaked night. But then maybe she’d read him wrong, read his palm wrong, too, as with her mother. That made her throb with pain. The day after she’d met Doctor X, her confidence, her world, had been rocked to its foundations.
She didn’t need any gift to read Mitch’s skepticism. “Everyone has psychic abilities, Mitch, however rudimentary or undeveloped. Even you. We all respond to subtle information about the people around us.”
She watched him fight a sharp remark, then decide to keep the peace. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Come to the workshop with an open mind and you’ll see.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “Surprise me.”
He’d sure surprised her.
Why hadn’t it been the friendly and familiar Jonathan smiling down at her when she’d shoved the eye bag off her face? Instead, it was Doctor X, who’d turned out all wrong.
The universe didn’t give you what you wanted, she knew, it gave you what you needed.
She needed Mitch Margolin? A brusque and suspicious lawyer who thought she belonged in a rubber room? It seemed impossible. Despite that, even after he’d gone she was shaking with arousal.
If he came to the workshop tomorrow night, she would get a chance to separate the tug of lust from the nudge of fate.
It just couldn’t be him.
Could it?
A LITTLE PUNCHY from the encounter with Esmeralda, Mitch swung by his office to pick up some files and to see if Craig had returned his call. He had to verify that the foundation was sound now that he’d promised to bring Dale to her workshop.
On dreams. God Almighty, how had she talked him into that?
It was that husky voice, those eerie eyes. And that mouth…
“You again!” Maggie, his motherly secretary, looked at him with dismay. “When you left here at four, soldier, I thought you were finally acting like a civilian.”
Maggie was always on him to take it easier. Her husband was retired military and Maggie swore that all the moves had taught her how to determine what mattered in life.
When you’ve packed as much as I have, you know what to U-Haul and what to yard-sale.
“Julie around?” he asked. He preferred to avoid her, at least until he got over the pain of his stupid crush. It had been three weeks, though. Should be time enough.
“Working at home.” Maggie’s steel-gray eyes were sympathetic. She’d figured it out, he guessed, and that made him feel even more ridiculous.
Before his crush on Julie had dead-ended, Maggie had strong-armed him into dating one of her daughter’s single friends—a PR woman with her own firm, as driven as he was. He’d liked her a lot, but they eventually got tired of matching calendars. When he’d felt only relief, it dawned on him what had kept him so disengaged. Julie. The way he felt about her.
He liked to hit problems straight on, so he’d asked her out to dinner, aching to lay it on the line. The rub was that they worked together. Also, she was younger than him. But if she felt like he felt, they’d figure out a solution.
She’d wanted to talk to him, too, it turned out, which gave him hope. As soon as they took their first sip of the wine he’d selected in the restaurant he’d chosen for its romantic ambiance, reserving a private table, she’d told him how much his friendship meant and how grateful she was that he’d taken her on right out of law school, and she wanted him to be the first to know that she was engaged to be married.
To some bureaucrat in land management. Dull as the dirt he parceled.
Mitch should have spoken up sooner. Why had he waited? Too late then and his confession had died in his chest. He’d wished her well. Of course. He wanted her to be happy.
He’d just hoped it would be with him.
“Dinner’s in your office,” Maggie said now. “A basket of homemade tamales from the wife of the landscape guy to thank you for all the extras. I could buy a new house with the billables you give away, Mitchell. Keep it up and your pro bonos will make us pro-broke-os.”
“I see their tax statements, Maggie. It does not serve us well to break their piggy banks paying us.” His clients often needed piddly advice he could rattle off without any research. “It’s practice-building,” he said. “Gets me referrals.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. He was swamped and she knew it.
The way he saw it was you gave extra and extra came back to you. Esmeralda would call it karma. He called it good business.
Right out of school, he’d gotten tons of experience with a business-law firm. Pro-bono work with the Small Business Administration helping startups had fired his blood, so he’d opened his own firm with that specialty six years ago, hired Maggie, then grew enough to bring on Julie last year.
He was up to his eyeballs in work, but he’d begun to feel restless, as though he needed a new challenge. Craig was after him to work for the A.G.’s office. A big income dive, but it was important work. A good next step, he figured.
“Let me see if any
