the apartment building, and rules were rules.
Clean your refrigerator thoroughly, and pay special attention to the crisper. A rotten vegetable will spoil your return to hearth and home.
No problem there. She hadn’t been home long enough to put anything in the crisper.
Check the expiration date of your perishables—boxed, canned, frozen and refrigerated foods and over-the-counter drugs—and throw away those items that will expire while you’re away.
Mallory stared at the page, briefly considering the possibility that her mother had at long last gone over the edge. But millions of women bought these books, women who pursued the same kind of happiness her mother enjoyed, that Mallory relied upon and took comfort from.
Give your itinerary to a close friend or family member.
This brought her up short. If she called her parents, the conversation would take hours. Her mother would put her through a verbal checklist, and they might get into a fight over the expiration date thing. She had friends. Close friends. The friends with whom she’d taken the St. John’s trip, for example, who’d stared at her in disbelief when she’d announced her intention to come home early. They’d tease her mercilessly if she told them she’d traded sun and sand for sin and sex with Carter Compton.
Her head jolted up from the book with a snap that almost left her with whiplash. She was going to New York on business, not to engage in sin and sex.
She suddenly remembered she had a brother in New York she could send her itinerary.
It wasn’t surprising she was just now remembering that Macon was in New York. Macon was the sort of person whose location was vague, not so much a brother as a cyber-brother. He communicated with the family by e-mail. He sent Internet birthday cards and gifts he’d ordered online. Occasionally he came home for Christmas, but more often, he spent the holiday monitoring some public or private computer system. Macon was a computer ace. He lived and breathed computers, had since he met a keyboard and experienced love at first byte.
From time to time, their parents took a notion to make sure he still existed in the flesh. After their last trip to New York, Mallory’s mother had reported that he was dressing better these days. But then, it was hard to believe he could be dressing any worse.
She dialed his number. Predictably, the phone rang once and a message came on. “Trent Computer Consultants,” Macon’s familiar voice droned. “I’m not here. E-mail me at macontrent, all one word, at trent dot com.”
“My brother the robot,” Mallory muttered.
Whose sister isn’t a woman, she’s a lawyer.
The similarity was too great. Getting up from the computer after e-mailing Macon to tell him they should get together in New York, she felt exhausted. She’d better pack before she found herself checking the expiration dates on the box of crackers and tin of smoked oysters she kept on hand as an emergency hors d’oeuvre. She turned to the chapter entitled “Carry On.” She didn’t really need to look at it. This chapter she knew by heart.
CARTER COMPTON WRAPPED his fingers around his most recent cup of coffee, took a sip and made a face. It was the worst coffee he’d ever tasted—okay, except for the last cup he’d made for himself. He’d had to resort to the vending machine in the basement, since the staff in the firm’s lounge had gone home hours ago.
He put down the cup and picked up his pen, flipping it back and forth between his fingers. He figured if he worked until nine, he could pick up a pizza on the way home, eat it while he packed and be in bed by ten. His secretary had ordered a car service to pick him up at six-thirty in the morning. That left no time to think. Just the way he liked it.
Something had caused an atmospheric disturbance today. He’d thought his atmosphere had become as dependable as the sunrise and no longer vulnerable to disturbance. Not being able to pin down what had caused it was more disturbing than the disturbance itself.
He had a feeling it was something about Mallory.
The Sensuous files on the Green case had occupied him for several hours. Mallory being all business, she’d probably want to discuss the case during the flight, and he wanted to sound as if he’d given it some thought.
His life was crawling with women, and here he was, trying to impress Mallory. He guessed he’d never feel secure enough about his professional expertise to get over the early days, when he’d had to pull out all the stops to change people’s impression of him.
He got up, stepped over to the big windows of his office and looked out at the glitter of Chicago. Christmas lights already. In the posh suburb of Kenilworth where he’d grown up, his parents had always had the biggest, most beautiful florist-decorated Christmas tree in the neighborhood, if you could call a tree that had a recognizable theme a Christmas tree, and if you could call the collection of huge houses on large acreages a neighborhood. Under that tree were mountains of presents, everything he wanted plus things he didn’t know he wanted. And, always, a tiny box from his father to his mother, containing a diamond slightly larger than the diamond he’d given her the year before.
He’d been a spoiled rich kid, an only child who didn’t know the meaning of rules. With every advantage life could offer, instead of making the most of them, he’d run wild. He’d lost his driver’s license twice for speeding, had totaled three sports cars—somehow, he couldn’t imagine how—without hurting anybody. He’d done enough damage to end up getting accused of things he hadn’t done. His parents had had to post bail for him when he was arrested for burglarizing a neighboring house. He hadn’t, but he couldn’t blame the police for suspecting him. Stealing and drugs were about the only two things he hadn’t experimented with.
Oh, yes. He’d never gotten a girl pregnant, which he saw as something of a miracle—the miracle being that his father had deposited a huge box of condoms on his dresser every Friday morning.
Good grades would only have ruined his high school reputation. He’d played football, but the coach was a diplomat used to dealing with the rich parents of spoiled rich kids, and as long as the team made a decent showing, he didn’t impose many rules, either.
So Carter had managed to get into Northwestern University in Evanston by playing football. There the coach had made him quit smoking, drinking, eating junk food and staying up all night with the cheerleader of his choice to prepare himself for the game the next day. But nobody found out how smart he was until he took the LSATs before applying to law school.
One look at his scores, and the University of Chicago Law School had snapped him up. What they didn’t know was that he didn’t know how to study, and that’s where Mallory had turned his life around. He couldn’t remember exactly how it had happened, just that he’d called her, admitted he was floundering and asked for her help. And she’d been his unofficial, unpaid tutor. He’d never even taken her out for dinner. He’d been afraid to ask.
Did she remember what a dolt he’d been?
Carter frowned. He’d better do a little more work, get familiar with the details, have a few intelligent questions to ask Mallory and, even better, a couple of intelligent comments to make. In short, he’d better get off this nostalgia trip and focus on the damned files.
THE PHONE RANG JUST as Mallory finished packing the flexible wardrobe her mother had been claiming for years would get a woman through anything for any length of time. True to form, when she finished, she actually had room to spare.
“Mallory?
