First he had to listen to a woman who was determined to thrust her infant daughter into the modeling game. Poor kid.
At twelve twenty-five, having left Mallory and Phoebe back at the law offices staring oddly at him when he deserted them, he gazed with grudging approval at the mansion which apparently lodged ImageMakers. This place would sell for three or four times the value of his parents' house in suburban Chicago, but it was less flagrantly ostentatious. He liked that.
He went up the cleanly shoveled sidewalk to the front door, where his positive feelings took a rapid downturn. He stared at the doorknocker. No way was he picking up that thing and banging it on its balls. It gave him a cramp in the groin just to think about it. So he knocked with his knuckles. A moment later the door opened.
'Mr. Wright,' the man at the door said, but his eyes went directly to the doorknocker. 'Oh, thank goodness, I thought it had been stolen.'
'Ever think of getting a doorbell?' Carter growled.
The man smiled. 'I'm Richard,' he said. 'Maybelle's ready to see you.'
'Maybelle?' Carter said, but followed him across the marble foyer, anyway. He took in the office of this Maybelle person in one swift scan, observed that it was unusual, then gave the woman behind the nonstandard desk a once-over and decided her hair must have gone through repeated shock treatment. He sat down, glared at her and said, 'Your knocker is obscene. You being interested in other people's images, I'm surprised you're not more careful about your own.'
The woman had been looking him over, too, but now she narrowed her focus to his face. 'What y'all talkin' about?'
Carter winced just hearing her voice. A quack all right, and he was getting out of here just as soon as he made his point about the knocker.
'The doorknocker,' he said.
'Oh, that. I toleDickie to pick one out. I don't never use the front door, so I don't know what he got. You don't like it? It sure bangs good.'
He stood up. 'You'd better take a look at it, decide for yourself.'
If she said, 'Hey, that's awesome,' or whatever she'd say in that Texas accent of hers, he'd know he had no business being here. Instead, as they stepped outside together and she got a look at the door, she screamed, 'Dickie.'
The scream echoed off the elegant facades that lined the quiet, winterbound street. 'Ma'am?' Richard appeared, wearing a sheepish expression.
'What is that?' Maybelle pointed with a shaking finger.
'Well, it's a-'
'Don't say it,' Maybelle snapped. 'You tryin' to ruin me? What are people gonna think? I'll tell you what-that I'm runnin' a male-escort service here.'
Dickie drew himself up to his full, extremely muscular height. 'To me, it said 'We have a sense of
'Way-ell, that ain't what it says to me. Get rid of it. Get me some nice antique thing that don't look like nuthin' but a doorknocker, you hear?'
'Okay,' Dickie, or Richard, said with a long-suffering sigh.
'And make us some coffee. You like regular or dee-caf.' She turned an assessing gaze on Carter, who was getting pretty cold out there on the stoop, while this skinny little woman in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a panther printed on it didn't seem to notice.
'Regular, but I don't-' He was leaving, was what he'd decided, just as soon as he got his overcoat back.
The gaze turned approving. 'I'll be danged. He likes regular. Y'all hear that, Dickie? Brew us up a pot of real strong stuff.' She turned to Carter, and her expression turned wistful. 'Y'all don't happen to like it percolated, do you? Kindly muddy-like?'
'No, but you have what you like, because I-'
'He don't,' Maybelle told Dickie. 'So drip it. Nobody's perfect,' she added before she marched Carter back across the foyer. He had his mouth open to ask for his coat when she said, 'That's not all you come here for, was it? To yell at me about the doorknocker?'
Instead of asking for his coat, he looked at her, looked into big blue eyes that offered to listen to whatever he had to say. 'No,' he admitted. 'The doorknocker thing was a sidebar.'
'Then sit down,' she said, marching toward the chair behind the desk that looked like the fossilized nest of some long-gone pterodactyl.
'Now that we've done the doorknob,' she said, 'tell me what y'all think of this here desk. Mebbe I'd better take a minute to work on my own image.'
She'd done everything Maybelle had told her to do and still he'd taken somebody else out to lunch. It wasn't Phoebe Angell, either. At least Phoebe was a known quantity.
She'd refused Phoebe's halfhearted invitation to have lunch. The woman's expression had said, 'I'd rather be a waitress on roller skates than have lunch with you.' Instead, she went back to the hotel, netted a table for one in the restaurant, ordered a salad and darted up to the suite. She needed to take a look at herself in the full-length mirror, figure out what she might have done wrong.
She flung open the door of the room, and the first thing she saw was the tiny Christmas tree-wearing the ornament Carter had bought at Bloomingdale's their first night here.
The nonverbal message in that single ornament stunned her. She was too verbal to know what it meant, but she was certain it was meant to tell her something. 'Glad you bought the mistletoe'-something like that. She became aware of the heavy weight that had settled in the lower half of her body, realizing it was nothing new, it was there every second she was with Carter, but it seemed to be getting heavier, harder to ignore.
While she gazed at the ornament, a certainty settled in her bones.
Carter came back to Phoebe's conference room looking like raw skin. Shaken and vulnerable, those were the words that came to Mallory's mind. Also, he was late.
'Are you all right?' she said, then realized she'd looked at her watch. Scolding him about his lateness was hardly the path to seduction.
'Is anyone all right after a root canal?' he growled.
'Oh, sorry,' she said lamely. He hadn't complained of a toothache. She hadn't noticed any swelling. He'd had crunchy bacon with his breakfast. It must have come on quite suddenly.
Or he was lying.
Apparently he wasn't feeling too bad, because he wound up the session with McGregor Ross at five-thirty promptly, and then said he had to leave.
At that point, she hoped it
With a desolate hour to spare before meeting Maybelle at Bergdorf's, she decided to check her e-mail.
It surprised her so much to see Macon's address in the Sender column that she ignored all her business messages and opened his. It was perfunctory as usual, but the message was not at all usual.
'mallory do you think anybody brought up like we were can relax enough to fall in love macon'
Macon? Asking about love? Was the earth still turning? Had the moon escaped?
She wrote back, 'I don't know, but I think we have to give it a try to find out.' Her fingers slowed on the keyboard, then she typed rapidly, 'What exactly is it that you're doing in Pennsylvania?'
She got up from the computer. The suite seemed empty without Carter. She felt as if her life had been empty without Carter, would continue to be empty without him. That was pretty good advice she'd given Macon, now that she thought about it. She'd never know until she gave it a try.
'Tonight we go for underwear,' she informed Maybelle when they met in Bergdorf's first floor Fine Jewelry. She looked her imagemaker straight in the eye.
'Oh, hon, this is startin' to sound good,' Maybelle crooned. 'I was thinkin' fingernails with stars on 'em tonight and save the underwear for the weekend, but if you're ready, let's go for it. Anything intrestin' happen today?'
They started up the escalator toward Lingerie. 'Carter's out with somebody,' Mallory said, feeling despondent.
