Mistletoe Over Manhattan. Barbara Daly

the suit you’d like to be buried in,” Carol said with a sigh Mallory had also heard from more than one of her friends. “I’ll wait fifteen minutes before I bring up the jacket.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice had taken on a new tone. “You’re going to love this jacket.”

      Did Carol’s voice have a sly edge, or was she imagining it? She hadn’t been imagining it, a fact she learned when she unhooked the red jacket from her doorknob.

      Mallory looked it over, and then, dismayed, tried it on. Had she gained weight? She and Carol had always been the same size. But this jacket hugged her waist, pushed up her breasts and flared out over her hip-bones, ending much too soon to hide her rear end, which Mallory felt was the best reason to wear a jacket.

      Carol had undoubtedly meant well, but Mallory was sure she could never bring herself to go out in public in this jacket. Still, she didn’t want to appear ungrateful. She folded it in the “Ellen Trent fold” and used it to fill the empty space in her roll-on bag. If this insane craving for red lasted, she’d buy a proper blazer in New York.

      She closed her mother’s book and held it in her hand for a moment, then slid it into her suitcase. Having it with her would be like wearing garlic to ward off illness or holding a cross to shield herself from the devil.

      The devil being Carter.

      CARTER DRUMMED ON HIS desktop with the pen he held the same way he used to hold a cigarette. He’d thought the pea-green query had been a good question for Mallory, but he could tell from her hesitation that she’d thought it was a damned silly question and she would probably have said so if she weren’t such a well-brought-up girl.

      She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was all woman.

      Feeling as if he’d regressed ten years, he threw everything into his briefcase and went home to his Lake Shore Drive apartment. It was a mess. He was glad to be leaving it, and his cleaning service would deal with it before he got back. He’d forgotten to pick up the pizza and had to order one in. It didn’t arrive until he’d finished packing, so he ate it in bed while he watched the news. He reflected that he still had that spoiled rich kid inside him, and every now and then, he had to let him out.

      Feeling that the smell of pepperoni might follow him all the days of his life, he picked a thread of mozzarella cheese off his favorite pillow, pounded it into a comfortable configuration and tried very hard to get a good night’s sleep.

      Good luck. But exhaustion took over, and next thing he knew, he was at the airport waiting for Mallory.

      So where the hell was she?

      He’d arrived at the gate at a time he thought was a polite compromise between the airline’s ridiculous demands and the reality of the situation, but he’d been there fifteen minutes now with no sign of the woman.

      Maybe she was there and ignoring him, the way she did at work parties where he’d caught an occasional glimpse of her but could never seem to catch up with her.

      With more relief than he wanted to admit to, he saw her aiming toward him, tall, elegant, dressed all in black with that silver-blond hair swinging forward on her shoulders.

      As far as he knew, it was her natural hair color, and he assumed that as she grew older, it would go gently from silver-blond to silver-gray. You would hardly notice. Especially since you hardly noticed Mallory in the first place.

      He stood up, started to smile at her, then felt his eyebrows drawing together in a frown as he wondered why his heart had speeded up a little. He really had to cut down on the caffeine. He had so much adrenaline pumping through him all the time he didn’t need caffeine at all.

      She was, in fact, a great-looking woman. The man across from him was giving her an appreciative gaze as she moved between them, pulling a roll-on briefcase behind her.

      Damn. She’d checked her luggage. Collecting it would take an extra thirty minutes at LaGuardia. His frown deepened, but whether it was because of the luggage or the appreciative male he was suddenly unsure.

      “Hi,” was all she said.

      The word came through full lips of the palest pink, and her voice was rich and throaty. Something about it, or maybe it was the look that man across from him was giving her, made him put his arm around her, nothing more than a cocktail party-type hug, but his heart did an even more violent flip-flop. This was absurd. He removed his arm in a hurry and said, “Mallory. What kept you?”

      He was thinking about talking to his doctor about that little aortic thing when she said, “You’re here so early! How can you work here? You must be able to focus better than I can. I always wait until the very last second to get to the gate, because…”

      As the appreciative man finally dropped his gaze to his newspaper, Carter had a cooling memory of the reason he hadn’t tried to make love to her during their law school years. It was clear she didn’t want him to. Although her voice sounded a little breathless, it was probably from hurrying, because everything else about her said, “Don’t touch.”

      “I just got here myself,” he said, and this time he managed a smile. “I guess you got held up checking bags.”

      “No,” Mallory assured him. “This is it.” She gestured toward the roll-on, and her ice-pale hair swung forward on her shoulders in a perfect, shining arc.

      Carter gazed at the bag with new curiosity. What did she have in there, freeze-dried outfits that expanded when dipped in water? He’d taken Diana to Acapulco last weekend—Diana and four matched pieces of tapestry-covered luggage—where he’d discovered that looking at beautifully dressed Diana was all he would ever care to do. A wasted weekend, and he had so few free ones.

      “Planning a shopping spree?” he asked Mallory.

      With a single glance through blue-green eyes as ice-pale as her hair and lipstick, she made him feel like the worst and most odious of male chauvinists. “Of course not. I’m going to New York to work, not shop.”

      Was she always that way? Or just with him? That made her the only woman in the world who was like that with him.

      “Welcome to United Airlines flight four-oh-three,” an agent piped up. “We are now boarding First Class and Premier members.”

      Carter chewed on his lower lip while they joined the line to board. He was afraid he knew why Mallory acted this way with him, and it didn’t bode well for their working relationship, which, he could easily see, was the only kind of relationship she cared to have with him.

      But with so many other women in the world, why should he care?