Читать книгу Claiming His Love-Child - Сандра Мартон, Sandra Marton - Страница 8

September: Boston, Massachusetts

THE end of summer always came faster than seemed possible.

One minute the city was sweltering in the heat and the Red Sox were packing in the ever-faithful at Fenway Park. Next thing you knew, gray snow was piled on the curbs, the World Series was only a memory and the Sox hadn’t even made it to the playoffs.

Cullen stepped out of the shower, toweled off and pulled on a pair of old denim shorts.

Not that any of that had happened yet.

It was Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer with the real start of fall still almost three weeks away. Cold weather was in the future, and so was the possibility, however remote, that Boston could rise from the ashes and at least win the division championship.

Cullen strolled into the kitchen and turned on the TV in time to catch the tail end of the local news. The Sox had lost a tight game yesterday; nobody had much hope they’d do any better today, said the dour-faced sportscaster.

“Wonderful,” Cullen muttered as he opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water and uncapped it.

The sports guy gave way to the weatherman. Hot and humid, the weatherman said, with his usual in-your-face good cheer. Saturday, 10:00 a.m. and the sun was blazing from a cloudless sky, the temperature was pushing ninety with no break in sight from now through Monday.

“A perfect holiday weekend,” the weather guru said as if he’d personally arranged it.

Cullen scowled and hit the off button on the remote.

“What’s so perfect about it?” he growled. It was just another weekend, longer than most, hotter than most. Long, hot, and…

And, what was he doing here?

Nobody, but nobody, stayed in town Labor Day weekend. Driving home from his office yesterday, traffic going out of the city had been bumper to bumper. He’d felt like the only person not heading off for one last taste of summer.

He should have been among them. He’d intended to be.

Cullen lifted the bottle to his lips and drank some water. He’d certainly had enough choices.

Las Vegas, for the usual O’Connell end of summer blast. Connecticut, for the barbecue Keir and Cassie were throwing because Cassie was too pregnant for the long flight to Vegas. He had invitations to house parties in the Hamptons, on the Cape, on Martha’s Vineyard and half a dozen other places, and there was always the lure of three days at Nantucket.

Instead, he was here in hot and muggy Boston for no good reason except he wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere.

Well, except, maybe Berkeley…

Berkeley? Spend Labor Day weekend on one of the campuses of the University of California?

Cullen snorted, finished off the water and dumped the empty bottle in the sink.

Back to square one. Wasn’t that the same insane thought he’d had flying home from Fallon’s wedding in July? It made no more sense now then it had made then. You thought about the West Coast, you thought about San Francisco. Or Malibu. Maybe a couple of days at Big Sur.

But Berkeley? What for? Nothing but college kids and grad students, protesters and protests, do-gooders and doomsayers. Maybe that vitality was part of why he’d loved the place as a law student, but those years were a decade behind him. He was older. He’d changed. His idea of a great party involved more than take-out pizza and jugs of cheap wine. And, except for a couple of his law school profs, he didn’t have friends there anymore.

Okay. There was Marissa Perez. But he could hardly call her a friend. An acquaintance, was what she’d been. Truth was, he didn’t “know” her at all, except in the biblical sense of the word, and even if his sisters sometimes gleefully teased him about being a male chauvinist, he had to admit that sleeping with a woman wasn’t the same as knowing her.

Especially if she crept out of your bed before dawn and left you feeling as if you were the only one who’d just spent a night you’d never forget.

Damn it, this was crazy. Why waste time thinking about a woman he’d seen once and would probably never see again? He was starting to behave like one of the attorneys at his firm. Jack was a dedicated fisherman, always talking about the big one that had gotten away. That’s what this was starting to sound like. The sad story of Cullen O’Connell and The Woman Who Got Away.

Cullen opened the fridge again. It was empty except for another couple of bottles of water, a half-full container of orange juice and a lump of something that he figured had once been cheese. He made a face, picked up the lump with two fingers and dumped it into the trash.

So much for having breakfast in.

Maybe that was just as well. He’d pull on a T-shirt, put on sneakers, go down to the deli on the corner and get himself something to eat. Solve two problems at once, so to speak; silence his growling belly and do something useful, something that would end all this pointless rehashing of the weekend he’d spent with the Perez woman.

Yeah. He’d do that. Later.

Cullen opened the terrace door and stepped into the morning heat. The little garden below was quiet. Even the birds seemed to have gone elsewhere.

First he’d try thinking about that weekend in detail, concentrating not just on what had happened in bed but on all of it. A dose of cool logic would surely put an end to this nonsense. Sighing, he sank down in a canvas sling back chair, closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun.

His 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 had brought a wash of color into her cheeks. It was a stunning contrast—the brush of apricot against her golden skin—and he’d sat there, enjoying the view as much as he was enjoying the knowledge that she was at war with herself.

Was she going to “yes” the honored guest to death, or tell him she thought he was an asshole?

“Hey,” he said, pushing a little harder, “you’re female, you’re Hispanic…Life’s going to be good to you, Ms. Perez.”

That did it. To his delight, what won was the truth.

“I am a lawyer, like you, or I will be once I pass the bar. And I am an American, also like you. If life is good to me, it’ll be because I’ve worked hard.” Ice clung to each syllable. “But that’s something you wouldn’t understand, Mr. O’Connell, since you never had to do a day of it in your entire, born-with-a-silver-spoon life.”

Whoa. The mask hadn’t just slipped, it had fallen off. There was real, honest-to-God, fire-breathing life inside his well-mannered, gorgeous gofer.

She sat back, breathing hard. He sat forward, smiling.

“Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”

“I’ll phone Professor Hutchins. He’ll arrange for someone else to drive you around for the rest of the time you’re here.”

“Did you hear me, Ms. Perez? That was a great performance.”

“It was the truth.”

“Sorry. Wrong choice of words. Mine was the performance. Yours was the real thing. Honest. Emotional. Wouldn’t do in a courtroom, letting it all hang out like that, but a really good lawyer should have at least a couple of convictions he or she won’t compromise on.”

She glared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you. Integrity, Ms. Perez. And fire in the belly. You have both. For a while, I wasn’t sure you did.”

He picked up his glass of iced coffee and took a long sip. God, he loved the look on her face. Anger. Confusion. Any other place, any other time he’d have used that old cliché, told her she was even more lovely when she was angry, but this wasn’t a date, this was what passed for a business meeting in the woolly wilds of academic jurisprudence.

Besides, she’d probably slug him if he said something so trite.

“I don’t…What do you mean, you were performing?”

“Monroe versus Allen, Ms. Perez. One of my first big corporate cases—or didn’t your research on me go back that far?”

She opened her mouth, shut it again. He could almost see her mind whirring away, sorting facts out of a mental file.

“Mr. O’Connell.” She took a breath. “Was this some kind of test?”

Cullen grinned. “You could call it that, yeah, and before you pick up that glass and toss the contents at me, how about considering that you’ve just had a taste of what you may someday face in the real world? You want to blow up when stuff like that’s tossed at you, do it here. Out there, you’ll be more effective if you keep what burns inside you. Discretion is always the better part of valor. Opposing attorneys, good ones, search for the weak spot. If they can find it, they use it.” He smiled and raised his glass of iced coffee toward her. “Am I forgiven, Ms. Perez?”

She’d hesitated. Then she’d picked up her glass and touched it to his. “It’s Marissa,” she’d said, and for the first time, she’d flashed a real smile.

Cullen got to his feet, slid open the terrace door and went back into the coolness of the living room.

The rest of the afternoon had passed quickly. They’d talked about law, about law school, about everything under the sun except what happened each time they accidentally touched each other. She’d dropped him at his hotel at five, come back for him at six, driven him to the dinner at which he’d made a speech he figured had gone over well because there’d been smiles, laughter, applause and even rapt concentration.

All he’d been able to concentrate on was Marissa, seated, as a matter of courtesy, at a table near the dais. No black suit and clunky shoes tonight. She’d worn a long silk gown in a shade of pale rose that made her eyes look like platinum stars; her hair was loose and drawn softly back from her face.

The dress was demure. She wore no makeup that he could see. And yet she was the sexiest woman imaginable, perhaps because she wasn’t only beautiful and desirable but because he knew what a fine mind was at work behind that lovely face.

Even though he figured it might kill him, he did the right thing.

He never so much as touched her elbow or her hand during the after-dinner reception and when she drove him back to his hotel for the last time, he sat squarely on his side of the car and kept his eyes on the road instead of on the curve of her thigh visible under the clinging silk of her gown.

“Thank you for everything,” he said politely, once they reached the parking lot.

“You’re welcome,” she said, just as politely, and then, so quickly it still stunned him, everything changed.

To this day, he didn’t know what had happened, only that what began as a simple handshake changed into a fevered meeting of mouths and bodies.

“Don’t go,” he’d whispered, and Marissa had trembled in his arms as she opened her mouth to the searing heat of his.

They’d gone to his room through the back entrance of the hotel because they couldn’t stop touching each other and when he undressed her, when he took her to bed…

“Oh man,” Cullen muttered, and he stripped off his shorts and headed for the shower again.

THIS time, after he toweled off, he shaved, put on a pair of khakis and a black T-shirt and reached for the telephone.

He needed a change of scene. That was a no-brainer. It was a little late to make weekend escape plans—the roads would still be crowded—but he knew all the back ways to reach the airport at Nantucket. Yeah. Maybe the best choice was the closest choice.

His cottage, and his boat.

Cullen punched in the number of the couple who took care of the cottage. The woman answered; he asked how she was, how her husband was, how the weather was…and then he heard himself tell her he’d just phoned to touch bases and no, he wouldn’t be coming out for the weekend and he hoped they’d have terrific weather and enjoy the three days, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

He hit the disconnect button, ran his hand over his face. Okay. Obviously, he wasn’t in the mood for a weekend of sailing. Well, what was he in the mood for? Something other than rattling around here, that was for sure.

Who to call next? Keir, to ask what time the barbecue was on? His mother, to tell her he’d be home after all? Or should he head for one of those other parties, maybe that one in Malibu? That was a better idea. His family would take one look at him, ask questions he couldn’t answer.

Hell.

Cullen grabbed his address book. He’d call the redhead he’d dated a couple of times the past month. She was pretty and lots of fun, and if he hadn’t called her in a week or two, it was because he was busy.

He hadn’t taken her to bed, either.

How come?

Perhaps this was the weekend to remedy that oversight. The lady had made it very clear she was more than ready to join him in the horizontal rumba.

Cullen smiled, thumbed open the address book, flipped to the page that had her number on it…

“Crap!”

He slammed the book shut, took a quick walk around the room and tried to figure out what in hell was going on. No sailboat. No gorgeous redhead. What did he want to do with the weekend?

The answer came without any hesitation and he acted on it that same way, not fighting it anymore, just grabbing the address book and telephone again, punching in a series of digits before he could change his mind.

“Flyaway Charters,” a cheery voice said. “How may we help you?”

“You can tell me how fast you can get me to Berkeley,” Cullen said. “Yeah, that’s right. Berkeley, California.”