He stopped laughing almost as quickly as he had begun, and before her very eyes, Mallory could see the legal part of his mind kick in. "How do you know Kevin was Santa Claus?" His voice had cooled off.
Now she'd have to lie, which had been the best reason for not telling him anything. "I'd rather not tell you that." She set her jaw, knowing he wouldn't settle for that answer, but it would give her a second to think of another one.
"I'd rather you did." He set his jaw, too.
"A Roquefort-PearTower for the lady," their waiter droned above them. "Curried Mussels for you, sir, and an order of our famous onion rings."
Mallory could imagine the conversation going on in the kitchen. "Will you hurry up with the orders for that pair at table nineteen before they draw blood?"
She attacked her salad with feigned gusto, but even with her gaze downcast she could feel him boring a hole through her forehead.
"I guessed," she said suddenly.
"You guessed."
"Yes."
"How?"
"Oh, his voice. Or something."
"So this is just a guess on your part."
"No, then I asked."
"When did you ask him?"
"At a time when you weren't there."
He frowned, probably trying to remember a point in the afternoon that she and Kevin might have been alone, and she hoped he didn't put too much pressure on himself. He wasn't going to remember one because there hadn't been one.
"I see," he said at last. "Well, now that that's out of the way, maybe we can get back to work. How do you think we ought to handle the woman with green teeth we're deposing tomorrow?"
Carter figured he could talk and brood at the same time. He didn't believe she'd asked Kevin. He didn't think there'd been a time he'd been out of the room when she and Kevin were still in it. She was still keeping secrets from him. And if her dates last night and tonight hadn't been with Santa Claus or Kevin, because they were one and the same, they'd been with somebody or bodies else and who the hell was he or they?
Damn! It really mattered to him. That was the problem. The time wasn't right for their relationship to turn physical, but there she sat, so beautiful, so desirable with her marshmallow-cream breasts peeping out at him, her pale hair swinging and her eyes the color of a freezer pack looking so wide and innocent. He could have slept with this woman five years ago if he'd turned on his charm when he'd had a chance, and the fact that he hadn't grabbed at that chance was killing him.
He had to get her off his mind-although it wasn't his mind that was giving him a problem-until he'd successfully settled this case and she was swooning with admiration. So he'd take Brie out tomorrow night and somebody else Friday night and then figure out how to get through the weekend.
She was arguing with him even now, and he couldn't blame her, because he'd been daydreaming and had said something stupid. No more stupidity. His life depended on it.
It was the following morning that Mallory felt the full impact of her recent veering-veering? careening!-from the beaten path to order and serenity.
By the time Carter came out of his room looking ready for breakfast-and a lot more coffee, judging from those bags under his eyes-she was dressed in her new tight pants, blue-green jacket, outrageous sheer tank top Maybelle had thrust into her bag at the last minute and high-heeled Pradas and was methodically dumping the entire contents of her handbag on the desk.
"What are you doing?"
"I can't find my credit card."
"Call and ask them to FedEx you another one."
She gave him a look that would have made her mother proud-until her mother saw her wearing aqua to the office.
"Okay," he muttered. "When did you use it last?"
She tried to focus on the lost card instead of on Carter's mouth. "Bloomingdale's, I think, when we went up to buy socks. You volunteered to handle our meals together and file for the reimbursement, so I think, yes, it must have been Bloomingdale's."
"You probably stuck it in some weird place."
"I never, as you put it, stick my credit card in some weird place. It has its place and that's where I put it."
"Okay," he muttered. "When did you use it last?"
She tried to focus on the lost card instead of on Carter's mouth. "Bloomingdale's, I think, when we went up to buy socks. You volunteered to handle our meals together and file for the reimbursement, so I think, yes, it must have been Bloomingdale's."
"You probably stuck it in some weird place."
"I never, as you put it, stick my credit card in some weird place. It has its place and that's where I put it."
"I might have known." She heard the sarcasm in his tone. "But this time-" he pointed a triumphant finger at her "-you didn't."
Her mouth tightened. "I hardly need you, who packed no socks, to point that out to me."
"No, I guess you don't. You never forget anything, right?" He moved closer to the desk, his gaze scanning the objects scattered over it. "Let's see what we've got here." His smile was not what you'd call friendly.
"Stay out of my handbag," she ordered him.
"I'm just looking for your credit card, not touching anything," he said. "A baggie full of first aid stuff isn't all that private, is it? Oh, my. Look what we've got here. A tiny tool kit. A tube of superglue. Do you have a foldaway crane in here somewhere? And where's the duct tape?"
Her face flamed with heat. She did, in fact, have small rolls of scotch tape and electrician's tape with her at all times, as well as a pair of scissors, two needles, one threaded with black and one with white, two small brass safety pins, self-sticking Velcro discs
"It's good to be prepared in an emergency."
"How often do you have an emergency?" he asked, zeroing in on her sewing kit.
"I pull out a hem from time to time."
He raised his face to the ceiling. "Oh my God, it's a crisis. Throw that woman out of this meeting. Her hem's hanging."
"If you look your best, you work your best," Mallory said, but it sounded pretty lame even to her.
"Not necessarily," he said, suddenly shifting gears and becoming just Carter again, Carter without the attitude. "For example, I look great." He began helping her take things out of the handbag. When he ran onto the box that that held exactly twelve aspirin tablets, he opened it, shook four out into his hand and swallowed them dry. "And now I'm going to work better. Hey! Here's your credit card." He pulled it out of an inner pocket of the handbag and held it up triumphantly.
"Thank you," she said, feeling wilted. "I would never have looked for it there. That's my PalmPilot pocket, not my credit card pocket. No wonder I couldn't find it."
"I think it works out better never to know where anything is," he said as she repacked her handbag. "That way, when you lose it, you know you'll have to look everywhere for it."
"I see a flaw in your reasoning," she muttered.
"We can talk about it at breakfast," he said. "Ready to go? I'm going to have pancakes this morning. All those eggs are giving me too much energy."
I know a really great way you could use it up.
"Goon into the conference room," she said when they'd breakfasted and arrived at Angell and Angell. "I'm going to talk to Phoebe about speeding up the photographic evidence."
"Good luck," he muttered.
She left her briefcase in the hall outside the conference room door and stepped down to Phoebe's office, where she heard voices through the not-quite-closed door. Just one voice, actually, Phoebe's.
"I'm doing my best, Father," she was saying. "I don't like it, though. It's not ethical, and I-"
Mallory could just barely see Phoebe as she paced her office, a phone to her ear and her hand clasped to her forehead.
"I know," Phoebe said after a long listen. She sounded beaten.
"Yes, Father, I know. Tough and practical," she said a moment later. "I'll keep trying, of course."
Mallory slipped away. Alphonse Angell was controlling Phoebe's decisions from Minneapolis. She just wondered what he wanted his daughter to do that she considered unethical.
"Did she agree?" Carter asked when she returned to the conference room.
"I'll talk to her later," Mallory said. "She was busy."
"You chickened out." His eyes glittered devilishly.
"Did not!"
"Bet you did."
"If I did, may my teeth turn green," Mallory said, "and hush. Here's our witness."
"What I don't unnerstand," Maybelle said, "is why that woman don't just have her teeth whitened."
"What I don't understand," said the makeup artist, "is why she opened her mouth to the max and flung her head back in the middle of dyeing her hair."
Mallory stifled an impatient breath. She stifled it to keep from blowing the makeup artist in the eye. Maybelle had decreed they would meet at Bergdorf's at seven, and Mallory had arrived nearly in tears, wanting to tell Maybelle that in spite of the red jacket, pants she could hardly sit down in and flirty snow boots, nothing whatever had happened last night. In fact, the first thing Carter had done when they'd gotten home was call Brie and remake their date for tonight.
She had actually wept a little as she took the tags off her new clothes and hung them up, had wept for Carter and had wept at the money she'd spent. Or not spent, since she hadn't actually paid for them yet. And then, to top everything off, Carter had taken Phoebe Angell out to lunch.
Here she was in her darkest hour and all Maybelle could do was obsess on the woman with green teeth, that is, after telling Mallory her next step was to jazz up her makeup a little. So while Maybelle extolled the wonders of whitening, Mallory sat on a high stool at the Trish McEvoy counter in Bergdorf's Level of Beauty-a fancy name for a fancy basement-getting stuff brushed on her eyelids, her cheeks, her nose, along with a steady stream of instructions from a woman so elegant, so perfectly groomed that Mallory wondered how she ever got anything else done. Later, she'd get to spend a few hundred dollars more on makeup. Tonight, Maybelle had assured her, she wouldn't have to spend a dime, just had to sit still, be quiet and she'd have a whole new image in no time flat.
"I mean, those whitnin' jobs are incredible," Maybelle was saying now. "I talked the president into one."
The makeup artist came to a halt with the lip pencil. "The president?"
"Not ours," Mallory said, proud to be able to add something to this conversation. "The president of an emerging nation who needs to change his image to get reelected."