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“Jenny? Are you there?” Jordan asked as the silence stretched out between them.
She cleared her throat, silently calling herself a dunce. “You, um, you talked to them?”
“I talked to Peter. He suggested Eric join us, and thought that an appeal from you might cinch the deal.”
“Appeal to Eric,” she repeated as if in a trance.
“You might.”
And then she laughed. “Yeah, right.”
The next moment, she came to her senses and realized she’d taken that in the wrong context. God knew she would have given her right arm to appeal to Eric, but she wasn’t his type. She had far more of a chance of winning the Kentucky Derby than she had of appealing to Eric.
There was silence again and she was quick to remedy it. “You’re his best friend, Jordan. You talk to him.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because, as his best friend, Eric wouldn’t be uncomfortable saying no to me. But he won’t say no to you. Especially since his parents have donated a considerable amount of money to your cause as well as to the Children’s Connection,” he told her, mentioning the name of the adoption organization associated with both Portland General Hospital and PAN itself. “He just needs a little convincing.”
She knew all about the Logans’ generosity, as well as what Eric did and didn’t do. She made it a point to keep tabs on him, even if he was completely unattainable. “And you think I can do that.”
“Hey, you’re the chairlady. I can’t do all your work for you. Besides, you’re the one who can argue the ears off an Indian Elephant.”
She supposed that was a compliment, although she’d had better. “Lovely image.”
“You’ll find him at Logan Corporation. I know he’s free this afternoon about one.” Jordan paused. “He’s expecting you.”
She was due in court by three o’clock. That gave her a small margin of time if she juggled it right and had lunch at her desk.
So what else was new?
Jenny felt her heart hammering as she echoed incredulously, “He’s expecting me?”
“Uh-huh. I told Eric that you might drop by to try to convince him to jump on the bandwagon, so to speak.”
Jenny felt her mouth becoming completely dry. That was because all the moisture in her body had suddenly rerouted itself straight to her hands and then condensed there.
She heard herself saying with more than a little disbelief, “Then I guess one o’clock it is.”
“Great. Talk to you about the details later.”
She wasn’t sure if her brother was referring to the details involved in his taking part in the auction, or the details of what was probably going to prove to be her latest mortifying experience, but she didn’t have the opportunity to ask. Jordan had hung up.
Gripping both sides of the desk, she rose from behind it on shaky legs that had suddenly been rented out to someone else. In a gait she knew had to approximate that of Frankenstein’s monster as he took his first unattended steps, she began to cross to the hall.
“Hey, your next appointment is here,” Betty hissed to her as Jenny strode past the younger woman’s cluttered desk.
Jenny didn’t even spare Betty a look. She couldn’t. Moving her head to the left or right might carry dangerous consequences with it.
“Tell them I’ll be right back.”
Getting accustomed to her new wooden legs, Jenny quickened her steps as she hurried to the bathroom. To throw up.
For a second after she exited the cab, Jenny stood on the curb, looking up at the tall edifice before her. The building that was owned by and housed the Logan Corporation. With effort, she gathered together the last drops of her courage. She needed all the help she could get.
Despite her last appointment running over, she’d made it to the Logan Corporation building with a few minutes to spare.
All the way over to the shining thirty-story edifice she had practiced what she was going to say to Eric once she was alone with him. But, unlike when she was preparing to deliver summations in court, no amount of rehearsal seemed to improve her performance. The moment she went through her arguments, they melted from her brain like lone snowflakes out on a June sidewalk.
He was just a man, she told herself as she rode up the elevator to his floor. Two legs, two arms, one body in between to hold the limbs together. Beneath his tanned skin he had the same skeletal structure as millions of other men.
But oh, that skin, Jenny caught herself thinking. And growing warmer.
This thinking was going to get her nowhere. Worse, if she wasn’t careful, it would lose the auction a potential and incredibly desirable bachelor. The fewer bachelors, the less money would be raised. Any fool could see that having Eric Logan on the block would raise the organization a very pretty penny.
There were no two ways about it. She had to think of him as just another body.
Focus, focus, she ordered herself as she stepped off the elevator and walked down the hallway to the inner sanctum that was the gateway to his office.
His office lay just behind the massive double doors. As the VP of Marketing & Sales for the Logan Corporation, Eric occupied an impressive suite. She had no doubts that the entire staff of Advocate Aid, Inc. could easily fit into it with room to spare, desks and all.
She presented herself to the keeper of the gate. “I’m Jennifer Hall. Mr. Logan is expecting me.”
Unlike Betty, who came to work in jeans that had seen a better century, the woman she addressed looked as if she had been forged out of a mold that was labeled: Perfect Secretary.
The woman smiled distantly but politely, then checked a list before her.
“Yes, he is,” she replied coolly. “If you’ll come this way.” Rising to her feet, the secretary led the way back. She knocked on the door, then turned the knob, opening the door just wide enough to allow Jenny to slip through. “Ms. Hall to see you, sir.”
Nodding her thanks to the woman, Jenny crossed the threshold. When the door closed again behind her, Jenny concentrated on not sinking to the floor in a heap.
She looked like the personification of efficiency, Eric thought as he rose to his feet to greet Jenny. Every light brown hair was pulled back and in place, except for one wayward wisp at her right temple that seemed to have rebelliously disengaged itself from the rest.
It made her look more human, he thought, his eyes sweeping over the rest of her. Jordan’s sister was wearing a light gray suit that appeared just large enough to hide her figure.
Was there a figure beneath all that, or was she shapeless?
Didn’t matter one way or another. He reminded himself that this was his best friend’s sister and not another conquest to be won over. This was strictly business, not pleasure. If anything, he was doing a favor for a friend. A friend to whom he’d ultimately lost a handball game to yesterday.
“Sit down.” He gestured toward the comfortable chair before his desk.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
The words were uttered slowly, distinctly. She wasn’t enunciating so much as trying to work around a tongue that felt as if it had swollen to three times its normal size. Sitting, she leaned her briefcase against the back of the desk and placed her hands on either armrest, praying she wouldn’t leave damp streaks on them. Her palms felt as if they were more than one half water.
Taking a deep breath, she launched into her campaign, fervently hoping she wouldn’t sound like a blithering idiot to him.
“I realize that your time is precious, Eric—” She could call him Eric, couldn’t she? After all, they did go way back, technically. “But this is a very worthy cause.” Her palms grew damper, her speech rate increased. “Since 1989, PAN—that’s the Parent Adoption Network—has been able to help—”
Was she trying to convince him? he wondered. He was under the impression, after talking to Jordan, that this was a done deal. “Yes.”
The single word pulled her up short. She felt like someone slamming on the brake and skidding back and forth along the road, trying not to hit something. “Yes?”
Was there something he wasn’t getting? Or had Jordan failed to tell her that he had agreed to this? “Yes, I’ll be part of the bachelor auction. That’s what you were leading up to, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” She blew out a breath, her mind a sudden blank with nothing available in the immediate area with which to fill it. She flushed. “Wow, that certainly takes the wind out of my sails.”
He found pink was an appealing color on her. Maybe she wasn’t quite as plain as how she first came across. Jenny did have beautiful blue eyes. “Why? Didn’t you want me to say yes?”
“Yes.” She liked the sound of that word in her ear, the taste of it on her tongue. Yes… There were so many scenarios she wanted Eric and herself to agree on….
Yanking herself out of her mental revelry, she tried to backtrack. She wasn’t going to suffer death by headache today. No, if she was going to die today, it was going to be death by sheer idiocy. “I mean, I’ve been looking for the right words to persuade you, practicing speeches.” Because Eric was looking at her so intently, she flushed again. She tried not to contemplate what was going through his mind. “The cabby must have thought I was crazy.”
“Cabby?”
Jenny nodded. “I had to take a cab to get here. Actually, I had to take a cab to get anywhere today. My car died.” She felt her tongue tangling more and more and waved a hand at her words. She’d gone off on a tangent again. It was what happened when her brain wasn’t operating properly. “Never mind, you don’t want to hear about that.”
Eric smiled at her. Jenny found her knees dissolving like sugar cubes in a hot cup of coffee. Any second now she was going to turn into a complete puddle.
“I’ve been subjected to worse things,” he confided. Glancing over at his day planner, Eric made a decision. “Why don’t we grab a cup of coffee somewhere and talk over exactly what you want me to do?”
Oh, if you only knew. Jenny grabbed her thoughts before they could bolt from the corral and go off running.
This was a bad idea, she thought.
Her confidence didn’t come into play in this arena the way it did when she was in the courtroom. There she was completely prepared, knew her case’s strengths, its weaknesses. Here, the only weakness she was acutely aware of was her own.
This wasn’t about her, Jenny upbraided herself. This was about charity. She had to stop thinking like an adolescent and start thinking and behaving like the mature twenty-six-year-old woman she was. A twenty-six-year-old woman who was a damn good attorney and had graduated at the top of her class within a highly competitive academic forum.
A twenty-six-year old woman-slash-attorney who was turning into mush while looking up into warm chocolate-brown eyes that reminded her of her favorite pudding.
Enough.
Exercising tremendous self-control, Jenny forced herself to think practically, not an easy matter under the circumstances. She had to be in court by three, which meant she needed to be inside a cab by two-fifteen. That in turn meant calling a cab by one forty-five. Since it was a little after one o’clock now, that gave her approximately forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes to bask in Eric Logan’s smile and try very, very hard not to behave like a living brain donor. It was a challenge.
“Sounds good to me.” She slowly peeled the words off the roof of her mouth one by one.
The next moment, Jenny looked away from the even wider smile that was now gracing Eric’s lips. She had to. She knew she wasn’t about to regain the use of her knees any other way.
Three
T he coffee shop turned out to be just around the corner from the Logan Corporation. There were tables outside the shop for those who felt like facing the brisk early December afternoon. In deference to the weather, Eric selected one inside for them. It was close to the window so that they still had a good view of all the foot traffic on the busy thoroughfare.
Eric waited until they were both seated and facing each other across a small, round oak table before he said anything beyond asking her what kind of coffee she felt like having.
He watched her take a delicate sip. Jordan’s sister had nice features, he decided, but someone needed to introduce her to makeup.
Still, he knew a great many women who, deprived of their paints, powders and brushes, looked far less attractive than Jenny did. There was something to be said for that.
“So, is this what you do?” Eric asked.
With Eric so close, at times brushing against her in this crowd, it was all Jenny could do to focus on what he was saying, to put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. Thinking was out of the question, so she hit on the first thing that came to her mind.
“You mean badger men?”
He laughed and though it was dangerous to her newly returning sanity, she allowed herself to absorb the rich sound and bask in it for a moment before, once again, reminding herself that this was not about her long-standing infatuation with Eric, it was about the charity.
Ah, but charity begins at home, a tiny voice whispered, and wouldn’t you like to take him home?
Jenny shifted in her seat, as if to physically get away from the thought that neatly tucked itself under the heading of impossible dreams.
“No,” Eric said, “I meant fund-raising.”
Holding her gaily decorated cup in both hands, she stared into the light chocolate liquid, making a deliberate effort to avoid his eyes. If she looked into them, she knew she could easily get lost. And without a lifeline or compass to guide her, she might never be able to find her way back.
“No,” she replied, raising her voice above the murmuring din. “I’m an attorney.”
Eric cocked his head and looked at her, as if absorbing the information and trying to apply it to her. “Really.”
It sounded as if it was half a question, half a statement uttered in disbelief. Obviously her big brother didn’t talk to Eric about her. Not that she would have expected him to, she supposed. When handsome men in their prime got together, siblings were probably the last things they talked about.
From some automatic pilot region that was usually tapped into only when her mother was around, Jenny felt her backbone stiffening.
“Yes, really.”
She saw amusement curving his mouth. Did he find lawyers amusing, or just the idea of her being one?
“Which firm?” he asked.
“Advocate Aid, Inc.” There was a touch of pride in her voice as she told him. They were an incredibly small group, numbering four now that Russell had bailed on them. But they were a proud group nonetheless.
Eric really hadn’t expected that. He’d thought that Jennifer’s father’s connections would have placed her in some highbrow law firm, the way they had Jordan. He tried picturing her in less than affluent surroundings and came up short.
“Why?”
Jenny’s back became ramrod straight. This she was accustomed to. Being challenged. For a moment, she forgot that a glance from Eric Logan’s soft brown eyes could melt steel pins at a hundred paces. Her protective nature came out, the same nature that allowed her to champion so many of the championless people who came her way, looking upon her as their last chance.
“Because they need someone on their side a lot more than the people who come to Jordan’s firm do.”
Eric wondered if this was something she truly believed in, or just something she felt she should be giving lip service to. So many men and women involved in charities only did so by remote control. They kept their hearts completely out of the affair.
Because the noise level was rising, he leaned forward across the table. “So you’re saying the poor need more justice than the rich?”
It felt as if his face was inches from hers. She could feel his breath along her skin. Could feel the inside of her body coiling, ready to spring. Not that she ever would. She was too terrified to make a move.
