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Even after Sophy had hung up, Natalie had tried to come up with alternatives. But short of calling her mother and telling her the problem, she didn’t see one. It was an indication of how badly she didn’t want to do it that once she actually picked up the phone and began to punch in her mother’s number.
But before she finished, she hung up again. She couldn’t be that selfish.
Not that her mother wouldn’t want to come home. Her phone call had made it clear just how much of a trial Grandma Kelling was.
But Laura’s duty, as she perceived it, Natalie knew, was to be there for her no matter how irritating it was.
Just as her own duty was to step in and take over for Laura. Her sense of familial love and responsibility was, after all, one of the moral tenets Natalie most admired about her mother, one her father had turned out to be notoriously lacking. Laura never hesitated to do the right thing even when it was the hard thing—like putting up with Grandma Kelling and her bell.
Like working for Christo Savas.
And so Natalie had dragged herself off to the shower, washed and dried her hair, put on a tailored, professional navy-blue skirt and white blouse, then added a matching navy blazer for good measure. It was armor, and she knew it. But she felt as if she were heading into battle.
Then, shortly before eight, she’d rung Sophy again.
“I’m going,” she said without preamble.
“Of course.” There was the sound of satisfaction in Sophy’s voice. “I knew you would.”
Natalie had known she would, too.
And she was determined to begin as she meant to go on—as the consummate professional. So she shut the door on Christo, leaving him to the files in his office while she went out to the reception area to finish the call she’d taken and schedule the appointment required.
It wasn’t difficult to step into her mother’s shoes. She understood the way her mother did things, her work-flow pattern as it were, the process she used to get things done.
Laura had never done things haphazardly as a wife and mother. She wasn’t rigid, but in the Ross household there had always been a place for things, and things were always in their place.
So it was no trouble now for Natalie to open the middle left-hand drawer of her mother’s desk and find the appointment book right where she expected it would be. She ran her eyes down Christo’s appointments for the next week, understood quickly the general pattern of his days, picked up the phone, and offered the caller three possible times.
She wrote the client’s choice in the book, hung up the phone and realized that Christo was standing in the door to his office staring at her.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head. “Three out of four of them couldn’t find the appointment book. Two of them said it should be on the computer.”
“My mother wouldn’t keep the primary schedule on the computer.”
“I know.” He rocked back and forth on his heels. For a moment he didn’t say anything else. Then he said, “Suppose you find the Duffy file then.”
“Did my mother file it?” Natalie asked.
He shrugged. “God knows.”
Life in the office got almost instantly better—and simultaneously worse.
It was better in the sense that Christo didn’t have to quit what he was doing to rescue and detraumatize young clients whom Tuesday’s martinet had pointed to chairs, fixed with a steely stare and commanded, “Sit there and don’t move.”
Natalie found the books and puzzles and toys her mother kept in the cabinet, and if a parent with children or a child he was representing had to wait for him, she saw that they were calm and engaged until Christo could see them.
She fielded phone calls without interrupting him. She took legible notes and reported conversations accurately. It took her a while to find the Duffy file—because it hadn’t been filed at all, but had been shuffled in with another case’s pre-trial motions.
When he was terse and demanding, which admittedly he sometimes was, she didn’t take it personally and burst into tears. She simply did what needed to be done. And more. When he missed lunch to attend a meeting, for example, he found a sandwich sitting on his desk when he got back.
As far as Christo could tell, by the end of the afternoon Natalie was up to speed and every bit as capable as her mother at juggling three opposing counsels, two cranky judges, one school social worker and, for all he knew, a partridge in a pear tree.
Workwise, then, Natalie Ross was everything he could ask for—her work wasn’t a problem at all.
Seeing her was.
When he opened the door to his office that afternoon, he felt an instant punch in the gut seeing Natalie at Laura’s desk. Her mother was an attractive woman, but Natalie was beautiful. And there was a light and a vitality about Natalie that took her beauty to a whole different level. She was smiling up at Madeleine Dirksen, one of his weepier clients, while at the same time bouncing Madeleine’s two-year-old on her knee.
“You can come in now,” he said to Madeleine.
“I’ll keep Jacob for you,” Natalie offered.
Madeleine gave her a grateful smile. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” Natalie assured her and slanted a quick glance in Christo’s direction. “He can help me file.”
Christo ushered Madeleine into his office, fully expecting to hear Jacob start howling or, before long, bookcases crashing. But no untoward sounds reached his ears. And when he and Madeleine emerged an hour later it was to find Natalie with the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder while she scribbled notes with one hand and kept the other wrapped around Jacob who, thumb in his mouth, was sound asleep on her lap.
Madeleine blinked back her tears and gave her a wobbly wet smile. “Ah, wonderful.”
“He is,” Natalie agreed. “I’ll carry him out to your car if you’d like. That way he may not wake up.”
When she got back she had a question about one of the letters he’d wanted typed. “Here,” she said. “This doesn’t make sense to me.” She rattled off some of his legalese, pointing at it on the computer screen.
He crossed the room to have a look, and discovered that if the sight of Natalie rattled him, breathing in the scent of her distracted the hell out of him.
As he leaned over her shoulder to have a look at what she didn’t understand, he caught the scent of some wild-flowery sort of shampoo. Not a strong scent; it was barely evident, in fact. He stepped closer, breathed deeper. Shut his eyes.
“Did you leave a word out?” Natalie turned her head to look up at him so their faces were scant inches apart.
Christo jumped back. “What? What word?”
“I don’t know, do I?” she said with some aspersion. “You’re the one who’s writing the letter.”
“Er.” He had to step closer then to try to make sense of his words on the screen, to see what he’d been saying, to recapture his train of thought. And he caught another whiff of wildflowers. He stiffened and held his breath.
Natalie turned once more, her brows drawn together. “Are you catching a cold?”
“What?”
“You’re sniffling. Do you have allergies?”
“No, damn it. I don’t have allergies.” He spun away and stalked back into his office. “Forget it. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“We’re working tomorrow?”
“Not you. Me.” He’d need his Saturday morning in the office just to catch up from the week’s earlier disasters—not to mention from proximity to Natalie.
He shut the door, sank into his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why the hell had he ever asked her to find him a secretary?
Why the hell had she agreed to do it?
He knew the answers. Or at least the acceptable ones.
But three more days of this?
Be careful what you wish for, his Brazilian grandmother always used to tell him.
Now he really understood exactly what she meant.
“You’re still here.” The words were more accusation than question. Christo, arms braced on either side of the open doorway, collar unbuttoned, tie loose, was glowering at her as if she were doing something wrong. “It’s past six o’clock.”
Natalie shrugged. “I still had work to do.” She forbore pointing out that he was still here, too. “My mother taught me not to leave things undone.” She picked up the last of the papers she was filing and concentrated on finding the proper folder in the drawer, not allowing herself to look again at the man across the room.
The theory behind vaccinations—the one that had brought her here to work for him today—was that if you introduced a small dose of something dire into your system, you would develop antibodies that would help you resist the Big Bad Real Thing.
Good idea for resisting polio and smallpox and influenza. It didn’t help with resisting Christo Savas one bit.
A little exposure to Christo simply made her want more. And the more chance she had to look at him, the more her eyes tried to follow his every move. The more he demanded, the more she was determined to prove equal to the task. And as he shoved away from the door and came toward her, she found herself leaning toward him.
God, was gravity against her, too?
Certainly her own inclinations were. Far from getting over him, she was as attracted as ever. Possibly more, because Christo the litigator had been a brilliant incisive attractive man. But this Christo, who took time with weeping women and who had spent half an hour putting a puzzle together with a shy little girl before he ever got her to say a word—this Christo was even more appealing. He was kind, he was compassionate. He was caring. He was human.
He was everything she’d once believed him to be—except available to fall in love with.
“I’m going now,” she said, slipping the last file into the correct folder and shutting the drawer with a firm push. She plucked her blazer off the coat rack and put it on, feeling a sudden need for armor again under the intensity of his hooded gaze. “You don’t want me to come in tomorrow?”
“No.”
That was certainly clear enough. “Right.” She picked up her briefcase. “Well, I’ll see you Monday, then.” She opened the door.
“Natalie.” Her name on his lips stopped her in her tracks. She looked back.
He sucked in a breath. “Your mother would be proud.”
She smiled faintly. “I hope so.”
She left quickly, closing the door behind her. Three years ago she thought she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. Today—coming to work for Christo—she wondered if she might have made a bigger one.
Saturdays were catch-up day.
Christo didn’t work at his office every Saturday. But when things piled up during the week and he needed quiet time to work out his arguments, to think outside the box and get new perspectives on cases, he headed for his office.
There were no clients demanding attention on Saturdays. There were no judges or other attorneys calling, and there were no household chores to distract him.
Saturday at the office was, hands-down, the best day and the best place for productive, intense, focused work.
Or it had been until now.
Now, the minute he walked in the door he caught a hint of Natalie’s elusive wildflower shampoo. Her handwriting was on a note on the top of his pile of things-to-do. He found himself prowling through his file drawers looking into folders she’d filed, studying notes she’d made. Ostensibly it was because he needed the information.
But he couldn’t quite lie to himself well enough to believe it didn’t have something to do with his preoccupation with Natalie.
He shut the file drawer and went back to his desk, but he didn’t sit down. He paced the length of his office and asked himself, not for the first time, what the hell it was about Natalie that got under his skin?
Or was it simply that she was the one who’d got away?
She didn’t get away, he reminded himself irritably. She’d turned up in his bed and he’d effectively tossed her out. End of story.
Except it wasn’t the end of the story. And however hard he tried to concentrate on the argument he was trying to write, memories of Natalie kept niggling in his brain.
Instead of an annoyance it was a relief when his cell phone rang to distract him. And when he saw the number calling his mood lightened at once. “AvČ!”
“Ah, Christo. I miss you.”
The sound of his Brazilian grandmother’s voice could always make him smile. He missed her, too. “What’s up?”
She was a dynamo, his grandmother, always involved in a hundred different things. He tipped back in his chair now and put his feet on the desk, letting her voice carry him back to the place she called home. She told him about the crops—it was a farm as well as an estate of note these days. She told him all about her neighbors and the extended family and her many bridge games. She kept him up to date on where his father was.
“In Buenos Aires this week,” she said. “Last week in Paris.”
Par for the course as far as Christo was concerned. Xantiago Azevedo, whom he’d never called Dad or Papa or anything other than Xanti, the name on the back of his father’s soccer shirt, had been on the move all of Christo’s life.
He hadn’t even met his father until he was nearly six. And then it had been a surprise to both of them.
Xanti had come to play in a match in L.A., and he’d had a night to kill before his plane left for Sao Paulo the next day. At loose ends, he’d apparently decided to look up an old flame. Probably, Christo realized later, he had decided to see if Aurora Savas wanted a roll in the hay for old time’s sake.
Xanti hadn’t actually said that in so many words—not that Christo would have understood them at the time if he had—but he’d definitely blinked in surprise when the door had been opened by a boy who looked just like him.
“Who’re you?” Xanti had demanded.
Before Christo could say more than his first name, his mother had come up behind him. “Meet your son, Xanti,” she’d said to his dumbstruck father. “Want to take him home with you for the summer?”
Surprisingly enough, Xanti had.
But not before he’d married Aurora.
“Of course, we will marry,” he’d said, adding with the foolish nobility Xanti generally approached things with in the short run, “It is my duty.”
Maybe. But his commitment to it didn’t last. It was the long run Xanti was never able to handle, which is why the whirlwind marriage had lasted barely two months.
Still, it had given Christo a grandmother who loved him and a home away from home in Brazil. Widowed Lucia Azevedo had welcomed her only grandchild with open arms. With her husband deceased and Xanti, her only child, jetting around the world playing soccer and sleeping with women, this unexpected grandchild quickly became the light of her life.
And Christo, after a week of determined indifference, found his resolve undermined by Avó’s equally determined love. Her gentle smiles and calm acceptance undid his resolution to remain aloof from this new world he’d been thrust into—a world in which he didn’t even speak the language.
