Barbara Daly - Mistletoe Over Manhattan

What a relief to be home.

Mallory Trent stepped out of the elevator on the fifty-third floor of the HamiltonBuilding in the Chicago Loop and gazed lovingly at the brass plaque beside the massive walnut double doors. It read Sensuous, Inc., and below that, Legal Department. After the horrible experience she'd just escaped, that plaque looked like a Welcome, Mallory sign on the pearly gates of Heaven.

The horrible experience had taken place on St. John'sIsland in the Caribbean. Five days on St. John's might be viewed as a vacation by some people. Some people might even have stayed the full seven days they'd originally planned to. Apparently some people enjoyed sunburn, scorpion sightings and sand grating between their toes. She wasn't one of those people. She was happier at work. Let the icy winds blow across Lake Michigan. She didn't care. She had a PalmPilot to keep her warm. She could pick up mangoes and pineapples at her local specialty market. And she had Sensuous, the cosmetics company whose offices filled the top five floors of the building and was her Heaven on earth.

"Hi, Cassie," she said to the first of her colleagues she passed in the hall.

Cassie, a smooth-skinned, pretty woman with soft, curly black hair who could open sealed boxes with her razor-sharp tongue, stared at her with wide, startled dark eyes. "You're finally back," she said in a whisper. "Bill's about to have a stroke."

"But I wasn't supposed to be back until-" Mallory said.

"Later," Cassie said, hurrying on. "Got to find out if he's in the building."

"Who? Bill? I imagine he's" But she was talking to thin air, and approaching her from Cassie's direction was Ned Caldwell, another of the junior members of the legal team that provided in-house counsel to Sensuous. Ned was Cassie's opposite, a bespectacled man who spoke slowly and thought deeply. He saw her, slowed and moved toward her with an increasingly funereal expression.

"If it's serious," he murmured, "let me know how I can help."

"Help with-" But he was gone, too, scurrying away with unusual speed as if Mallory were carrying a fatal virus-which, for all she knew, she might be. A virus transmitted by squadrons of foot-long mosquitoes that traveled in formation, like the ones in St. John's. Mallory fought down an urge to go back to her apartment, take two aspirin and check in the next morning. Instead, she forged onward into her office suite and looked warily at the administrative aide whose services she shared with Cassie and Ned.

"Good morning, Hilda," she said firmly, daring the woman to say anything out of the ordinary.

"You're back!" Hilda said in a loud whisper, clasping a hand to her ample bosom. "Bill Decker wants to see you immediately."

"How does he know I'm here?" Mallory whispered back. "And why are we all whispering?"

Hilda raised her voice to a low drone. "He doesn't. On Friday he called every thirty minutes to ask if I'd located you yet, and every thirty minutes I reminded him you were on vacation, and and I lied!" She rolled her eyes heavenward. "I told him you'd refused to tell me how to reach you."

"Hilda!" No wonder Bill was hysterical. "He knows I'd never, never do that!"

"I just wanted you to have a vacation for once in your life-" The phone buzzed. "Oh, hell, I bet that's him again."

Hilda never swore. What was making everyone so tense?

"Yes, Mr. Decker," Hilda was saying, her calm restored by her little outburst. "She, ah, she-" Hilda darted a quizzical glance at Mallory.

Mallory nodded. "Tell him I just walked in. Two days early," she couldn't help adding. Something was out of kilter, and she couldn't deal with life when it went out of kilter.

"She'll be there shortly," Hilda said, and when she'd disconnected, she gazed up at Mallory. "I want you to know-" she was back in her whispering mode "-I'm on your side, whatever happens."

Mallory tightened her lips and squared her shoulders, picked up her PalmPilot and tugged at the hemline of her neat black suit jacket. She took a step forward, then paused to extend each leg in front of her, twisting each foot to the left and then to the right, to assure herself that the polished gleam of her sensible black pumps had not picked up a speck of dust while she had so unwisely exiled herself to the Caribbean.

An early book of her mother's had advised, "Career success depends on keeping your work wardrobe in perfect condition-your suits clean, blouses pressed, shoes shined and protected by flannel shoe bags."

Her friends hooted at Ellen Trent's literary masterpieces-how-to bestsellers that taught both housewife and career woman to achieve domestic perfection with maximum efficiency. Mallory followed them to the letter. If she were ever a witness in a court case, she'd demand to swear on a stack of her mother's books.

Her mother would be proud of her now as she strode down the hall to the office of the legal department's head honcho, Bill Decker, with the confident carriage of a nobleperson. In this case, it appeared that the nobleperson might be on her way to the guillotine, but if her head rolled, her hair would be shining with good health and sporting a recent cut. She would die with her PalmPilot in her hand and her nails perfectly manicured.

From the way her colleagues were acting, she could only infer that she'd done something terribly, disastrously wrong. Something she couldn't even guess at. Maybe she was about to be fired. For a second, that stopped her in her tracks. Of all the things in the world Mallory had imagined could happen to her-being overworked, underpaid, taken for granted, used, ignored-being fired was at the bottom of the list.

You could cruise the indices of her mother's books until the end of time and you wouldn't find a reference to "adjusting efficiently to being fired." It was unthinkable in the Trent household, equally unthinkable for one of Ellen Trent's disciples and out of the question when you qualified for both categories.

"You finally came back." Bill Decker, who should have been thrilled to see her, frowned, just as a woman at the gym frowns when you're emerging from a shower she's been waiting for. That frown saying, "What took you so long?" instead of a smile saying, "Thanks for showering so swiftly."

"I'm back two days early." It was a point she felt she had to keep drumming into him. He had no right to expect her until Wednesday. This was Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a Monday she'd intended to spend lying supine on a beach chair-until she found out how maddeningly boring, how unproductive, how inefficient that was. She'd even paid a hundred-dollar penalty to the airline for the privilege of coming back early. That's how badly she wanted out of that beach chair.

The impatient wave of his hand prevented her from spelling it out. "Sensuous is in deep trouble," he said. "The Green case is more than we can handle in-house. We've hired outside counsel. The law firm we're using is Rendell and Renfro, and a young litigator named-" He broke off to pick up a phone. "Nancy, is Compton in the building today?"

A cold chill crept up Mallory's spine, freezing the noncommittal smile on her face.

"Ask him to come in for a minute," Decker was saying.

Could there possibly be more than one Compton who was a trial lawyer at Rendell and Renfro?

She steeled her spine while Decker's voice rolled on, seeming to echo through the fog in her mind. "As I was saying, Carter Compton's going to handle the case. I imagine you know him. Good lawyer. Bit of a rascal, I'm told." His chuckle was annoyingly indulgent. "He's going to New York to depose the plaintiffs' witnesses. We thought it would be a good idea to have a female on his team, and of course you're the right choice. Ah. Here he is."