One Night Mistress...Convenient Wife

by Anne McAllister

  “Your mother says you run a rent-a-wife agency,” he said without preamble.

  Natalie blinked in surprise. But she stopped herself before she wetted dry lips. “That’s right,” she said.

  “Do you rent office personnel, too?”

  “Office…”

  “I need someone to take your mother’s place.” His jaw worked.

  “I thought everything was under control?”

  When he narrowed his gaze at her, Natalie shrugged. “I just got off the phone with my mother. She said she’d talked to you and that you said everything was fine.”

  “I lied.” He dropped his jacket over the porch railing and raked fingers through already mussed hair. “They didn’t work out.”

  “They?”

  “The first one was bossy to the kids. Acted like she was some damn mother superior.”

  Kids? It took Natalie a moment to realize what he was talking about. When she thought about Christo she generally still thought of him at her father’s firm, but of course he wasn’t there. He’d left not long after she had at the end of that summer to go off on his own—to start his own practice in which he focused on family law. Because of Jonas? She’d often wondered. But of course she’d never found that out.

  Now he said, “I sent her back, and they sent me another one. One your mother hadn’t trained,” he added grimly. “And she cried.”

  “She cried?” Natalie echoed.

  “A lot. Every time she couldn’t find something.” He ground his teeth.

  “Every time you yelled at her?” Natalie guessed.

  “I didn’t yell. I was very polite.”

  She bet he was. Icy politeness from Christo Savas would be far worse than being yelled at. “And she left?” Natalie guessed.

  He shook his head. “I sacked her, too. And today they sent two others, but they’re hopeless. I sent them back. And the agency doesn’t have anyone else. Not until next week. Lisa can come on Thursday. She knows the office. She’s worked with your mother. She’s worked with me. But I can’t put the office on hold until Thursday. And—” he paused and rolled taut shoulders as if doing so would loosen the tension in them “—I can’t tell your mother. She’d come back.”

  She would, too. Natalie knew it. “She might be glad to,” she ventured with a slight smile.

  Christo’s brows raised. “She would?”

  “Yes.” Natalie sighed. “But she can’t. She needs to be there. To get Grandma through this and capable of being on her own again.”

  He grimaced. “That’s what I thought, why I lied. Why I don’t want to call her back. So…do you have someone? Just through Wednesday.”

  “I’ll check,” Natalie said.

  And there it was again, lighting his face—the heart-stopping grin that had seduced her once before—the drop-dead-gorgeous, Christo-Savas-thinks-you’re-wonderful smile.

  “Terrific,” he said. “Just send her to my office tomorrow morning by eight-thirty. I’ll get her up to speed. Thanks.”

  He knew it was a long shot, asking Natalie to supply a secretary. He didn’t want to ask her for anything. He’d been vaguely distracted ever since she’d taken up residence at Laura’s place.

  Not that he’d seen her—except for when he’d caught a glimpse of her in the window of the apartment when he’d been sanding the bookshelves. But she’d disappeared instantly, as if she had no more desire to see him than he did to see her.

  Good, he’d thought. But that had been before he’d run out of office help.

  He couldn’t believe the agency didn’t have anyone else. More likely they just didn’t have anyone he wouldn’t make cry.

  Laura never cried. Laura was as tough—and compassionate—as they came. There was nothing she couldn’t handle—not his most difficult clients, not cantankerous judges or demanding opposing counsels, not irate parents or Christo himself when his own mother or father breezed in to complicate his life.

  If he’d thought he was doing Laura a favor, offering her the job as his secretary and office manager after her divorce, he soon discovered he was the lucky one.

  She made his office run efficiently. She smoothed and soothed everyone she came into contact with. She got them to slow down, think clearly, take a deep breath.

  “How do you do that?” he’d asked her more than once.

  She’d laughed. “Practice. For twenty-five years I was a wife and mother. You don’t forget.”

  Then she’d told him her daughter was creating an agency of temps who could do the same thing. “South Bay Rent-a-Wife, she’s calling it.” Laura had laughed and shaken her head.

  “Your daughter?” The only daughter he knew was Natalie. The other child, he was sure, was a son.

  She nodded. “Natalie. You must have met her the summer she was clerking at Ross and Hoy.”

  Oh yeah. He’d met Natalie all right. But all he’d done was nod. “She’s a lawyer.”

  “No. She dropped out of law school.”

  “Dropped out?” He remembered how shocked he’d been at Laura’s words. And how guilty he’d felt. She hadn’t left because of him, had she?

  “She always wanted to be a lawyer,” Laura said. “Was always her daddy’s girl. But when Clayton left—” She paused, and he’d thought she was just going to leave it there, but after a moment, she continued. “Well, Natalie decided she didn’t want to be like her father after all.” She smiled slightly. “She said she’d rather be like me—but get paid for it.”

  Christo’s eyebrows went up. “Paid for it?”

  Laura laughed. “She’s a savvy girl, my Natalie. She and Sophy, her cousin, tried it themselves first—worked as ‘wives.’ Now they run the agency and only step in when they have to. But she tells me her ‘wives’ can do anything I can do.”

  Now rifling through the filing cabinet of his office looking for papers yesterday’s temp was supposed to have filed there, Christo hoped that was true. Otherwise the next four days were going to be a nightmare.

  He glanced at his watch. It was almost eight. He started digging through the file cabinet again. He was getting a bit desperate as he wondered where the hell that blasted woman could have put the Duffy file, when he heard the door to the outer office open.

  “In here,” he bellowed.

  He reached the end of the drawer and banged it shut just as his office door opened. “Good,” he said without turning. “You can start looking here. I need the Duffy papers.”

  “Fine.”

  His head whipped around at the sound of Natalie’s voice.

  He opened his mouth, but she forestalled him with a steely smile. “Don’t—” she warned “—ask me what the hell I’m doing here. You know what I’m doing here. My mother’s job.”

  She shut the door and set her briefcase on the floor by the coat rack, then straightened. “Struck dumb?” she asked wryly when he didn’t speak.

  Almost. “You’re planning on running my office?” he said, narrowing his gaze.

  The mere sight of her in a pencil-slim navy skirt and a high-necked white blouse and a trim navy blazer should have called to mind visions of repressed Catholic schoolgirls. Instead it was playing havoc with his hormones and giving them decidedly inappropriate ideas. Inappropriate ideas were the last thing he needed right now.

  “What do you know about office work?” he demanded.

  “I run one,” she said. “And I’ve worked in a law office. And I know my mother. Besides, we don’t have anyone else who can do it. So unless you’ve conjured someone up in the meantime…” She let her voice trail off, inviting him to suggest an alternative.

  He didn’t have one.

  “And you’re right,” she said. “I don’t want you calling my mother.”

  Their gazes met, clashed. There was a challenge in hers that defied him to argue. He wanted to argue. He wanted her gone, because besides the challenge, that damnable sizzle was there, too. His jaw tightened. He cracked his knuckles.

  But before he could figure o
ut an alternative, the phone on the desk rang.

  Natalie was closer to it than he was, also faster off the mark. She picked it up.

  “Savas Law Office,” she said, in a voice that was both warm and professional. “Yes,” she said to the caller. “I’ll be happy to. I’m with Mr. Savas right now. Give me a moment and I’ll have a look at the appointment book and we can set something up.”

  She put the phone on hold, set it down, tilted her head and looked at Christo. “Unless you’d like to take over.” Even her eyebrows were challenging him.

  He sucked his teeth. “Be my guest,” he said gruffly. “Just don’t cry. I’ve got a case to prepare.”

  It was going to be a salutary experience. Four days of working with Christo Savas and she’d be well and truly over him.

  At least that’s what Natalie had been telling herself since she hadn’t been able to come up with an alternative to Sophy’s, “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to do it,” answer to whom they were going to send to work for him this morning.

  “I don’t want to do it!” she’d protested, aghast.

  She’d rung Sophy just past six, having spent most of last evening going through her files looking for a suitable temp. But while there were a few who might have some of the office skills, all of them were already on other jobs. And none of them was such a standout that it made sense to juggle things around.

  She’d hoped her cousin would be able to think of someone she’d overlooked who could do the job in her mother’s place. But Sophy hadn’t—besides suggesting Natalie do it herself.

  “I can’t do it,” she insisted again.

  Sophy yawned on the other end of the line. “Why not? Because you still have a crush on him?”

  Sophy was the one person Natalie had admitted her infatuation to. And unfortunately her cousin had a memory like an elephant. Thank heavens, she’d never confessed to the mortification in Christo’s bedroom.

  “I do not have a crush on him,” she said firmly. “Once I did. Yes, I admit that. But that was years ago. I was a child then.”

  “So,” Sophy said airily. “No problem.”

  Problem. But she wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing with Sophy. “I’ll see what I can come up with,” she’d said.

  “You know what you have to do,” Sophy responded. “I won’t bother you today.” And she’d rung off.

  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 wildflowery 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.