Snowy Mountain Nights

by Lindsay Evans

  “This proves that he has no love for you, Marceline,” Reyna said quietly. “You have to do something about this before it gets any worse. You need your own lawyer.”

  “No…” Marceline’s weak voice suddenly grated on Reyna’s nerves, reminding her too much of herself years ago.

  “Snap out of it,” Louisa muttered, her lips pursed at the edge of her teacup. “What are you waiting for? For him to punch your lights out?”

  Marceline froze in Reyna’s arms. Reyna drew a breath, sharp and surprised. No, she thought, not this. Louisa was at their side in seconds.

  She stared at Marceline. “He hit you before?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “No.” Louisa sharply cut her off. She abandoned her tea on the table, hands visibly trembling. “Reyna. We need to take care of this. Now.”

  We? Reyna’s mind raced. What could she do to help Marceline? She didn’t have the clout that Bridget and her parents had, nor the financial resources available to Louisa. Marceline’s parents had been wealthy but died leaving her orphaned, if exceedingly rich. She was alone with no remaining family in the United States. No one to turn to except her friends. And all Reyna had to offer her, as a friend, was Garrison.

  Chapter 12

  Garrison sat behind his desk with his legs stretched out, his eyes closed. The day had been a long one, client after client, a few conferences, until finally, now at six in the evening, the tempo of the office was getting lower, business falling to a gentle hum instead of the usual frantic buzz.

  He sat in his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his suit jacket long discarded after his last meeting. The small, powerful heater he kept in his office—in addition to the one that warmed the entire suite—hummed quietly nearby. Anthea was getting ready to leave, the other three attorneys who worked for him were already gone and the cleaning staff was about to come through.

  This was the lull before his rush of evening work. The moment when everything he had been fighting off mentally threatened to overwhelm him. And thoughts of her overwhelmed him. The smiling tease of her face in the candlelight. The way she looked down, long lashes brushing her cheeks like luxurious silk fans, just before she challenged him on something.

  Reyna floated just beneath his consciousness, beautiful and angry, an avenging angel. Was it wrong that the fierceness of her, the protective instinct that had made her snap and snarl at him, also made him want her even more?

  His cell phone rang, pulling him from his thoughts. He picked up the call after a brief glance at the display.

  “Wolfe. What a nice surprise.”

  He turned around in his chair to face the window, his smile automatic at hearing from his good friend from college. The setting sun warmed his face, and he squinted from its brightness.

  “You sure I’m not interrupting some wild office party up there?” Wolfe asked with the usual laughter in his voice.

  Garrison didn’t bother to ask his friend how he knew he was still in the office long after five o’clock.

  “Of course you’re interrupting something. You know me.” He tipped back in the chair to take in the haloed view of Manhattan, the Chrysler Building and the striking power of the city he never got tired of. “There’s a stripper giving me a lap dance as we speak.”

  “Damn!” Wolfe laughed outright. “I better hurry up and get to the point so you can return to your fun.”

  Garrison chuckled. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m heading up your way for a meeting in a few months. I figure I better give you some notice, otherwise you’d be locked up in your usual monastic solitude, unable to make time for an old friend.”

  “Let me know the exact date, and I’ll put you on my calendar.” He was only joking a little. “You need a place to stay?”

  “No. Not officially. I’ll be in town with Nichelle.” Wolfe named his business partner and longtime friend. “But if you ply me with that expensive scotch of yours, I might have to crash in your guest bedroom at least one night.”

  “You know you’re always welcome.”

  Wolfe was a friend he’d made in college, an ebullient and charismatic man who attracted women the way flowers drew bees. Many of these women wondered out loud and to Garrison’s face what someone like Wolfe, a brilliant jock, was doing with a friend like Garrison, who was brilliant, too, but more reserved in his interaction with women and everyone else on campus. They met the first week at Columbia and had been in each other’s lives since.

  “Good to know some things never change.” Wolfe chuckled.

  The intercom button on Garrison’s office phone buzzed. He sat up. “Hey, I have to take this call.”

  “Sure,” Wolfe said. “I’ll call you again later on in the week.”

  “All right.” He hung up his cell phone. “Yes, Anthea?”

  “You have a Miss Allen here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment but insists you’ll see her anyway.”

  Garrison sat up. Reyna? Or was this some annoying coincidence, just like the situation with Reyna’s best friend being the wife of one of his clients? “What is this woman’s full name?”

  His secretary tilted her mouth from the phone to ask. The answer she came back with settled a mixture of chagrin and satisfaction in his belly. “Send her in. And you can head out now. No need for you to stay longer than necessary.”

  He heard the barely repressed curiosity in Anthea’s voice. “Of course, Mr. Richards.” In the morning she would—very subtly, of course—give him the third degree.

  A few seconds later, Reyna walked into his office. The sight of her was like a shot to the solar plexus. Garrison had to actually steady himself against his desk when he stood up to greet her. She was breathtaking in her low-heeled boots, tight black jeans and hip-length red jacket. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a severe style that suited the dark red lips and dramatic eyeliner. She looked armored and ready for battle.

  Reyna adjusted the messenger bag over her shoulder. She was restless, unease dancing beneath the calm on her face. That haunted look made him want to stroke her back until she relaxed, and she looked at him with that familiar melting that he always had to work hard for. But he didn’t touch her.

  “This is a surprise,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  She licked her lips. “Can I sit down?”

  “Of course.” He waved her to the couch then sat. The tension in her reminded him of how she had been in the mountains when Marceline went missing. It seemed like an anxiety that had nothing to do with her, but rather with someone she cared deeply for. She adjusted the messenger bag around her shoulders then took it off, dropped it on the couch and shoved up the sleeves of her jacket.

  He thought briefly of turning off his heater so she could be more comfortable then immediately dismissed the idea. She wouldn’t stay long enough for it to make a difference.

  “Is this about Marceline?”

  She looked up at him in surprise. Her white teeth sank into the full nutmeg pink of her lips. “How did you know?”

  He sat and waited while she gathered herself, apparently deciding what and how much to tell him. When she still didn’t speak, he went to the bar tucked away near the far wall and made her some hot chocolate. She smiled tightly at him in thanks when he handed it to her. She put the mug to her lips and sighed into the steam that billowed up around her face. Her red lips stained the white mug.

  She sipped in silence. He waited. If she was in no hurry, then he wasn’t, either. Garrison breathed quietly, bathing in the softness of her presence in his office, an office that had only seen hard things and catered to dreadful business. He loved that she was there, marking his physical space the way she had carved a space for herself in his head. He couldn’t uproot her if he tried.

  “Marceline’s husband is an abuser.”

  He jerked himself from his hazy thoughts of Reyna and the places she could fit in his life. “Excuse me?”

  “Daniel Keller beats on her like they’
re in a damn fight club.”

  Garrison held himself still. “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “I am sure,” Reyna said. “She told me.” Despite the subject matter, she was calm, as if she’d practiced saying the words to him without shouting. Or crying. She cradled the hot chocolate just below her nose before tasting it.

  He braced his forearms against his thighs. “Tell me.”

  She drew a deep breath and told him about the scene she and Louisa had stumbled into. Daniel Keller rushing out and leaving behind a devastated Marceline. She and Louisa talking to their friend and hearing the details of the emotional and physical abuse she’d endured from Keller. By the time she finished, Garrison was ready to call the cops himself. It was always the laughing ones. The ones you didn’t suspect. There was nothing about Keller that said he was overaggressive, was compensating for something or wanted a regular human punching bag.

  Then again, the relationship he had with Garrison was strictly business. He was handling the athlete’s divorce, and Keller was paying him. They never socialized. Keller never invited him to any games or private parties with the Giants. He was simply not a man whom Garrison connected with at all. Perhaps this had something to do with it.

  Garrison stood up. “I’ll call Keller and tell him I can’t represent him anymore.”

  That was the least of what he wanted to do. Hearing what the woman had been through—and he was sure she had sanitized some of it for his benefit—made him want to do something permanently damaging to Keller. What gave him the right to treat a woman like that? A woman he claimed to have once loved.

  Reyna looked surprised. She held the mug of hot chocolate in her lap, her hands curled around the handle as if it alone would anchor her to the couch instead of wherever it was her mind had wandered to minutes before.

  Her lips parted. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, I do.” He didn’t bother telling her about his mother and the abusive boyfriend she’d had while Garrison was in high school. Those two years made him vow that Marian Richards would never have to rely on any lover for anything else. “I cannot work with a man who mistreats women.”

  Reyna’s nod of satisfaction, a confirmation perhaps of something she already knew, warmed him. But he focused on the matter at hand.

  “Does Marceline have a lawyer of her own?”

  Reyna’s head dipped. She almost looked…embarrassed. “No. She never got one. She was hoping that he’d just come to his senses and come back home to her.”

  Just as Reyna once had, Garrison thought with sudden understanding. He had not been able to help Reyna then, but he would do what he could to make Marceline’s situation better.

  He took a card from his desk and passed it to her. Their fingertips brushed, a single electric touch.

  “Give this to Marceline. Tell her she can call me anytime about the divorce. The arrangement Keller and I had should be dissolved by morning.”

  “That quickly?” She seemed pleased, hopeful.

  “I don’t like to waste time.” Garrison gave her a meaningful look.

  The sun had crept through the window to touch her while they talked. It made her glow in her austere red and black, her beauty seductive and irresistible. His want for her overwhelmed him suddenly. Not just for her body, but to have her in his life, despite everything that had passed between them.

  Reyna nibbled on her lip and put down her half-finished drink. “Okay, I should go.” She picked up her bag and stood. “Thank you for listening. I didn’t expect you to…to be so responsive, but that just shows that I don’t really know you at all.” She put her hands in her pockets again, eyes on his face, an irresolution to her stance. She seemed to be waiting for something. When she didn’t get whatever it was, she turned from him with the barest of sighs. “I’ll see you around.”

  She moved quickly, slipping from the couch to the door before Garrison could tell her to wait or stay or anything. His brain uncharacteristically sluggish, he escorted her to the door while the words of a dinner invitation hovered on his lips.

  Reyna paused in the open doorway of his office. “You should have dinner with me tonight.”

  He kept his face deliberately expressionless in the wake of his words falling from her mouth.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why do you want to have dinner with me?” Was it because he offered to help out her friend? He wasn’t in the mood for a gratitude meal, or whatever would happen between them afterward.

  Reyna seemed startled, then embarrassed, subtle color touching her cheeks.

  “You don’t have to repay me for this.” He made a gesture that encompassed their recent conversation, the things he had promised to do for his own peace of mind.

  That was the wrong thing to say because the look on her face changed from embarrassment to anger, her eyes snapping a dark fire. His fingers twitched from the urge to touch her.

  “Never mind.” She muttered something else and stepped out into the hallway, over to the elevators.

  For a moment, he was frozen by her abrupt exit, blinking in the afterimage of her flight, the flicker of anger—or had it been chagrin?—on her face. Although she had never been difficult to read, at times he felt as if he was drowning in her emotions, inundated with so much of it that the separate feelings coming from her were difficult to sort out. The silken caress of her arousal. The vicious barbs of her anger. The rough and tender parts of her curiosity about him. In the past half hour, he’d felt all three from her, and more.

  Garrison had never been a very emotional man, certainly not as much as he wanted to be. Growing up, his mother’s constant emotional roller coaster made him leery of expressing even the most basic of emotions with anyone not close to him. And he had somehow cut himself off from knowing what those emotions truly meant. He’d known women who cried from practically anything. A bad movie. Broken bottles of expensive wine. Simultaneous orgasms. The same physiological reaction to such vastly different things. It frustrated him to even begin figuring them out.

  But Reyna made him want to try.

  Garrison blinked, suddenly aware that he had been staring for much too long at the empty space Reyna left. He started after her.

  But when he got to the elevator, the doors were already closed. Reyna had walked away from him again.

  Chapter 13

  Reyna had never felt so embarrassed in her life. Garrison had dismissed her and her dinner offer as if he was absolutely done with her. Her chin wobbled, but she drew a deep breath to calm herself.

  He looked so good in his office. That pale blue, pinstripe suit minus the jacket, his rolled-up sleeves. She had wanted to slip her arms around his waist and inhale him. Not only did he look good, he was good to her and to Marceline, too, proving himself to be essentially the polar opposite of what she had accused him of over a week ago.

  Her quest to find the truth of what Ian said about Garrison and the ex-wives of his former clients yielded nothing. All she found online about Garrison was his successful law practice that catered mostly to the rich and famous, various awards for apparently being one of the sharpest legal minds in the country and a long-ago social item about a Fortune 500 CEO who’d famously offered to throw his mistress in as part of the divorce settlement Garrison was negotiating.

  Reyna called herself an idiot many times over. Why had she even listened to Ian when he spouted off about the supposed other women Garrison dated? He was a compulsive liar. Hadn’t she learned that lesson enough times in the past?

  In the elevator, Reyna crossed her arms tightly over her chest and stared sightlessly at her reflection in the mirrored doors. There were apparently some lessons she had to learn more than once.

  *

  A few days later, Marceline called to let her know Garrison had been in touch with her, had offered her legal representation free of charge, and she was certain she could get her divorce finalized within six months. Her friend sounded stronger on the phone and animated in a way that Reyna hadn’t heard i
n a long time. Was that Garrison’s doing?

  True to his word, Garrison got Marceline the divorce she wanted, and without ever having to see Daniel Keller across the negotiating table. Under the threat of his abuse of Marceline being reported to the newspapers, and his public image being ruined—although Reyna was sure it was only a matter of time before TMZ found the police report—he acquiesced to everything Garrison demanded on Marceline’s behalf.

  On the day the divorce became final, Reyna and the girls took Marceline to a bar in the East Village. There, they ordered drinks, celebrated and cried with Marceline until their friend was laughing again.

  Even after three months, Reyna was still horrified that her friend had been in an abusive relationship and actually wanted to stay married to her abuser. It was dreadful. And Marceline had seemed so very happy in the beginning of it all. Ecstatic. She had dared to reach for a superior love, only to be rudely awakened by a dizzying and disorienting fall.

  “To Marceline!” Bridget, already drunk from her two chocolate martinis, raised her voice above the music and loud conversations in the bar. “We love you, honey baby. And any man who doesn’t love you the way you deserve can kiss my butt!”

  Reyna and Louisa laughed and raised their own glasses. “We’ll drink to that!”

  But even with her friends’ cheerfulness and the half dozen cocktails she drank, Reyna found her mind still thinking about the end of Marceline’s relationship, and the aborted fling she’d had with Garrison.

  “Penny for your thoughts, girl.”

  Naturally, it was Louisa who noticed her distraction. Sitting diagonally across from Reyna at the table for four, she said the words in an absence of privacy, inviting the other women into the conversation.

  “What’s up, baby?” Bridget sipped her martini and looked at Reyna over her half-empty glass.

  Reyna brushed the curls from her face and reached for the latest drink Bridget ordered for her. Her world was delightfully blurry. “Nothing I want to talk about right now,” she said with a dismissive wave. “Tonight is about Marceline and her beautiful divorce.” She lifted her glass. “Right, girls?”