“You didn’t eat breakfast, did you?” Her sheepish grin told him he was right. But at least she was grinning.
“I didn’t want to throw up all over either of us.” She couldn’t look at him while she said it.
Classic mistake for a rookie flyer. “Come on. I’m buying you breakfast.”
“But you already got me a smoothie.”
He leveled his best don’t-argue-with-me glare at her and then broke out his feral smile. She momentarily wilted before she did something unexpected. She began to laugh.
Not the response he was used to getting. He’d brought grown men—men with power and clout—to their knees with that look. And this beautiful woman was laughing at him. The odd thing was, he kind of liked it. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said, her eyes still dancing.
Like hell, he thought, but she didn’t say anything else. Instead, she took great care in wrapping her lips around the straw and sucking down the last of the smoothie.
Raw desire hit him hard. No, he was not going to sleep with her, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t think about it.
She giggled again, and even though the airport was filling up with early-morning travelers, he had a weird feeling, as if the world was of no consequence to him and Maggie.
Before they got onto the next plane, he’d call Yellow Bird for a status report. He had to keep Maggie off the stand. If she was off the stand…well, it would make the ethical dilemma of their mutual attraction less compromising—for both of them. And the sooner that happened, the better it would be for everyone.
He’d never wanted a case to be over so badly in his life.
Ten
James walked down a wide space that looked more like a mall than an airport. Maggie tried not to gape like some country bumpkin, but it was almost impossible. Expensive-looking, intimidating shops sat near the more everyday newsstands. James passed them all as if he knew where he was going. All Maggie could do was try to keep up.
Finally, he stopped in front of some sort of French bakery. They got a table near the front, and James let her sit so she could watch the world walk by. A waitress brought them menus. “The omelets are really good,” he said, his tone making it clear she wasn’t going to get away with ordering just a bagel.
Maggie sighed in mock frustration, but secretly, she was pleased. Was it weird to enjoy someone—someone other than Nan, that was—taking care of her? It made her feel, well, safe. Like James had her back.
Which was something completely different than having her front. At this forbidden thought, her cheeks warmed, so she buried her face in her menu. No way, no how could she think such things—not so soon after nearly fainting on the plane, not ever. He’d let her see his cracks once. However, a single moment of humanity didn’t mean he was some sort of knight in shining armor. She knew the score. They weren’t having breakfast together because this was a date. They were here because he was worried about his case. That’s why he was making her go to D.C. and attend cocktail parties.
Still, she could like him. She’d never had a man friend before. Obviously, with that whole sex-on-a-kitchen-counter thing, she wasn’t doing a great job of having one now, but she was committed to trying.
“You look better,” he said after they’d ordered their food. “How are you feeling?”
Any time she wanted to stop blushing around him would be great. It would be even better if she could do that today. “I didn’t think it would be that scary.”
He nodded, looking thoughtful. He didn’t call her stupid or silly. He listened. How crazy was that? “It was a rough flight, but the next one will be better.” He looked her in the eyes as he leaned forward a little. It felt as if the space between them evaporated—she could almost feel him touch her. “I promise.”
“You make a lot of promises.” The old her wouldn’t have said anything like that. But James had never known the old her. It was freeing to be able to remake herself any way she wanted. She straightened up in her chair and felt herself smile. It felt good.
Being with James felt good.
“Only the ones I intend to keep.”
Did that include not sleeping with her? So much for not blushing. He watched her as the waitress brought them their food. “What?” she asked.
“I can’t believe that plane ride is the scariest thing you’ve ever done.”
She tried to shrug that off. “There’s a difference between scary and stupid, you know.”
He nodded in acknowledgment. “Even when you walked into that blizzard?”
Maggie was confused. He already knew all this stuff—why was he still asking about it? Then she realized he wasn’t asking her about facts. He was trying to understand why.
Not even Rosebud had asked why. Maggie had assumed Rosebud understood. But James had assumed once, before their first meeting, and he’d promised he wouldn’t do it again.
“Was I scared I was going to die?”
James nodded.
“Yeah, that was a part of it. But there was more to it than that.” She tried to find the words, but how did one explain the intent to kill oneself? “I was…relieved. I was glad I was the one who was ending it. It was my choice. In this weird way, deciding to die finally gave me control of my life.” James’s eyes had gotten wide. “That sounds bad. I’m sorry.” She didn’t know why she was apologizing.
Not that her apology did anything to make James look less upset. If anything, he looked even more disturbed than he had when he’d deposed her. He pushed back from the table, looking as if he was a second away from getting up and pacing. Just as he’d looked the other night—right before he’d told her he’d have to use her testimony. She didn’t like it when he looked like this. It usually meant something bad was about to happen. “What?”
“You’re apologizing to me? I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
“The plane ride wasn’t that bad,” she lied, feeling lame as the words left her mouth. He was making her nervous.
He leveled those beautiful eyes at her. “I didn’t give you time to choose. The other night. I had no business making that choice for you.”
Was he apologizing for…what? For having sex with her? For wanting to have sex with her? For so quickly turning their relationship from professional to personal? Just thinking about the interlude on the counter made Maggie’s insides go warm and gooey. What was she supposed to say? “In case you didn’t notice, you didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“Like hell it is.” Sex was many things, but “irrelevant” wasn’t one of them. She leaned forward, tapping a finger on the table to emphasize her point as she dropped her voice. “You said you wanted me. Did it ever occur to you that I wanted you, too?” He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. “And it’s not irrelevant. I’m an adult, fully capable of consenting or not consenting of my own free will.”
A strange mix of emotions washed over his face. “I should have been more careful, though.”
The conversation needed to move away from the whole sex thing—the sooner, the better. Talking about it was thinking about it, and she couldn’t afford to keep thinking about it. “When does our plane leave? For D.C.?”
He held her gaze for a moment longer. Maggie was afraid they weren’t going to be moving away from the sex thing—or that they would be moving someplace even more unnerving. But the second passed, and James agreed to her unspoken choice. “We depart at 10:10. We’ve got another three hours.”
A gentle smile changed everything tense or worried about him, and suddenly she was sitting across from the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Warmth—different from the heat that made her blush—pooled low in her belly. So much for moving away from that sex thing.
“We should make sure we eat some food before we board. There’s lots to do here—shopping, people watching.”
“There’s not much in Aberdeen,” she said, feeling a little shy. Not that there wa
s anything wrong with Walmart or JCPenney, but she hated admitting how little she knew about his world. Everything she knew about shopping came from a Real Housewives of wherever show—and those people weren’t real. Not like James. She wouldn’t fit in his world, that much was blindingly obvious, and to try was delusional at best and suicidal at worst. But she could enjoy this time with him. The clock was ticking, but she wouldn’t take this interlude for granted. “This won’t be bad—for the case, right? If we wander around?”
“I know Yellow Bird will turn up something else. As long as…” Maggie nodded, hoping he wouldn’t say it out loud. “As long as we keep this professional, we can wander around, see what catches our eye.” He almost—but not quite—winked at her. “We’ve got to see the Snoopy statue, too. Nan will get a kick out of that picture. We’ll be in D.C. until four tomorrow afternoon—is there anything you want to see? D.C. is a wonderful place. I’d like to show you around. We could hit a museum or the Lincoln Memorial…” His voice trailed off as he whipped out his phone and began scrolling. “The Museum of the American Indian? I don’t think we can do the White House—too late to get on the list…”
We. Maggie sat in wonder at this man while he reviewed the entire list of tourist attractions in D.C. He was doing his level best to make sure that she had fun. Her tummy comfortably full, a cup of fancy coffee in her hand, sitting in an airport across from one of the nicest, smartest and—honestly, now—hottest men she’d ever talked to. She had a weird, out-of-body, out-of-life feeling. This was someone else’s life—Rosebud’s maybe, but not hers.
James glanced up at her and smiled. Not a quiet or gentle thing, but the full-force, happy-to-see-you, great-teeth smile. Not because he wanted something from her. Because he was happy to see her, to be here with her.
She knew she shouldn’t let that raw joy get to her. She should be putting up a little wall around her heart—a thick, sturdy wall to keep the thousand small kindnesses he showed her from making her fall for him. She shouldn’t appreciate his making sure she had a good breakfast. She shouldn’t admire his understanding about the turbulent plane ride. She shouldn’t enjoy his planning something fun for them to do together. She shouldn’t find him so damn attractive.
But she did.
And she had fallen for him.
* * *
They spent two hours wandering around the airport mall. JCPenney it wasn’t. James insisted on taking her picture with a statue of Snoopy that was twice as big as she was. Maggie bought Nan a T-shirt with a Minnesota moose on it. They bought cookies and drank sodas and snickered at the outfits people chose to wear in public. It would have felt like a date, if she were still in junior high.
The not-date went well until they entered an expensive-looking jewelry store. “Rosebud probably mentioned that Lenon has these mandatory cocktail parties. He’ll expect you to go so he can judge how you handle a hostile environment. It would be best if you looked the part,” James said by way of apology.
“Rosebud gave me a dress, just in case.” James nodded in approval and they began to look around.
Maggie decided to splurge on a pair of fake diamond stud earrings to go with her black cocktail dress. James agreed the pear-cut ones looked best, and they were on clearance for forty-five dollars.
“We have a coordinating pendant,” the saleslady said in her smooth-as-pudding voice as she removed a necklace from the case. She casually flipped the price tag to the front—a hundred and twenty-five dollars was too rich for Maggie’s blood. But before she could politely decline, the saleslady went on. “Or, we have this stunning luxury tennis necklace.”
Maggie’s eyes tried hard to pop out of their sockets as the saleslady unlocked a separate case and pulled out a necklace that looked as if it was made of solid diamonds. “This is regularly 3,890 dollars, but we’re having a special on it this week.”
“How much?” Maggie’s voice came out as a strangled whisper. Maybe her ears had stopped working, but it sounded like the woman had said thousand, when hundred was beyond her means.
“Two thousand five hundred,” the saleslady replied, like any of this made sense. “It’s twenty-seven carats, total weight.”
That clarification didn’t improve Maggie’s thunderstruck feeling. She leaned over to look at the name of the store. Still Erwin Pearl—not Tiffany or anything. Then she stretched to see the case where the necklace had come from: Affordable Luxury in Cubic Zirconia. Was this woman serious—two thousand five hundred dollars for fake diamonds? On sale?
Speechless, Maggie turned to James and was shocked to find him reaching for the necklace. “Try it on,” he said, undoing the clasp and waiting for her to turn around.
“Are you kidding?” She didn’t even want to touch the thing, for fear she might break it and be out two thousand five hundred.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he stepped around her and lowered the necklace until its cool weight rested against her skin. It was heavy, the sort of necklace that demanded awareness of its sheer extravagance.
“Stunning,” the saleslady said in the kind of voice that all salespeople used when they had suckers on the line, and James had the nerve to nod in agreement.
“I can’t afford this,” Maggie whispered to James. “I can’t afford the cheap one. I can barely afford the earrings.” Shame rushed through her. This was all wrong. She wasn’t the kind of person who belonged at airports, jetting off to the capital of the whole country to take a meeting with the most powerful lawyer in the land. She didn’t belong here, with James—not now, not ever.
When she raised her eyes, she was shocked to see a hardness in his gaze that made him look cold and calculating. She’d only seen him look like that once before—the first time she’d met him, when he’d tried to bluff her with intimidation. With exact precision, his eyes flicked over her—her hair, her face, her ears with the yet-to-be-purchased earrings still in them and the necklace that felt like a lead weight around her neck. He was sizing her up. And Maggie knew she would come up wanting. When it came to James Carlson’s world, she would always come up wanting.
The salesclerk cleared her throat. “Of course, the earrings that were designed to complement that necklace are also on sale.” She pulled a dangly set with huge, pear-shaped, not-real diamonds out of the case. “Both the necklace and the earrings would be thirty-one hundred dollars.”
Three grand for fake diamonds. Her Jeep wasn’t worth that much, and she used that on a regular basis. James picked up the earrings and held them against Maggie’s head. Instead of the normal heat she felt from him, his hands felt as if he’d just pulled them out of a freezer.
“Your dress is black?”
What did that have to do with anything? She wasn’t getting this jewelry. At this rate, she’d be lucky if she didn’t pass out from sticker shock in the middle of the store.
James handed the saleslady the earrings, then motioned for Maggie to turn around. His fingers traced along her nape, then the weight of the necklace was gone. She fumbled the cheap earrings out of her ears, wondering how on earth she could buy them now without looking like a jerk.
“Well?” The saleslady’s hope made her sound expectant.
James looked at Maggie, then at the jewelry, then at Maggie again. She would never measure up to whatever standard he was holding her against. She would never be the woman he wanted, the woman he needed, and the sooner they all realized it, the better off they’d be.
But she couldn’t open her mouth to tell him that. She couldn’t just tell him she wasn’t worth the time and effort. She had some pride. Hell, after this little soul-crushing lesson in rich versus poor, it was blindingly clear that her pride was the only thing she could still afford.
James pulled a credit card out of his wallet. “I’ll take them.”
Suddenly, Maggie moved. She grabbed James’s arm and yanked him back from the counter. “What are you doing?”
Now, finally, his face softened. “You’r
e going into my world, Maggie. You’ve got to look the part. I have some money,” he added, cutting off her first line of defense. “There’s a chance that you’ll meet people—my people—and they’ll judge you in the blink of an eye. We have to be ready for any contingency.”
So she went with the second line of defense. “Isn’t buying jewelry ‘compromising’ a witness?”
“It’s a business expense. I’ve bought other witnesses clothes for trial before.”
“I won’t accept it.” Yep. Still had her pride. That gave her a strangely comforting feeling deep in her belly. She could not be bought. Not even for three grand.
James’s smile was the most dangerous mix of tender and sweet she’d ever seen. “Yes,” he said, his voice low as he ran a hand down her arm—a gesture of possession, not of comfort. “You will.”
Eleven
Maggie was silent. She didn’t say anything when the clerk handed them the gift-wrapped boxes in a bag. She didn’t speak when he took her into a wireless store and bought her the latest smartphone. She didn’t protest, complain about the cost or even thank him when he had the clerk connect it to her email and load up some games she could play.
She said nothing.
This stony silence continued while she dutifully ate the General Tso’s chicken he ordered her. She didn’t so much as squeak when the door of the plane whumped shut, or when the plane took off. She sat in her seat, eyes closed, hands lightly gripping the armrests.
James was befuddled. He could have sworn women liked to get presents, especially jewelry. Yeah, impulsively dropping thirty-one hundred was a lot. He knew that. But he also knew that dime-store fakes wouldn’t pass muster in D.C. Same thing with the phone. Even legal assistants from South Dakota needed cell phones. She had to look the part. He couldn’t risk alerting anyone outside the case that she was a key witness. He was still banking on Yellow Bird finding something that would keep Maggie off the stand. And he couldn’t let anyone in the DOJ know what she really was to him.
A Man of Privilege Page 10
