LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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