LITMIR.BIZ

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weatherman said, with his usual in-your-face good cheer. Saturday, 10:00 a.m. and the sun was blazing from a cloudless sky, the temperature was pushing ninety with no break in sight from now through Monday.

      “A perfect holiday weekend,” the weather guru said as if he’d personally arranged it.

      Cullen scowled and hit the off button on the remote.

      “What’s so perfect about it?” he growled. It was just another weekend, longer than most, hotter than most. Long, hot, and…

      And, what was he doing here?

      Nobody, but nobody, stayed in town Labor Day weekend. Driving home from his office yesterday, traffic going out of the city had been bumper to bumper. He’d felt like the only person not heading off for one last taste of summer.

      He should have been among them. He’d intended to be.

      Cullen lifted the bottle to his lips and drank some water. He’d certainly had enough choices.

      Las Vegas, for the usual O’Connell end of summer blast. Connecticut, for the barbecue Keir and Cassie were throwing because Cassie was too pregnant for the long flight to Vegas. He had invitations to house parties in the Hamptons, on the Cape, on Martha’s Vineyard and half a dozen other places, and there was always the lure of three days at Nantucket.

      Instead, he was here in hot and muggy Boston for no good reason except he wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere.

      Well, except, maybe Berkeley…

      Berkeley? Spend Labor Day weekend on one of the campuses of the University of California?

      Cullen snorted, finished off the water and dumped the empty bottle in the sink.

      Back to square one. Wasn’t that the same insane thought he’d had flying home from Fallon’s wedding in July? It made no more sense now then it had made then. You thought about the West Coast, you thought about San Francisco. Or Malibu. Maybe a couple of days at Big Sur.

      But Berkeley? What for? Nothing but college kids and grad students, protesters and protests, do-gooders and doomsayers. Maybe that vitality was part of why he’d loved the place as a law student, but those years were a decade behind him. He was older. He’d changed. His idea of a great party involved more than take-out pizza and jugs of cheap wine. And, except for a couple of his law school profs, he didn’t have friends there anymore.

      Okay. There was Marissa Perez. But he could hardly call her a friend. An acquaintance, was what she’d been. Truth was, he didn’t “know” her at all, except in the biblical sense of the word, and even if his sisters sometimes gleefully teased him about being a male chauvinist, he had to admit that sleeping with a woman wasn’t the same as knowing her.

      Especially if she crept out of your bed before dawn and left you feeling as if you were the only one who’d just spent a night you’d never forget.

      Damn it, this was crazy. Why waste time thinking about a woman he’d seen once and would probably never see again? He was starting to behave like one of the attorneys at his firm. Jack was a dedicated fisherman, always talking about the big one that had gotten away. That’s what this was starting to sound like. The sad story of Cullen O’Connell and The Woman Who Got Away.

      Cullen opened the fridge again. It was empty except for another couple of bottles of water, a half-full container of orange juice and a lump of something that he figured had once been cheese. He made a face, picked up the lump with two fingers and dumped it into the trash.

      So much for having breakfast in.

      Maybe that was just as well. He’d pull on a T-shirt, put on sneakers, go down to the deli on the corner and get himself something to eat. Solve two problems at once, so to speak; silence his growling belly and do something useful, something that would end all this pointless rehashing of the weekend he’d spent with the Perez woman.

      Yeah. He’d do that. Later.

      Cullen opened the terrace door and stepped into the morning heat. The little garden below was quiet. Even the birds seemed to have gone elsewhere.

      First he’d try thinking about that weekend in detail, concentrating not just on what had happened in bed but on all of it. A dose of cool logic would surely put an end to this nonsense. Sighing, he sank down in a canvas sling back chair, closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun.

      His old Tort Law prof, Ian Hutchins, had invited him to fly out and speak to the Law Students’ Association. Cullen hadn’t much wanted to do it; he had a full caseload and what little free time he could scrounge, he’d been spending on Nantucket, working on his boat. But he liked Hutchins a lot, respected him, so he’d accepted.

      A week before Speaker’s Weekend, Hutchins had phoned to make last-minute updates to their arrangements.

      “I’ve asked my best student to be your liaison while you’re here,” he’d said. “Shuttle you around, answer questions—well, you remember how that works, Cullen. You were liaison for us several times while you were a student here.”

      Cullen remembered it clearly. People called it a plum assignment and, in some ways, it was. The liaison networked with the speaker and drove him or her around in a car owned by the university, which invariably meant it was in a lot better shape than the student’s.

      Still, it was almost always a pain-in-the-ass job. Pick up the speaker at the airport, drive him or her here, then there, laugh at inane jokes about what it had been like when the speaker was a student on campus. When Ian added that Cullen’s liaison would be a woman, he almost groaned.

      “Her name,” Ian said, “is Marissa Perez. She’s a straight-A scholarship student with a brilliant mind. I’m sure you’ll enjoy her company.”

      “I’m sure I will,” Cullen had said politely.

      What else could he say? Not the truth, that he’d met enough brilliant female scholarship students to know what to expect. Perez would be tall and skinny with a mass of unkempt hair and thick glasses. She’d wear a shapeless black suit and clunky black shoes. And she’d either be so determined to impress him that she’d never shut up or she’d be so awestruck at being in his presence that she’d be tongue-tied.

      Wrong on all counts.

      The woman standing at the arrivals gate that Friday evening, holding a discreet sign with his name printed on it, was nothing like the woman he’d anticipated. Tall, yes. Lots of hair, yes. And yes, she was wearing a black suit and black shoes.

      That was where the resemblance ended.

      The mass of hair was a gleaming mass of ebony waves. She’d pinned it up, or tried to, but strands kept escaping, framing a face that was classically beautiful. Gray eyes, chiseled cheekbones, a lush mouth.

      Perfect. And when his gaze dropped lower, the package only got better.

      Yes, she was tall. But not skinny. Definitely not skinny. The businesslike cut of the black suit couldn’t disguise the soft curves of her body. Her breasts were high, her waist slender, her hips sweetly rounded, and not even the ugliest pair of sensible black shoes he’d ever seen could dim the elegance of legs so long he found himself fantasizing about how she’d look wearing nothing but a thong and thigh-high black stockings.

      Cullen felt a hot tightening in his belly and a faint sense of regret. The lady was a babe but she might as well have been a bow-wow. There were unwritten rules you followed on these weekends. He did, anyway.

      He never hit on the students he met, any more than he mixed business with pleasure in his professional life back home.

      Still, as he walked toward her, he liked knowing he’d spend the next couple of days being shuttled around by a woman so easy on the eyes.

      “Miss Perez?” he said, his hand extended.

      “Ms. Perez,” she replied politely.

      She held out her hand in return. He took it and the brush of skin against skin rocked him to his toes. ZTS,

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