“Let me get this straight.

“We’ll do things together for a while—uncomplicated things—while we swear off dating until such time as one or both of us feels up to plunging back into the dating pool?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking relieved. “We could swear off chasing the opposite sex while we keep each other company. We could assuage all those male-female urges without the issue getting too complicated,” he explained excitedly. “So, what do you think?”

“Not so fast,” I said. “First, define uncomplicated.”

“I don’t know. Dining, drinks, companionship. Sex.”

He shoved the last part in quickly, and the air stopped somewhere midway in my chest.

“That’s the whole point of this,” he said when I didn’t answer immediately. “Without the sex, we’re right back to bashing our heads against the wall looking for the whole enchilada!”

The more I thought about it the better it sounded.

“This could be a mutually gratifying situation,” he continued.

“Okay,” I said. I was breathing again, but just barely.

Then he smiled.

“When do we start?”

Dear Reader,

Make way for spring—as well as some room on your reading table for six new Special Edition novels! Our selection for this month’s READERS’ RING—Special Edition’s very own book club—is Playing by the Rules by Beverly Bird. In this innovative, edgy romance, a single mom who is sick and tired of the singles scene makes a deal with a handsome divorced hero—that their relationship will not lead to commitment. But both hero and heroine soon find themselves breaking all those pesky rules and falling head over heels for each other!

Gina Wilkins delights her readers with The Family Plan, in which two ambitious lawyers find unexpected love—and a newfound family—with the help of a young orphaned girl. Reader favorite Nikki Benjamin delivers a poignant reunion romance, Loving Leah, about a compassionate nanny who restores hope to an embittered single dad and his fragile young daughter.

In Call of the West, the last in Myrna Temte’s HEARTS OF WYOMING miniseries, a celebrity writer goes to Wyoming and finds the ranch—and the man—with whom she’d like to spend her life. Now she has to convince the cowboy to give up his ranch—and his heart! In her new cross-line miniseries, THE MOM SQUAD, Marie Ferrarella debuts with A Billionaire and a Baby. Here, a scoop-hungry—and pregnant—reporter goes after a reclusive corporate raider, only to go into labor just as she’s about to get the dirt! Ann Roth tickles our fancy with Reforming Cole, a sexy and emotional tale about a willful heroine who starts a “men’s etiquette” school so that the macho opposite sex can learn how best to treat a lady. Against her better judgment, the teacher falls for the gorgeous bad boy of the class!

I hope you enjoy this month’s lineup and come back for another month of moving stories about life, love and family!

Best,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

Playing by the Rules
Beverly Bird

www.millsandboon.co.uk

BEVERLY BIRD

has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island off the coast of New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.

Dear Reader,

I can honestly say that Playing by the Rules is my favorite of all my Silhouette books. It was an absolute kick to write this entirely from Mandy’s point of view and in her own words, and it offered the interesting challenge of portraying Sam only through Mandy’s eyes and his dialogue—like figuring out a man in real life! I’ve often wondered if relationships might be easier if we went into them with our expectations and “rules” right up front, and Playing by the Rules was my chance to explore that idea and to take it to an extreme. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I loved writing it.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter One

The last time things were normal between Sam and me, we were fighting in Judge Larson’s courtroom.

We’re lawyers. At least, I’m a lawyer. Sam Case is more like a world-class actor with a law degree. He lulls the opposition into a false sense of security by coming off as overly polite and just a little slow-witted. He’s transplanted from south Texas, land of drawling cowboys and good tequila, so he can get away with it. He cultivates an impression of bemused confusion at our East Coast aggression, and it always seems to work.

Judge Larson should have been wise to his tricks by now because he’d been appearing before her for the better part of six months. But she was a pretty blonde on her third marriage—having sacrificed her first two husbands in the interest of her career, or so rumor had it—and Sam likes blondes. Ergo, Larson likes Sam. It’s virtually impossible not to like Sam once he decides that you’re on his list of favorite people.

The judge gave him a dopey smile. It’s my firm opinion that no one ought to be allowed to simper while seated on the bench, but she did it, anyway.

“You have a point to make, Counselor?” she asked him.

“Well, something sort of occurred to me, Your Honor.” He swiveled on his heels to languidly look my way. Languid was part of the whole performance. “I believe my adversary’s chief argument is that a full-time mother is preferable to a half-time father. Is that about right, Ms. Hillman?”

I stood. “A full-time mother is preferable to a twenty-five-percent father. That’s my premise.”

“Hey, where did my other twenty-five percent go?” He sounded genuinely injured.

I stepped around the defense table and moved closer to him, then I spoke in a hiss meant for his ears alone. “My guess would be down your client’s throat.” I turned my attention back to the judge with a polite smile. “Mr. Woodsen has a drinking problem, Your Honor. This has been established. Until he gets treatment, the children are better off with their mother as the custodial parent. We’re willing to grant ample visitation, provided it’s supervised, but Mrs. Woodsen simply isn’t comfortable with her children spending overnights with Mr. Woodsen when no other responsible adult is present.”

“No other responsible adult?” Sam grabbed that one quickly. “Your Honor, I do believe she just called my client responsible.”

“No, I did not.”

“Yes, you did.”

I rolled over him before he could finish turning everything around on me, shoving a shoulder in front of him so I stood between him and the judge. “Lyle Woodsen is anything but responsible, Judge. There’s every possibility that he wouldn’t be coherent or capable during his parenting time.”

“Pshaw,” I heard Sam say in an undertone.

I wheeled on him in disbelief. “What?”

His eyes widened innocently. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You said pshaw. Is that a Deep-South word or something?”

“I don’t know,” Sam protested. “They sure don’t say it in Texas.”

“People, please,” Larson interrupted. “This is a courtroom.”

This time Sam stepped around me to speak earnestly to the judge. “Mr. Woodsen isn’t comfortable with his children spending unsupervised overnights with their mother, either. She has that—how can I put this delicately?—rather complex sense of self.”

A rather what? I felt tension wrap around my spine. “Be more specific,” I snarled, nudging him aside again so I could see the judge, too.

“It’s my understanding that Lisa Woodsen has spent a good part of the last several years undergoing vigorous psychiatric treatment,” he said.

Drugs, I thought. It had to be drugs. He’d need something worse than Lyle’s alcoholism, and that would do it.

I went back to my table and sat again, feeling a headache coming on. I glared at him, trying to figure out what he had up his sleeve and why I hadn’t been aware that there was anything there until just this moment. Sam crossed his arms over his chest and watched me right back. If he smirked, I would have to wipe the floor with his face, I decided.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about, Your Honor,” I said finally. And, oh, how it rankled to have to admit it.

Judge Larson sighed gustily. “Mr. Case, I like you. I genuinely do.” There’s a revelation, I thought. “But I don’t like you well enough to overlook your generous use of evidentiary loopholes. Even in divorce court, we have such a thing as discovery.”

Hallelujah.

Then Sam turned a soulful gaze on the judge. The man had blue eyes that could charm Satan, and a crooked smile that could melt that same black soul. He’d just broken the most basic court rule in the book, and I was pretty sure he’d done it intentionally, yet he managed to look abashed and a bit confused. “Gosh, Your Honor. I’m sorry.”

Gosh? I choked, and—predictably—Larson forgave him.

“Very well,” she said, “but I’m still going to adjourn these proceedings until Friday to give the defense a chance to catch up.”

As slaps on the wrist went, it was relatively minor, but I consoled myself with the fact that at least it was something. The judge banged her gavel and rose neatly from the bench. I waited. It took Sam no more than a minute to clear his client out of the courtroom.

I shifted in my seat to look at Lisa Woodsen. “So how right is he?” I asked her.

“A little.”

I felt my headache pop behind my eyes, gaining life. “This isn’t one of those gray areas in life, Lisa. Either you’ve had psychiatric treatment or you haven’t.”

“Well, then, yes. I did. Do. But I’m staying on my medication this time.”

Medication. Oh, glory, I thought. “What’s your problem exactly?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I can probably grasp it,” I assured her.

“It’s…well, a form of schizophrenia.”

I folded my arms on the defense table and lowered my now-throbbing forehead against them. A complex sense of self, indeed! It wasn’t drugs after all, but this was definitely worse than Lyle Woodsen’s nightly twelve-pack-and-shooters habit.

Lisa Woodsen began to cry, so I lifted my head and dug a tissue out of my briefcase. In family law, tissues—along with candy, coloring books and trading cards—are crucial accessories. I raided my daughter’s supplies with some regularity. So far Chloe hadn’t caught on.

I spent another five minutes comforting the woman before we left the courtroom. When she’d passed through the heavy oak doors of the lobby into the blinding sunlight outside—for some reason the sun always shines brightly on the rotten moments of my life—I looked around for Sam.

I knew he would have waited for me, and he had. The sad truth was that he was my upstairs neighbor and my very best friend—platonically-speaking—to boot. All in all, that made it very hard for me to hate him on any kind of regular basis.

He stood beside the water fountain, leaning one nicely broad shoulder against the wall there. I bore down on him.

“You just talked your way right out of tonight’s linguine and scampi, pal,” I said.

He straightened from the wall and his eyes went as soft and hopeful as a puppy’s. “You were going to make me scampi?”

“No. I was going to make Chloe and me scampi. I was going to let you have the leftovers. But now I’ve changed my mind.”

“You’re a hard woman, Amanda Hillman.”

“Only when I’ve just been played for a fool.”

“I thought Lisa had told you. I thought you were just holding it close to your vest and hoping I didn’t find out.”

“You were holding it close to your vest and hoping that I didn’t find out.” No wonder he hadn’t wanted to bother with exchanging interrogatories, I thought. He’d said it would just run up the Woodsens’ respective bills, and we both knew the couple couldn’t afford that. But the simple act of having my client answer all those detailed questions would have revealed all sorts of vermin in the woodpile.

I rubbed my forehead.

“Another headache?” Sam asked.

“You gave it to me,” I muttered.

“Lisa Woodsen gave it to you. She should have confided in you. And I keep telling you that your forehead isn’t the root of the problem. It’s the way your neck gets all knotted up. Turn around.”

I wanted to be obstinate, but it would have been a little like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Sam has hands to die for.

I turned and gave him my back. His strong fingers flexed at the base of my skull and found all the tight spots down the line of my vertebrae. My headache waned even as something coiled in the pit of my stomach. This was a normal reaction to Sam’s neck rubs that I had learned to ignore over the months. But this time I think I might have groaned aloud.

“Better?” he asked.

“Much. I’m still mad at you, though.”

He laughed and his hands fell away. My loss. I turned to face him again.

His dark hair had fallen over his brow sometime during our long afternoon in court. Together with his just-slightly crooked, bad-boy grin, it gave him a rakish look. It was something else I’d noticed before and that I tried to disregard. As a general rule, it’s not good to get all quivery inside over your best—platonic—friend.

“Our first priority should be those kids,” I said finally, pulling myself back to business.

“Agreed. So share your scampi with me and we’ll talk about it over dinner.”

“No.” I pivoted sharply and headed for the big oak doors and all that sunshine outside.

“I have a date, anyway!” he called after me.

I swung back to him. “That’s two already this week, Sam. You’ve got an obsession going on here. Want me to ask Lisa Woodsen for the name of her shrink?”

“Hey, I’m busy looking for the wrong woman.”

Which I knew he had found many, many times. More accurately, Sam didn’t seem to want to find the right one. I put my back against the door and pushed it open.

“Good luck,” I called back to him. “Maybe she can make you shrimp and linguine.” I was all the way down the big stone steps outside before I shook my head and let myself laugh aloud.

“Sam again?” asked a voice from behind me.

I turned to find Grace Simkanian on my heels. Grace was also my neighbor. She lived one floor up from Sam in a one-bedroom unit she shared with Jenny Tower. They had to buddy-up to afford the place. Jenny was a waitress and Grace clerked for one of the criminal court judges. Law clerks are paid worse than volunteers, but they have very bright futures.

“Sam again,” I agreed. I matched Grace’s stride and we headed for the municipal lot. I always gave her a ride home when I was in court in the afternoon.

“When are you two going to stop fighting and start clawing each other’s clothes off?” she asked.

My stomach lurched hard and suddenly. “There’s a ridiculous notion.”

“Ah. Clawing is beneath you.”

That stopped me in my tracks. Grace headed on to my car without me.

“I claw,” I protested finally, shouting after her.

Grace stopped at the trunk of my Mitsubishi and looked back at me. “When? Tell me the last time you even considered it.”

I caught up with her and unlocked the trunk, and we tossed our briefcases inside. “Let me think.”

“This will take a while.”

The hell of it was, she was right. I was coming up empty. I hadn’t had a date in six weeks and even then, Frank Ethan—the last guy—had definitely not been the clawing type.

“Well,” I said finally, “I could claw if I wanted to.” Then I frowned. “Why are we even discussing this?” I asked.

“Because I think you should be clawing with Sam. He’s got the look of a man who’d be good at it.”

There was that action with my stomach again. I was starting not to like this conversation. “Sam isn’t interested in me that way.” I wondered who he was seeing tonight, if it was the same voluptuous blonde from Monday.

“You’re touching your hair again,” Grace said. “What’s that all about?”

I dropped my hand fast. “What?”

“Whenever you talk about him, you touch your hair.”

“I do not.” Then I thought about it. As I’ve mentioned, Sam has a strong preference for blondes. Specifically, he likes blondes with a lot of hair. Mine is short and black. I have that kind of face, with small features. Anything more would overpower me. I have that kind of life. I’m a single parent. I don’t have time to fuss with voluminous layers.

My headache chose that moment to come back with an extra punch. “If you’re that impressed with Sam, then why don’t you claw with him?” I asked her.

Grace shrugged. “I scare him.” She’s sleek, sophisticated and sharp as a tack. She says what’s on her mind and she makes no apologies for it. She’s a stunning woman with reams of dark hair, a flawless dusky complexion, and the kind of figure that stops men dead in their tracks. Then they get to her mind, and that usually backs them off. At least it does if they have any sense.

“He tried to snuggle up to Jenny once, though,” Grace said.

I frowned. This was the first I’d heard of it. Jenny is a sunny blonde transplanted from Kansas.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing. He scares her.”

I nodded, understanding that, too. Jenny is waiting for Mr. Right. The last time I checked, her list of prerequisites had not included good-hearted wolves like Sam.

I opened my car door. “I want to go home now. I’ve had a long day.”

“Let’s go to McGlinchey’s, instead,” Grace suggested. Jenny worked at the bar there and would be getting off at five-thirty.

I looked at my watch and decided that I really didn’t want to cook shrimp for two tonight after all. I took my cell phone out of my purse. “If Mrs. Casamento can keep Chloe an extra hour, then I’ll go.”

Grace settled into the passenger seat. Grace doesn’t sit, she settles. It’s a kind of gentle floating-down with her. Men tend to be very appreciative of the phenomenon.

I made the call to the baby-sitter as I got in the car with a little less finesse. Sylvie Casamento keeps me on a short leash even as she laps up the money I pay her. Sam says it’s her express purpose in life to ensure that no one she knows enjoys anything. No one except Sam, that is. Most women adore Sam, and Mrs. C. is no exception.

I got the okay from the baby-sitter, but not without a lot of aggrieved and chastening sighs over the fact that I might—heaven forbid—have a good time. I started the car. When I turned out of the parking lot, Sam was just stepping into the street. I stomped on the gas to pass him before I was tempted to run him over.

McGlinchey’s was mobbed, as it usually is at that hour. The bar was crammed with enough bodies to rival a New York subway at rush hour. I was still trying to explain my feelings about clawing to Grace as we squeezed past a knot of people in animated conversation. They, too, were lawyers.

Philadelphia’s legal community is incestuous. Don’t get me wrong—we all know how to draw lines in the dirt and keep to our own side of them. Favors are owed, calculated and warily exchanged, but that occurs during regular business hours. The rest of the time, it’s sort of a family affair. Many of us have, at some point in time, been married to a handful of the others. For example, Chloe’s father is an attorney here in the city, though I pride myself on the fact that I had the good sense not to go tying any knots with him. But the bottom line is that everyone seems to know everyone else’s personal business, and they talk about it.

As I shoved my way through the crowd, I saw too many considering expressions on faces I recognized. Here’s Mandy, those expressions said, and she’s with a female friend again.

I never considered myself exempt from the storytelling, but I did think I knew what they said about me: She’s more interested in her career than in men. Chloe’s father started that one. His name is Millson—Millson Kramer III. If he were going to be honest, he’d tell you that he was actually relieved when I refused to marry him. He was just “doing the right thing” by asking me in the first place. Right after Chloe was born, he suffered a hiccup of conscience and tried to make things neat and legal and tidy for all of us. I declined his offer, and that, of course, looked bad for him, so he saved face by informing Philadelphia’s legal community that he had tried his best but that I was a cold and brittle workaholic.

I’m pretty sure that Frank Ethan—the last date I’d had six weeks ago—contributed to Mill’s version of Mandy Hillman when I declined to go out with him a second time. There have been a few others like Frank over the years who’ve failed to excite me, so no doubt they’ve all tossed their two cents into the pot, as well. But I’m not cold. I just like my own company. And your perspective on these things changes when you pass that milestone of turning thirty-five, which I had just done. You don’t need to claw quite as much.

“When you’re in your twenties, you’re just seized by all the possibilities,” I tried to explain to Grace as we waded through McGlinchey’s clientele. For all her jaded world-wisdom, Grace is only twenty-six.

Someone nearly spilled a drink on her, and she curled a lip in the man’s direction. He apologized profusely. “What possibilities are those?” she asked me.

“Sexual. Life advancement. Societal compliance.” We finally reached the bar. I had to raise my voice to order. Then we began trolling for a table, each of us armed with a glass of Chardonnay.

At McGlinchey’s, this is a game not unlike musical chairs. The trick is to be near a table when the inhabitants stand to go. It took us twenty minutes, but we managed it. Grace slipped into one of the vacated seats. Her stockings whispered as she crossed her legs. The noise level in McGlinchey’s was at full throttle, but every male within a six-foot radius heard the sound. Heads ratcheted in Grace’s direction.

“That,” I said, looking around at their faces, “was the sexual part of it.”

Grace shrugged. “It’s the Pavlov syndrome, an automatic response to stimuli. It means nothing.”

I pursued my point. “Anyway, when you’re young, you’re more inclined to settle into a relationship just because the sex is fantastic.”

“That’s a very good reason at any age, Mandy. Assuming one was the settling type.”

“Over thirty-five, you’re less likely to be satisfied by the sex alone,” I insisted, sipping wine. “And you’re less likely to hook up with someone for the express purpose of having children and raising a family. Most people take care of that issue in their twenties.”

“Not so much in this day and age. Women are having their children later and later in life.”

“I said most, not all.” I held up a three fingers. “Third, you’re also not likely to settle down in your thirties just because it makes it easier to get a mortgage. You’ve probably already done that, too.”

“You haven’t.”

“I live in Philadelphia. Real estate is ridiculously expensive.”

“So move out of the city.”

“I love the city. What number was I up to?”

“Four.”

I nodded. “Last but not least, you’re also less likely to take a mate just because society is geared almost exclusively toward couples.”

“That’s the compliance part?”

“Yes. So you see, if you hook up with someone once you get past thirty-five, I think you do it for the purest of reasons. Compatibility. Comfort. Conversation. Then throw in a little lust for fun and games. The whole situation becomes easy and noncombative. You don’t fall into a relationship for what the guy can give you, because you’ve probably already gotten it for yourself. You don’t have the need to demand anymore. You can just accept.”

Grace swallowed wine. “Oh, joy. I can hardly wait. Does this come hand in hand with crow’s feet?”

I ignored that. “It’s why I don’t date…much,” I explained. “And why I don’t have an overriding need to claw.”

“Because you’ve already got a child, you don’t want a mortgage and you don’t care what people think anymore?”

“In a nutshell, yes. I can afford to be selective now, so I am.”

Grace put her wineglass on the table and leaned forward. “Mandy. You haven’t dated lately because you spend all your free time with Sam. Let’s not lie to each other here.”

My spine jerked straight, hard enough and suddenly enough to hurt a little. “That’s not true.”

“What’s not?” Jenny Tower asked, flopping into one of the chairs. By the way she shifted her weight in her seat, I knew she was toeing her shoes off under the table. She looked tired.

“Mandy doesn’t date because she’s too busy hanging out with Sam,” Grace said.

“It’s my choice!” I was going to get that through to her if it killed me. “I can afford to wait for compatibility, comfort and conversation because I’m thirty-five!”

Jenny took her apron off and laid it on her lap, pulling a wad of tips from the pocket. She started sorting the ones from the fives. “I don’t ever want to be that old.”

“It’s better than dying young,” Grace said, “but barely.” Then she grabbed the money from Jenny’s hand. “Honey, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Jenny looked around the bar and blinked as though coming out of a dream. If there’s anyone in the world more trusting than Jenny is, then it would have to be Toto himself—and even Toto had the good sense to bark at that goofy wizard. “You think someone’s going to snatch it right out of my hand?” she asked disbelievingly.

Grace took the hand in question and pressed the money back into it, folding Jenny’s fingers over it. “Call me mercenary, but our rent is due in two weeks.”

Jenny sighed and pushed the money into her jeans pocket. “Okay. I’ll count it later. Let’s get back to why Mandy doesn’t date.”

I launched into my theory again. “I haven’t met anyone recently who particularly inspires me, and I don’t need all those other things I was mentioning—the mortgage and whatnot—so I won’t tolerate someone who doesn’t inspire me.”

“Which brings us back to Sam,” Grace said. She cut a look at Jenny. “We were talking about clawing his clothes off, at which point Mandy went off into this business about relationships at a certain age. Compatibility. Comfort. Conversation. Wait, what was the other thing you mentioned?” She glanced at me again and tapped a finger against her cheek exaggeratedly. “Ah. Now I remember. Lust.”

“Lust is good,” Jenny contributed. “But I agree, the other things matter a whole lot, too.”

“You and Sam are compatible,” Grace continued, still aiming her words at me. “You’re comfortable with each other. The conversation between you is great—just ask any of us who’ve ever tried to horn in on it. Therefore, according to everything you just told me, the progression is obvious. You two ought to be having sex.”

I opened my mouth to argue and realized that I had just been boxed in by my own theory. Grace was going to make one hell of a lawyer when she finished clerking for the criminal court judge.

Then she sat up a little straighter and looked over my shoulder. I turned in my chair and followed her gaze and my pulse hiccuped.

Sam had just arrived. He was standing at the bar.

Chapter Two

“Who’s that with him?” Jenny asked, leaning forward at our table to check out the situation.

My gaze hitched to Sam’s left. It was the woman he’d taken out Monday night. Surprise—she had a lot of hair and all of it was blond. “I think he said she works for Fox, Murray and Myers,” I said. “She’s a receptionist.”

“She looks like a bimbo,” Grace observed.

My gaze dropped to her not insignificant bosom. “I don’t think he wants her for her mind.”

Then, as though my attention had drawn his, Sam looked around and saw us. He grinned at me and picked up his scotch-and-water from the bar. I knew it was scotch because that was pretty much all he ever drank—Glenlivet specifically. With his glass in one hand and the blonde’s elbow in his other, he began steering her toward our table.

Jenny ogled them. “He’s bringing her here? He’s bringing his date to sit with Mandy?”

“He probably wants my stamp of approval,” I murmured.

“You two are strange,” Jenny said.

“We’re friends. Just friends. Why is that so hard for you people to wrap your minds around?”

Grace watched them approach as well. “His bimbo isn’t happy,” she decided.

I agreed. The blonde’s jaw seemed a little too set, her eyes too narrow.

Sam finished propelling her toward our table. He pulled out the last chair for her and snagged a seat from the next table for himself, then he placed it on the opposite side of the table from the bombshell.

“This is Tammy,” he said. He deposited his glass on the table and shifted his chair to face mine. “I had a thought on our Woodsen stalemate. What we need to do is get them back together. They’re shaky parents individually, but as a team they might be almost solid. Especially if we can convince Larson to appoint some kind of supervisor to look in on them from time to time. I think Lyle has a sister who lives something like two doors down.”

I opened my mouth, shut it, then tried again. On the second effort, I found words. “Where do you get these ideas? We’re divorce lawyers, Sam. We’re supposed to break people up. It’s what we get paid for.”

“I’ll kick in my fee if you do.”

“I can’t kick mine in. I have partners to report to.” I was being cranky. I was still stinging from what he’d sprung on me in court.

“Just give it some thought,” he urged. “We should try to save them for the kids’ sake. Besides, I believe strongly in the sanctity of marriage.”

I snorted. “Unless it’s your own.”

I realized too late that his ex-marital status wasn’t common knowledge. The look Jenny gave him was amazed. I could only imagine that having traipsed down the aisle once in his life lent Sam a little more potential in her eyes.

“You were married?” she asked quickly. “I never knew that.”

Sam cast me a wounded look. “I left McAllen, Texas, after my divorce and came here. It was too painful to stay.”

Jenny’s gaze went kind and misty. In a moment, I thought, she would begin stroking his hair and cooing things like poor baby.

“Mandy decided that I was the one who ended the marriage, and I’ve never disabused her of the notion,” he went on.

It stung a little because I had assumed that.

“Why?” Jenny asked, looking between us. “Why wouldn’t you tell her the truth?”

“Because there’s something emasculating about being tossed over for another man and—worse—being slow to recover from it.”

“You told me that,” Tammy said suddenly. “You told me you were divorced.” The rest of us looked at her. I think we’d forgotten she was there.

“Which just goes to show,” Grace murmured, “that Sam doesn’t mind appearing emasculated in your eyes.”

Ouch, I thought. Like I said, Grace can be brutally honest.

I pulled the subject back to what I figured was safe territory. “About the Woodsens,” I said quickly. “I don’t think Lisa has hooked up with anyone new yet.”

“Lyle hasn’t, either,” Sam replied.

I thought about his suggestion. “He’d be the hardest to convince. He was the one who filed for divorce in the first place.”

“She’s a paranoid schizophrenic. She woke up one morning and decided he was an extraterrestrial. It was making his life hell.”

“She didn’t mention that.” There was a lot Lisa hadn’t bothered to tell me. Then it hit me. “An extraterrestrial?”

“From Pluto. No mundane Martians for our girl.”

“Excuse me,” Tammy tried to interrupt.

I laughed aloud. “She told me that when he got drunk he would chase her around the house. Maybe that was what tipped her over into planetary delusions.”

Sam perked up. “Were they wearing clothes, do you think?”

I had just sipped more wine and it backfired up my nasal passages. I coughed and he clapped me on the back.

“If Lisa stays on her medication and Lyle forgoes a six-pack now and again, it could work,” he insisted.

“Between the two of them, one might be sane and sober for the kids at any given time,” I agreed when I could finally talk again. “The supervisor idea has some merit, but we’d need to have random blood tests for the children’s sake, too. You know, test him for blood-alcohol content, and her to make sure she’s still on her medication.”

“I’ll sound him out on it in the morning,” Sam said.

“I’ll do the same with Lisa. But I’m not going to my partners about kicking in my fee.”

“Excuse me,” Tammy said again.

“We’ve got trouble,” Grace murmured and eased her chair back from the table a little. I barely glanced at her.

“Are you going to be in court tomorrow?” Sam asked me.

“In the afternoon. I’m arguing a motion at one-thirty.”

“So am I. Get there early and I’ll buy you a hot dog from our favorite vendor.”

“The one with the spider monkey?” His name was Julio, and he was the only one who had fried onions on his cart.

“It’s a chimpanzee,” Sam corrected me.

“No, it’s not—” Then I broke off because it happened.

I caught a quick movement out of the corner of my eye, a flick of Tammy’s wrist. Then something pale and pink floated over the table in a pretty arc. I reared back in my seat just in time to avoid it. Then her drink was in Sam’s face, dripping from his chin. He didn’t look good in pink.

He came to his feet, sputtering. “What the hell was that for?”

“You don’t love me!” Tammy’s voice went to screech volume. “You can’t even remember that I’m sitting here at the same table with you!”

Grace rose to her feet. “Okay, that’s my cue. I’m going somewhere else.”

Jenny just looked stupefied.

“Who said I loved you?” Sam looked at me a little wildly. For help, I knew.

Tammy’s face contorted until she managed to squeeze tears from her eyes. She was so young—I really hadn’t caught that before. I actually felt a little sorry for her. She’d need a lot more seasoning before she was ready for the Sam Cases of the world.

I stood and reached for her. I was thinking that I should guide her away from the table, maybe to the ladies’ room, where she could calm down. Then I spotted Frank Ethan over her shoulder.

The evening was going to hell in a handbasket, I thought. I should have just listened to Sylvie Casamento and gone straight home to my daughter after court. I hadn’t seen Frank since the night six weeks ago when I’d discovered that he kissed like a fish. He didn’t frequent McGlinchey’s—but he knew that I did. Which more or less equated to the certainty that he was here hoping to find me.

Sam recognized him. “Hey,” he said. “Isn’t that the corporate dude who used to stand outside our building and check his watch so he’d knock on your door at the exact time he said he’d pick you up?”

“Shut up.” I spat the words just as Frank started toward me, his arms spread wide and his mouth puckered up fish-style. I caught Sam’s sleeve and backpedaled. “Time to go.”

He was trying to dry his face with a bar napkin. He threw it back onto the table. “Sounds good to me.”

We turned together and headed for the door. Or rather, Sam headed for the door. I walked into a wall of blue chambray and a snarl of chest hair at its opened collar.

“Ms. Hillman?” chest-hair asked.

Sometimes you just know something and there’s no getting around it, even when you’d prefer ignorance. Blue chambray or not, this guy was a sheriff’s officer. I’d met enough of them in ten years of practicing law to recognize one when I ran into his chest.

I tried to step around him. I knew he wasn’t allowed to detain me, not for what he wanted to do. But he didn’t have to. He slid the papers he was holding into the open side flap of my purse.

Service acquired.

Sam tried. He’d only been in Philadelphia for six months, but he’d passed our Commonwealth’s bar exam with flying colors and he knew the ropes. He tried to knock the papers out of the guy’s hand before they landed. Sam was quick, but the deputy was quicker.

Sam swore once the damage was done and more or less dragged me out of the bar by my arm. I stopped on the sidewalk, pulling back against his grip, and I drew in a steadying breath.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m all right now.”

“How can you be after that?” he demanded.

“If it makes you feel any better, then I’m a puddle of Jell-O.”

“Jell-O is solid,” he pointed out. “It can’t be a puddle.”

“It’s not so solid that it doesn’t jiggle.”

He thought about that and finally gave me the point. “What did he serve on you, anyway? Are you getting disbarred?”

I choked at the mere thought. “No.”

“How do you know without looking at the damned papers?” He was more upset about this than I was, I realized.

“Because the bar association sends their axes by certified mail in this state,” I explained. At his startled look—one that asked how I knew that—I added, “It happened to a guy in my office once.”

Besides, I didn’t have to look at the papers because I already knew what they were. Now that they’d finally turned up, I realized that I had pretty much been expecting them ever since Millson Kramer III had tossed his hat into the political arena a while ago. I’d guessed then that Chloe and I would become his official campaign skeletons-in-the-closet.

To appreciate this, you’d have to know Mill. He’s the proving ground for the fact that too much IQ is not necessarily a good thing. He’s clinically a genius and my daughter is a shining testament to that. Chloe grasps it all—math, science, concrete concepts and those of an airier, more abstract variety. She’s dazzling. Mill, on the other hand, tends to be so captivated by his own calculating thoughts that he has the charm and disposition of a wet dishrag. He is, however, very exacting, orderly and methodical. So I’d known that Chloe and I were probably on his to-do list of things to clear up so he would become highly electable.

We’d been seeing each other on a comfortable basis for a little over a year when I got pregnant. I wasn’t appalled when I found out about Chloe. I’d always wanted a child, though this wasn’t exactly the way I’d envisioned it happening. I knew I would be swimming upstream by going ahead with parenthood on my own, but I was reasonably sure I was good for the challenge. And Mill provided an excellent gene pool, being intelligent, attractive, well-bred and, best of all, indifferent.

After I decided that I wanted the baby, I also realized that hooking up with Mill on a legal basis for the express purpose of her existence would be a mistake of monumental proportions. Regardless of the fact that I arrange divorces and negotiate custody disputes for a living, I strongly believe that marriage is supposed to be forever. And the comfortable pseudorelationship I had going with Mill was not the sort of thing forever is made of. In fact, when I realized that, I was a little ashamed of myself for letting it progress for as long as it had.

In the end, I trusted in the fact that Mill was so utterly self-absorbed, he wouldn’t try to take the idea of parenthood too seriously. He wouldn’t try to make our relationship more than it was because of the baby. I knew that if I declined his proposal of marriage and asked him to go away, he’d go away. I was right—he did, with a few snide comments for casual observers—until now.

Now he had decided to run for city council, and the whole business of Chloe would make him look less than stellar in the eyes of Philadelphia’s more conservative voters. I knew this was a custody suit even without taking the papers from my purse, and I was definitely not going to do that. Not yet. On top of Grace’s bizarre opinions about me having sex with Sam, and the Woodsen matter of schizophrenia, I was in no way planning to address the issue of my daughter’s parentage before morning.

I opened my mouth to tell Sam this, then McGlinchey’s door opened behind us. Sam tugged my keys from my hand. I tried to hold on to them as we started jogging toward the parking lot, but he twisted them free of my fingers, anyway.

I yanked on the passenger door once he had unlocked it. I dropped inside and looked over my shoulder. Whoever had come through the door after us—if it had been either Tammy or Frank—they weren’t following us. And the deputy didn’t have to. He’d already accomplished his dirty work.

Sam found the little button on the side of the driver’s seat, and he moved the seat backward with ruthless intent. I could never get it into the right position again when he did that. He shot the key into the ignition, revved the engine and looped around onto Pine Street. We headed toward the outskirts of Society Hill. Mill lived in the district. Sam and I could only afford to come close.

“You’re not very good at this, you know,” I told him.

He angled a glance my way. “At driving?”

This is something else I’ve learned from thirty-five years of living: never ever criticize a man’s driving, no matter how bad it is. It’s a testosterone thing. “Actually, I meant dating. Keep your eyes on the road.” I closed my own so I wouldn’t have to note how fast we were going.

“I’m a great dater.” This came out with predictable evidence of that same testosterone.

“No, Sam, you’re not. Practice does not always make perfect.”

“It strikes me that this is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.”

I opened my eyes again. “I hardly ever date!” I protested.

“That is my point.” He swerved around a cab and we veered north onto Third Street.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I straightened in my seat. Damned if the man couldn’t get my ire up. Plus, he’d managed to hit on a topic that I’d already been under fire for through half the evening from Grace and Jenny.

“It means that maybe if you did more of it, you might be in a position to judge my tactics,” Sam said. “It means that you might figure out that a guy who has an obsession about time is probably going to be a little anal retentive. And he just might be the type to come at you in a bar with his arms open wide, puckering up his mouth like some kind of overblown fish.”

I was just outraged enough that I didn’t know which comment to respond to first, but I’d be damned if I’d admit that Frank Ethan really did kiss like a fish. “I happen to appreciate a sense of punctuality and responsibility,” I said.

“Yeah? What about that day you canceled all your appointments and played hooky so you could show me the Liberty Bell?”

“That was you.” As soon as it was out, I considered biting my tongue off. Grace’s voice whispered nasty little observations in my head again.

“Which means…what?” Sam asked.

I wasn’t going to answer that. “I fail to see what this has to do with Frank,” I said stiffly. “Besides, there’s no such thing as an overblown fish.”

“Yes, there is. There are those ones that puff up occasionally for some scientific reason I can’t remember right now.”

“Like Tammy’s chest?”

“Leave her chest out of this.”

“That’s tough to do, Sam. It’s so…out there.”

He took his eyes off the road again to glare at me. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

“I’m fine.” Grace was wrong with me, I thought, her and her absurd opinions about me and Sam.

“You’re not fine,” Sam said. “You’re being caustic.”

“At least I don’t tell people I love them on the first date. Or did you do it on the second?” We’d reached the parking lot that I used and he drove my car into a space. The Mitsubishi rocked on its shock absorbers when he hit the breaks too hard. I tried not to wince.

“I did not tell her that I loved her,” he said.

“Well, you must have done something to put the idea in her head.” I got out and slammed the door. “In the throes of passion, maybe?”

“I never even got around to passion with her!”

My heart shifted a little. Damned if I cared. I grabbed my keys from his hand and started up the street toward our apartment building.

“So what about that scampi?” Sam asked, following me. “Since we’re both home now and we’ve semi-resolved the Woodsen thing, we might as well eat together.”

“Bribe me and I’ll consider it.”

“You want me to pucker up like a fish?”

I turned and walked backward to face him. “For the record, Frank kissed like a…like a…”

“Words fail you?” he said when I couldn’t quite continue.

“I’m trying to reach for the perfect superlative.”

“I hope you come up with it before my hearing starts to go.”

“There are just so many to choose from.”

He reached around me and opened the outside door of our building. I pivoted back to face forward and we crossed the black-and-white marble vestibule to step into a fern-filled hallway. My apartment was on the first floor, his was one floor above mine.

“Come on, Mandy. Feed me,” he said. “I’ve got some wine I could contribute. I bought it because I was going to try to lure Tammy back here tonight.”

“Ah, leftovers. Sam, I am so flattered.”

“I’d rather share it with you.”

Everything inside me rolled over. Slowly, sweetly. It was purely Grace’s doing, of course. I had been absolutely fine when I’d been hating Sam in Judge Larson’s courtroom two hours ago.

“Go get the wine, Sam,” I said, a little tired of fighting off images of how he would claw. But I watched him move up the stairs with that slow, prowling way he had of moving, and I found myself thinking that on so many levels he seemed absurdly unaware of his own appeal. Either that or he took it for granted. I had never quite figured out which it was.

I went into my own apartment and closed the door behind me. The telephone was ringing. I jogged across the living room into the kitchen and grabbed it. It was Sylvie Casamento.

“It’s after six o’clock,” she said immediately. “You said you’d be home by six o’clock.”

I looked at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. It was two minutes past the hour. “I had a wonderful time,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

“Did that man find you?”

“Which one? The blue shirt, or the one with the fishy mouth?” What difference did it make? They’d both nailed me, but I wanted to know which one of them had come here looking for me first.

“He was wearing blue,” Mrs. Casamento said.

“Then, yes. Thank you so much for your help. You can send Chloe down now.”

Mrs. Casamento lived in my building on the second floor across from Sam. I went back to my apartment door and into the hall, and I collected my daughter.

I sent Chloe off to take a bath. Back in the kitchen I stared at my purse, at the papers stuffed into the side flap.

Over the years, from conversations at preschool, playgrounds, and PTA, I have come to the conclusion that single mothers share a near-psychotic obsession with being a good parent. Maybe this is because statistically we are expected to fail, to produce serial killers and assorted other prison inmates. Our children cannot possibly thrive in a broken home. To prove those statistics wrong, we obsess. And obsession can be exhausting. This is why, when your seven-year-old stares at you with guileless eyes and swears up-and-down on the life of her Barbie that she did her homework at the babysitter’s, sometimes you believe her. You do it because you want the hard part of your day to be over and done with. You’ve earned your wage, you’ve paid the gas bill. If there’s not food on the table, then at the very least it’s in the refrigerator waiting to be warmed up, or it’s in a takeout bag on the counter. So you take your child’s word at face value until you begin to shoo her out the door the next morning and you realize that she fibbed…just a little. The homework is half-done. You’re late for court and she’s late for school and there’s no way to backtrack and fix this. Now her teacher is going to know the truth. You are actually a bad parent in sheep’s clothing. Your child is doomed for the penitentiary.

This is why I ended up opening the papers right then, after all, instead of waiting for morning. Part of it was that I might be considered a bad parent for not reading them right away. The other part was that I really wanted the hard part of my day to be over, and I knew that wouldn’t happen unless and until I knew exactly what Mill was up to.

Chloe was in the tub with the door open so I could hear if the splashing stopped—that way I’d know if she was drowning. I scanned the papers and they were pretty much what I had expected. Mill had decided that he wanted Chloe to live with him.

My heart did a dive. I read the papers again before I went to the phone and dialed Mill’s number. This is another thing about single parenthood—if a man fathers your child, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t laid eyes on him since the moment of conception. You will never forget his phone number.

“Have you lost your mind?” I demanded as soon as Mill answered. “You don’t want this.”

“Amanda.” Other than Sam, he was the only person in my life who ever dared to call me by my given name. I wondered briefly what the implications of that might be. One was the father of my child, and the other was my…well, my platonic friend.

“This wasn’t our deal,” I grated finally, staring at the papers in my hand.

“No,” he agreed. “But a father can’t actually sign away his parental rights, can he?”

He was right. A parent is a parent is a parent. Though I had a consent order with his signature on it wherein he solemnly swore never to intrude in Chloe’s life if I promised never to ask him for a dime of child support, I’d always known that if he chose to get involved, that piece of paper wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.

The fact that he knew that, too, told me that he had been boning up on his family law—Mill specializes in corporate and tax law. Either that, or the attorney he was using for this had informed him of the fact.

I was starting to feel sick.

“I want my daughter,” Mill said. “I want a relationship with her.”

“Oh, the hell you do.” It was knee-jerk, out before I could stop it.

There was silence. I took that as a good thing. Maybe he was thinking that I wasn’t snowed. Or scared. Though, actually, I was a little—a lot—of both.

“Mandy, it just doesn’t look good,” he said finally.

I realized that he would probably be taping our conversation by now—it’s a neat lawyer trick. As long as words are spoken on a telephone line—which is technically a public medium—they’re legally up for grabs. So I took a new tack. “It’s the election thing, right?” I asked. “Mill, I understand. Okay, then. I’ll marry you.”

I was gratified by a gargling sound. “I beg your pardon?”

“You asked me once, then you withdrew the offer. And I was so young and foolish at the time. Now I’ve realized the error of my ways. Marry me, Mill. Please.”

Chloe chose that moment to wander into the kitchen wrapped in her favorite, too-pink Barbie bathrobe. I tried to shoo her away but she wouldn’t go. I had him, I knew I had him, but I couldn’t push my advantage with her listening on.

“I heard you were seeing someone,” he said suddenly.

“You did?” I couldn’t fathom how that rumor might have gotten started. Then, with his next words, I got it.

“That lawyer who lives in your building,” he clarified.

My heart stalled a little. Things always managed to come back around to Sam lately, didn’t they? “I’m not seeing him,” I said. “We’re just friends.” This was starting to sound like a mantra, I thought.

“That might have changed the whole complexion of this issue.”

I almost laughed aloud. Mill would always be…well, Mill, I thought. No, he didn’t want Chloe. He was just trying to find an easy way out of our seven-year-plus mess. If Chloe had another father figure in her life, then maybe he wouldn’t have to do the job. He couldn’t be publically chastised as much for not remaining a part of our lives.

In an odd way that made me sad.

I was about to say so when Sam came banging at the door. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want him to hear me talking to Mill about this. Maybe because I didn’t want him to know there was suddenly a major crusade afoot to push us together and the entire city of Philadelphia seemed to be in on it.

“I’ll get it, Mom!” Chloe shouted. Then, a heartbeat later, “It’s Sam!”

“I’ve got to go,” I said quickly.

Mill overheard. Chloe’s voice can be like a siren when she’s happy. “Sam?” he asked.

“The pizza guy.” I hung up the phone fast.

“I have two bottles,” Sam said, stepping into the kitchen. He held them both in one hand. In the other was his Glenlivet. That told me I could have the wine to myself—he wouldn’t be sharing it.

“Was it going to take you that much to get Tammy into—” Then I broke off. Chloe was leaning against his right thigh, looking at me expectantly.

“Get Tammy into what?” she asked. Then she looked up at Sam. “Who’s Tammy?”

“Never mind, rug rat.” But Sam knew where I’d been headed with my comment. “One was for before,” he told me, “and the other was for after. I’m good. I don’t need much help.”

Funny thing about a woman’s body. It has a mind of its own. You can react even when your brain is utterly sane with the understanding that reacting is stupid. It happens viscerally. I imagined “good” with Sam and when something rolled over inside me this time, it wasn’t in my gut. It was a lot lower than that. And after it rolled, it tightened up.

Damn Grace. I rubbed my forehead again.

“Neck rub?” he asked, noticing.

“Just uncork the wine, Sam. And hurry.”

Chapter Three

I blame Sam’s wine as much as I blame anything else for what happened next. By nine o’clock, when Chloe was tucked into bed, my eyes were closed and my head was tilted back against the sofa cushions. My feet were propped on the coffee table. So were Sam’s. He was on the other end of the sofa.

“You know what the problem is?” he asked me suddenly.

I made the kind of noise in my throat that said I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but that he should go on, anyway.

“With dating,” he clarified.

I opened one eye. “Ah, that problem. Your way or mine? Excessively or rarely?”

“I don’t date excessively.” He sat up straight, indignantly. “Saturday night comes every week. I just like to use it accordingly.”

“Sam, you date on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, too.”

“My point is that too much or too little of this dating business is equally frustrating.”

He was staring down into his scotch glass now. His expression was serious. After a day filled with Grace’s observations and Mill’s custody petition, Sam’s suddenly pensive mood worried me.

“You go out with a woman for the first time and she expects all these subtle little things to immediately click right into place,” he continued. “Talk about pressure.”

“As opposed to men,” I asked, “who don’t give a damn about things clicking one way or the other?”

He looked over at me and his face took on that offended look again. “That’s not true. We give a damn.”

“Before or after you catch sight of the finish line?”

“Both.”

I rolled my eyes to show my opinion of that. “Continue. What little things?”

“Mental stimulation. Good conversation. Mental stability. Sexual attraction. Everything is supposed to happen all at once, and men are looking for that, too. I mean, some of us want it and some of us run like hell when it’s there, but it’s still an issue.”

Suddenly, I was sure that Grace had repeated to him everything I’d told her earlier about my own over-thirty-five theory, my three-Cs rule of thumb—companionship, comfort and conversation. This was a little spooky.

“Have you been talking to Grace?” I demanded.

Sam looked around my living room as though expecting to find her there. “Not since McGlinchey’s. Why?”

“What did she say to you?”

He looked at me oddly. “You were there. You heard the whole conversation. You were part of it.”

“You didn’t talk to her privately?”

“When would I have done that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re really acting strange tonight,” he said.

I grabbed the wine bottle from the coffee table and topped off my glass. “Having your daughter’s father sue you for custody can do that to a woman.” I’d filled him in on the problem after dinner when Chloe had gone to her room to watch television.

Sam waved a hand negligently. “I told you I’d handle that.”

“And I told you no thanks.”

“You’re too close to it to represent yourself.”

And he was closer to it than he knew. I could only imagine Mill’s reaction if Sam—the man I was reputedly seeing—appeared with me in court. “Get back to your point,” I prodded him. “You were philosophizing.”

Sam slanted another look my way. “Okay. The thing is, somebody is always waiting, wanting, hoping for all those little things to click into place and coincide.”

“The mental stimulation, the conversation and the animal attraction,” I said to clarify.

“I didn’t say animal. Who said anything about animal?”

I realized I had claws on my mind again. “Well, that’s what we’re all looking for, right?”

His brows climbed his forehead. “Are you?”

I definitely wasn’t going to get into that discussion again. “We were talking about you, Sam.”

“All right. Fine. We’ll call it animal attraction. But it never happens, you know. Either you get the mental stimulation going, but then the animal business is missing—or it’s there, but the woman turns out to be a Looney-Toon, emotionally unstable. Or she thinks you’re great and you think she’s about as interesting as a can of vegetables.”

I got stuck on the emotionally unstable part. “Like Tammy?”

He didn’t argue it. He just shrugged. “Then you’re left trying to wriggle free without hurting anyone’s feelings or wearing some pink drink,” he said.

He was like that, I knew. He worried as much about hurting women as I did about bad parenthood. “You looked ridiculous, by the way.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. He lifted his glass and swallowed the last of his scotch. “I just get tired of it, Mandy. But it’s like some kind of…of addiction. We keep scrambling after it because we need that male-female thing going on in our lives. And the need makes us keep going out there, bashing our heads against walls, smashing ourselves all up, getting drinks tossed in our faces, just because we had the audacity to look for a partner who’s on the same wavelength.”

“Wavelengths are shifty little things,” I agreed.

He stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve his bottle of scotch. When he came back, he bent and picked up his shoes from my living room floor. Then he stood at the door, armed with all of it. “On that note, I’m going home,” he said. “Thanks for dinner.”

Suddenly I felt an overriding need to set everything back to the way we had been in the courtroom that afternoon. I wanted to banish Grace’s insane observations and Mill’s innuendoes from the air. Maybe I just figured that by reminding us of what we were supposed to be, we would be able keep it so.

“You know, it’s really great to have a male-type friend,” I said. “It’s nice to talk like this, to get a masculine perspective.”

“That’s me,” Sam said shortly. “Male-type.” Then he left. Quickly.

I frowned after him. I knew him well enough to understand that somehow or other, I had just hurt him. But how? Then my heart hit the wall of my chest. Did he not want to be just a male-type friend anymore?

I shook my head. This was Grace’s doing. Such a thought would never even have occurred to me five hours ago.

Or maybe it was the wine, I thought. I’d had too much of it. I narrowed my eyes to focus them on the door he had just passed through. There was only one door there, so I was not drunk. Nope, I was fine.

Either way, now that I was alone, a million little demon thoughts came spewing out of the recesses of my mind to hoot and holler. Most of them wore little T-shirts labeled Sex and Sam. It came to me then that I probably wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I knew why he’d been insulted by what I’d said. I got to my feet, still looking at the door. I put my wine down on the coffee table. The Sex and Sam goblins were jumping gleefully up and down by now, clapping their hands. A tiny, sane part of me told me to go to bed right now. So, of course, I listened to the demon-goblins.

I peeked into Chloe’s room. She was sound asleep. I tiptoed in, kissed her forehead, then I closed her door quietly behind me. I left my apartment and stood in the hall, looking at the stairs to the second floor.

If I came right out and asked him if he wanted to be more than just my male-type pal, I knew I was going to get my pride kicked hard. For one thing I wasn’t his type physically—not a blond hair in sight. For another, if he’d had any romantic designs on me whatsoever, I figured he would have acted on them a long time ago. We’d known each other for nearly six months, and Sam is definitely not the reticent sort.

That realization made me sane again. I started to turn back into my own apartment, but then I saw his legs appear on the landing. The top part of him was chopped off by the next level of stairs.

“Sam?” I said, to be sure.

“What are you doing down there?” he demanded.

“I was coming to your apartment.”

“No need. I’m right here. So you can just stay where you are.”

Talk about one of us acting odd. “Okay.”

“Why were you coming to my apartment?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “I was just…thinking.”

“That’s a very dangerous thing to do at this hour.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

“Yeah, but that makes it something like three in the morning in parts of Europe.”

“Okay. So what are you doing on the stairs at three in the morning in parts of Europe?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Then there was a very long, very quiet pause. “I guess I was thinking, too.”

Somehow, in that very moment, I knew I’d been right. He’d definitely been offended by what I’d said, unhappy about being classified as a male-type friend. “About time zones?” I asked, in case I was wrong.

“About us.”

I’d been expecting it, but I think my heart actually vaulted over its next beat anyway. “Are you drunk?” I asked. I’d ruled myself out—now I needed to make sure he was sober, too.

He took some time to think about it, and I imagined he was probably squinting at doors, too, just to be sure. “No,” he decided finally.

I inched toward the stairs, leaving my door open so I would hear Chloe if she woke up and called me. He headed down. We reached the bottom tread at the same time and I dropped to sit there, but he kept standing beside me.

“I was thinking that maybe we could give each other a kind of break for a while,” he said finally. “From dating. You know, we could do things together.”

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

He scowled down at me. “I don’t know. Just…uncomplicated things. Things that don’t involve pink drinks or timing devices like Frank Ethan’s watch. We could swear off chasing the opposite sex for a while if we keep each other company in the interim. We could assuage all those male-female urges without the issue getting too complicated.”

It wasn’t me who needed the break, I thought. Grace had been right. I’d pretty much been on a dating hiatus since I’d met him. But I decided that it might be prudent not to mention that, because there was a lot in this for me. I could put up a good front for Mill, I realized. If he thought I really was happily involved, maybe he would back down on this whole custody issue. I can rationalize anything, even the irrational.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” I said. “We’ll do things together for a while—uncomplicated things—while we swear off dating until such time as one or both of us feels up to plunging back into the pool?”

He looked relieved. “Yeah. That’s it exactly. So…what do you think?”

“Define uncomplicated first.”

“I don’t know. Dining, drinks, companionship. Sex.”

He shoved that last part in quickly, and my air stopped somewhere midway in my chest. Well, I thought, this would certainly put Grace’s opinions to rest once and for all. I could claw my heart out with him for a while and get it out of my system.

“That’s the whole point of this!” he said when I didn’t answer immediately. I thought he sounded stressed. “Without the sex, we’re right back out there bashing our heads against the wall looking for the whole enchilada! Damn it, male-type friends can have sex, too!”

Ah, I thought. Bingo. Am I perceptive or what? “Of course they can,” I said quickly.

“This would be a mutually gratifying situation,” he said. “Not a relationship.”

“We already have a relationship.”

“But we don’t have a relationship.”

I thought about it. “True.” I got to my feet. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“It sounds reasonable to me.” I was breathing again, but just barely.

“So when are we going to start this?” he asked.

“Tomorrow? It makes sense to begin with a brand-new day, doesn’t it? And we could each have tonight to change our minds.”

“Are you going to change your mind?”

“Probably not.”

“Neither will I.” He laughed. He sounded self-conscious. Then he started to turn up the stairs again and he paused. “I’m still good for that hot dog tomorrow if you want to get to the courthouse early. Maybe we should each bring a couple of…I don’t know…ground rules for this…this…” He trailed off completely this time, sounding lost.

“Nonrelationship?” I suggested.

“Arrangement.”

I nodded. It was as good a word as any I could think of. “You want bylaws?”

“They could be our arrangement bill-of-rights-and-wrongs,” he said.

“Should we write them down and affix our signatures?”

He laughed again, but his voice still didn’t sound quite right. “Sure, if you want.” Then he went upstairs.

I watched him go. When his legs disappeared around the landing, I came to the amazing discovery that I no longer possessed legs of my own. They’d gone hollow.

After a while, I wobbled back to my apartment. I checked on Chloe, still snoozing, barely moved. This is another parent thing, but I think it’s the same whether you’re single or with a mate. You check your young repeatedly while they sleep. I don’t know what exactly it is that we expect to have happen to them while we’re not actually looking at them. It’s just a compulsion, and maybe it’s a selfish one at that. Because in the back of your mind, you know that the only way you can really settle down and get some rest yourself—or write lists, as the case might be—is if your child is genuinely zonked for the duration of the night.

Since Chloe appeared to be sincerely zonked, I went to my briefcase, found a legal pad and a pen, and carried them back to my own bed with me. Impulsively I took the last of the wine and the shrimp, too. Two hours later I was surprised by how hard it was for me to come up with the ground rules Sam wanted.

Who needed guidelines? I thought. I figured we’d just pretty much stay the way we were, except we’d…do the sex thing. I’d get to touch him with impunity. I’d finally get to drive my fingers into that great, dark hair of his, touch it when it fell down over his forehead the way it did. I’d get him—and Grace’s theories—out of my system.

Still, I figured I needed to come up with my own bill of rights if only to keep in the spirit of things, so I spent much of the rest of the night on my list. I still wasn’t satisfied with it when I tucked my car into the municipal parking lot at twelve-thirty the following afternoon.

Sam was already standing on the corner beside the hotdog vendor. The spider monkey—or chimpanzee, or whatever it was—was perched on his shoulder. Sam should have looked ridiculous. Instead, something airy filled my legs at the sight of him.

I got out of my car and rooted in my trunk for my briefcase, wondering if this wobbly-leg business was going to be a new phenomenon while our arrangement was in place. I could only hope that it would go away as things wore on.

His back was to me and he didn’t see me approach. I was able to step up behind him before I spoke. “Boo.”

He turned. The monkey began chattering. It swiped an eerily human hand in my direction and I jumped back. I did not like the beast. However, like so many females, she was crazy about Sam.

“She has a crush on you,” I said.

It was an opinion I’d shared before, but this time Sam wiggled his brows at me. “Jealous?”

“I am beside myself with anguish. Where’s my hot dog?”

“Anguish obviously doesn’t affect your appetite.”

“Not a bit.” The vendor held a hot dog in my direction, gooey with melted cheese and fried onions, just the way I like it. The monkey made a grab for it. “Back off,” I warned. “Mine.”

“See?” Sam said to Julio, the vendor. “She’s jealous.”

I took a bite. “I was referring to my meal. He’s paying this time,” I said to Julio. The poor guy’s gaze was whipping back and forth between us now. He seemed confused and wary.

“We have an arrangement,” Sam told him, then he looked at me again. “By the way, it’s started now, right?”

Things danced inside me. I managed to nod. “But if you call me something like doll, I’ll clock you.” It was one of the few rules I’d been able to come up with last night. No saccharine endearments. I’d included this mostly because I’d overheard a good many of Sam’s over the last six months, and they all tended to be nauseating.

He shook his head seriously. “Doll? I don’t think that particular term has ever passed my lips.” He bit down into his own hot dog. The monkey did not try to take his.

“Yes, it did,” I said. “With that redhead.”

“What redhead?”

“A couple of months ago. The one in the rust-colored spandex. We arrived home at the same time—me and Frank and you and her. And when you opened the door for her, I distinctly remember hearing you call her doll.”

“Oh, that redhead. Of course I did. That was her name.”

I laughed. “Doll?”

“Eee. Doll-y.” He grinned that crooked grin. “So do we have a marriage or what?”

The last bite of my hot dog jammed in my throat. I swallowed hard to push it down. Last night he’d been calling this thing an arrangement, and now he was talking about marriage? I felt like I’d fallen asleep in the theater and woken up at the end of the movie. “Come again?”

“The Woodsens,” Sam explained. Then he lifted the little monkey from his shoulder. “There now, darling,” he cooed to her, giving her back to the vendor. “I’ll be back before you know it.” He picked up his briefcase from the sidewalk and headed toward the courthouse steps.

The Woodsens, I thought. He was talking about the Woodsens. Of course he was. I paid the vendor without even thinking about it—because Sam hadn’t—and I went after him.

“Did you talk to Lisa?” he asked when I caught up.

“Yes. She’s says she’ll attempt a reconciliation rather than lose her kids.” We were back in lawyer mode. There was a great deal of comfort to be found there. Not that I didn’t want to proceed with our arrangement. I did. But I was finding that it was a little like walking a tightrope, and every once in a while it just seemed best to step down and plant my feet on solid ground again.

“It’s never going to work if that’s her attitude,” Sam said.

“He dumped her and filed for divorce over a simple medical problem!” I protested.

“Simple medical problem?” Sam laughed as we trotted up the steps. “Is that politically correct for running around the house naked?”

“Only when your partner perceives it as an invasion from Pluto.”

We stopped in front of the big oak doors. “Lyle’s going to need more of an enthusiastic response than that,” Sam insisted. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“And he’ll get it. Eventually. She’s just going to make him jump through a few hoops first.”

“See all the games and garbage we can avoid with our arrangement? Doll?”

I laughed, but I think it came out a little hoarsely. “What else are we avoiding?” I asked him. “Did you decide on your ground rules yet?”

“Sure. They didn’t take much thought.”

For a brief moment, I hated him. “Great,” I said. “So you go first.”

“All right. No sleepovers. Also no sharing of toothbrushes. Those two sort of go hand in hand.”

I frowned. They fell into my “companionship” category, but I had been getting by without that sort of thing for a while now and I figured I could keep on doing it. “Okay.” But then my curiosity got the better of me. “Why not?”

“It’s just part of keeping it uncomplicated,” he said. “It will be neater if we just keep all that cuddly stuff out of it. You know, that’s always where I get into trouble.”

“With cuddly stuff?”

“Yeah. That’s the point of this, right? We’re friends. We don’t have to cuddle. We don’t hold hands. We’re talking sex and companionship here. Period.”

He didn’t seem awkward with it today. He really had it down. “My turn,” I said, and I latched on to the rule I’d mentioned earlier—in part because for a moment I couldn’t remember any of the others. “None of those endearments of yours. Absolutely no…you know…darlings and dolls and snookums and babycakes.”

“Honestly, Mandy, you’re not the babycakes type.”

I wasn’t sure if I was insulted or pleased. I decided not to try to figure it out.

“No complaining or handing out guilt trips,” he said, ticking off another rule on the fingers of his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding his briefcase.

Now I was insulted. “When have I ever done that sort of thing?”

“You haven’t. Yet. But that was when we were just…you know, us. Now we’re getting into uncharted territory so I’m just putting it out there. If I decide I want to stay in some night and read, there can’t be any whining and making me feel bad about it. Also, it works both ways. You get to go to the gym like you’re always doing without me busting your chops because I wanted to see you.”

My head was spinning. But he was right. It made a certain amount of sense, I supposed. He wanted to take a break from the whining and the guilt trips. That was the whole purpose behind this thing. That, and getting him out of my system.

“Your turn again,” Sam said.

I dredged through my memory. “I, um, don’t have to run around picking up the apartment just because you’re coming over.” It sounded as lame now as it had last night.

“You never do that,” he pointed out. “Your living room is a Barbie metropolis.”

“Uncharted territory,” I reminded him.

He frowned. “Okay. No picking up.”

“And Chloe comes first. She’s my top priority.”

“Of course she is. And, anyway, that’s part of my rule. No whining or guilt trips if you prefer to spend time with her.”

I nodded. So far, this was very…civilized, I thought. “What else?”

“It’s not necessary for us to touch base every day.”

“Sam, we’ve been touching base every day for the entire six months I’ve known you.” For some reason, this was starting to bother me.

“But things are different now, so if it should ever happen that we don’t touch base for some reason, there won’t be a major conflagration.”

“No conflagrations,” I repeated.

“And nobody’s going to go falling in love,” he said. “That’s the big one. I don’t need to be going there again.”

I finally laughed at that. It came up from my belly. “I think you’re safe, Sam. I’ve already seen you at your most impressive and it hasn’t overwhelmed me. I’ve also seen you at your worst. Wearing pink, for instance. Or remember when you broke your finger putting in my air conditioner? You howled more than a woman giving birth.”

“The hell I did.” He scowled. “Anyway, this brings us back to throwing drinks and timing devices like Frank Ethan’s watch.”

“Exactly where we came in,” I agreed.

“Right.” He opened the courthouse door for me.

I stepped inside, but then I turned back to gape at him. “You never open doors for me.”

“That was before, when you were one of the guys. Now you’re my girl.”

“I’m—” I broke off. Somehow, it seemed diametrically opposed to everything we had just discussed.

“Figuratively speaking,” Sam explained.

“Oh. Of course.”

I knew then that I had to get a grip. This wasn’t going to work if the world kept tilting on its axis with everything he said. I was supposed to feel clinical and practical about this, not light-headed and weak-kneed and on the constant verge of passing out.

“They’re meeting for lunch right about now,” Sam said, looking at his watch. “Or at least they are if she agreed to see him.”

“Who?” I asked dazedly.

“Lisa and Lyle Woodsen.”

“Where?” And what the hell difference did that make?

“The same restaurant where they had their first date. So where’s ours going to be?”

I grabbed my wits about me halfway across the lobby. “I have show tickets for Atlantic City this weekend.” No, I thought immediately, that wouldn’t work. It would be better to take Grace or Jenny along, because that sort of occasion would almost necessitate an overnight. Would one of us sleep on the floor? Would we take two separate rooms? How would that fit into our rules?

“I was thinking more along the lines of tonight,” Sam said while I was picking at the problem.

Tonight? That was…soon.

I looked at him. He grinned that crooked, bad-boy grin, and I knew—suddenly I just knew—that he realized how flustered I was by all this. And he liked it. I decided I was damned if I was going to let him keep yanking my chain.

That was the only reason I did what I did next in full view of a lobby bustling with lawyers, litigants and various law enforcement personnel. Okay, maybe Mill had a little to do with it, too. I knew it would get back to him. I caught Sam’s tie with my left hand and gave it a tug until he stepped closer to me.

“Hey,” he said, startled.

I kissed him hard on the mouth. That had been my intention anyway—one strong smack to reestablish my upper hand. But then something happened. A rolling kind of jolt went through me. Because while I’d meant to smack, his mouth turned out to be as soft as a wish, and I stayed a little too long. At some point while I lingered, he obviously recovered from his surprise…and I forgot all about Mill.

His tongue slipped fast, neatly, past my lips, tangling with mine. It teased a moment. Then it was gone. I reeled back.

“Sneak preview,” he said, and winked at me. “Good idea.” Then he left me standing there like a dumbstruck idiot and headed for his courtroom.

Chapter Four

I have no recollection of being in court that afternoon, though I know I must have been because I billed Robert Awney for my time. The man was grinning when he left the courthouse. His wife had left him and he’d never gotten over it, so he took her back to court once a year, trying to change his child support or his visitation, just to harass her. Celia Awney Neulander’s expression was predictably murderous as she stalked off.

I stood on the cold, aged tile of the lobby floor watching them go, then I looked around for Sam. He was nowhere to be found. I found myself thinking about our arrangement again, and I was suddenly swept by the conviction that it would never work. Nothing between us would ever be as simple as he was making this whole thing out to sound. We both had our egos. We were both strong-willed. Each of us had a decided preference for being in charge. This was going to be a tug-of-war, I thought.

I decided that what I really needed to do about the situation was talk to Grace. I whipped around, swinging my briefcase like a deadly weapon, and headed for the elevator bank instead of the lobby doors.

I found her at her desk outside Judge Castello’s chambers on the sixth floor. She was snarling into the phone at someone who apparently mistook her for a woman who cared about the terms of his parole. I waited for six minutes and during that time, Grace told the caller no less than eight times that he ought to get a lawyer who would then tell it to the judge.

She hung up the phone a little too hard and looked surprised to see me. “If it’s five o’clock already, then this must be my afterlife.”

I hated to disappoint her. “I need to talk to you,” I said. “About Sam.”

Her brows did a slow slide up her forehead. “Have you decided to claw with him?”

I think I gave a jerky little nod before I shook my head.

“Which is it?” she asked. “Yes or no?”

“Yes. But I’m having doubts now.”

“That would make you an idiot.”

I glowered at her. “I should have gone to Jenny with this.”

“Jenny would already be out buying floral arrangements for your wedding.” Grace stood from her desk. “This requires coffee,” she decided.

I followed her out of the chambers area to the balcony that overlooked a lot of empty air all the way down to the ground floor. I generally avoided standing near the railing because it made me dizzy. Grace went right over to it and leaned against it, folding her arms over her chest, utterly unperturbed by the fact that if the wood suddenly gave way, her life would be over.

“What happened to the coffee?” I asked, surprised.

“This can’t wait for the elevator.” The cafeteria was on the third floor. “I want to hear what you two have been up to.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, it’s an arrangement,” I said. “It’s…uh, sex. Only.” But that wasn’t entirely true. “Also companionship,” I added.

“Conversation?” she asked.

“Of course.” I scowled. “We’re hardly going to claw with our lips sealed.”

“Comfort?”

Suddenly I saw where she was headed with this. I threw my hands up in surrender.

“Am I to take it that you two talked about this,” Grace asked, “set some guidelines and decided to get naked together?”

“We…” I trailed off. “That’s about the size of it.”

“It’s about time.”

“You don’t think it’s odd that we discussed it first?”

“You’re both lawyers. This is what lawyers do.”

“We made bylaws, too.”

She nodded as though this made all the sense in the world. “Less chance of chaos and misunderstanding that way. So what’s the problem?”

“My motives aren’t the purest.” There—I said it aloud. After all, confession is supposed to be good for the soul. “I’m not doing it to dodge the dating pool,” I admitted. “I haven’t been in the dating pool for a while.”

“So dodging the dating pool is the motivation behind all this?”

“It’s Sam’s.” We finally set off toward the elevators.

“What’s yours?”

“It’s entirely possible that I just want to rip his clothes off,” I admitted.

I said this just as the elevator doors slid open. There were three people inside. An elderly woman gasped mildly. An overweight man in red suspenders grinned at me. The child with him seemed to have no reaction to my comment whatsoever.

Grace sailed into the elevator car without a qualm. I followed, feeling ridiculous.

“How long is this arrangement supposed to last?” she asked me.

“Can we finish discussing this when we get to the cafeteria?” I looked left and right to find that we still had the rapt attention of both the other passengers over the age of ten.

The elevator doors slid open again, and I fled through them, refusing to look back. “Until one or both of us decide we want to move on,” I explained finally.

“This will get him out of your system so you can finally start dating again. You know, you’ve been hung up on him for a very long time now,” Grace observed.

I frowned. Teenagers got “hung up,” I thought. Cinderella had pined for Prince Charming, and Snow White had been prepared to sleep forever without that kiss. I, on the other hand, was a thirty-five-year-old professional just stuffed to the brim with common sense and independence. I did not get “hung up” on anyone.

“So when does this deal start?” Grace asked when we reached the cafeteria.

“Maybe tonight.”

“Ah. There’s the floor that makes the feet feel cold.”

“I’m not hung up and I don’t have cold feet.”

“Mandy, you’re jumping around like a ballerina here. Whose idea was this anyway—yours or Sam’s?”

I thought about it as we collected our coffee. “His.”

“That makes it even better.”

We sat at a table and reached for the sugar canister at the same time. We both took our coffee black except when we were at the courthouse. The brew there is abysmal. I got to the little packets first and plucked out a whole handful of them. We divided them up, four apiece.

“I have another ulterior motive,” I said suddenly. “I’m thinking maybe it will get back to Mill that I’m seeing someone.”

Grace very rarely made a move that wasn’t smooth, but this almost made her snort her first sip of coffee out her nose. “What does Mill have to do with it?” she asked.

“He’s suing me for custody of Chloe.”

She went very still. “Bastard.”

“It’s the election.”

“Of course it’s the election. That’s what makes him a bastard.”

I felt the tension continue to uncoil and relax inside me. That’s the thing about friends. The good ones, the real ones, don’t just talk you down when you’re nervous about something and they don’t just reserve comment about why you need four sugars in your coffee and what that might do to your health. Real friends are always on your side. If you take it into your head to shoot someone, a real friend will help you hide the body before she asks you why you did it.

“What are you going to do?” Grace asked me now.

“Tear him limb from limb and use him for fertilizer.”

“You should ask Sam to represent you,” she said. “He’s got that amazing winning percentage.”

A lot of it had come at my expense, too. “He offered,” I said. “I think if Judge Larson is going to hear this, I’ll probably take him up on it.” The complexion of things had changed since we had talked about it last night and I had declined his offer. We had an arrangement now and I wanted Mill to know about it. And Larson would probably give Sam the moon and the stars if he batted those blue eyes at her just the right way.

Grace finally drained her coffee—courageous soul that she is—and stood. “I need to get back upstairs. The criminal element calls. If tonight turns out to be the big night for you two, would you like Jenny to take Chloe off your hands?”

Some people might have thought it odd that she would offer up her roommate’s services that way. I was used to it by now. “I’ll let you know.”

“Don’t use Mrs. Casamento,” she warned. “She’d be knocking on your door on an hourly basis, and that would be very tough on the libido.”

“Sam’s or mine?” I asked, standing as well.

“Sam’s. Yours is so primed, a scud missile couldn’t take it out.”

I didn’t even try to argue that one. I had been ignoring the little shock waves he created inside me for quite some time now. So I just nodded again. My neck was starting to hurt from all the up-and-down jerks I’d given it in the past twenty minutes or so, but I knew I could probably count a good neck rub in my immediate future.

We went back to the elevator bay, and Grace rode up while I headed down. When I hit the lobby again, I rooted my cell phone out of my briefcase. I called the office and told my secretary that something personal had come up so I wouldn’t be back today. It wasn’t really a lie. This was definitely personal with a capital P.

Wine had gotten me into this, I decided, and wine would get me through it. I stopped at a liquor store on my way home and hit the front door of my building at the precise moment a cab pulled up to the curb, toting Chloe and three other classmates whose mothers I’d made kiddie-travel arrangements with for purposes of school. It was my week to pay. Mrs. Casamento was waiting at the curb to collect Chloe for me and I took back the money I’d given her for the taxi.

“I’m home early today,” I explained. Then Chloe bulleted out of the taxi and threw herself into my arms. I caught her neatly and didn’t even come close to bobbling the bottle of Cabernet I’d bought.

“How come, Mom? This is cool!” Chloe shouted. I felt a spasm of guilt that she was so glad to see me. I wasn’t around after school nearly enough.

“Hard to make a living if you don’t work normal hours,” Sylvie Casamento judged.

“I don’t get paid by the hour,” I assured her. “It’s okay.”

“Thing is, I count on this money every afternoon,” she complained.

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