Utterly Charming (3 page)

“Nonetheless,” he said. “I appreciate your candor.”

He bowed slightly, a courtly move that somehow seemed appropriate to him. Then he slipped out the door. She continued to stand for a moment, looking at the closed door, feeling vaguely unsettled. He seemed like a man who, despite his charming surface, was a bit lost.

Then she shook herself as if she were waking from a long, strange dream. It wasn’t often she let good looks influence her that much. She sank into her chair and picked up her pen, pausing over his name and address.

After a moment, she reached for her phone and dialed the number of Abercrombie, Hazelton, Finch, and Goldberg. The receptionist answered, and Nora hung up. What had she been thinking, dialing up Max? Max had interesting cases and interesting clients, thanks to his accidental success shortly after he had joined Portland’s largest firm. Max had been out of law school as long as she had, but already he had a buzz. Everyone was saying that Max would be the state’s best defense attorney, and she had a hunch everyone was right.

Max wouldn’t want to talk about this. Max would humor her, of course—he was nothing but polite—but he would think that she was even more marginalized than she already was.

Nora sighed and picked up her mini tape recorder. She would dictate a few notes about Blackstone and his little friend, just so that she had a completed file in case Blackstone did turn out to be a stalker and claimed he had done something on her advice.

Then she would close the file forever.

When she finished, she handed the entire mess to Ruthie and took off for her long overdue lunch. When she got into the elevator, which still smelled faintly of leather and something intoxicating, she let herself dream a little. It would be nice to have a man who looked like that be interested in her. A sane man.

But that would never happen, and she was smart enough to know it. Men always found her attractive at first—so little, so cute—and then she would open her mouth. So few men appreciated her blunt style, and even fewer of them appreciated her opinions. She didn’t know how many men she had scared away. The ones who liked her mouth and her brains only saw her as a friend.

She sighed. She hated being practical. Her father used to say that it stole the magic from her life.

And he was probably right.

Of course, if she were really practical, she would have taken Blackstone’s money. She had enough, if she were cautious, to pay one month’s rent and hope her landlord would be satisfied. If she didn’t have anything new on her desk in two weeks, she would have to apply at the law firms that had turned her down.

She would have to admit defeat.

And it was looking more and more like she would have no choice.

Two weeks later, nothing had changed, except that Nora had gotten a bit more desperate. She actually thought of calling her mother for a loan. But her mother would have given her a long lecture about responsibility, forgetting the admonition she had often given about following dreams, and then would write a check for three times the amount that Nora wanted to borrow. Nora hated going into debt. She hated it worse when it was accompanied by a lecture followed by kindness.

Fortunately, Ruthie had managed to get that client who bounced the retainer check to pay cash instead. Ruthie used to work for a collection agency, and for once her strange skills had proven useful. Privately, Nora believed Ruthie knew the end was near, and with her strange boyfriend Bryan to support, Ruthie would do anything to keep the office open.

Even with the lost retainer restored, Nora was still on the edge. She was sitting at her desk, checkbook beside her, a stack of bills on the other side, trying to see which ones she could skip and which ones she absolutely had to pay. No new clients had come in the door in over a week, and none had called. She was beginning to think she was going to have to chase ambulances to find work. At least then, she might have a chance of finding someone truly in need of her help, unlike the malpractice doctor who was the only person burning her phone lines these days.

As if on cue, Ruthie buzzed the intercom.

“Mr. Blackstone is on the line.”

Nora felt her heart jump and then frowned at herself in annoyance. Blackstone had been a difficult man who would prove to be a more difficult client. She wasn’t doing him or herself a favor by swooning over his looks.

Even if they were spectacular.

She thanked Ruthie and picked up the phone.

“’Bout time,” said a nasal voice that clearly didn’t belong to Blackstone.

Nora sighed. “Yes?” she said, pretending not to recognize the voice of the little man who called himself Sancho Panza just so she wouldn’t have to use his name.

“Blackstone’s in a lot of trouble. I think he needs an attorney.”

“If he needs an attorney,” Nora said, “why doesn’t he call me himself?”

“He can’t,” the little man said. “The police are just arriving, and he’s otherwise engaged.”

“Police?” She felt a chill run through her. “I’m not a criminal attorney.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re the only attorney we know. Can you come?”

“You haven’t told me where,” she said, mentally kicking herself for the curiosity that made her ask the question.

He listed an address in Beaverton near the Washington Square Mall. She recognized the neighborhood; it was one of the older developments in what had once been a bedroom community for Portland, instead of an indistinguishable suburb.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll be there. But I may have to—”

She heard a click on the other line before she finished the sentence. She stared at the receiver for a moment.

“—find him a new attorney,” she finished, softly, to herself.

Then she sighed and slipped on her trusty black shoes. She was glad she had worn a blazer, even though the shoulder pads made her look like a linebacker. Actually, they made her look like a cheerleader dressed in a linebacker’s suit coat. She grabbed her cheap briefcase and her oversized purse and headed out the door.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” she said to Ruthie. “Tell anyone who calls that I’m on an emergency and will talk to them later tonight or tomorrow.”

Ruthie nodded, pretending, like Nora was, that someone would call, and Nora hurried out of the office, wishing she were busy enough to tell Ruthie to cancel her afternoon appointments.

When Nora reached the elevator, she wondered exactly what she was doing. She didn’t have a criminal specialty. She should have called someone else. But she felt a need to see Blackstone, a need that she didn’t want to analyze too closely. A need she suspected had nothing to do with her work.

***

Her drive from downtown to Beaverton took nearly twenty minutes in the hot afternoon sunshine. She spent most of the drive worrying about how she could get a retainer out of Blackstone and keep it while she found him a good defense attorney. It wasn’t until she had reached Highway 217 that she actually realized she had tried and convicted the man in her mind. Just because he was in trouble didn’t mean that he didn’t need a civil attorney. Just because the police were involved didn’t mean she couldn’t help. Just because he needed help didn’t mean he was a criminal.

Gorgeous men shouldn’t be criminals. In the world of her imagination, they couldn’t be. Criminals looked like—well, criminals looked like Blackstone’s little friend, Sancho Panza. Not that criminals were short (she thought most of them were tall) but in the world of her imagination, they all had improperly set noses and they all rolled cigarettes up in their sleeves.

Maybe the little guy had gotten Blackstone in trouble. Maybe that was why he was trying to get Blackstone off the hook.

As she took the Tigard exit off Interstate 5, she frowned at the cloud of inky black smoke that covered the horizon. It was field burning season—when the Willamette Valley’s grass farmers burned their fields to prepare it for the next crop—but regulations required them to wait until the winds would take the smoke away from the city, not toward it. Besides, they would have to be burning fairly close to the west side suburbs for that much smoke, wouldn’t they?

She frowned and rolled up her windows, wishing that she could afford to fix the air-conditioning in her ancient Rabbit. Immediately the air grew stuffy, but that was better than the smoke that she was driving into.

With a flick of her right hand, she turned on the radio. The local talk station had a single helicopter that was just going toward the site. The news stated what she already knew: something was happening ahead of her.

A prickly feeling grew along her back. She hoped that the smoke wasn’t related to Blackstone, but that prickly feeling said it was.

Maybe she should stop at a pay phone and call another attorney now. But she was curious. She was broke. And she really, really wanted to see Blackstone again.

She rolled her eyes at her own thoughts. Maybe she deserved to look like a cheerleader. Only teenagers got crushes like this. Or, more accurately, only teenagers acted upon them.

She decided to take a back route to the address that the little man had given her. She took a side road, and then another, sweat running down the back of her cotton shirt beneath the blazer. The car was stuffy and smelled of smoke. The sky was so black here that she could barely see in front of her car, and what she did see was oily smoke and flaky ash.

There was no way one person could cause all of this. Maybe Blackstone wanted her to sue someone for burning his house down. Maybe. But then why had the little guy mentioned the police?

She bit her lower lip and turned into the neighborhood that the little man had told her about. Immediately she slammed on the brakes. Directly in front of her was a police barricade, and around that, fire hoses, emergency equipment, and more flashing red lights than she had ever seen in one place. She still couldn’t tell what was causing the smoke, but she knew it was just ahead.

A cop rapped on her window. His beefy face was red and streaked with soot.

She shut off the radio and rolled down the window. “I’m Mr. Blackstone’s attorney,” she said, wondering if that would mean anything to the cop.

Apparently it did. He waved her forward. She had to drive slowly to avoid the hoses and the emergency personnel. Burning bits of wood littered the road, and she constantly had to swerve to avoid them. Several homes were on fire. The fire leaped out like a live thing, not responding to the water at all.

The smoke had gotten into Nora’s throat, making it feel swollen. She had forgotten to roll up the window, and the stench was overpowering. She didn’t see Blackstone anywhere.

She kept driving, cautiously. The address the little man had given her was right in the middle of the devastation. Police cars blocked the entire road. She couldn’t drive any farther. She really didn’t want to get out, but she felt she had no choice.

She grabbed her purse but left her briefcase, thinking that she didn’t want to be too encumbered but she needed her identification. She opened the car door and slid out, gingerly putting her feet between fire hoses and charred debris.

It was worse outside. The stench permeated everything. Bits of charred wood and flame floated down with the ash. The sky was so dark, it seemed as if a severe storm were about to break overhead. Her eyes watered. Police band radios were crackling voices and static, and firemen were yelling directions at each other. Strangely enough, she didn’t see any residents. Maybe they had been evacuated. But she would have expected at least one, screaming and shouting and defending his house. Instead there was no one. Other than emergency vehicles, there weren’t even cars parked along the street.

For some reason that unnerved her more than anything. She walked around a parked police car, its flashing red lights a dramatic counterpoint to the artificial darkness.

There was a brown and orange Volkswagen microbus parked at the curb in front of the house that the little man had told her about. She walked around it, and then she saw Blackstone.

He was on a green lawn untouched by flames, its flowers a reminder of what the neighborhood had been just a short time before. He had not a speck of dirt on him. He wore the cowboy boots, and a tight pair of jeans, and a T-shirt so white, so clean, that it flared like a neon sign.

His hair was slightly mussed, but he seemed calm. And he was even more gorgeous than she remembered.

Five policemen stood around him—not protecting him so much as guarding him. Another group was on the driveway, including a man who was taking pictures. From her position on the street, Nora looked at what he was shooting, and the sensation that she was out of her league grew from a feeling to a certainty.

There was a woman on the concrete. She was sprawled, face down. With all the commotion around, Nora could only assume that the woman was dead.

Nora swallowed, then smoothed her skirt in a nervous gesture. Just as she had suspected, Blackstone needed a criminal attorney. But all he had at the moment was her. She would do what she could to get him out of here and call Max to defend him as soon as she was able.

Beside her the microbus rocked slightly. She looked up. Sancho Panza or whoever he was moved by the window. She was about to call up to him when he disappeared into the bus’s interior.

She swallowed against the smoke-ravaged dryness of her throat. She had to stay focused. She had to get through these next few moments and then get out of here.

She stepped onto the lawn, and her movement caught Blackstone’s attention. His face softened when he saw her. It had been all hard lines and angles before. Now it was gentle, rounded, as if someone had changed the lighting or he had become a different person somehow.

He looked at her as if she were a lifeline. She went to him like the schoolgirl whose crush she had appropriated. Only when she was halfway across the yard did she remember she was supposed to be his attorney.

She squared her shoulders and prepared to sound tough. Heaven knew, she couldn’t look it.

She stopped beside one of the police officers, a middle-aged man whose soft stomach edged over his belt. His face was soot-streaked, and his eyes were red from the smoke.

“I’m Mr. Blackstone’s attorney,” Nora said in her best don’t-screw-with-me voice. “What’s going on here?”

“Honey,” the officer said, “you don’t belong here.”

She raised her chin as if it would give her more height. She hated being called “honey,” and she hated even more being called “honey” in that tone of voice.

“I have every right to be here,” she said, louder and even more stridently than before. “I am Mr. Blackstone’s attorney. I demand that you tell me what’s going on.”

“Nora,” Blackstone said, and on his lips, the use of her name sounded like a poem. “What are you doing here? I don’t need you. It’s not safe.”

“What’s going on?” she asked again, this time to both Blackstone and the cop.

The cop stared at her as if she were a cat who had suddenly spoken. Then he looked around as if what she saw explained everything. “Your client destroyed this neighborhood.”

She raised her brows, skeptical. “This doesn’t look like the work of one person.”

“Believe me, lady,” the cop said. “It is.”

“Nora,” Blackstone said again.

She held up a finger, a silent command ordering him to wait. “I don’t believe you,” she said to the cop.

“We have witnesses,” he said.

“Nora—”

“Just a moment,” she snapped. Blackstone closed his mouth, obviously stunned at her curtness.

“And,” the cop said, “those witnesses put that woman alive not fifteen minutes ago.”

After the little man had called her. So he had called her while this—whatever it was—was going on.

She straightened. She had to take charge of this situation. “Are you charging my client with anything?”

It was the cop’s turn to raise his eyebrows, as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity of her question. “What aren’t we charging him with? Carrying incendiary devices. Arson. Murder, and attempted murder. And that’s just for starters.”

Blackstone rolled his eyes and then shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what was going on. Nora’s hands were trembling. She clasped them together to maintain her illusion of calm.

“Nora,” Blackstone said. “Since you’re here, find Sancho. Make sure he has secured the case.”

“I can’t believe you’re speaking,” she said, turning on him. “You’re being charged with damn near every felony in the criminal code. Don’t say another word.”

“Nora—”

“I mean it.”

He closed his mouth as if she had pushed it closed. The cop watched them. He hadn’t called her honey since she got strident. And now he was looking at her as if she were someone to be reckoned with. The other officers who had been crowding around watched as well. One of them finally took out handcuffs.