WB (2 page)

I sighed, removed the tea strainer and added the right amount of sugar cubes and cream to my tea, gave it a stir and started for the living room to lose myself in the drama of Jane, Bingley, Darcy and Elizabeth.

By six, the dream was just about forgotten. I decided to skip a run this morning and go straight for a shower and get ready for work.

WARLOCK’S BRIDE JENNIFER RINEHART 7

The Law Offices of Whitley, Smelt, Pennington, Hale and Van Leuwen (known as

Witless and Smelly by it's employees) was decorated in a tasteful combination of aged walnut furniture and upscale hotel art featuring mountains and fruit.

After giving a friendly wave to the receptionists, who were oddly named, Opal and Ruby, I made a right turn at the Grand Tetons and a left at a yellow bowl of pears to my small, windowless cubicle.

I peeked cautiously towards the closed office door opposite my cubby, it was firmly locked and no sound of a treadmill or half shouted phone conversations could be heard. My breath escaped me in a relieved rush.

My boss, Lillian Van Leuwen, the youngest attorney to ever make partner at the firm and, in my opinion, the most arrogant and difficult of all of them, wasn't in yet. Thank goodness for small favors.

Lillian was the product of a privileged home. Her father was a District Judge, her mother a Junior League organizer who could probably qualify as Botox's Woman of the Year her face was so unlined it looked like a overfull water balloon.

As the youngest in a family of four boys she was treated as a princess by pretty much everyone and it was a consensus around the office that it was her family's connections that got her a partnership in the firm at the tender age of thirty-five.

Lillian was accustomed to adoration and a stranger to disappointment. Whatever she wanted, she got. All of this reverence had turned her into a terrible brat and I, lucky girl, worked for her.

I stowed my purse in the bottom drawer of my desk and stashed my lunch behind a

Boston fern on a stand near my desk. Lillian had stolen my lunch too many times to count, so I wasn't taking any chances today.

I stood back a moment, and turned my head from side to side to make sure that the small brown bag containing my ham and cheese on whole wheat and a small pouch of dried fruit wasn't visible, then walked into my cubicle, hit the ON button for my computer and checked my inbox.

“La, I finally made it! What a tangle traffic is today. Martin had to pull around to the back entrance to drop me off,” Lillian said loudly. She liked to make a grand entrance.

I stood up with a welcoming smile on my face and thought about the excellent benefits package and the twice yearly bonuses I got. Only eight more hours to go I thought with an inward grimace. Yay, me.

“Good morning, Lillian. How was your weekend?” I asked with as pleasant a smile as I could manage.

Last week, she scolded me for not trying harder to be pleasant to her when she arrived.

She said my sour expression put a damper on creativity and was impeding the flow of her chi, whatever the hell that meant.

I had felt a momentary urge to snap at her that I would be nice when she was, but with an WARLOCK’S BRIDE JENNIFER RINEHART 8

effort I refrained and smiled so hard my eyes almost crossed from the strain and promised to try harder.

I watched as her hands smoothed the mink lapel of her gray wool coat. I could tell she wanted me to comment on it, and in a small act of rebellion, I pretended not to notice.

Lillian was an attractive woman. She had short, curly brown hair, aggressively tan skin that made her blue eyes bluer and a thin figure that bordered on skeletal. A body type made popular by runway models and heroin junkies.

She had a wide smile of golf ball white teeth that she used often and a sharp voice that hovered between honeyed (when she was with someone she wanted to impress) and shrill (practically everyone else). But what I found the most annoying of all of her obnoxious habits was the way she had of pretending to be chummy with everyone in the office. She was notorious for her backstabbing friendships with what she sweetly called, 'my office family.'

I came back to what she was saying and realized it wasn't very important. She was in the middle of a description of the party she attended at Linus and Beth Tate's mountain lodge (I made a mental note to send them a thank you card), the special curry that was being named in her honor at Amritza (a posh curry night spot) and Anouk's (her yappy little bichon frise, vegetarian, Gemini) intestinal problems, yuck, I didn't want to know about that!

Lillian walked into her office, calling out cheerful greetings to nervously smiling coworkers and I breathed a sigh of relief. She'd had a good weekend and was in a happy mood.

Today was turning out better than I expected.

I noticed the message light was blinking on my phone. I cradled the handset against my ear and entered my secret pass code to retrieve my voicemails.

The first message was a reminder to use the new courier request forms. I still hadn't received a copy of the old courier request forms and frowned over that. Perhaps it hadn't been requisitioned properly from the document department? The document department had recently changed their document request forms too, arghh. Such was the modern law office.

The second was from my Aunt Celia. Her voice was wispy and insubstantial with a faint French accent. I had to put a finger in my opposite ear and jam the phone hard against my head to hear what she was saying.

Celia has a tiny voice that matches her petite, childlike frame. She is delicate, like a small china doll, with tiny hands and feet, a rosebud mouth and thinning, dark hair. I had outgrown Celia, in height and weight, when I was twelve years old. I felt freakishly tall around her with my five foot ten inch height, generous bosom and rounded hips. I wasn't fat, but anyone would feel like a plump giant around Celia.

“Anna, I … darn, I wish I didn't have to leave you a message. I need to talk with you in person. Could you stop by tonight on your way home? I need to … hmm … well, I'll talk with you about it later.” Click! Then nothing but dial tone sounded in my ears.

I stared at the phone a moment in disbelief. She did it again!

This wasn't the first time Celia had left me a cryptic message. Sometimes I think she got a kick out of it and left these messages just to wind me up.

I played back the message twice more, hoping to hear something I had missed which would shed some light on why she called, but it was the same mysterious message each time. I almost picked up the phone to call her but decided just to stop by after work.

I spared a momentary thought on how best to get to Celia's place tonight. I was slightly southwest of her now. Celia lived in the Pearl District, it was a real bitch to try and find a WARLOCK’S BRIDE JENNIFER RINEHART 9

parking spot there. But, if I headed over right after work, I might get lucky and snag a place outside of the new sushi restaurant around the corner from her building.

I wondered what she wanted to talk about, I hoped she wasn't planning on moving again, because I had promised myself, no more moving, I liked Portland.

Celia had uprooted us and moved to what seemed like every mid sized city in the country when I was growing up. We even spent a summer in Halifax when I was nine years old.

As much as I would miss Celia, if she had any plans to move she would have to make them without me this time. Next month would mark my two year anniversary in Portland, I was staying.

A heavy hand on my shoulder made me look up and forget my musings on Celia and her mysterious message.

Guy Small stood behind me with an arrogant smile on his face. Guy was the office lecher, every place had one I thought with resentment. His father was the managing partner of the firm and in a burst of nepotism had given Guy the job title, Management Liaison, a six figure salary and the authority to do nothing important.

He spent most of the day playing minesweeper on the computer in his tiny office, leering at the lesser support staff and berating the bicycle messengers for tracking in mud.

I shrugged his sweaty hand from my shoulder and waited, as patiently as possible, to hear what he had to say.

“I heard you had a wild weekend.”

His smile was wide and I watched as the hands in his pockets pushed out and he jiggled his manly parts at me in an obscene (sensual, in his mind) way.

Guy's cologne was so strong I had to breathe slowly through my mouth to keep from gagging on it. He was a handsome man, if you liked the player type who referred to all women as bitches and liked to 'hang with his posse' on the weekends. I didn't like him at all.

“I don't know what you mean, Mr. Small.” He had asked me to call him Guy on several occasions, but I was on to his game after hearing about the way he had cornered one of the receptionists in the break room on the forty second floor. Mr. Small is what I called him and if the talk around the office was true, he was small in more than just name.

I turned my back on him and neatened a stack of papers on my desk, shuffled a few files around, basically, I tried to look busy, too busy to talk to him. I was hoping he would take the hint that I, unlike him, had a real job to do and needed to get back to it.

“You went on a blind date,” he said with a low laugh and a suggestive wink.

Even his laugh grated on my nerves. Most days I could handle Guy. As long as you knew where you stood with him, never gave him any encouragement and treated him like the nasty pervert he was, he was manageable.

I looked back with a sigh, he was still standing behind me. He wore cowboy boots with ridiculously high heels, a diamond the size of a blueberry on his pinky finger and a smug smile.

“Yes, I did, it was lovely.” Actually, as usual, it had been a total disaster. Unlike all the other dates, this one hadn't been entirely my fault.

Allen was a nice guy. He was handsome, had a steady job, lived in his own apartment and didn't spend the evening talking about his evil ex-girlfriend or his fitness regimen.

We had a lot in common; a love of reading, swimming and French food. There was just one fly in the ointment; he was gay. I had begun to suspect when he told me about the six times he watched Steel Magnolias. Allen was a huge fan of Sally Fields, but the way he perked up at WARLOCK’S BRIDE JENNIFER RINEHART 10

the sight of our handsome food server, Mario, really clinched it for me.

I spent the rest of the evening listening to increasingly flirtatious banter between Allen and Mario, an aspiring artist who had just moved to Portland from Chicago with a boyfriend who ditched him for a truck driver. All in all, it was not my most successful evening, but it was nice to see Allen and Mario hookup.

When I had a minute alone with Leah I would give her hell for trying to match me up with her 'super nice' cousin.

“Where did you hear that?” I asked with a narrow eyed look. My morning was starting to look a little less rosy.

In addition to the whoring around and computer games, Guy was a gossip. He loved to hear it and liked to spread it even more.

“A little birdy told me. You look a little tired today, worn out, know what I mean? I guess your date went into overtime.” He made the ridiculous sound of a game buzzer and laughed at his own joke.

I was trying to think of a clever comeback that didn't include the words, asshole and piss off, when Lillian's voice called out from her office, “Anna, could you come here for a minute?”

I gave him a thin smile and skirted around him on my way to Lillian's office. Her wall of accomplishments, every attorney had one, was covered in pictures of herself interspersed with her degrees and Oregon State Bar License. I glanced at the pictures of Lillian with the mayor, Lillian on a yacht with her fiancé, Martin. Lillian posing next to her red Porsche, Lillian on top of Mount St. Helen's. In every picture she had a blinding smile showing off her impossibly white teeth.

All the photos were professionally framed and matted in exotic hardwoods. Nothing shabby was ever allowed into her office. I had once seen her reduce one of the cleaning staff to tears because of a streak on her window.

Lillian was at her desk and holding out a paper towards me with an accusatory frown, “I thought I told you to have this recorded on Friday?”

She wasn't really asking a question, I could tell by the insincere sound of confusion in her voice that she was waiting to pounce, but I had to say something. I had a moment to peek at the paper she was holding and recognized the ornate writing at the top.

“The Meyers' revised Quitclaim Deed?” I asked with my best curious, but not alarmed look.

Cool and calm was the best way to handle Lillian. If you showed the slightest hint of fear she would grind you into a quivering mass good only for a year of quiet work in the basement assisting in long term file storage.

She shook it at me with a snarl of frustration, uh oh, she was really coming unglued now,

“Yes, yes, the Meyers' Deed! What else would I have you record? I'm not a fucking Real Estate slob who spends my day holding my clients hands while they close escrow on their shitty little dream homes!” She was really on a roll now, this could turn into a ten minute rant if I wasn't careful.

I saw her drawing breath to further impress on me how much I had disappointed her, was useless and had better not do it again or I would be fired, fired, fired. I had heard it all before, last Wednesday actually, when I wasn't able to get her a dinner reservation at Saskia's.

I interrupted quickly with a smile and said, “Lillian, Friday was a holiday. The Recorder's Office was closed, as were the courts and banks .... ” my voice trailed off at her look WARLOCK’S BRIDE JENNIFER RINEHART 11