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“We can’t do this.”
Carter tried to push Mallory away, but his heart wasn’t in it, nor was the rest of his body.
“Yes, we can,” she said, breathing the words into his ear. “We are doing it.”
“No, no we shouldn’t…oh, God,” he said as she darted her tongue between his lips and seized his mouth again.
She nibbled her way along his jaw. “Why shouldn’t we?”
“You don’t really want to is why,” he panted as her lips reached his neck. “It’s just the moment. It’s the night and the Christmas season and the tension of the case…”
“What’s wrong with any of that?” she asked, her voice so husky with need, she could barely speak.
“Nothing, except—you’re going to respect me even less in the morning.” His arm went swiftly around her and his mouth came down to hers. Unable to hold back anymore, Carter decided that if he was going to be nothing more to her than a toy, something to relieve the sexual need she was surprising him with, then he was going to be the best sex toy she would ever possess.
Dear Reader,
Mothers—you have to love them. Mallory Trent not only loves her efficiency-expert mother, but faithfully follows the rules set out in Ellen Trent’s bestselling books on creating perfect order in one’s life and never veering from one’s routines. When Mallory is pushed, kicking and screaming, into a second chance with Carter Compton, a man she’s desired for years, she discovers that she’ll definitely have to veer if she intends to make Carter see her as a woman.
She needs an image change, and fast, if she expects Santa Claus to give her Carter for Christmas. In this moment of crisis along comes none other than Maybelle Ewing from A Long Hot Christmas, who, as Maybelle herself would put it, “gits bored real easy” and has given up feng shui decorating to become “ImageMakers, a new you in no time flat.”
But Carter’s not eager to be “gotten.” Tired of his “lady-killer” image, he wants Mallory to respect him as a lawyer, meaning it’s important for him to treat her like one of the guys.
Does he have a chance against Maybelle’s advice and Mallory’s wiles? Especially when he’s sharing a hotel suite with a Mallory who’s a lot sexier than she was when they studied together as law students and getting sexier every day? Surrounded by mistletoe and lighted trees in the glitter of New York in the holiday season? Poor man. As I was writing Mistletoe Over Manhattan, the story of his futile fight against amazing womanpower, I actually began to feel a bit sorry for him.
So turn to chapter one and let the battle begin!
Happy holidays,
Barbara Daly
Mistletoe Over Manhattan
Barbara Daly
To Jennifer Green, in celebration of our first book together.
Contents
1
WHAT A RELIEF TO BE HOME.
Mallory Trent stepped out of the elevator on the fifty-third floor of the Hamilton Building in the Chicago Loop and gazed lovingly at the brass plaque beside the massive walnut double doors. It read Sensuous, Inc., and below that, Legal Department. After the horrible experience she’d just escaped, that plaque looked like a Welcome, Mallory sign on the pearly gates of Heaven.
The horrible experience had taken place on St. John’s Island in the Caribbean. Five days on St. John’s might be viewed as a vacation by some people. Some people might even have stayed the full seven days they’d originally planned to. Apparently some people enjoyed sunburn, scorpion sightings and sand grating between their toes. She wasn’t one of those people. She was happier at work. Let the icy winds blow across Lake Michigan. She didn’t care. She had a PalmPilot to keep her warm. She could pick up mangoes and pineapples at her local specialty market. And she had Sensuous, the cosmetics company whose offices filled the top five floors of the building and was her Heaven on earth.
“Hi, Cassie,” she said to the first of her colleagues she passed in the hall.
Cassie, a smooth-skinned, pretty woman with soft, curly black hair who could open sealed boxes with her razor-sharp tongue, stared at her with wide, startled dark eyes. “You’re finally back,” she said in a whisper. “Bill’s about to have a stroke.”
“But I wasn’t supposed to be back until—” Mallory said.
“Later,” Cassie said, hurrying on. “Got to find out if he’s in the building.”
“Who? Bill? I imagine he’s…” But she was talking to thin air, and approaching her from Cassie’s direction was Ned Caldwell, another of the junior members of the legal team that provided in-house counsel to Sensuous. Ned was Cassie’s opposite, a bespectacled man who spoke slowly and thought deeply. He saw her, slowed and moved toward her with an increasingly funereal expression.
“If it’s serious,” he murmured, “let me know how I can help.”
“Help with—” But he was gone, too, scurrying away with unusual speed as if Mallory were carrying a fatal virus—which, for all she knew, she might be. A virus transmitted by squadrons of foot-long mosquitoes that traveled in formation, like the ones in St. John’s. Mallory fought down an urge to go back to her apartment, take two aspirin and check in the next morning. Instead, she forged onward into her office suite and looked warily at the administrative aide whose services she shared with Cassie and Ned.
“Good morning, Hilda,” she said firmly, daring the woman to say anything out of the ordinary.
“You’re back!” Hilda said in a loud whisper, clasping a hand to her ample bosom. “Bill Decker wants to see you immediately.”
“How does he know I’m here?” Mallory whispered back. “And why are we all whispering?”
Hilda raised her voice to a low drone. “He doesn’t. On Friday he called every thirty minutes to ask if I’d located you yet, and every thirty minutes I reminded him you were on vacation, and…and…I lied!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “I told him you’d refused to tell me how to reach you.”
“Hilda!” No