Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance (6 page)

“Hmm. Not your normal approach to starting a relationship, I can see that.” She pursed her lips. “What would have happened if you’d met Elise Carroll somewhere more neutral—this Roundtable, for example?”

He’d asked himself the same question. “I’d have talked to her about something casual, oh, like women judges. Then I would have asked her out.”

“Right. What if she’d said no? Because she has to know your reputation for dating women who are absorbed with their careers. It could be she wouldn’t have wanted to date you then either.”

Turned him down? He frowned. The way he imagined these alternate scenarios, Elise chatted with him quite happily. She was bright and funny. They had something in common, although he never bothered to name this conveniently-shared interest. Maybe she liked to cook. It didn’t matter. In his imagination, she smiled at him—she was relaxed and having a good time.

“I don’t know. In my fantasy she always says yes,” he said.

“Jack, I agreed to help you get her over here, but I won’t let you turn a blind eye to her autonomy. She’s likely to say no, and frankly, if she does I’m backing her up.”

“How can you know that she’ll say no?”

“Because Ms. Carroll isn’t one of your billboard bimbos. She sees herself as a regular girl—excuse me,
woman
—and she sees you as a sort of celebrity. Which you are, in your way.”

Jack glanced at the clock. Elise should be arriving any minute. His clever plan was starting to feel like a Hail Mary pass with ten seconds left in the game. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Anita King was right. This ploy might have bought him another chance, but there was a limit to how much he could do this way. He couldn’t trick a woman into dating him.

Think
. It was a problem. He solved problems all the time, it’s what had made him such a good prosecutor. “Is there any way I can appeal to her generosity? Sense of fair play? Convince her of my neediness?”

Judge King laughed. “You have it bad, don’t you? To answer your questions, no, no and no. You can’t trap her, and she’s always going to turn you down. I won’t let you hound her. You may have to let this one go.”

Jack rubbed his face. He wasn’t accepting no as an answer—yet. But he recognized that Judge King was right. He could only push so much.

“Oh, stop thinking so hard,” she complained. “You’re giving me a headache. I’m a romantic, you know, and I figure if you two are meant to be together, you’ll figure it out. Both of you will figure it out. Stop assuming this is solely your problem to solve.”

There was a knock, and one of Judge King’s law clerks showed Elise in.

Her hair—with its gleaming silver curls—was tousled and her cheeks were rosy. Just seeing her overwhelmed his senses and snagged his breath. In the interval since the hearing, the memory of her had dimmed slightly. Now, with her standing there, his feelings clicked back on, a hundred neon signs flickering into brilliance. He couldn’t evade the sense she was his future, his life, his—everything.

He froze, drinking her in. She was an oasis after he’d been dying of thirst.

Elise looked over at him, a challenge in her eyes. He forced himself to stay where he was, feigning a relaxed pose against the judge’s desk. Every part of him wanted to touch every part of her.

“How nice to see you again, Judge McIntyre,” Elise said. Her voice was like the Sahara. She turned to Judge King. “I gather this is about more than the Roundtable, Judge?”

Anita King chuckled. “Yes, I’m an irrepressible
shadchan
—a matchmaker. When I heard that you’d managed to snag this one’s interest, well, I had to offer to help. You haven’t made it easy on him, have you?”

“No, Judge, it’s fair to say I haven’t.” Elise’s deep-pink lips widened in a cheerful smile.

She didn’t seem fazed at all by the summons to Judge King’s chambers. In fact, she appeared composed, even pleased. She looked like she knew Mona Lisa’s secret. Jack’s breath caught. Was this going to be a wasted gambit?

“Anita, you can’t blame her,” he said to Judge King, although he couldn’t take his eyes off Elise. “I’ve mishandled this from the beginning. Any sensible lawyer would look askance at being accosted by a judge.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that.” Judge King spread her hands out in appeal. “But, dear, just consider, it took a lot of—what’s the word you young people use these days? Oh, right—
cojones
for him to announce his feelings from the bench.” She smiled brightly at them both. “So, what’s it to be? Are you going to make this Jewish grandmother happy or aren’t you?”

A rhetorical question, of course. Jack wasn’t sure which of them was supposed to be swayed by the judge’s plea. All he could do was wait for Elise to speak.

His moonlight girl looked—well, beautiful of course, but also calm and extremely controlled. Determined. Steely, even. Her expression didn’t bode well for him.

Oh, shit. She was going to say no. He was going to lose this round, and he didn’t have a plan for the next skirmish. He held his breath.

“Okay.” Elise pointed at him. “My place. Tomorrow. Seven.” She turned to grin at Judge King. “Those papers, Judge? For the Roundtable?”

The judge’s mouth was open just a bit. Jack couldn’t remember ever seeing Anita King look nonplussed. “Of course,” she said hastily. She handed the folder over to Elise. “Thank you for helping out such a good cause.”

Yup, that was what he’d been reduced to—a charity case.

“I’m happy to do what I can, Judge.” Elise’s parting smile was sunny. So why didn’t Jack feel more relieved?

When the doorbell rang, Elise was satisfied. Her house was cleaner than it had been in a long time. She’d changed the sheets, put out fresh towels, and squeezed in time for a proper bath. With perfumed bath salts, even. She was wearing her cherry-red silk shorty robe and precious little else.

She was ready for sex. Good old-fashioned, rumple-the-sheets, make-the-earth-move sex. She smelled good. She looked good. And she felt both in control and curiously empowered by her decision to sleep with Blackjack McIntyre. She reached for the doorknob just as the bell rang again.

“Hi.” She smiled at him. “Come on in.”

He looked very formal. Impeccable gray flannel overcoat, open over a dashing suit. He might be infuriating, but the man could dress. Elise salivated, thinking about taking all that clothing off him, one piece at a time.

“These are for you.” He handed her a bag with a florist’s logo. Inside was a shallow box holding an arrangement of roses and lilies in a crystal bowl.

“Ooh, these are stunning.” She waved at the hall coat closet as she walked toward the kitchen. “You can hang your coat there.”

Elise glanced back. He was still wearing the coat, and he was frowning, presumably annoyed that things weren’t going as planned. She wanted to laugh at how predictable he was.

She unpacked the bouquet, admired the bowl, and put the flowers in pride of place on her dining room table. Maybe later she would put them in the bedroom.

“I made a reservation for seven-thirty,” Jack said carefully. He was standing in the doorway of the living room, ready to head right out. He held his wrist like he wanted to refer to his watch but was too polite.

Elise grinned at him and pointed. “The phone’s over there. You can cancel the reservation.”

His frown tightened. “You’re not feeling well?”

“On the contrary, I feel great.” She walked over to him, placing her hands on his coat lapels. “Are you sure you won’t take off this coat?”

“No. I mean, yes. I’m sure.” He stepped back a few inches. He looked stern and unwavering—a bit like he had when he’d been prosecuting Philly’s mob boss Dino “T-Rex” Reggiano. No sense of humor, clearly. Either that, or he was about to find her in contempt of court.

“Jack,” she soothed. “I can feed you if you’re hungry. Gusto’s delivers. It’s pretty good pizza.”

The offer seemed to startle him, which warmed her cynical heart no end. She watched as he considered his options.

“I would prefer to take you out to dinner. If you’ll uh, put on some clothes,” he said, studiously not noticing her breasts, which felt very perky under the thin silk of her robe. “I’ll have Gino put back our reservation at La Famiglia.”

“I don’t need to be wined and dined. I’m happy to skip straight to dessert. And by ‘dessert,’ of course, I mean sex.”

Elise drew her hand down the gray flannel sleeve closest to her. She let her fingertips skate along his hand, which he twitched away and hid behind his back. She glanced at his face. He looked stony enough for Mount Rushmore. She hadn’t thought Jack could get more austere—he appeared almost apoplectic with frustration. He clearly hadn’t gotten laid in a while.

This was going to be fun.

“That’s not why I’m here,” he insisted. He stopped trying to limit his gaze to her face. Now he was staring over her right shoulder.

“Well, that’s why I invited you. For sex.”

“I want to date you, not sleep with you.” He said it as though he were stating the obvious to a dim-witted defendant.

So crusty and serious. Elise couldn’t resist teasing him. “Really? You don’t want to sleep with me? Not even a little?”

That got his attention. He narrowed his eyes as he met her look. “Ah, the litigator’s trick. Won’t work. Of course I
will
want to sleep with you. But tonight, no. What I want tonight is to take you out to dinner.”

“Funny,” Elise said, reaching down to brush her fingertips over his groin. “I could have sworn you were interested in having sex sooner rather than later—”

He took another half step back and glared at her. “Still won’t work. That’s a physiological reaction. It doesn’t change my stated intention to take you to dinner. You said you would come on a date with me.”

“Assuming facts not entered into evidence, Your Honor,” she objected. “All I said was okay. No one bothered to ask what I was saying okay to, and as there wasn’t an explicit offer on the table, you can’t read terms into my acceptance.”

“Elise,” he growled.

“Judge,” she growled back at him.

He really was going to throw a blood clot, she thought, as his face contorted with frustration. It got almost—but not quite—ugly. She didn’t think anything could make him look ugly. Damn him. And why didn’t he want to skip straight to the sex? If she made herself any more available, she’d be draped over the couch wearing nothing but a shiny red ribbon.

Suddenly his face cleared. His shoulders dropped a full inch and he even managed a slight smile. He folded his arms and leaned back.

“Fair enough. You’re absolutely right. We didn’t spend enough time yesterday negotiating terms. By all means let’s do that now.”

“I don’t want to negotiate terms. I want to take you upstairs, unwrap you like a Christmas present, and get sweaty with you in my bed.”

“I understand that,
Elise
.” He made her name sound like a Gypsy curse. “I am declining that generous offer. My counteroffer of dinner at a five-star restaurant is clearly unacceptable to you. So let’s try to find some middle ground.”

“There is no middle ground,” she protested, retreating a bit. She crossed her arms over her chest. Clearly the poky nipples weren’t working for her.

“That’s no way to enter into the spirit of negotiation. You said yes to something last night. What was it?”

“I told you. Hot, steamy sex.” Elise winced. She sounded whiny, like a petulant teenager. That wasn’t the way to win this war and it wasn’t worthy of her skills. She was a better lawyer than that. She released a cleansing breath, lowered her arms and got into the spirit of negotiation, as he’d called it.

“I take your point,” she said in a calmer voice. “Let’s see. I want sex, and you want five-star restaurants, correct?”

Jack inclined his head slowly, guarding against some stunt she might pull. It wasn’t a stunt, though—it was a calculated risk to advance the negotiation.

“Okay, then,” she went on. “How about we trade? One date goes your way and we eat out, the next my way, namely hot and sweaty.” She figured she could resist his evil magic charm across the dinner table if she thought of it as one-week-early foreplay. Her master plan would just take a little longer, that was all.

“But not on the same night,” he said.

She pursed her lips to keep from smiling. “Of course not. We’d spend all our time arguing whose half of the date had lasted longer. No, I’m talking about alternating dates. You get one, I get one. That sort of thing.”

He appeared to consider that. “I get to go first.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s traditional to take a woman to dinner before having hot, steamy sex with her.”

Elise laughed. “That’s so last century.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a last-century kind of guy.”

“Okay, I’ll concede that point. On my dates, however, the food has to take a back seat. No cooking for me, or expecting me to cook for you.”

“Why not?”

“Too romantic. If I let you cook for me, next thing I know, you’ll have white tablecloths and a Hungarian violinist here on one of our sex dates.”

He put his hands in his pockets and rested his shoulder against the wall. “So what happens on one of your uh, sex dates?”