Chapter 2

 

Half a dozen disjointed thoughts tumbled through her mind in the next few seconds.

He can't be!

And even if he is, why would he want someone so much older than himself?

He must be absolutely crazy to risk his political career like this.!

And even crazier to be so cavalier about the possibility of AIDS.

No wonder he wanted to speak to me in private.

And then, finally, from the deepest, most feminine recesses of her soul came the plaintive lament, What a waste.

Prodded by her silence, Matt looked up from his studied contemplation of the crease in his slacks. "I take it you think seventy is too old," he said when she just sat there with her pen poised above the yellow pad, staring at him with an odd expression on her face.

Susannah shook her head, wondering how on earth she could have misread him so completely. It wasn't as if he hadn't given her plenty of clues, she realized, both subtle and otherwise. Everything he'd said about an interest in the ballet and the opera being of primary importance...about roses and refinement...about the need for complete discretion. And the way he'd tried to avoid her gaze. It was all so clear. Now.

"Seventy isn't too old?"

"No, it's, ah..." She cleared her throat. "It's..."

"It's what?" he demanded, vaguely irritated by the way she just sat there, staring at him as if he'd suddenly grown a second head. "What's the matter?"

"Seventy's fine," she managed in a strangled voice. "If that's what you want, it's fine."

Matt snorted inelegantly. "Right," he said, pinning her with the look he used on uncooperative witnesses. "Now try the truth. What's the matter?"

She opened her mouth to answer him but nothing came out. What could she say? His sexual preferences were really none of her business. Except that it meant she needed to tell him The Personal Touch didn't handle same-sex pairings. Only how? In her nearly three years running a dating service, it had never come up before. Not once. She closed her mouth without saying a word.

"Susannah?"

"I just can't believe you're gay," she blurted, and then blushed beet-red.

Matt sat bolt upright on the love seat. "What!"

"I mean I can believe it, of course," she said, trying to cover the awkwardness of the moment with words, "because there you are, big as life. It's just that, when you first came in here, I didn't even begin to imagine you were." Was it politically correct to say that? "Not that there's any need to imagine it because lots of people are," she added, in case it wasn't. "Gay, that is. It's not as if it's unusual or anything. It's just that I assumed... I mean, you're just so hand—" No, that was definitely an unenlightened thing to say! And stupid, too. Looks had nothing to do with it. "You're in the newspapers so often and I've never heard any rumors or anything. And the way you looked at me... I mean," she corrected herself, "the way I thought you looked at me." She lifted her shoulders in a self-deprecating little shrug and tried to smile. The attempt was more than a little sheepish. "I didn't think you were, is all. I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you." And myself, she thought, cringing inwardly at the memory of the way she'd... well, ogled him when he obviously didn't want to be ogled. By a woman, anyway.

"Gay?" he said, just to be sure.

Susannah nodded.

Matt didn't know whether to be angry or insulted or...what. His first instinct was to leap across the desk and prove her wrong in some irrefutable and satisfying physical way. But Matt rarely went with his first instincts. His analytical lawyer's mind was too disciplined for that. Still, the urge to commit some overwhelmingly macho act in his own defense was undeniably there.

No one had ever questioned his sexual orientation before. He was utterly amazed that anyone would question it at all, ever. Especially a woman for whom he'd developed a rapidly escalating case of the hots from practically the moment he'd laid eyes on her. It was almost funny. Almost.

He stared at her for a moment, his expression revealing none of what he was feeling, neither the inchoate sense of masculine outrage nor the nascent urge to laugh. He relaxed against the back of the love seat, deliberately making his body language less threatening and accusatory. Any defense lawyer who'd ever faced him in a courtroom would have shuddered and said he was getting ready to rip a witness apart in cross-examination. "What led you to believe I'm gay?" he asked blandly.

"Well, actually, I didn't at first," Susannah admitted, sure he must already know that much. "Not until you said you didn't care if he was seventy, as long as he was a young seventy. I'm embarrassed to admit it but I actually thought you were talking about a woman up until that point." Her eyes meet his, wide and guileless.

Matt felt his lips twitch with the need to smile. He ruthlessly quelled the need and continued to gaze at her, silently calling forth more information.

"I didn't realize you were describing your ideal man." Her tone was faintly accusing, as if she suspected him of having misled her on purpose.

With a strangled sound, somewhere between a groan and a snort of smothered laughter, Matt's sense of outraged masculinity finally succumbed to the absurdity of the situation. The really funny part, he thought, was that she was absolutely right. He had been describing the ideal man.

"For my mother," he said, still struggling to hide his smile.

The woman who had innocently impugned his manhood stared at him as if he'd gone crazy. "Your mother?"

"I was describing a man for my mother."

She stared at him blankly, unable to put what he'd just said together with what had gone before.

"To date my mother," Matt clarified, his piercing blue eyes dancing with barely suppressed merriment. "She's a widow."

"To date your..." Comprehension dawned. "Oh, good Lord." The rosy color in her cheeks, which had faded somewhat in the last few moments, bloomed into full color again. "Your mother."  She covered her burning cheeks with both hands and stared at him over them. "Oh, good Lord," she said again, unable to think of anything more apropos to the situation.

Matt's hidden smile curved into a full-fledged grin. "Yes, I'd say that just about covers it," he agreed, enjoying her flustered consternation.

Susannah stared back at him for a second longer, taking in his grin and the amusement lurking in his eyes. Her hands dropped back down to the desk. "You're not angry," she said wonderingly, hardly able to believe it. Most heterosexual males of her acquaintance would be furious—or, at least, highly installed by her assumption.

"I'm crushed," he said, clearly not crushed at all. "My ego may never recover from the blow."

Susannah couldn't stop her lips from curving up into a small answering smile. "Somehow I doubt even a Sherman tank could crush your ego," she said, her tone half-admiring. "But I'm really sorry, anyway." And vastly—unaccountably, she told herself—relieved. "I just assumed you were here to find a date for yourself. A quite natural assumption, under the circumstances," she added in her own defense.

"Oh, quite natural," he murmured, still grinning.

"And when you said he, well...." She lifted one hand, palm up. "What can I say?" Her smile widened to match his. "I jumped to an obviously erroneous conclusion."

"You didn't think it was so obvious a minute ago," Matt reminded her, unable to resist the urge to tease her. She blushed so beautifully, the rosy color staining her cheeks and throat before spreading downward under the lacy collar of her blouse. The expression in his eyes heated as he wondered just how far down the color went. Because she'd had the temerity to suspect him of being gay, he let the heat build. And made sure she felt it.

Susannah took a quick little breath. "Yes, well..." She flicked her hand, brushing the remark—and the heat—aside, and picked up her pen. "Shall we start over?" she said briskly, intent on putting the whole embarrassing episode behind her. "The notes I took—" she tapped the pad with the point of her pen "—aren't going to be very helpful the way they are."

* * *

"I've got to warn you, Matt, I've never worked this way before," Susannah said fifteen minutes later, after he'd told her what he felt were all the pertinent facts about his mother. "I've never matched up anyone without meeting both parties face-to-face first. Matchmaking for me has always been much more than a matter of pairing up lists of compatible likes and dislikes," she explained, indicating the notepad in front of her. "I rely on my impressions and intuition about a person, too."

"Intuition?" His smile was gently teasing, full of masculine amusement. "You mean, like, feminine intuition?"

"Gut instinct. Hunch," Susannah said, refusing to rise to the lure. "Whatever you want to call it. The point is, on paper two people can appear to be as compatible as twin peas in a pod and yet have absolutely no chemistry together. And, vice versa," she added, involuntarily thinking of her unwanted reaction to him. "Some of my best matches have been between people who didn't seem to have anything in common at all. But they hit it off instantly."

"I'm sure you'll manage to come up with someone who'll be just fine."

"Even if I do come up with a suitable candidate, I don't see how I'm going to get him together with your mother unless she knows what's going on."

"Don't worry about that part of it," Matt said. "You just find the right guy. Getting them together is my department."

"And you've already got that department organized. Right?"

"Of course." Matt's nod was the epitome of assured self-confidence. "Easiest thing in the world to introduce him to her during my next campaign appearance or at some benefit or other. As long as he's discreet—" and Matt's tone said he'd better be "—she'll never suspect a thing."

"So why haven't you done it before now?"

Matt lifted an eyebrow. "Come to a dating service?"

"Fixed her up. You must know lots of eligible men. Lawyers. Judges. Captains of industry." Her tone was gently mocking. "Pillars of the community. Political bigwigs."

"I've tried." Matt sighed. "Believe me, I've tried. But all the eligible men I know, she knows. And has known for years. Most of them either worked with or were friends of my father's before he died. If she had any interest in any of them, don't you think it would have manifested itself by now?" He shook his head. "I know when I've exhausted my options." He smiled appealingly and spread his hands. "And when it's time to call in the professionals."

"Well, speaking as a professional, I think you should tell your mother what you're up to. It seems... I don't know—" Susannah shrugged "—dishonest to do it behind her back. Especially if she hits it off with whoever. It'd be like starting off a relationship with a lie. Not a good idea," she warned him.

"It's just a tiny little white lie. And it's the only way my mother's going to be open to meeting anyone new."

"But—"

"Like I said, I've already tried fixing her up but she refuses to cooperate. She says she's 'past all that nonsense.' I suspect what she really means is that she wouldn't feel comfortable dating any of my dad's old friends."

"Maybe she's still mourning your father," Susannah suggested gently. "Two years isn't really all that long to grieve."

Matt sighed. "I think a part of her will always grieve for my father but the signs that she's finally gotten over the worst of it are there, believe me. She's begun to take a real interest in life again." In his life, especially, and most especially his recently announced bid for district judge. "She's ready to go on to the next stage, whatever it is." His grin flashed briefly. "God knows, I'm ready for her to go on to the next stage."

"Well, I'll give it my best shot but I can't prom—" The phone rang shrilly, cutting her off in midsentence. She glanced at it, waiting for the light to go on that would tell her it had been picked up by one of the women in the outer office. It rang twice more before she excused herself to Matt and reached for the receiver.

"The Personal Touch," she said pleasantly. "How may I help you?" She listened a moment. "I'm sorry, sir, we don't match people up over the telephone. You'll need to come in for an inter—" A frown drew her brows together as she listened to the caller restate his request. "You've obviously made a mistake," she said, icicles dripping from every word. "We're not that kind of dating service. No," she said firmly, when the caller tried to argue. "I haven't misunderstood anything. You have."

Matt lifted an eyebrow at her as she replaced the receiver.

"Some men seem to think dating service is a euphemism for escort service," she said with a grimace of distaste.

At her words, a light went on in Matt's mind. "Your receptionist," he said, suddenly picturing the sleek, seductive young woman he'd seen in the outer office in a far different setting.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I knew I'd seen her somewhere before, but I couldn't place her until just now. She's been in court more than once." His gaze was steady and speculative. "Are you aware that your receptionist is a prostitute?"

"Ex-prostitute," Susannah corrected him calmly. "She hasn't been out on the streets for almost a year."

The lawyer in him had formed his next question before he even thought about it. "Do you know that for a fact?"

"Yes, I do. Judy's been working for me part-time since she quit the streets. Her parole officer is an old friend of mine," she added, feeling compelled to explain.

"Only part-time?"

"She goes to secretarial school the rest of the time," Susannah said, her voice edging toward cool. "And I resent your implication."

Matt ignored the warning. "If I remember her case rightly," he said, and he remembered just about every case that had ever crossed his desk, "she's got a string of arrests going back, oh, a good seven years, at least. And not just prostitution. She's done time for drug possession and petty theft, too."

"I'm aware of that." Susannah's tone slipped from cool to frosty. "What's your point?"

Matt inclined his head toward the phone. "You don't think she had anything to do with that?"

"No," Susannah said firmly. "I don't."

"Don't you think you should consider the possibility?"

"The Personal Touch has received the occasional call like that practically since the day we opened for business." There was almost as much ice in her tone now as there had been when she was talking to the caller. "Well before Judy started working here. As I said, some men think the terms dating service and escort service are interchangeable." She stood up, deliberately signaling the end of the interview.

Matt remained seated. "Seems to me working part-time for a dating service might be an excellent cover for less savory activities."

Susannah abruptly wondered how she could have ever thought him attractive, or even considered voting for him. The man was obviously a hard-nosed, hardhearted hard-liner without an ounce of compassion or understanding in his whole gorgeous body. "It must be very difficult, going through life burdened with all that suspicion and self-righteousness."

"I'm an attorney with the DA's office," he said easily, refusing to be baited. "It's my job to be suspicious."

"And the smug self-righteousness? Is that part of your job, too?"

Matt found it just a bit harder to reply calmly this time. "I prefer to think of it as common sense," he said, surprised that such a relatively mild jibe had gotten under his skin. He'd been accused of much worse in the course of his career and been able to brush it off with an unconcerned shrug. But this woman seemed to have a real knack for riling him. "Habitual criminals rarely turn into model, law-abiding citizens," he said sharply. "Especially not overnight."

"Judy Sukura is not a criminal, habitual or otherwise," Susannah said heatedly, all trace of coolness disappearing from her voice and manner. "She's a young woman who was given a very raw deal in life. She's been physically and sexually abused, both at home and on the streets, and she's dealt with it the best way she could, doing what she thought she had to in order to survive. And, for your information, Counselor—" the inflection she gave the word made it sound like a particularly virulent disease "—she didn't make some miraculous, overnight change. It's taken months of therapy and hard work and plain, gut-wrenching effort for her to get to where she is today. And it's going to take a lot more of the same before she can completely overcome the abuses of her past, including, I might add, those inflicted by the callous, uncaring maze we call a legal system, which treats women like Judy as if they were dangerous criminals instead of giving them the help and understanding they so desperately need."

She stopped and took a deep breath, forcibly bringing herself under control. "So, you can just take your nasty little suspicions and your self-righteous smugness right on out of here. Now." She gave him a heated glare, full of simmering indignation on behalf of her receptionist. "I don't have the time or the inclination to deal with some tight-ass district attorney with more ambition than compassion."

Five seconds of utter silence greeted her tirade.

"Ex-social worker, right?" Matt asked.

Susannah gaped at him for a moment. "What?"

"That bit about 'the callous, uncaring maze we call a legal system'" he said, a touch of asperity in his tone. He was getting really tired of all the abuse heaped on lawyers lately. And of people who thought anything the government had a hand in was automatically suspect. "Either you used to work within that system and burned out, or you feel you were worked over by it," he said, watching her for a reaction. "I'd go with the first." She didn't strike him as someone who had been through the system herself, although you never knew. There was enough anger there for her to have been a recipient of the government's slow-moving, unsentimental largess. He leveled an uncompromising, implacable look at her over the desk. "State, county or city?"

"County Social Services," she said before she could think not to. There was something about the way he asked that compelled her to answer.

He brushed aside the spurt of satisfaction being right gave him and pushed for more information. "How long?"

"Almost five years. Five frustrating, infuriating years," she added before he could ask. "And, yes, I burned out, as you so eloquently put it." It was still a sore spot with her that she hadn't had whatever it took to hang in there for the long haul. "It finally got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore and I quit," she said baldly, daring him to make something of it.

His lifted eyebrow managed to look mocking. "It?"

"The endless red tape and paperwork, the long hours, the bureaucratic lack of compassion for the very people I was supposed to be helping. I got tired of spinning my wheels and going nowhere."

He gave her a deliberately disparaging look. "And so now you're safely out of it and you think the system and the people in it stink."

"No, not the people," she said indignantly. "Most of the people who work in Social Services are hardworking and well-intentioned—" at least, at first, before the hopelessness of it gets them down "—doing the best they can with what they have to work with. But the system...?" She paused, afraid of offending him, and then decided to just go ahead and say it. He hadn't appeared to worry in the least about offending her. And it was, after all, what she truly believed. "Definitely, yes," she said with an emphatic nod. "I think the system pretty much stinks. It has too many loopholes and lets too many people fall through the cracks. People like Judy. And the homeless. And teenage runaways." Her hands fluttered up into the air as she got into it. "Battered women and children. AIDS patients. Disabled veterans. The impoverished elder—"

"So what are you doing to make it better?" Matt demanded, suddenly fed up with bleeding-heart liberals who whined about the way things were but didn't do a thing to try and make them better.

"What?"

"You stand there," he said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm, "bellyaching about all the ills of the present system. But instead of trying to improve it, you jumped ship. I want to know what you're doing to make things better."

"I was planning on voting for you," Susannah shot back, her tone equally sarcastic. "But now I'm not so sure!"

Her answer surprised them both and they stared at each other for a long moment, shocked at the excess of overheated emotion zinging back and forth between them.

"Good Lord," Susannah said, putting a hand to her throat in a vain effort to calm her runaway pulse. "How'd we get into this? No, never mind." She made a vague brushing-away motion. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

"Good. Because I don't think I know the answer," Matt admitted. "I'm not in the habit of..." He lifted his broad shoulders in a halfhearted shrug, feeling uncomfortably like a tongue-tied schoolboy who'd started a silly argument with the girl sitting next to him just to get her attention—and then didn't know what to do with it when he had it. "I don't usually fly off the handle like that," he finished.

"No. No, me either," Susannah said, instantly and instinctively understanding all that he wasn't saying. "Well, then..." She made a loose fist, bouncing it nervously against the notepad on her desk a couple of times as she searched her mind for something to say. "I guess that concludes our, um, business. I'll call you when I have someone lined up. That is—" she hesitated, recalling the words tight-ass and bellyaching "—if you still want me to?"

For just a second, Matt considered the wisdom of changing his mind. And then, inexplicably, he decided to ignore what was surely his better judgment. "I still want you to," he said with a brief nod.

"Okay, good," she said, too brightly. "That's good. I'll call you when I have someone lined up." She moved around the desk toward the door, unconsciously walking a little faster as he rose from the love seat to follow her. "We can decide what to do about setting up a meeting between them then."

She reached out with her right hand to open the door. He reached out with his left and covered hers on the old-fashioned brass doorknob.

"There's just one more thing," he said softly.

Susannah was afraid she knew exactly what that one thing was. Knew, too, that it was probably in her best interests to avoid it. But she made no move to do so.

"I probably won't have any candidates for you before next week at the earliest," she said, as if he hadn't spoken. As if he wasn't standing there with his hand on hers. As if she wasn't standing there, staring at it, transfixed.

It seemed huge, covering hers completely. His fingers were long and square-tipped, the nails clean and lightly buffed, the wrist thick and substantial beneath the snowy-white cuff of his shirt. Except for the neatly manicured nails, they could have been the hands of a laborer, tanned, strong and capable-looking. Susannah tried to tell herself she wasn't the least bit affected.

"It usually takes at least a week to find a suitable match," she said. "Maybe longer in your case since I—"

His fingers tightened on hers, just slightly, and he lifted her hand from the ornate doorknob.

"—since I haven't meet your mother one-on...ah..." her voice faltered as he pulled her to him "...one..." It died away completely when he cupped her cheeks in his wide palms and turned her face up to his.

Their eyes met for a fleeting second, long enough for her to see the searing heat and purpose in his. Long enough for him to glimpse the answering heat in hers. And then her lashes fluttered down and his lips took hers in a kiss more carnal than any first kiss should be.

His mouth was skillful and insistent against hers, rife with masculine hunger, blatantly masterful, allowing no room for argument or refusal. Susannah offered none, choosing instead to answer fire with fire. Her head fell back under the aggressive onslaught of his lips. Her mouth opened to accept his seeking tongue. Her hands clutched at the lapels of his navy-blue suit to hold him as securely as he was holding her. She stood toe-to-toe with him for hot, endless seconds, giving as good as she got, taking as much as she gave. When he finally lifted his head, he was breathing as heavily as she was.

And trying just as desperately not to show it.

Susannah gulped back a shuddering sigh and loosened her hands on his lapels. "Was there a point to that?" she asked with credible calm, just as if her head wasn't spinning. And her heart wasn't slamming against the inside of her chest. And she couldn't feel the rock-hard erection pressed against her stomach.

Matt let his hands drop from her face and stepped back. "Just in case you had any lingering doubts," he said raggedly, and let himself out of the office before he did something really stupid like tearing her clothes off and taking her down to the floor beneath him.