“Way-ell, that ain’t what it says to me. Get rid of it. Get me some nice antique thing that don’t look like nuthin’ but a doorknocker, you hear?”

“Okay,” Dickie, or Richard, said with a long-suffering sigh.

“And make us some coffee. You like regular or dee-caf.” She turned an assessing gaze on Carter, who was getting pretty cold out there on the stoop, while this skinny little woman in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a panther printed on it didn’t seem to notice.

“Regular, but I don’t-” He was leaving, was what he’d decided, just as soon as he got his overcoat back.

The gaze turned approving. “I’ll be danged. He likes regular. Y’all hear that, Dickie? Brew us up a pot of real strong stuff.” She turned to Carter, and her expression turned wistful. “Y’all don’t happen to like it percolated, do you? Kindly muddy-like?”

“No, but you have what you like, because I-”

“He don’t,” Maybelle told Dickie. “So drip it. Nobody’s perfect,” she added before she marched Carter back across the foyer. He had his mouth open to ask for his coat when she said, “That’s not all you come here for, was it? To yell at me about the doorknocker?”

Instead of asking for his coat, he looked at her, looked into big blue eyes that offered to listen to whatever he had to say. “No,” he admitted. “The doorknocker thing was a sidebar.”

“Then sit down,” she said, marching toward the chair behind the desk that looked like the fossilized nest of some long-gone pterodactyl.

“Now that we’ve done the doorknob,” she said, “tell me what y’all think of this here desk. Mebbe I’d better take a minute to work on my own image.”

She’d done everything Maybelle had told her to do and still he’d taken somebody else out to lunch. It wasn’t Phoebe Angell, either. At least Phoebe was a known quantity.

She’d refused Phoebe’s halfhearted invitation to have lunch. The woman’s expression had said, “I’d rather be a waitress on roller skates than have lunch with you.” Instead, she went back to the hotel, netted a table for one in the restaurant, ordered a salad and darted up to the suite. She needed to take a look at herself in the full-length mirror, figure out what she might have done wrong.

She flung open the door of the room, and the first thing she saw was the tiny Christmas tree-wearing the ornament Carter had bought at Bloomingdale’s their first night here.

The nonverbal message in that single ornament stunned her. She was too verbal to know what it meant, but she was certain it was meant to tell her something. “Glad you bought the mistletoe”-something like that. She became aware of the heavy weight that had settled in the lower half of her body, realizing it was nothing new, it was there every second she was with Carter, but it seemed to be getting heavier, harder to ignore.

While she gazed at the ornament, a certainty settled in her bones. Tonight or never.

Carter came back to Phoebe’s conference room looking like raw skin. Shaken and vulnerable, those were the words that came to Mallory’s mind. Also, he was late.

“Are you all right?” she said, then realized she’d looked at her watch. Scolding him about his lateness was hardly the path to seduction.

“Is anyone all right after a root canal?” he growled.

“Oh, sorry,” she said lamely. He hadn’t complained of a toothache. She hadn’t noticed any swelling. He’d had crunchy bacon with his breakfast. It must have come on quite suddenly.

Or he was lying.

Apparently he wasn’t feeling too bad, because he wound up the session with McGregor Ross at five-thirty promptly, and then said he had to leave.

At that point, she hoped it was a dentist he was running off to. Her resolve flagged as she stomped her way through a light snow to the hotel, her new snow boots the only bright spot in her cloudy sky. How could she ever have thought of wearing plastic thingies over her Soft ‘N’ Comfys?

With a desolate hour to spare before meeting Maybelle at Bergdorf’s, she decided to check her e-mail.

It surprised her so much to see Macon’s address in the Sender column that she ignored all her business messages and opened his. It was perfunctory as usual, but the message was not at all usual.

“mallory do you think anybody brought up like we were can relax enough to fall in love macon”

Macon? Asking about love? Was the earth still turning? Had the moon escaped?

She wrote back, “I don’t know, but I think we have to give it a try to find out.” Her fingers slowed on the keyboard, then she typed rapidly, “What exactly is it that you’re doing in Pennsylvania?”

She got up from the computer. The suite seemed empty without Carter. She felt as if her life had been empty without Carter, would continue to be empty without him. That was pretty good advice she’d given Macon, now that she thought about it. She’d never know until she gave it a try.

“Tonight we go for underwear,” she informed Maybelle when they met in Bergdorf’s first floor Fine Jewelry. She looked her imagemaker straight in the eye.

“Oh, hon, this is startin’ to sound good,” Maybelle crooned. “I was thinkin’ fingernails with stars on ‘em tonight and save the underwear for the weekend, but if you’re ready, let’s go for it. Anything intrestin’ happen today?”

They started up the escalator toward Lingerie. “Carter’s out with somebody,” Mallory said, feeling despondent. “Not Phoebe, and he didn’t mention Athena or Brie, so this one’s an entirely new challenge.” She could bet her name began with a C, unless the Cs were all unavailable. “He might even have taken her out to lunch,” she told Maybelle. “He said he’d had a root canal. He might have been lying, but he did look awful when he came back.”

Maybelle let out a bark of laughter. “I consulted with a man today who acted like tawkin’ to me was worse than havin’ a root canal,” she said, shaking her head.

“Men,” Mallory said. “They just hate opening up, don’t they?”

“Yep, jes’ like oysters,” Maybelle said. Her eyes gleamed with victory. “I knew jes’ by lookin’ at this one that pryin’ wouldn’t do no good. I had to smash his shell with a sledge hammer. I made him come back a second time in the same day. That’s a record.”

Mallory felt a certain sympathy for the guy. “What was his problem, since we’re not mentioning names?” she asked.

“Oh, one of the old standards,” Maybelle said offhandedly. “He’s always had a way with the ladies, but now he wants ‘em to look at him in a different way. If you ask me, he’s in love with one gal and don’t know it yet, and even if he did know it, he wouldn’t have no idea how to tell her.”

Turned around backward, that could describe me. But they’d arrived in lingerie, and Maybelle vanished into the foam of silk and nylon, pastels, blacks and leopard prints. While she circled, grabbing things up, chatting with yet another obsequious salesperson, Mallory stood transfixed, staring at a mannequin in a hot-pink gown and robe. The robe was kimono-style with wide, flowing sleeves and a sash. It was short, and the gown was shorter, lace-trimmed, a simple shift with spaghetti straps.

Maybelle zoomed by toward a dressing room. “I want this,” Mallory said.

Maybelle screeched to a halt. “That’s real purty.” She said to the salesperson. “Get her one to try on, will you, hon?”

In the dressing room Mallory reached first for the hot pink ensemble. She had a feeling about it, pure intuition, and the feeling intensified when she stepped into the tiny gown. She was naked beneath it, and it brushed her body like a caress. She wriggled with pleasure. The familiar ache of wanting deepened until she thought her knees might buckle under her. If Carter had been in the dressing room with her-She’d better try the robe. She put it on, wrapped it across her breasts, tied it, then watched it begin to part in the front, silk sliding against silk. For a moment she leaned against the dressing room wall.