Beauty vs. the Beast Read online

  “You’ll handle it,” Adam said in his quiet, matter-of-fact way. There was something about the solidness of her senior partner’s infrequent but well-timed assurances that always filled Kay with confidence. She found some new starch for her spine as she sent him a small smile.

  “Just watch out for Croghan,” Marc cautioned.

  “I’ll try to deflect any legal darts he throws my way.”

  “Be careful he doesn’t do to you what he did to my friend and wait until your back is turned before throwing them.”

  Kay nodded, a small frown forming between her eyebrows as an unbidden and unsavory image flashed into her mind. She could clearly see her back outlined with several circles of chalk marks, the bull’s-eye right between her shoulder blades.

  * * *

  “I’M NOT RELOCATING with you, Dr. Steele,” Tim Haley said in a voice cracking with nervous defiance. “I’m going to stay with Dr. Payton.”

  Surprised, Damian turned toward his receptionist. Tim Haley stood behind his desk, his bespectacled eyes downcast, his freckles suddenly darker against his naturally pale skin, his tall, thin frame visibly quivering like that of a newborn colt.

  Damian rested the box of patient files he had just carried out of his office on the edge of the receptionist’s desk and faced him. This was very atypical behavior for the shy, willing young man, who always strove so diligently to please. Very atypical.

  “Tim, we’ve been together almost six years. I thought we were a good team. What’s wrong?”

  Tim’s eyes rose briefly to Damian’s. The effort to maintain his confrontational pose had set even his normally neat shock of copper hair to shivering on his scalp.

  “You know what’s wrong,” he said, his voice cracking anew.

  Damian hadn’t known, but he was beginning to get a glimmer. “Tim, it’s not what you think. What you overheard—”

  Tim’s eyes dropped to his desk as he quickly interrupted. “Dr. Payton told me everything. So, it’s no use, you see.”

  Yes, Damian could see. Nothing he could say now would matter to the man. Only thing he could do was to try to leave on as friendly a note as Tim would allow. He extended his hand.

  “I’m going to miss you, Tim. Best of luck in everything.”

  Tim stared at Damian’s extended hand, biting his thin lips, quivering again with the conflict of his emotions. As the seconds ticked by and Tim didn’t take the proffered hand, Damian realized that Tim would not be able to engage in even this one, last, small gesture of friendship. It would have required that the receptionist leap across the professional and personal chasm that he had so recently and painstakingly dug between them.

  Damian dropped his hand and exhaled an internal sigh as he picked up his last box of patient files. He consoled himself with the fact that it could be worse. This last day in his office could have spelled far more serious confrontational disasters.

  As he turned to leave, he saw that he had clearly started to count his blessings too soon. Dr. Priscilla Payton stood in the doorway.

  He stiffened as he stepped aside to let her pass. “Dr. Payton,” he said in as formally polite a tone as he could muster.

  Priscilla Payton’s dark cap of short, straight, black hair seemed to rise on her head as though electrically charged. She stared at Damian with pupils so dark and enlarged, they looked like aimed bullets.

  “Oh, right, it’s Dr. Payton now.”

  Damian took a slow, deep breath. “I don’t mean to make this difficult for either of us. I thought you weren’t going to be in this morning. If I had known you’d be here, I would have cleaned out my office another time.”

  Her eyes flashed as she spat out the word. “Coward!”

  This was not a conversation Damian had any intention of prolonging. “I have to take these files to my car, and I’m due for an important appointment. So, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I won’t excuse you,” Priscilla Payton barked. She not only didn’t move from her position in the doorway, she spread her feet to block it further so Damian couldn’t get past.

  “You want to know why I’m here this morning?” she said. “I’m here because I have an appointment with Bette Boson.”

  Damian didn’t like the sound of this. “Ms. Boson is my patient. How can you have an appointment with her?”

  “Because she’s not your patient anymore. She was waiting in reception that day when we had our little discussion, remember? She heard it all, every word. You think she’ll ever trust you again after what you did to me? You think she’ll ever even want to see you again?”

  Damian remembered how Bette had nearly run out of the reception area that dreadful day. Maybe he really shouldn’t be surprised that she had decided not to continue therapy with him. Particularly since Priscilla had obviously talked to Bette before he could, just as she had talked to Tim Haley.

  No use pointing out the total lack of ethics such behavior displayed. Priscilla was, obviously, in no mood to hear it.

  “I want her videotapes, Damian.”

  “Fine,” he answered. “I’ll pack them up and drop them off here on my way to the lake on Sunday.”

  “Her videotapes aren’t still in your office?”

  “I already moved all the videotapes to my home office. Now, if you’ll stop blocking the doorway, I’ll be on my way.”

  Priscilla didn’t budge. Her hands set on her hips. “I saw Mrs. Nye on the news last night. I hope her attorney creams you in court.”

  Damian was getting very weary of this vindictive trip Priscilla was on. Very weary. “I expected you to be a little more professional about our differences, Dr. Payton.”

  “Me a little more professional? Ha! Look who’s talking.”

  Enough was enough. Damian’s tone descended into an icy hush of warning. “This isn’t getting either of us anywhere, Doctor. Move aside.”

  Her voice rose, even more belligerent and taunting. “What’s the matter? Can’t face a fight, Damian?”

  Damian’s jaw clenched. “You know better. If you don’t stop blocking the doorway, Dr. Payton, I will physically move you out of the way. You make the choice. You have ten seconds.”

  Damian watched Priscilla’s expression change from one of dare to one of growing disquiet as she read the intent in his eyes. He was not bluffing and she knew it. She scooted nervously out of the way.

  “You always resort to violence, don’t you, Damian? Don’t you?”

  Damian didn’t waste his time with a retort, nor a backward glance in her direction. He charged through the cleared pathway. He took the hallway in massive strides, shouldered his way through the outer doorway to the parking lot and made a beeline for his forest-green ‘61 Jaguar coupe, keeping cool in its private parking space beneath the shade of a thickly branched giant madrona tree.

  This office complex had been his professional home since he had been lucky enough to find it tucked into a residential section along Lake Union seven years before. It wouldn’t be easy to find another that fit his needs so well.

  Still, he was going to have to try.

  Maybe it was good that this change was being foisted on him. Maybe he’d become too complacent. Maybe he needed a little shaking up.

  Well, need it or not, he was certainly getting it. And to think it was only a year ago that he’d refused to be featured in the Seattle Times supplement as a prime example of the ruggedly individual and intellectual Pacific Northwest bachelor.

  Ruggedly individual? Intellectual? What a joke. It seemed as if lately, all he’d been doing was marching straight into the sea of professional and personal suicide like some brainless lemming. What else could possibly go wrong?

  Damian dug into his pants pocket for his key as he approached his car. He opened the driver’s side and carefully set the last box of patient records in the back seat. As he straightened up, he noticed a blue envelope beneath the windshield wiper.

  He snatched it, expecting it to be yet another announcement for yet another new es
presso shop. No wonder everyone was sleepless in Seattle. He was just about to throw the blue envelope into a nearby waste bin, when his eyes caught sight of the business card taped to its front.

  His business card.

  His eyebrows met in a dark frown. This was no casual advertisement. This was from someone who knew him. Damian slit open the sealed envelope and slipped out the single sheet of pale blue paper from inside.

  The words on the page were large, blunt and perfectly even. They looked as if they had been formed by someone passing a thick black felt-tip pen over a stencil. He sensed a careful, composed and calm hand had modeled them. The meaning in the words themselves, however, gave him a sense of something quite different.

  You are going to pay. I’m going to make sure of it.

  Chapter Three

  “Dr. Steele, is something wrong?” Kay asked. Over the last week of working closely together, she couldn’t remember ever seeing Damian with a frown. “Are you worried about how things will go this morning?”

  He was sitting next to her at the defense table in the courtroom, smelling like a hint of spicy after-shave on clean-shaven skin, looking far too good in a single-breasted, Italian cut navy suit, a French-cuffed white shirt and a tie with a subtle geometric pattern. His quick smile showed bright against his summer tan.

  “I’m not worried about the suit. I have a good lawyer.”

  The compliment slipped beneath Kay’s careful professional guard. She let out a deep, internal sigh. If he had told her she was attractive, she could have ignored it. But this compliment to her competence managed to find her Achilles’ heel.

  Maybe it was because so few men had ever really made the effort to see past her outward packaging, and those few who did had not been that complimentary about what they found.

  Her eyebrows dived together in a frown. She reminded herself for the millionth time that it did not matter that so many men ended up uncomfortable with her. All that mattered was that she was comfortable with herself.

  She was beginning to feel comfortable with this client of hers, too. All week long as they prepared for the preliminary hearing, he had treated her with charming deference and respect, never once getting out of line. That first day in her office, he had said he could control his impulses, and he had certainly proved it this week.

  Unless he no longer had those impulses. Well, he wouldn’t be the first to be turned off by her once he got to know her.

  Now, why did that thought suddenly depress her? Theirs could only be a professional relationship. If he was turned off by her, so much the better.

  “I do have a request, however,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve suffered all week with this Dr. Steele label. Go back to calling me Damian. Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean I’m getting carried away by your ability and beauty, or that you’ll soon be having to fight me off. I promise that as difficult as it is, I’ll do my best to be a gentleman.”

  His smile was dazzling and dynamite. Kay could feel it lighting a fuse at the base of her spine. And she could also feel his attraction for her registering happily—very happily—in every female cell in her body.

  She let out another internal sigh. Why did it feel so good to know he was still attracted to her? Damn. This was totally illogical.

  She took a deep breath and tried to keep her tone as even and professional as possible as she looked at his ruggedly handsome face.

  “Sure, Damian. Not a problem.”

  But, once again, the sound of his first name passing her lips set off a warm hum inside her mouth that made her self-conscious. She dropped her eyes to the papers on the table in front of her.

  Damian smiled as Kay turned away. Always the careful lawyer. She assiduously kept her position on the professional side of the line.

  If Damian hadn’t been trained to observe and interpret unconscious movements so well, he never would have noted her tugging at her right earlobe whenever he prolonged eye contact, or the way she crossed her legs three different times in succession whenever they sat in proximity to each other.

  He knew he disturbed her on a subconscious level and the knowledge excited him. Still, he was content to leave it alone.

  No, content was the wrong word. Reconciled was definitely a more appropriate choice. If he had needed an additional reminder as to why professional relationships had to remain professional, he’d gotten just that on Wednesday in that final confrontation with Dr. Priscilla Payton.

  What a mess. Still, as angry as Priscilla was with him, he had a hard time believing she was behind that note he’d found on his car and the second note he’d found in the mail this morning. Surely a psychologist couldn’t be that petty and unstable? But if Priscilla wasn’t behind it, who was? And why?

  “You do seem to be concerned about something,” Kay said as her eyes swept his face.

  Damian deliberately unfurrowed his forehead and unclenched his jaw. He had no intention of burdening Kay with this. Still, he would have to watch his every facial expression around his attorney. She didn’t miss much.

  “I’m not fond of waiting,” he said to mislead her.

  She nodded, accepting his evasion. She’d been perusing the preliminary motion she’d forwarded to the judge earlier that week. She went back to her reading.

  She was sitting to his right, looking cool and collected in a blue-mint linen suit. He was close enough to feel her warmth and inhale the light, sweet scent of her skin and hair. She was very alluring. A lot of men must make a play for her. Still, he doubted she had very satisfying or enduring love affairs.

  If he had to guess, he’d say that the kind of men who pursued her soft and beckoning femininity soon found themselves unexpectedly coming face-to-face with the strong woman beneath. He also guessed it wouldn’t be a happy surprise.

  There was just something about a man’s short, stubby Y chromosome that had a habit of short-circuiting his brain cells every time he found himself in the presence of such a delectable female. Made it hard for a male to think at all, much less think straight about the fact that the female could be appreciated in ways other than the physical.

  Damian found himself staring at the honey-gold strands at the back of her slim white neck. Images of those glistening strands falling long and loose and free across bare, milk-white shoulders stole into his mind. She was so deliciously feminine, so tantalizingly close. He could feel his circuits overloading.

  Damn that stubby Y chromosome. He rubbed his suddenly moist palms across his slacks beneath the table. He hoped they’d be able to put this legal suit to bed in the next few minutes.

  To bed. Unfortunate phraseology. Freud would have been delighted with the slip and the immediate x-rated images it brought to mind.

  Damian tore his eyes from Kay and let them sweep over the large lady clerk and thin lady court reporter, both of whom waited at their positions. Behind the court reporter stood a burly biceped bailiff with a stiff black smudge of a mustache and a grim look. The clerk, court reporter and the bailiff were the only others present in the courtroom.

  Damian glanced at his watch, no longer needing to feign impatience. “It’s nine twenty-five. Any idea why Mrs. Nye and her attorney aren’t here yet?”

  “They might be caught in traffic.”

  Damian’s eyebrows rose in amusement. “Traffic? May I remind you, it’s a sunny, seventy-degree Friday morning in June in Seattle. The only traffic to speak of is heading out to the recreational areas.”

  She looked up and flashed him a small rueful smile. “You’re right, of course. I spoke without thinking.”

  Damian liked the way she easily admitted her mistakes, almost as much as he liked her sunny, infrequent smiles. He found himself fascinated by these glimpses of genuine warmth beneath her cool facade. He wondered what she would be like if she ever stepped totally out of her legal persona.

  “Do you wish you were heading out to one of those recreational areas for a head start on the weekend, too?” he asked. />
  She quickly extinguished the smile, reestablishing her emotional distance and refocusing her eyes on her reading. “Not particularly.”

  “To you, work is fun, isn’t it?”

  She looked up at him in surprise. “I didn’t think you’d...”

  Her voice trailed off uncertainly. It wasn’t difficult for him to guess what she had left unsaid. “Understand?”

  “Yes, that’s what I was going to say.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “Because, frankly, I didn’t think a psychologist could ever view work as fun.”

  “I often view my work as fun, Kay. Exploring the mind is an exciting adventure. And helping people to get in touch with their happier feelings is the greatest high I know.”

  Her eyes shone as she looked off into a mental distance. “I know that high. Sometimes when I’m addressing a jury, and I know the logic of my argument is indisputable, and I can see the understanding dawning on their faces, it’s like—it’s like my birthday and Christmas and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.”

  “Looking for that high in your work is what makes you good at it.”

  Her returning smile was small but possessed genuine warmth. Then she began to look uncomfortable at the prolonged eye contact and tugged at her right earlobe. Damn, it was an adorable earlobe and she looked adorable tugging at it.

  “Is your first name really Kay, or does the K.O. stand for something else?”

  “It stands for something else.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, but I limit the number of people who know that secret to my three closest friends—all of whom have given me their solemn vow of silence in a blood pact.”

  He grinned. “It’s that bad, huh?”

  She chuckled. “Worse.”

  “You were named after a mad aunt?”

  Her chuckle deepened. “Good guess. Actually, I was named by a mad aunt.”

  “I have to hear this story.”