Fiancé at Her Fingertips (28 page)

Logan supposed that most men, given the unusual circumstances under which this incredible woman had come into his life, would be spooked, even panicked by the discovery. Logan felt only profound gratitude and a deep and wondrous feeling of humility.

He sifted through the rest of the box contents and came to a sheet titled “The Girlfriend at a Glance Profile Sheet.” Logan pored over it as if it were the most important brief in the most important case of his career.

Logan finished reading and was overcome. He took a deep, steadying breath and filled his constricted lungs. Something else was in the box. Pictures, he discovered. Photographs of Debra. He picked up a five-by-seven photograph and stared at it. Devoted Debra wore a long, form-fitting, sleeveless black dress. The highlights in her hair were vivid, but it was the fire in her eyes that held his attention. He shook his head. It defied logic. Went against every evidentiary rule he lived by. Every sound argument he could make in opposition. It was crazy, but he felt as if he had seen Debra just this way, looking up at him with that same hot, steady regard, the
intensity of her gaze burning a hole straight through to his heart.

Logan sat in stunned silence. Never had a woman opened up to him as completely, as fully, as this woman had. He couldn’t believe it. Yet somehow, he did. Somehow, she filled him up. Completely. Made him whole. Left him wanting for nothing except her in his life. Always and forever.

How it had happened, he couldn’t say. Yet somehow, some way, without a shred of evidence to the affirmative, regardless of how shaky the logical argument and with witnesses to the contrary, Debra Daniels had put forth a compelling case for the existence of true love—love that lasts a lifetime.

And the verdict was in. She’d made this lawyer believe in forever.

He jumped up.
Hell’s bells!
The other half of his whole was cooling her heels in county lockup!

Debra stood in the holding cell and watched a woman in her fifties play This Little Piggy with her dirty toes. Across from her a slimmer version of Elvira, the vamp of the macabre (and an occasional beer commercial at Halloween) gave Debra the evil eye. If this episode ran true to form, soon one of the women would approach her and say,
What are you in for, sweet
cakes?

Debra grabbed the bars and put her forehead against the cold, hard steel and wondered how long it would take her father to round up an attorney to get her out of here. Maybe she should have called Suzi’s cousin Sherman, the correspondence-course counselor.

When Debra had left her parents’ home the afternoon before, a crazy idea began to formulate in a brain already suffering overload from the events of the last several weeks. The more she’d driven around in her dirty red car, the more determined she was to follow through on the harebrained hunch that had no scientific or factual basis as a solution for the unexplainable Fiancé at Your Fingertips phenomenon.

But, she’d reasoned, since it
had
all started with that infamous box of paraphernalia, was it not, therefore, reasonable to assume that duplicating the original conditions might alter the status quo and, perhaps, reverse the effects that shredding Lawyer Logan’s image had set in motion?

So how come she was standing in a filthy, stinking jail cell with half a dozen other inmates and afraid to sit down, much less make eye contact with her fellow detainees?

She sighed. She’d known she was taking a huge risk going to his apartment after the restraining order was filed, but once she’d decided on a course of action, nothing could deter her. Not even threat of imprisonment. But having that eighty-year-old doorman, Eddie, pull his pepper spray and yell, “Spread ’em,” was not what she’d bargained for.

Nor were the accommodations here at Hotel Sangamon. She put a hand to her hair and scratched. Maybe it was time for her to admit she needed professional help. Funny, she felt perfectly sane. Most of the time, anyway. Of course, maybe all crazy people thought they were sane.

“Well, what have we got here, ladies?” Elvira approached Debra, one black-fingernail-polished hand reaching for a lock of Debra’s hair. “Come to slum it, did you, Blondie? Hey, look, everybody, it’s the Martha Stewart of Sangamon County!”

The other cell mates laughed. Debra shrugged off the dark-haired woman’s hand but didn’t back away. A second prisoner took a position behind Debra, who was starting to feel like the innards of a not-so-appealing sandwich.

“Hey, Your Majesty, cat got your tongue?” a stocky black woman with bleached blond hair and dark roots asked. “You too good to talk to the likes of us?”

“Hey, ladies, we got freakin’ Martha Stewart here,” Elvira announced again. “What’s cookin’, Martha?” she asked with a dry smoker’s laugh.

“Yeah, Marty, what got you thrown in here? Did you poison someone with your crème brûlée? Did your cherries jubilee cause a four-alarm fire?” More laughter filled the cell. “Come
on, Blondie. Tell us. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” A heavy hand settled on Debra’s shoulder.

Debra turned to face the much shorter peroxide blonde. “I ripped a man to pieces with my bare hands,” she said. “I literally tore him up.”

Her two inquisitors paused and looked at each other.

“Yeah, right,” Black Roots responded, but dropped her hand from Debra’s shoulder. “A prissy thing like you?”

Debra nodded. “He was my true love,” she said. “My first and only love.”

An even dozen eyes settled on her.

“So, what happened?” another inmate, this time a red-haired, stick-thin woman with freckles, asked. “Did you kill him?”

Debra shook her head. “No, but he’s lost to me. You see, he doesn’t remember me.”

Elvira gasped. “Amnesia?”

Debra shook her head. “I don’t think so, but the end result is the same.”

“You said something about ripping him to pieces. What was that all about?”

“I ripped his picture up.”

“You were thrown in jail for ripping up a picture?” Black Roots was incredulous. “What did they charge you with? Littering?” She hacked out another brittle laugh.

“Violating a restraining order, or what ever they call it now.”

“Who would file a restraining order against Martha Stewart?” Elvira asked.

“Anyone who knows her,” one of the other women cracked, and the inmates roared.

“The man I love filed the restraining order against me,” Debra said, still finding it hard to believe that Logan would do such a thing.

“I thought you said he forgot who you were,” Black Roots said.

Debra nodded. “That’s why he filed the restraining order.”

“But you said he didn’t have amnesia,” reminded the freckled inmate. “How did he forget who you were?”

Debra shook her head. “You’re never going to believe me, ladies,” she told the women. “I lived it and I still don’t believe it.”

“Try us,” Black Roots said.

“I warn you, it’s hard to swallow.”

“In my line of work, I’m used to that,” Elvira said with a grin.

“It’s a long, involved story,” Debra warned.

The lady Debra had seen earlier playing This Little Piggy got up and walked over. “We got nothing but time, Blondie,” she said. “Right, gals?”

They all nodded in agreement. Debra took a seat on the long wooden bench running down the center of the cell.

“Well, you see, ladies, it all started in this novelty shop. I’d just been through
the
worst date ever with Howard the Librarian….”

A loud click, followed by the squealing groan of a heavy door, preceded the appearance of a uniformed female deputy. “Daniels. Debra Josephine Daniels,” the officer yelled.

“Josephine?”

Debra ignored the guffaws of her cell mates. “That’s me,” she said, and got to her feet.

“One moment,” the guard said. A buzzer sounded. The latch clicked and the female officer opened the door. A tall figure emerged from the darkened corridor.

“Debra?”

Debra didn’t move. Couldn’t move. She remained rooted to her spot near the bench, her cell mates clustered about her.

Throughout those days when Logan Alexander had been an unwelcome intrusion in her life, she had never wanted to see him anywhere or anytime less than she wanted to see him here. Now.

“Debra?”

“What are you doing here?” she managed.

“Your father said you needed a good attorney,” he answered, his eyes as blue as she remembered.

“And he sent
you
?” Black Roots, whom Debra now knew as Angel, stood up beside her. “Too bad Johnnie Cochran went to that big courtroom in the sky. Now, Johnnie, he rocked.”

Logan put his hands out and gripped the bars. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you how sorry I am that
this happened,” he said. To his credit, he did manage to look like he really meant it. Still, he was the one on the outside of the cage.

“You tell me,” Debra said, a weariness in her voice she didn’t try to hide. “A district court bailiff came to my place of employment, which just happens to be the office of the state attorney general, and served a restraining order against me. I was pepper-sprayed by a doorman old enough to be my grand pappy. I was arrested and had my Miranda rights read to me on a public sidewalk outside one of the nicest high-rises in the city. I have been patted down, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and now have an honest-to-goodness mug shot—which I might add, is the most flattering photo of me ever taken. I’ve been locked up in a cell for hours with cockroaches and assorted other crawlies. And apart from some new friends, there’s not much to recommend the establishment. My family has been humiliated and I may well lose my job. Gee, let’s see how it all balances out.” She put her hands in front of her, palms up, as if they were a scale of justice. “Apology. Strip search. Apology. Criminal record. Apology. Jail time.” She moved her hands up and down. “Hmmmm. No, I don’t think an apology is going to cut it, Lawyer Logan,” she said.

“You tell him, girlfriend,” Freckles, also known as Flavia, stood and encouraged her.

“That’s right, Debra! You go, girl!” Sandra—previously known as Elvira—cheered.

“I’d offer to slap your lawyer fellow alongside the head to knock some sense into him,” Peggy, the piggy lady, offered, “but it looks like someone beat me to the punch.”

For the first time Debra noticed how red his face was, as though he had big patches of sunburn on each cheek.

“I promised your father I would see you got home,” he told Debra.

“Would that be anything like the happy ending you promised her best friend, Suzi?” Angel asked.

“Yeah, what about that? Lying to your gal’s best friend— man, that’s low, even for a lawyer,” Betty added.

“I never lied!” Logan’s voice rose. He looked at the women flanking Debra and put a hand through his hair. “Listen, Debra,” he continued, his voice back to courtroom level. “You’ve got to know I never meant for this to happen. If you don’t believe anything else, believe that.”

“Oh, so that little ol’ restraining order just miraculously got itself written up, signed by a judge, and served on Debra there at her employer’s, huh? Man, you got to do better than that,” Betty said.

“Maybe O. J. did it,” Peggy suggested with a snort.

Logan shook his head, and his grip on the bars tightened.

“I never filed that order. My secretary did it by mistake. I’d forgotten all about it until your friend showed up and ripped me a new…well, you know. And believe me. I’d never lie to Suzi. She scares the hell out of me.”

“I’m liking this Suzi chick more and more,” Betty said.

“But you
drafted
it,” Debra said, trying not to cry. “You were afraid. Of me. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

She stopped. She’d been afraid of Logan, too, she recalled, in the beginning. When he’d Houdini-ed into her life with no plausible explanation for being there and took the family by storm, she’d been fearful too. And hadn’t she fought tooth and nail against Lawyer Logan’s intrusion into her life? It had taken a change in her, a softening of her tough, uncompromising veneer, a new openness, to accept the reality of Logan’s existence and his very real and—as it turned out—welcome presence in her life. It had taken her falling in love with him. But Lawyer Logan hadn’t made that gargantuan leap of faith.

Debra shook her head. There were never any easy answers. But now it appeared there were no answers at all. All she knew was that she had fought the good fight. She just hadn’t won.

“Please just go,” she said. “Please.”

“I’m sorry, Debra,” Logan repeated. “I didn’t mean for—”

She interrupted. “That is the one thing out of this whole, bizarre mess that I do believe: Neither of us meant for this
to happen. But fate or destiny or what ever you want to call it had its own agenda where we were concerned. I don’t know how things came to be between us, Logan, but I like to think I know why. I also realize that until you understand why— and until the how ceases to matter—there is nothing more to be said. When the route on this journey becomes inconsequential, when the ultimate destination becomes the only thing that matters, then and only then will you realize how wondrously fate has dealt with you.” Debra faltered, puzzled at how such eloquence could have sprung from her lips.

“I understand,” Logan said, a huskiness in his voice that wasn’t there earlier. Sniffles and quiet sobs could be heard from inside the cell.

Logan stepped closer to the bars, an intensity about him that prompted Debra to take a step forward too, her new band of sisters in lockstep formation with her.

“You’re not listening, Debra,” Logan told her. “I said, I understand.”

“You do?” she said.

He nodded. “But I’m afraid you don’t.”

Debra watched a smile begin to form at the corner of his mouth as he reached inside his suit coat.

“I’d like to show you something,” he said.

The group of women took a collective step forward.

“I hope that ain’t cab fare you’re pulling out of that there pocket, Mr. Lawyer Man,” an inmate named Angel said.

Logan’s smile took on the familiar crooked quality Debra had grown to love, and she pinched her arm to keep from throwing herself at the bars between them.

“I thought you might be interested in taking a glance at the woman who made me believe in magic again,” Logan said, and he passed the object through the gray bars.

Debra looked down at the photograph in her hand and saw her very own, very nonphotogenic face staring back at her. Tears filled her eyes and began to plop onto the picture.

“That picture doesn’t do her justice,” Logan added, and to Debra and her Sangamon County sisterhood’s shock, the
drop-dead-gorgeous attorney dropped to one knee on the dirty floor in his Armani suit and pulled out a little square box.

A chorus of gasps and sighs resounded inside the cell.

Through tear-blurred eyes, Debra looked on as Lawyer Logan opened the box and passed it through the bars.

“Miss Daniels,” he said, “would you do me, Lawyer Logan, the honor of being my Devoted Debra for as long as we both shall live?”

Debra stared in stunned surprise at the shiny rock in the velvet-lined box.

“Well?” Angel said. “What about it, Devoted Debra? What do you say?’ Cause I’m thinking a Lawyer Logan in the hand beats two Johnnie Cochrans in the bush anyday.”

Debra stretched out her fingertips and took her fiancé’s hand, and the Sangamon sisterhood applauded.