Free Custody by Nancy Thayer

handsome as well—thought they were above the world. Well, they were above the world. They had more than theydeserved.
    She knew the moment she looked at him that she’d be damned if she’d let him win this case.
    At the same time, with astounding irrationality, she was glad she’d worn her red lace Victoria Secret bra and garter belt.
    They were brilliant adversaries that day. Afterward, like actors after a play, they were both high on performance. The moment Jason was alone with his cell phone, he called to invite Kelly to meet him for a drink.
    Amazed at herself, she accepted.
    “I have to warn you,” Kelly told him that night, “I don’t have time for dating.”
    “You’ll find time for me,” he assured her.
    She had liked his cockiness, but she’d spoken the truth. In addition to her duties at the law firm, which paid her salary—and, unlike Jason, she needed her salary—she did pro bono work, sat on several committees, and was writing an article on improving the court’s assistance to pro se representation in divorce. When she wasn’t working, she had to take her clothes to the dry cleaners, buy her own groceries, clean her own apartment. She didn’t have a housekeeper.
    So she had declined his next few invitations. Jason wasn’t used to rejection. The more Kelly refused him, the more determined he became to win her.
    First, he treated her friends and colleagues to dinners at posh restaurants where he questioned them thoroughly about Kelly. What kind of flowers did she like? What perfume? What music?
    Next, bouquets of irises arrived at her door, CDs by Aerosmith and Wagner, glittering bottles of White Shoulders and Passion, with never a note or return address. Kelly couldn’t prove they were from Jason, but she knew they were, and she couldn’t help but enjoy this kind of courtship and admire his persistence.
    Then a season ticket to the opera arrived in the mail. Kelly was mad for opera, but she never could have afforded such a marvelous seat, so she went, and was not surprised to find Jason in the seat next to hers.
    It would have been churlish and silly not to talk to him. He invited her to the Federalist for a late supper after the opera, and she accepted. During the meal he was charming, and she couldn’t deny that he was handsome, and entertaining, and clever.
    Still, over the next few months, she remained evasive. She wasn’t playing a game—she was just focused as she had always been on her work.
    And deep inside, where she told herself the truth, lay the suspicion that it was only the challenge that kept Jason pursuing her; if he ever caught her, he’d lose interest in her. She didn’t need that kind of insult and injury.
    Then René phoned to tell her that he and Ingrid had moved back to Boston because her mother was dying of cancer and needed to be hospitalized.
    The world closed in on Kelly. She dropped almost everything but work to make time to visit her mother at the hospital. She became emotionally vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been for years. She’d kept herself so closed off for so long she’d almost forgotten how much she could hurt, but now sorrow pierced her again. It made her weak.
    All she would tell Jason was that there had been a rift between her and her mother fifteen years ago. She did still love her mother, but she disliked her mother’s husband. Someday she would tell him the rest, she promised, thinking that that day would never come.
    For the next few months, Jason accompanied her often when she went to visit her mother in the hospital. In spite of herself, Kelly became fond of Jason. He was the one who brought a small CD player with earphones and classical CDs for Ingrid, for the few rare times she felt well enough to listen. He showed an exquisite instinct for leaving Kelly alone with her mother when necessary, almost before Kelly wished it herself. He brought expensive, fragrant flowers. When he took Kelly home afterward, he often found ways to amuse her,