Rapunzel in New York

“I was trying to help her,” he said flatly, for the hundredth time. No one but him seemed to care.

“Your file indicates that you specialize in Information Technology, is that correct?” the judge asked. She said that as though he was some kind of help-desk operator instead of the founder of one of the most successful young IT companies on the east coast.

Dean spoke just as Nate was about to educate her. “That is correct, Your Honor.”

The judge didn’t take her eyes off Nate’s. Thinking. Plotting. “I’m going to commute your sentence, Mr. Archer, so that it doesn’t haunt your record for the rest of your life. One hundred hours of community service to be undertaken within thirty days.”

“Community service? Do you know what one hundred hours of my time costs?”

Dean swooped in to stop him saying more. “My client would be willing to pay financial compensation in lieu, Your Honor.”

Willing was a stretch but he’d go with it.

The judge looked at Nate archly, and he stared solidly back at her. Then she dragged her eyes to his left. “No doubt, Counselor, but that’s not on the table. The purpose of a service order is to give the defendant time to reflect. To learn. Not to make it all go away with the sweep of their assistant’s pen.” Nate could practically feel the order doubling in length. Or severity. She made some notes on the documentation in front of her, eyes narrowed. “Mr. Archer, I’m going to recommend you undertake your service on behalf of the plaintiff.”

His stomach lurched. Note to self: never upset a district judge. “Are you serious?”

“Nate—” Dean just about choked in his haste to silence him, but then changed tack as the judge leaned as far forward as she could possibly go without tumbling from her lofty perch. “Thank you, Your Honor. We’ll see that it happens.”

But Nate spread his hands wide and tried one more time. “I was trying to help her, judge.”

Dean’s hand slid onto his forearm and gripped it hard. The judge’s lips drew even tighter. “Which is why it’s not a two-hundred-hour order, Mr. Archer. Counselor, please explain to your client that this is a judicial sentence, not a Wall Street negotiation.”

Nate ignored that. “But what will I do for her?”

“Help her with her laundry? I really don’t care. My order is set.” She eyed the man by Nate’s side. “Is that clear, Counselor?”

“It is, Your Honor, thank you.” Dean whispered furiously in Nate’s ear that a commuted service order was as good as invisible on his record.

“Easy for you to say,” Nate growled. “That’s not one hundred hours of your executive time.” Spent in a building he preferred not to even think about.

The judge with super hearing lifted one arch brow. “I think you’ll find that my time is just as valuable as yours, Mr. Archer, and you’ve taken up quite enough of it. Next!”

The gavel came down on any hope of someone seeing reason in all this lunacy.

Ten minutes later it was all over; Nate and Dean trod down the marble stairs of the justice building and shook hands. From an attorney’s perspective it was a good outcome, but the idea of not only spending time in that building—with her.

Viktoria Morfitt’s suit for trespass was ridiculous and everyone knew it. The cops. The judge. Even the woman herself, judging by the delicate little lines that had formed between her brows as the cops had escorted him from his own building.

But he’d spooked her out on the ledge and then made the tactical error of letting her know he was her landlord. If he’d kept his trap shut she probably would have let him off with the promise of restitution for the door. But no … He’d played the rare do-you-know-who-I-am? card, and she’d taken her first opportunity to let him know exactly what she thought about his building management.

Not very much.

And now he had a hundred hours of community service to think about how he might have done things differently.

“There’s a morning we’ll never get back,” Dean grumbled comfortably. “But don’t worry about it, I’ll get appeal paperwork straight off. Though you might have to do a few hours before that gets processed.”

“When am I supposed to start this farce?”

“The judge’s decree will be lodged after two-thirty today, but, reasonably, tomorrow will be fine. That’ll give the public defender time to alert your jumper to the order.”

“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.”

“I’m sure she won’t,” his friend said, turning and trotting down the steps with a chuckle. “But the Archer charm hasn’t failed you yet.”

The fact that was true didn’t really make things any better. One hundred hours with a human porcupine in a building he could barely stomach.

Great.

Tori filled her lungs behind her brand-new door and composed herself. The judge must have been having a badly hormonal day to task someone like Nathan Archer with community service. Either that or his smug confidence had got up Her Honor’s nose as much as it had irritated her last week. Not hard to imagine.

Now or never. She pulled the door nice and wide and made a show of leaning on it. Showcasing it. “Mr. Archer.”

The breath closest to her lips froze in its tracks at the sight of him filling her doorway and all her other breaths jammed up behind it in an oxygen pile-up.

Fortunately, he didn’t notice as his blue eyes examined the door critically. “Could they have found anything less suitable?”

She looked at the modern, perfect door which was so out of place in a 1901 building. “I assumed you picked it specifically. But it locks, so I’m happy.”

She’d forgotten how those eyes really felt when they rested on her. Like twin embers from a fire alighting on her skin. Warm at first touch, but smoldering to an uncomfortable burn the longer they lingered.

“Well, one of us is, at least,” he mumbled.

She couldn’t stop the irritated sigh that escaped her. “I didn’t ask for this community service, Mr. Archer. I’m no more thrilled than you are.” The last thing she wanted was to be forced into the company of such a disagreeable stranger, with the uncomfortable responsibility of tasking him with chores.

Silence fell, and the only sound to interrupt it was 10A’s television blaring out late afternoon Sesame Street.

He stared at her until finally saying, “May I come in?”

Heat broiled just below her collar. Leaving him standing in the hall … She stood back and let all six-foot-three of him into her home. “So how does this work?”

He shrugged those massive shoulders. “Search me, this is my first offence.”

Tori winced, knowing that—truthfully—he’d done nothing more than try to help her. But one hundred hours was a small price to pay for how he’d neglected the building they both stood in. “Hey, service orders are the latest celebrity accessory. You can’t buy that kind of street cred.”

He turned and shot her a dark look from under perfectly manicured brows. Every glare he used was a glare wasted. She really didn’t care whether or not he was happy. He was only her landlord.

She took his coat and turned to hang it on the back of her front door before remembering her new one didn’t have a hook. She detoured via the sofa to drape it over the back. The contrast between the expensive fabric of his coat and the aged upholstery of her sofa couldn’t have been more marked.

“Something’s been bothering me,” he said, turning those blue eyes on her. “About last week.”

Only one thing? Quite a lot had been bothering her about it. Her reaction to his closeness not the least.

“What were you doing out on that ledge?” he continued.

“Not jumping.”

“So I gathered.”

She stared at him and then crossed to the large photo album on the coffee table. She spun it in his direction and flipped it open. “These are Wilma and Fred.”

He leaned down to look at the range of photographs artfully displayed on the page. “Hawks?”

“Peregrine falcons. They live wild in this area.”

Deep blue eyes lifted to hers. “And … ?”

“And I was installing a nest box for them.”

He blinked at her. “Out on the ledge?”

She clenched her teeth to avoid rolling her eyes. “I tried it in here, but it just didn’t do as well.” Idiot.

Archer grunted and Tori’s arms stole round her midsection while he flicked through the various images in her album.

“These are good,” he finally said. “Who took them?”

“I did.”

His head came up. “Where from?”

She pulled back the breezy curtain from her living-room window to reveal spotless glass. “There’s another window in the bedroom. Sometimes I use the roof. Mostly the ledge.”

“So that wasn’t your first dangerous foray out there?”

“It’s not dangerous. I’m tethered at all times.”

He lifted aristocratic eyebrows. “To a century-old building?”

A century-old building that’s crumbling around you. He might as well have said it. It was perfectly evident to anyone who cared to look. The neglect wouldn’t fly in Morningside proper, but being right on the border of West Harlem, he was getting away with it. Of course he was. Money talked around here.

“I pick the strongest point I can to fix to,” she said.

He looked at the pictures again. “You must have some great equipment.”

She shrugged. Let him believe that it was the camera that took the photo, not the person behind it. “I’ve always enjoyed wildlife photography.” More than just enjoyed. She’d been on track to make a career out of it back when she’d graduated.

He reached the back pages of the album. “These ones weren’t taken out your window.” He flipped it her way and her heart gave a little lurch. An aerie with a stunning mountain vista stretching out in all directions behind it. An eagle in flight, its full wings spread three meters wide. Both taken from high points.

Really, really high points.

“I took those in the Appalachians and Cascades,” she said, tightly, but then she forced the topic back to her city peregrines before he could ask any more questions. As far as she knew, this court order didn’t come with the requirement for full disclosure about her past.

“Fred and Wilma turned up in our skies about three months ago, and then about four weeks ago they started visiting this building more and more. I made them a nest box for the coming breeding season so they don’t have to perch precariously on a transformer or bridge or something.”

So she could have a little bit of her old life here in her new one.

“Hawks …” He closed the album carefully and placed it gently back on the coffee table. Then he stood there not saying a word. Just thinking.

“So.” She cleared her throat. “Should we talk about how this is going to work? What you can do here for one hundred hours?”

His eyes bored into her and triggered a temperature spike. “I sense you’ve been giving it some thought?”

She crossed to the kitchen and took up the sheet of notepaper she’d prepared. “I made a list.”

His lips twisted. “Really—of what?”

“Of all the things wrong with the building. Things that you can fix in one hundred hours.”

The laundry. The elevator. The floors. The buzzer …

His eyebrows rose as he read down the page. “Long list.”

“It’s a bad building.”

His long lashes practically obscured his eyes, they narrowed so far. “So why do you live here?”

Her stomach shriveled into a prune under his scrutiny. “Because I can afford it. Because it’s close to the parks.” Not that she’d visited those in a long time. But it was why she’d chosen this building originally.

He continued reading the list. “Just one problem.”

“Why did I know there’d be a ‘just’?”

He ignored her. “The judge’s decree is firm on me not outsourcing any of this service. It has to be by my own hand. Most of this list calls for tradesmen.”

She stared at him. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d actually follow the order. You struck me as a corner-cutter.”

“Not at all.”

She matched his glare. “The front-door buzzer’s still faulty.”

“That’s not about cutting corners—or costs,” he said just as she was about to accuse him of precisely that.

“What is it, then?”

He folded his arms across his chest, highlighting its vast breadth. “It’s asset strategy.”

Her snort was unladylike in the extreme. “Is your strategy to let the building and everyone in it crumble to dust? If so, then you’re right on target.”

Was that the tiniest hint of color at his collar? He laid the list down on the table. “I’ve accepted the terms of the order. I’ll see it through. My way.”

“So what can you do? What do you do?”

His grunt was immediate. “I do a lot of paperwork. I sign things. Spend money.”

“Just not here.”

He ignored that. “I’m in the information industry.”

Tori threw her hands up. “Well, what’s that going to be useful for?”

It took the flare of his pupils to remind her how offensive he might find that. And then she wondered why she cared all about offending him. “I mean, here … in my apartment.”

“Actually, I have an idea. It relates to your birds.”

“The falcons?”

“Urban raptors are a big deal on Manhattan. There are a number of webcams set up across the city, beaming out live images to the rest of the world. Kind of a virtual ecotourism. For those who are interested.”

The way he said it made it perfectly clear of how little interest they were to him.

“I guess. I was just doing it for me.” And in some ways she’d enjoyed keeping the peregrine falcon pair a special thing. A private thing. Which was probably selfish. The whole world should be able to see the beauty of nature. Wasn’t that what her photography was all about? “A webcam, you think?”

“And a website. One’s pointless without the other.”

Flutters fizzed up inside her like champagne and the strangeness of it only made her realize how long it had been since something had really excited her. A website full of her images, full of her beautiful birds. For everyone to see. She knew about the other falcon locations in New York but hadn’t thought for a moment she might ever be able to do something similar in Morningside.

“You can design a website?”

His expression darkened. “Sanmore’s mailboy can design a simple website. As can half the fifth graders on Manhattan. It’s no big deal.”

Not for him, maybe. She turned her mind to the ledge. “I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to set a camera up on the ledge, focused on the nest box. If anything of interest happens, it’ll probably happen there.”

“How can you be sure they’ll use the box?” he asked.

“I can’t. But I’m encouraging them down every day. So I’m optimistic.”

His eyes narrowed. “Encouraging?”

Might as well tell it as it was. “Luring. They’re usually pigeon eaters, but mice are easier to trap. This building has no shortage.”

His lips thinned. “All buildings have vermin.”

Her laugh was raw. “Not this many.”

He stared at her, considering. “Excuse me a moment.” Then he stepped into her small kitchen and spoke in quiet tones into the cell phone she’d held for him the week before. When he returned, his expression was impassive. “You may need to find a new source of bird bait.”

She frowned. “What did you just do?”

“I took care of the vermin problem.”

“With one phone call?”

“I have good staff.”

One phone call. It could have been solved so long before this. “Good staff but not residential agents, I’d say. We’ve been reporting the mice for eighteen months.”

He thought about that. “I trust our agent to take care of code issues.”

“This is the same agent you trusted with my door selection?”

His eyes shifted back to the hideously inappropriate door and she felt a mini rush of satisfaction that she’d finally scored a point. But snarking at him wasn’t going to be a fun way to spend the next hundred hours. And as much as she’d like to make him suffer just a little bit for the torn carpet and clunky pipes and glacially slow elevator, she had to endure it, too. And she had a feeling he would give as good as he got.

“Anyway,” she said. “I’m sure raw meat will suffice in the unlikely event I run out of fresh food.”

“Then what? They’ll just … come?”

She slid her hands onto her hips. “Is this interest? Or are you just being polite?”

His left eye twitched slightly. “I have a court order that says I should be interested, Ms. Morfitt. No offense.”

She arched a single eyebrow. People like him had no idea how offensive their very existence was to people like her. To every tenant who scraped together the rent to live in his shabby building. To the people who went without every day so he could have another sportscar in his parking space.

Her birds had no way of making him money; therefore, they didn’t rate for Nathan Archer.

“None taken.” She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “I’m planning on moving the mice to the nest box tomorrow, to see how the falcons respond to it.”

“Might as well get the camera set up and operating straightaway, then,” he said.

“You’re assuming I’ve agreed?”

“Haven’t you? Your eyes twinkled like the Manhattan skyline when I suggested it.”

It burned her that he could read her so easily. And it bothered her that he was paying that much attention to what her eyes were doing. Bothered and … something else. Her chest pressed in tighter.

She shook the rogue thought loose. “Can we use something small and unobtrusive? I don’t want to scare them away just as they’re starting to come close. It took me weeks to get them accustomed to visiting the ledge, and any day now they’ll need to start laying.”

He moved to the window and looked out, examining the wall material. “I can probably core out one of the stone blocks in the basement and fit the camera into it. They’ll barely know it’s there.”

She smiled. “There you go, then. You’re not totally without practical skills.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but then seemed to think better of it. “I’ll need your bathroom.”

She flinched. That seemed a stupidly unsettling and intimate request—not that the dictatorial words in any way resembled a request. The man was going to be here for one hundred hours—of course he was going to need the facilities at some point.

She stepped back from the doorway. “You know the way.”

One brow twitched. “You’re not coming?”

Both her own shot upward. “Uh … no, you’ll have to manage by yourself.” Who knew, maybe the man had assistants for that, too.

“You’re going to play hardball on this court order, aren’t you? Well, don’t come crying to me if I pull out something I shouldn’t.”

What? Tori frowned after his retreating figure. Then, as she heard the exaggerated ziiip, her frown doubled and she muttered, “What, Mr. Corporate America isn’t a door-closer?”

Seconds later she heard another metallic ziiip and she realized her mistake. Heat flared up her throat. The man wasn’t peeing. He was measuring—with a steel tape measure. Probably the ledge window.

Of course he was.

And she’d just come across as the biggest moron ever to breathe. Things were off to a great start.

Just fabulous.

Nathan turned out of West 126th Street onto St. Nicholas Avenue and wove his way through the late-afternoon pedestrian traffic heading for the subway. It didn’t matter that it was nearly evening—activity levels at nearby Columbia University didn’t drop until much later, which meant the streets around it were perpetually busy during class hours. Even a few blocks away. He’d spent a lot of time out on these streets as a kid—more than most—so he knew every square inch.

Something about Tori Morfitt really got his people antennae twitching. What was a young, beautiful woman—a wildlife photographer—doing living alone in his shabby building, with no job or family that he could discern, spending her time hanging out with birds?

In a world where he tended to attract compliant yes-men—and oh-yes women—encountering someone so wholly unconcerned about appropriateness, someone who wore their heart so dangerously on their sleeve was a refreshing change. When she forgot to be angry with him she was quite easygoing: bright, sharp, compassionate. And the immediate blaze of her eyes as he’d suggested the webcam had reached out, snared him by the intestines and slowly reeled him in.

No doubt his interest would waver the moment he uncovered her mysteries, but for now … There were worse ways of spending time—and community service—than with a lithe, healthy young woman who liked to spar verbally.

He pulled out his phone as he walked.

“Dean,” he said the moment his attorney answered his call.

“Hey, Nate.”

“Forget the appeal, will you?”

“Are you serious?” He could almost hear the frown in his friend’s voice—a full two-eyebrow job. What he was really asking was, Are you insane? “I can get you off.”

“I’d rather see it out, Dean. It’s a principle thing.”

“You sure you can afford the moral high ground right now? We have a lot on.”

His friend’s gentle censure merged with the noise of the traffic. “I’ll fit everything in. You know that. It’s been a long time since I had anyone to get home to.” He jogged between cars across the street and joined the salmon-spawn crush on the subway stairs. “Who’s going to care if I pull some late ones at the office?”

“You’re superhuman, Nate, not invincible.”

“I don’t want to lawyer my way out of this. Call it strategy—a good chance to get a handle on the lay of the land at Morningside, tenant-wise.”

A good chance to get a handle on one particular tenant, at least.

Dean took his time answering. “Wow. She must be something.”

Nate instantly started feeling tetchy. If he had to face an inquisition he might as well go back to Tori’s. “Who?”

“Your jumper.”

“She wasn’t jumping.”

“Don’t change the subject. This is about her, isn’t it?”

Nate surged forward as he saw the subway car preparing to move off. “This is about me remembering where I came from. How things were done before the money.”

Dean sobered immediately. “The building’s getting to you, huh?”

Nate shouldered his way between closing subway doors and leaned on the glass partition. “I just don’t want to buy my way out of this.”

“So you keep saying. But I’m not convinced. You worked hard all your life precisely so that you could have access to the freedom money buys.”

“Yeah, but I’ll do my hundred hours and then walk away knowing I did it the right way.” Knowing that she knew it.

Dean thought about that. “Your call, buddy.”

“Thank you. You can withdraw the appeal?”

“Consider it done.”

Nate signed off and slid his phone back into his pocket.

One hundred hours with Tori Morfitt and he got to keep the moral high ground. A win-win. His favorite type of outcome.

He had some guilt about the effort they were about to go to in setting up the webcam but, at the end of the day, it was his effort to waste. He’d be doing most of the work. And it wouldn’t be totally pointless. His plans to redevelop the building site wouldn’t kick off for months so they’d get one good season out of the webcam, at least.

Of course, it meant spending more hours in the building where he was born than he particularly wanted to, but he’d control that. He’d managed the feelings his whole childhood, how hard could it be now? Memories started to morph from the gray haze he usually maintained into more concrete shapes and sounds.

He went for his phone again and dialed his office rather than let them take root in his consciousness.

“Karin, I’m heading back. What have I missed?”