Must Love Mistletoe

Chapter 17

After that night in The Perfect Christmas, Bailey gave up resisting and decided to embrace her inner sex fiend. So when Finn showed up on her front porch that afternoon to help her with the surprise light stringing at her mother’s, she merely laughed when he held up a ribbon-wrapped bundle of mistletoe. Without hesitation, she went on tiptoe for his kiss.

Their mouths met and he tasted like cinnamon again. She savored his flavor, savored his kiss, her hands spearing through his dark hair. When they came up for air she fell back to her heels and rubbed her cheek against his hard shoulder, giddy with his nearness. She was like a cat with a catnip toy, she thought, drunk on his scent and ready to take a bite. As she smiled to herself, her teeth nipped at him through his soft flannel shirt.

He yelped, then pushed her away, his expression bemused. “Good God. Has someone kidnapped my real GND?” He hooked a finger in her T-shirt and pulled it away from her body, copping a look at her chest in the process. “Nope. Those are indeed your lovely breasts.”

She batted away his arm, someplace between embarrassed and pleased with herself. Who knew she could be such a physical creature? Her fingertips trailed along his hard abdomen, and he responded by holding up his mistletoe again. He glanced at it, glanced down at her face. Expectant. Confident.

Bad boy.

Fine. She kissed him again, giving him tongue, making it sloppy and wet until his free arm came around her hips and tilted her against his growing hard-on. Her knees sagged. Then “Good King Wenceslas” sounded in the near distance, and she came to her senses and stepped back, clearing her throat.

“The neighbors are out,” she said, nodding across the street where Mr. Lantz was up on his roof, adjusting the plastic Santa that was trying to stuff a pretend big-screen TV down the chimney. “We don’t want them calling the police.”

Waving the leafy bundle over her head, Finn grinned. “We’ll blame it on the mistletoe.”

She took a second step back from temptation. Six feet, two inches of hard-muscled male, of Finn, had become her personal, sexual switch. When he smiled at her like that, heat shot up her calves, flooded her belly, even made its sneaky way toward her chest. She rubbed there and took a breath of air, clearing away the giddy effervescence that was fizzing her blood and fogging her mind.

“You know that plant’s a parasite, don’t you?” she said, pointing upward. “It has those leaves to produce its own food but it would rather root into its host and take its water and nutrients. There’s no way to get rid of the stuff either, nothing short of amputation, anyway.”

He grimaced, his hand dropping to his side. “Gee, thanks for ruining a perfectly harmless custom. Has anyone ever told you you’re a wet blanket?”

Shooting him a cheeky grin, Bailey walked away. Sex fiend was fine, but better a wet-blanket sex fiend than a shattered romantic with a thing for one man’s body. Despite their attraction and her physical capitulation, she was still committed to keeping her emotions unengaged and unscathed. “It’s what comes from working with dozens of ferocious divorce attorneys.”

He caught her elbow, hauled her back. “What? I thought your firm was family law.”

“Oh sure, we’ve got your ugly one-night-drunk paternity suits, your siblings at each other’s throats over who gets the soup tureen, your fed-up folks wanting to emancipate their bratty teenagers, but we’re best known for our take-you-to-the-cleaners divorce department.”

His hand loosened, but she felt his gaze still studying her as she walked over to retrieve the boxes of lights she’d stacked nearby. “Sometimes I’m sorry I can see inside your head,” he said.

“Orderly, practical.” Unswayed by the fact that multiorgasmic was no longer just the subject of an article in Cosmo. “What’s not to like?”

He didn’t answer the question. “But I don’t get this Christmas lights thing. You, Ms. Grumpy Grinch, volunteering to do more decorating?”

“It’s for my mom.” There was the mailbox bow, the front-door wreath, the garland on the stairs, the tiny tree in the kitchen. Bailey had hung Christmas guest towels in the powder room downstairs and stacked holiday mugs in the kitchen cabinets. So far, though, no sign of her mother at The Perfect Christmas. Not even a whiff of interest in what was going on at the business. Not a good sign.

“I’ve got to snare her into the season.” Bailey gathered the boxes of lights and turned to Finn. “You said you’d help. You’re not changing your mind?”

“I’m not changing my mind about anything.” Taking the boxes from her, he set them aside. Then he put his arms around her and dragged her into a shadowy corner of the porch. “Let’s go have more sex.”

“Finn!” His mouth was already on her, though, hot on her neck, then trailing toward her collarbone. His hand slithered under her tight T-shirt, and her belly quivered as he found his way to her breast.

Making her giddy again. She pressed into his hand and moaned when he rubbed the edge of his thumb across her nipple.

“I want to do it in your room,” he whispered in her ear, his breath hot. “On your bed, in your shower, every place you’ve ever been naked that I haven’t been with you.”

Lust tightened her throat, her thigh muscles, her womb, even as another-possibly perverted-part of her thought the line was kind of sweet. “Finn…”

“On your desk. I want to sit you on the very edge with your legs open and your heels on my shoulders. Then I’ll write an essay about all the things I like about your pretty pu-”

Definitely perverted, she thought, her mouth fastening on his, heat shooting everywhere now, toes to fingernails, breasts to thighs, ankles to neck, because that line wasn’t sweet at all and still she liked it. His tongue thrust inside her lips, and giddiness evaporated as her temperature soared. All she wanted was Finn.

Finn forever.

The last two words froze in her mind. Chilled all her heat. Once again she broke away, chest heaving. To hide her new uneasiness, she worked at plastering on a casual smile.

Finn said nothing, his one-eyed pirate gaze watchful. Suspicious.

She swallowed. “I only have a couple of hours before I have to be back at the store. Can we, uh, pick this up where we left off tonight?”

He turned to retrieve the lights. “Tonight might be a problem. I have a dinner thing.”

A dinner thing? Her stomach tightened. What kind of dinner thing did a sexy, piratical man have? Her uneasiness washed away and something else took its place. She saw red, then green, and a little spike of temper burned through her blood. A dinner date kind of dinner thing?

“I see,” she said, keeping her voice calm, though. Noncommittal.

His head whipped around, his eye narrowed. “Oh no. No. You’ve got it wrong.”

“What do I have wrong?” She thought she got incredulity just right. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have that braided-bracelet face on.”

Oh hell. In an instant she knew what he meant. She’d been jealous once, fine. She’d kicked up a fuss, probably flounced off in a huff, and then refused to speak with him until he’d cut that butt-ugly bracelet off his wrist. He’d handed it to her.

Later she’d flushed it down the toilet.

Now she felt her face turning red. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“GND.” He snagged her with an arm around her waist and drew her close to his body again. “I’m meeting some people about a job.”

She meant to pull away, but his words surprised her. “A job? You have a job.”

“Yeah, well.” It was he who let go this time, he who moved off to make his way down the porch steps with a box of lights, his destination the ladder she’d propped against the side of the house.

She had to trot to catch up with him. Her fingers curled around the sides of the ladder as he started to climb. “What are you talking about? What’s this job?”

“There’s a local company. They have contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Over the past couple of months they’ve been giving me the big recruiting rush. I’ve decided I should hear what they have to say.”

Her jaw dropped. “Oh. I, uh, thought you were pretty into working for the Secret Service.”

“We get pretty tight because of the long hours and all the travel.” His long arm stretched to loop the string of lights on the hooks screwed into the eaves. “You follow a diplomat around for a month. Then you’re working the Super Bowl for a couple of weeks, next you’re called on to chase down some loon who’s been sending the White House threatening letters. The saying goes that if the Secret Service wanted you to have a family, then they would have issued you one.”

“You…” Bailey’s chest ached, just a little. “You want a family?”

“That’s not the point.” Finn descended the ladder and she moved aside for him to adjust its position.

He was tense again; she could tell from his jerky movements and the closed expression on his face as he climbed back up. Which meant she shouldn’t press for more, she told herself. A sex fiend didn’t need to know the interior landscape of the object of her lust.

“Well, what is the point?” she heard herself ask anyway, proving that even fiends couldn’t keep their minds on just sex and just sex only.

“I don’t know if I can work for the Service anymore.” He continued stringing lights, as if the admission meant nothing to him.

Bailey stared. “Why?”

“The job requires skills I’ve…lost.”

Whoa, that was news. “Like what?”

“My observational skill, for one,” he replied, his voice matter-of-fact. “You’ve seen it a hundred times, the president or some important dignitary doing the grip-and-grin along a rope line, Secret Service at his or her shoulder. Agents have to be observant enough to detect the first sign of trouble. Missing an eye, I’m not so good at that.”

The cool way he said it abraded her nerve endings. “But…but…” She craned her neck to get a read of his face. “There’s got to be other duties-”

“Sure. Desk job. Counterfeit work.”

That wasn’t so much to his taste, obviously. “But you said ‘skills.’ Your vision, that’s one skill. What else have you lost?”

He didn’t bother looking at her. His voice went cold and hard. “Nothing you can give me, GND.”

The simple words hit her square in the chest. Back off, he might as well have told her. I don’t want you to know any more about me. She stumbled away, surprised by how much the rebuff hurt. Her palm rubbed the ache between her breasts. She wasn’t supposed to feel pain when it came to Finn.

When it came to any man!

Rattled, but determined to hide the fact from him, Bailey retreated from the ladder and moved toward the front of the house. Maybe a glass of water or one of the Christmas cookies she’d brought home from the bakery would settle her back down.

A luxurious motor home rolled to a stop across the street. That wouldn’t have caught her attention without the pumping strains of “Start Me Up” blasting from the half-open driver’s window. Her stomach clenched, tight enough to make her belly ache along with her chest.

A man with a lion’s mane of gray hair leaped out, exuding enough energy and charisma to replace his beloved Mick on any concert stage. “Bailey!” he crowed as he jogged across the street.

She hadn’t seen or spoken to him in two and a half years.

“How the hell are you, little girl?” He enfolded her in a sinewy embrace.

Her mouth moved into a smile. It always did. Even when she’d been dragging his suitcase to the car for him as he prepared to leave her forever, she remembered smiling at her daddy.

She’d smiled at him maybe a dozen times since: often at Christmas when he’d drop by without warning. Once on her mother’s birthday-he’d mixed it up with Bailey’s. At her high school graduation.

Her father moved back, clapping his palms together in his hearty way. “Surprised, huh?”

Her smile flitted again. “Surprised.”

“But tell me this is a good time to visit.” He propped his fists on his hips.

“A great time. It’s always great to see you.”

It was always great to be reminded of the hard lessons of a lifetime, she told herself, especially when the two men who had meant the most in hers were suddenly so close again.

Taking a step away from her father, she checked over her shoulder. Finn was still high on the ladder. The distance from the both of them made it easier to breathe.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 18

England’s King Henry III was known to put a merchant out of business if he didn’t like the size of his end-of-year cash gift.