Must Love Mistletoe

Chapter 22

Bailey drove directly to Hart’s. It was the same as the first time, sticky floor, loud music, muscled, clean-cut young men and the much-smaller number of decorative females. As the door closed behind her, from somewhere by the pool tables a male voice yelled out “Hooyah!” and three other guys beat their chests in response.

Neither the hooyah-er nor any of the chest beaters was Finn.

“He’s not here,” Tanner said, suddenly appearing by her side, causing an approaching young man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a full bottle of lite beer to veer off.

“You heard…?”

He nodded. “He called this morning. After breakfast, Mrs. Jacobson decided to take her usual rest. When he went to check up on her an hour or so later, she’d died in her sleep. All things considered…”

Bailey swallowed the lump in her throat as she thought of the lady who had been her next-door neighbor all her life. They’d shared French toast the morning before. And a hug. She was glad for that last moment even though she hadn’t know it was good-bye.

She’d always been lousy with those anyway.

Her throat felt thick and she swallowed again. “You said Finn called you?” He hadn’t contacted Bailey. Even if he didn’t know her cell phone number, he could have reached her through the store.

“Yeah.”

“But he hasn’t been by tonight? I tried calling the house and no one answered. I figured he was here.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t come here.” Tanner shook his movie-star hair.

Bailey frowned. “Why not?”

“He knows that I wouldn’t serve him any liquor unless he’d talk first.”

“Well surely that’s good, the talking, I mean,” Bailey said. “He’s got to be feeling-”

“That’s the whole problem, Bailey,” Tanner put in. “That’s Finn’s whole problem. He doesn’t want to be feeling anything at all.”

She didn’t waste any more time in the bar. On the sidewalk outside, she hesitated a moment, thinking through her options. Finding Finn wasn’t the issue-that had to be done. But where to look first?

“You’re Finn’s friend,” a voice from the shadows said.

Bailey jumped, then swung toward the stranger stepping into the light over the bar’s door. The young woman had long, straight dark hair, exotic eyes, and coltish legs in tight, bleached jeans.

She held out her hand and gave a winsome smile. “I’m Desirée.”

Ah. Desirée, sometimes referred to as Desirée al-Maddah, sometimes Desirée Bryant, depending upon whether the press was describing the celebutante as the daughter of her Middle Eastern prince of a father or as the daughter of her famous model mom. Bailey shook her cool hand. “I’m Bailey Sullivan. I recognize you from the, uh, kiss.”

The younger woman grimaced. “Don’t mention it to Tanner, will you? And don’t tell Troy you’ve seen me here, okay?”

Which reminded Bailey she had yet to see Finn and he shouldn’t be alone. “It’s nice meeting you, but I have to go now.”

“You heard about Mrs. Jacobson?”

“Yes.” Bailey hesitated. “By any chance, you wouldn’t happen to know where Finn is, would you?”

“Well, I-”

The bar door swung open. A male voice growled through the night air. “What the hell are you doing here again? Haven’t I already told you to get lost?”

Desirée flinched, then lifted her chin to face the behemoth who stomped outside to confront her. “It’s a free country, Troy.”

“I thought I ordered you to stop hanging around the bar when you showed up here the other day.” He crossed his arms over his chest, looking half genie and mostly scary with his bulging biceps and shaved head.

Bailey frowned. Troy appeared angry and Desirée defiant, but there was something else buzzing beneath the surface of their conversation. Something hot and-

“We don’t want you here,” Troy stated.

Apparently unwelcome.

“I don’t want you here,” he clarified.

Very unwelcome.

Desirée blinked, swallowed, and despite her mulish expression, Bailey had the distinct feeling she just might cry.

To preserve the younger woman’s dignity, Bailey slid her hand through her elbow. “We’re on our way,” she said, guiding them both toward the parking lot.

Desirée looked back, just as the bar’s door slammed shut. Bailey felt her flinch again. Then she slipped free of Bailey’s arm to wrap her arms around herself in a sad self-hug.

“Thanks,” she said, her winsome smile now turned wry. “I thought it was bad when Tanner was mad at me, but then I met Troy and…I don’t know why I let him get to me. Especially when he doesn’t bother trying to soft-pedal the way he feels.”

Bailey lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes you don’t have any choice.”

“Yeah.” Then she reached out and touched the top of Bailey’s hand. “And speaking of men with chips on their shoulders, I saw Finn’s SUV parked at the north end of the beach.”

Bailey stopped her Passat behind Finn’s big, black car. It was a no-moon night, and with her headlights off the darkness wrapped around her like a blanket. A safe blanket.

She could go home.

No. She couldn’t leave him out here alone.

At Trin’s, she’d changed out of her work clothes, and she realized she should have changed back, because her high-heeled sandals were impractical sand gear. She slipped them off as she reached the beach and let them dangle in one hand, shoving her other inside her jacket pocket to grip her cell phone.

The sand was slippery cold against the soles of her feet. Her toes curled into it as she gazed up and down the beach. The only clear thing she could see was the white froth of the incessant waves.

There! she thought, squinting. There was movement.

A spark pierced the darkness and then kindled into a small fire a quarter mile down the beach. Still gripping her cell phone in case it wasn’t the man she was looking for, she headed for it. As she drew closer, she noticed the pallets and other shadowy pieces of wood piled nearby, enough to keep the darkness at bay all night long.

When she neared, Finn didn’t look away from the fire he’d started in the cement circle. He was sitting beside it, a flask in his hand. As he lifted it to take a drink, the light of the flames flickered yellow and red against its silver surface, a bright contrast to his black eye patch, the dark night, the murky ocean with its ever-changing frothy skirt of white sweeping back and forth, back and forth, across the wet sand.

Bailey’s shoes dropped from her suddenly sweaty hands. She followed them down to the sand, leaving that ring of fire between her and Finn. She filled her chest with a long breath of the cool air, tasting the salt on her tongue and wishing it was words instead.

When she’d thought about finding him, she’d never thought about what she would say once she did.

Comfort, she told herself. She was here to offer sympathy, provide support, be his friend.

Somehow make the loss easier for him.

Flames glinted against the flask again as he brought it to his mouth for another swallow. “Go away.”

She jerked at the sudden sound of his hard voice, and flashed back to poor Desirée and her reaction to Troy’s rejection. But it wasn’t the same at all, she thought. The sexual, romantic part of her relationship with Finn wasn’t unrequited, it was O-V-E-R.

So she dug her butt into the shifting sand and refused to be scared away.

Finn said nothing more. Through the flames she saw him reach out to the pile of fuel and grab another piece. He tossed the length of wood into the blaze. It had twigs and leaves attached, and as they caught, they crackled with the sound of candy wrappers, then smoked like a wizard’s spell.

But not the kind of alchemy that worked magic. Finn remained silent. She didn’t know what to say herself.

Maybe companionship was enough.

“Go home, Bailey.”

He thought he didn’t even want companionship, then. But she was stubborn too. “I’m fine. The fire is keeping me warm.”

More minutes of brooding silence followed. He drank. She waited. Then he picked up another length of wood and fed it to the leaping flames. Took another swallow. Added more wood to the fire.

Finally Bailey couldn’t take the tension. “She was a wonderful woman,” she offered. “I’m sorry I didn’t know she was so ill.”

He hesitated, flask in his right hand, wood in the other. Then his left arm dropped, the piece of fuel slamming into the fire.

Sparks exploded, and Bailey flinched, but kept on talking anyway. “You didn’t say a word about that, Finn.” It was the first thing that had struck her when Trin told her the news. “You insisted she was going to get well. Didn’t you know-”

“I know what the doctors said.” He hurled a second piece of wood into the blaze. Embers sprang high, as if trying to escape.

“Then why-”

“Because I didn’t want to think about it, all right?” He swigged from the flask, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Or believe it?”

Another piece of wood crashed into the fire. Silver turned red as he brought the drink to his lips again.

She dug her fingers into the sand, though the unstable stuff offered nothing solid to hang on to. “It’s no crime to grieve, Finn. Grief is normal, natural-”

“Oh, I’m done with grief.” His voice was more caustic than the acrid smell of smoke in the air. “I’ve been living with it grinding my guts into sausage meat since I woke up in the hospital and found out that Ayesha was dead eleven months ago.”

He tilted his head back and sipped again from the flask. “There’s nothing left inside of me for it to chew on.”

The wind off the ocean fluttered the ends of Bailey’s hair. “Then you don’t need to be out here all alone. Let’s go back to my house…or to the bar. Tanner’s there.”

“I can’t deal with Tanner’s guilt tonight too.”

Oh, Finn. “Your grandmother wouldn’t want you to feel guilty. You know that. You know you didn’t have the power to stop what happened to her.”

“But then there’s Ayesha.” He tossed another piece of wood into the crackling blaze even as he took another drink. “You can’t say I didn’t fail her.”

Confused, Bailey shook her head. “What could you have done about that either?”

“I was her supervisor.” He stared at his reflection in the surface of the flask. “I should have seen something. Sensed something.”

She lifted her hand, sand sifting between her fingers. “You couldn’t have known about that assassin. You can’t read some murderer’s mind who shows up out of nowhere.”

“Oh, baby, you’ve got it all wrong.” He shifted his gaze from the booze to spear a long, thin stick into the middle of the blaze and watch it light up.

It looked like an accusing finger, she thought, and Finn had pointed it toward himself.

“You’re right that I couldn’t know the assassin was going to pick that target, that day, that time,” he continued. “But I knew Ayesha. And I should have suspected what she might do.”

“Her job.” Bailey heard the sharp edge in her voice. “You said she did her job.”

“Yeah.” The stick was burning now like a tongue of flame. “But the problem is, see, I don’t know that her actions were dictated by the mission. There were other ways for it to play out that day which didn’t involve her standing up for that bullet. I wonder…was she thinking of me? Was she trying to impress me? Save me? I don’t know. But I should have seen, I should have sensed in those days and weeks before, that she wasn’t operating in pure agent mode. I should have worried about how far she would go for love.”

The smoke was stinging Bailey’s eyes. Blinking them away, she had to clear her throat too. “How could you look into someone else’s heart?”

“Easy.” His laugh sounded short and rough, and then he took a long draw from the flask. “I only had to look as far as my own. I was the same for you, Bailey, once upon a time. I would have done anything for you-hell, I did. I cleaned up my act, went to college, joined the Secret Service as my way of impressing you. A bullet? I would have taken that too.”

“I…I don’t know what to say.” She didn’t want to think about all she’d lost by running away.

“Good-bye will work.” He was staring down at the booze again. “Oh, that’s right, you tend to duck those.”

It stung, but this time she wasn’t leaving, even though the smoke was making her chest feel tight now too. “That’s not fair. I came here tonight, didn’t I? I came to talk to you about how you feel. I came here to…to be your friend.”

There was a charged moment of silence. Then he shot to his feet. Bailey twitched at his sudden movement, staring at him and how the light of the flames on his jeans and black sweatshirt made it appear as if he’d caught fire himself.

“My friend?” he repeated, his tone incredulous as he stared at her through the leaping blaze. “You call yourself my friend? You want to know how I feel?”

“Well, I…yeah.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a dark sound that made her think of pirates again. Or devils. “Be careful what you wish for, baby.”

Though it was clear that the alcohol, or his emotions, probably both, had caught up with him, Bailey needed to see this through. “I can take it.”

“Then how about this.” He snagged another piece of thick wood and threw it into the blaze. More sparks exploded, flying upward. “I feel torn to pieces over Ayesha. I feel pissed off that I lost my eye and my ability to do the job I love.”

More fuel was dumped on the fire, and pieces of ash swirled around him. “I hate that I couldn’t stop a disease that was leaching the life from Gram.”

Turning, he dropped his flask to the sand, then bent at the waist to pull something from the hodgepodge of wood beside him. When he straightened again, she could see it was a full-sized Christmas tree-but an old one, its needles dried to a rusty brown. “I’m damn depressed that it’s the holidays and I can’t think of a single thing worth celebrating.” With one strong movement, he lifted the tree over the concrete ring and jammed its trunk into the sand and into the center of the leaping fire.

As the needles burst into flame, crackling and popping, their corner of the beach turned bright as day. The heat forced Bailey to scoot back.

But not far enough to miss Finn’s next words, harsher and more biting than all the others. “And at the top of my list, I feel like letting you know you’re not my friend. Friends are people I trust. And you just don’t qualify.”

She was on her feet, backing away from the burn, but he still seared her.

“You, Bailey, you are nothing to me.”

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 23

Guidelines from a department store Santa Claus training school include admonishing Santa not to leave his chair even if a child has an “accident” and to always keep gloves and beard scrupulously clean. They further advise that it never looks quite right for Santa to flirt with the elves.