Must Love Mistletoe

Chapter 2

With the door shut behind that mysterious figure next door, Bailey had managed to put him from her mind to concentrate on talking with her mother about her recent separation and The Perfect Christmas. The effort hadn’t gotten her anywhere, however. So she’d followed Tracy to an early bedtime and woke up early as well, to now find dark-rimmed eyes staring into hers.

Bailey jumped, pressing back against the pan-cake-flat pillow of her childhood, then relaxed again as she realized she was gazing at one of her old band posters and into Kurt Cobain’s compelling-likely drug-addled-gaze. Even still, she felt a tug of attraction.

Once you jonesed for a bad boy, you always jonesed for bad boys.

But she wasn’t going to think about bad boys, or mysterious strangers, or even the possibility that the mysterious stranger next door was Finn.

Even if it was Finn-itwasn’tFinn itwasn’tFinn itwasn’tFinn-this unlucky intersection of their lives didn’t make it necessary for her to see or talk to him. Not that she couldn’t! But surely it was natural to feel discomfort around an old-first-flame, wasn’t it?

Especially as they hadn’t parted on ideal terms. As a matter of fact, they were un-ideal enough to make her even more certain she should continue avoiding Finn just as she’d done for the past ten years.

With a last glance at that gorgeous, doomed Kurt, Bailey climbed out of bed and headed straight for the attached bathroom. The sooner she stopped thinking about old times and old flames, the sooner she could get on with her day. The sooner she got on with her day, the sooner she could tackle the chaos at the store and the renewed disorder in her mother’s emotional life.

The sooner she could escape from all of it.

Despite her time in the shower, the whirr of the blow dryer, and then the rattle she made in the kitchen getting coffee and toast, neither mother nor even sound emerged from the master bedroom. Once dressed, complete with Christmas apron and striped stocking cap, Bailey let herself out the front door, resigned to the next resort of spending yet another day in sole charge of the store.

Her feet stuttered to a halt. The next resort would have to wait until she first made contact with the nitwit who’d left a refrigerator-sized wooden carton on the street, directly behind her Passat.

The folded invoice inside the plastic sleeve stapled to the pine slats confirmed her unluck was holding…the address was that of Mrs. Jacobson. If Bailey was going to do all that getting on and tackling she had planned, she first would have to knock on the one door she particularly didn’t want to open.

Her feet dragged as she headed down the sidewalk and up the front walk of the other house. She might have excused herself that it was too early in the morning to disturb any occupants, but the unmistakable mingled scent of coffee and bacon had made its way to the front porch. Someone was up and cooking breakfast at the Jacobsons’.

Taking a breath, Bailey rapped on the wood. It didn’t take long to hear the approach of footsteps on the other side. The door swung open.

Itwon’tbeFinn itwon’tbeFinn itwon’tbeFinn.

It…wasn’t?

The T-shirt was the same, the broken-down blue jeans, the battered motorcycle boots. But this wasn’t a teenage juvenile delinquent. This looked more like an adult delinquent, someone who spent time on a chain gang, or bounced other bad guys out of rowdy bars, or ran security for Hell’s Angels events.

He was certainly no boy and no angel himself, not with those wide, I-work-out shoulders, mussed black hair-sans the bleach overlay-and dark stubble. This man didn’t wear her first lover’s steel earrings, but instead a black eye patch covered one of his brown eyes.

Finn’s eyes.

She took a step back.

A smile flitted over his face. Finn’s smile. The uncovered eye didn’t betray a flicker of emotion or familiarity, though. “Is it Girl Scout cookie season too?”

He didn’t recognize her! The man who had been Finn, the pirate that was this Finn, didn’t realize she was the grown-up girl next door. To him, apparently, ten years was distant history.

Okay.

That was good, easier, fine. She could at least pretend the same. It wouldn’t be hard anyway, since he seemed so different than she expected.

Who was she kidding? Second only to prison convict, she’d have bet the farm that Finn would turn pirate.

She gestured behind her. “There’s a package on the street with this address,” she said, in the tones of a polite stranger. “It’s blocking my car.”

His eyebrows shot up and he moved out the door and past her, leaving his scent in the air. The Finn she remembered had smelled like Irish Spring. This Finn smelled shower-fresh too, but with a subtler scent that tickled her nose. Following him out to the street, she rubbed it. As her hand came down, her fingers brushed the nametag pinned to her apron.

BAILEY

(Yes, like George!)

Damn Finn. He knew exactly who she was. Even if she didn’t look exactly as she had at eighteen, he wouldn’t have forgotten her name.

She snatched the dopey hat off her head and combed her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. He wasn’t looking at her, though. Instead he strode straight to the carton, ripped the invoice from its plastic, and unfolded the thin sheet.

He cursed like a pirate too.

Then he glanced over at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this out of your way.”

She smiled sweetly. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this out of your way, Bailey. The name’s Bailey Sullivan.”

His gaze flicked to her nametag, back to her eyes. “I can read.”

But he couldn’t remember?

She remembered everything.

The sullen expression on his thirteen-year-old face the first summer he’d been packed off to his grandmother’s. The outrage that had replaced it when Bailey had accepted her best friend’s dare and squirted him, long and cold, with the garden hose.

The summer she was fourteen and she cajoled him to the beach with her every afternoon. His kiss one July day-her first. She hadn’t known to open her mouth for his tongue, and her skin had heated like sunburn when he whispered the instruction. Then his tongue had touched the tip of hers and he’d tasted like pretzels and Pepsi and salt water. Going dizzy, she’d clutched his bare shoulder, her fingertips grazing across gritty golden sand sprinkled on his damp tanned flesh.

Two years after that, the darkness of her backyard and the ghostly glow of the soccerball-sized hydrangeas. The fresh scent of night-blooming jasmine. The flinch of her stomach as his bony boy fingers touched her belly skin on their first, bold approach to her breast. The instant pebbling of her nipple beneath her neon bikini top and her naïve, desperate hope he wouldn’t notice.

He had.

“Something wrong?” he asked now.

He’d always paid such close attention.

She tossed her hair back and crossed her arms. “Nothing access to my car won’t fix right up.”

“Give me a sec.”

She let herself watch him stride off, his long legs so familiar, the wide plane of his back and his heavy-muscled shoulders so not. What had he done to earn that beefcake physique? What had he done with his life? What had happened to his eye?

Did he ever hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and in his memory smell the fruity coconut-oil scent of suntan lotion? Would he then recall the way he rubbed it on her shoulders and then the small of her back, his fingertips sliding under her bikini bottoms to tease the round globes of her butt and then trace the half-hidden bumps of her tailbone?

He’d been such a bad boy.

Her bad boy.

But the bad boy had grown into a one-eyed stranger who was already back with a hammer and who didn’t appear interested in talk.

Or interested in her.

So she clapped her mouth shut too and watched him break open the big crate.

Then felt her jaw drop as out of frothy curls of shredded paper he drew a shrink-wrapped gingerbread cookie. A life-sized, frosted-in-colorful-detail sheep. Followed by a calf, a chicken, two lambs. Then it was figures. A man, a woman, an angel, a baby in a cradle. Baby Jesus.

A whole, to-human-scale Nativity scene of gingerbread.

Bailey had to blink a few times to believe her eyes. “Someone has a Neiman Marcus catalog and a triple-platinum AmEx card,” she said.

He said nothing. In silence he stacked the cookies on the lawn, shoved the packing material into a garbage bag, then finally broke down the wood carton, piling the pieces far enough away to create getaway space for her.

Getaway. Great. Perfect. All that she would have asked Santa for if she’d ever had the chance to believe in him.

But the craziness of the family business during December had prompted her parents to forgo the usual fantasy for their child. With Santa visits part of The Perfect Christmas’s holiday schedule, instead it had made sense for them to explain that the man in the red suit who spent afternoons in their store was an out-of-work navy vet and that the character who supposedly left gifts on Christmas mornings for good little girls and boys was none other than their mommies and daddies.

But shhh! she had to keep the secret for everyone else.

So she was good at keeping quiet and she continued the practice as she ducked into her car, turned the key, then slipped it into reverse.

Not putting voice to her questions for Finn didn’t make them disappear, though. Just as wishing her memories of him to a cobwebbed shelf in the back corner of her brain didn’t immediately send them there either.

But the fact that he didn’t appear the least bit affected by her presence-or their past-should make the banishments not far off. Just, say, five minutes away.

Before that could happen, though, a knock on her driver’s door window made her jump. The one-eyed pirate who was moments from being out of her mind forever was giving her another expressionless look from his one dark eye.

Bailey unrolled the window, trying to appear as if she’d already forgotten who he was and what they’d once meant to each other.

It certainly appeared as if he had.

“Yes?” she asked. “Did you want something?”

“Just checking.”

She frowned at him. “Checking for what?”

“That you’re still into skipping good-byes.” And then he turned, leaving without another word.

She put the pedal to the metal and got out of there as quick as she could too.

Her palm smacked the steering wheel as she drove off. He had to do it, didn’t he? Just when she was sure she could parlay his disinterest into her own, he had to make that little crack.

God, she hoped it was a wear-her-heels-down day at the store. Not just because they needed the business, but because without that, she was lost. Without a steady stream of spending customers, it was a damn certainty she wasn’t going to be able to think of anything or anyone but Finn.

Finn Jacobson stalked back into his grandmother’s kitchen, pissed off at himself for making that last remark-almost as pissed off as he was at Bailey. The fact that he was feeling anything toward her at all made his back teeth grind and the bones around his missing eye ache like a bitch.

On his way to the refrigerator, he kicked the leg of a wooden chair, shoving it toward the farmhouse table. Then he jerked open the door to reach for a beer and had to swallow his curse as Gram nearly caught him at it when she came through the other door.

“Finn?” Her frail-too frail-hands stroked the velour of her holiday-red sweatsuit. Her lipstick matched, and with her white hair and white running shoes she looked like a sporty Mrs. Claus. Sporty, but not yet one hundred percent recuperated from the pneumonia that had hit her hard last month. She was on the road to recovery, though.

“Morning, Gram,” Finn said, wrapping his fingers around the half-and-half instead. Then he poured her a cup of coffee and added a dollop of the cream, just as she liked it. Still, his actions were jerky, and he knew his brusque tone would only make her worry. “Wrong side of the bed.”

From the corner of his one eye, he made sure she settled safely into her chair, then placed her cup in front of her. She smiled at him. “You spoil me.”

“That’s why I’m here.” After she’d been released from the hospital last week, he’d packed up enough from his downtown San Diego loft to stay through Christmas. The field office had been ecstatic over short-tempered Finn using some of his pile of vacation hours-hell, they’d been this close to ordering him out anyway, even though it hadn’t been long since his return from medical leave. His parents had been relieved to give over his grandmother’s care to him. They were already at his sister’s awaiting the birth of the first grandchild-a son.

Though Gram insisted she didn’t need a keeper, the fact was, when he was a teenager he had needed one, and it was Gram who had volunteered for the job. He owed her-and maybe one other-for all that he’d become.

So he also owed it to her to plaster over that eleven-month-old crack in his soul and the simmering emotions it laid bare. Without finding a way to control his feelings, he’d end up killing himself by either drinking too much or driving too fast. Even if he managed to survive his sins, he owed his colleagues too. He couldn’t return to his job unless he could return to his former professional, cool self.

“Did I hear someone at the door?”

“Mmm.” He didn’t want to rehash the visit with himself, let alone with his grandmother, so he ignored the question and tried de-growling his voice. “Mom called this morning. She reports she bought the prodigy-yet-to-be-born some sort of infant computer and educational software yesterday. Dad purchased a football, baseball mitt, and, his concession to the Midwest, an ice hockey stick.”

His grandmother sipped at her coffee. “No drum set?”

God, she knew how to get to him. He almost found himself smiling. “Now how did you know that was what I sent for my nephew’s first Christmas?”

“Your parents will be amused.”

“You think?” Finn doubted it. They’d likely shudder at the bad memories the gift would evoke. The fact was, he’d caused his family buckets of anxiety as an adolescent hellion. At thirteen he’d started smoking cigarettes and hanging out with a new neighbor who had a band, a van, and a fake ID. Finn had been big for his age and the other guy had probably thought him nearer his grade than he actually was-or maybe the guy just appreciated Finn’s talent with drums. He’d actually sucked…but then they all did, all of them who made up Corpses in Heaven.

At their wits’ end that summer vacation, his parents had sent him from home in Northern California to his grandmother’s to get him away from his older friend and Finn’s first brushes with the law. One dose hadn’t cured him. By fifteen, along with the local cops, he’d considered himself a regular Bad Ass and his folks starting sending him to his grandmother’s every summer and Christmas. They’d realized that even a Bad Ass had a soft spot, and Finn’s was his gram. He was named for her husband, his Grandpa Finn, and though he barely remembered the man, Finn and Gram formed a two-member mutual admiration society.

His long bleached hair, his steel earrings, the skulls and other symbols he’d self-tattooed on his knuckles-she’d seemed amused by them. She was tolerant of him in every way except the cancer sticks. And because he hated upsetting her, during the weeks he spent at her house he would not only stop smoking but also try shedding his urban street image and begin fitting in with the Coronado sorta-suburban, sorta-surf-dude society-as well as anyone could, anyway, who had that scruffy hair, those steel earrings, the tattooed knuckles.

Then once Bailey Sullivan accepted him, the rest of the kids did too.

The name must have floated from his mind into Gram’s. “I thought I heard Bailey’s voice,” she said. “It was like old times.”

“It was her,” he admitted, turning his back to reach for his own coffee cup when a beer still sounded so much better. Or whiskey. “I guess she’s home for a visit too.”

“Imagine that.”

Yeah, imagine. He hadn’t even bothered to consider it when he’d moved in at Walnut Street a few days ago. Just as he’d never imagined on that first visit at Bad Ass thirteen that he’d get tangled up with super-insider, super-perfect, Coronado’s super It Girl Bailey Sullivan.

Teen tease. Ice princess. Girl next door. His first lover. His first love.

She been all these to him at one time or another.

Oh, yeah, and the first and only one to break his heart. But hell, what’s youth for, anyway?

He should have let go of it by now, don’t you think?

He’d never let go of it.

But that wasn’t true. He’d done a damn fine job of letting go of Bailey and all the immature dreams he’d had at twenty years old when he’d come to Coronado that last time, only to find her gone. He’d moved forward with his life and surprised the hell out of his parents by becoming a son they boasted about.

Until eleven months ago.

He supposed they still boasted about him, but he didn’t feel the same about himself. Certainly he’d never be the same.

He adjusted the strap of his eye patch, and the sharp ache in his facial bones sank all the way to his gut.

Closing his one working eye, he sucked in a deep breath. For a second, over the coffee and the pain, he smelled Bailey again. He’d never pinpointed the name of her personal perfume, but it hadn’t changed in a decade. Light, citrusy, with a layer of some flowery note on top. Then all wrapped up in bow of sex appeal.

One sniff this morning and, damn it all to hell, he’d been going hard and horny again.

Because that delicate blond prettiness of hers was still the same too. That sleek golden hair and gymnast figure that had made him feel both macho and clumsy when he was sixteen. That now just made him feel mean because despite himself it still pulled at him.

But who could blame him for reacting to all the memories between them? Innocent kisses. Not-so-innocent kisses. Her small breasts in his palms. The first time he’d touched the wetness between her thighs and how she’d buried her face against his neck in embarrassment.

The burn of her skin when he’d tasted that delicious wetness on his tongue.

As he said, who could blame him?

But hell, it only twisted the uncontrollable tension inside of him tighter. He was the Bad Ass again, feeling all edgy and penned-up and rebellious. Like then, just a razor’s edge away from fucking up.

Oh, wait. He’d already done that eleven months ago.

But he was supposed to be getting past that. He was supposed to be icing over all the anger, the guilt, the sense of loss. During this “vacation” with Gram he was supposed to be unwinding eleven months of coiled emotions that had made him harder and meaner than ever before. And he couldn’t-wouldn’t-let the unwelcome return of Bailey Sullivan impede his objective.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 3

Helen Keller said, “The only real blind person at Christmas time is he who has not Christmas in his heart.”