Must Love Mistletoe

Chapter 4

During hours lying in bed and hours working in the store, Bailey had tried to absorb what her bad-boy boyfriend had made of his life. Finn Jacobson, college graduate, Secret Service agent, man seriously wounded in the line of duty. My God! Who would have guessed?

She hadn’t.

Not only was she embarrassed by her original assumptions, she felt shaken by the truth. She’d seen that video of the assassination attempt a number of times-it was one of the biggest news stories of the year, probably because it was so dramatically caught on tape.

The cameraman had won accolades for his work. Not only had he captured all the action, but he’d done a superb editing job as well. The version played by the networks always faded out on a pair of shattered sunglasses lying in a puddle of crimson. Those were Finn’s, she now realized. Both the glasses and the blood.

Replaying it in her mind as she drove home from a fourth long day at The Perfect Christmas, Bailey felt yet another wave of nausea roll through her stomach. What had happened eleven months ago made her sick…and sad.

And more determined than ever to stay clear of Finn.

Sympathy over what had happened was normal, of course. But she was in downright danger of becoming sloppy over it. And long ago she’d made the choice not to be sloppy over any man.

Inching along behind the lookie-loos ogling Walnut Street’s Christmas excess, Bailey knew that the permanent solution to avoiding the man living next door meant forcing another confrontation with her mother. This time, she told herself, she’d talk until her mother truly comprehended the predicament she and The Perfect Christmas were in.

Bailey was a sensible, rational person. Tracy was an logical, reasonable woman. Surely some straight talk between the two of them would rouse her mother from her stupor or depression or whatever it was and get her behind back into the store.

And Bailey back to her Los Angeles life.

Ten minutes later, she let herself into the house. “Mom?”

“In here,” came from the kitchen.

Squaring her shoulders, Bailey strode into the room. Surrounded by a plethora of vegetables, Tracy was tearing lettuce into tiny shreds and dropping them into a wooden salad bowl. In the last couple of days she’d abandoned the comfort of pasta foods and was going strictly rabbit. Just that was enough to depress anybody.

With a casual movement, Bailey set onto the counter the eleven-inch Christmas tree she’d brought home from the shop. The tiny pine needles looked real enough and it was decorated with firefly-sized lights as well as pine cones and glass ornaments no bigger than M &M’s. She plugged it in without comment, though hoped it would remind her mother of what was waiting for her just a few blocks away.

“How was your day?” her mother asked without looking up, on obvious maternal autopilot. She appeared rumpled and drowsy, as if she’d slept the day away wearing yet another pair of ragged sweats.

Bailey glanced at the little tree, then took a breath, preparing herself to hit the situation head-on. “It was your day, Mom, remember? I’m away from my life to run your store.”

“It’s the family store,” Tracy replied, matter-of-fact.

Dead end there, Bailey thought. She tried another tack. “Okay, but Dan-”

“You saw him?” her mother interrupted, chin jerking up. “What did he want?” Color suddenly flagged her pale cheeks, and she seemed to find a surge of energy as she grabbed a carrot and began attacking it with a grater.

Bailey watched the violent process with dawning alarm. “No, I haven’t seen him. Not yet. But Mom, face it. You can’t hide here any longer taking your emotions out on defenseless vegetables. You need to talk to Dan.”

The carrot was quickly decimated to the size of a mini gherkin as her mother’s color faded and her mouth set in a stubborn line. “I don’t see why.” She picked up another innocent root and took it down to midget proportions too.

Bailey cooled her impatience. “Then at least you have to come back to the store.”

“No,” Tracy said.

“Mom-”

“I’m not going to talk with him and I’m not going to the store. Not if he’s going to be there.”

Frustrated, Bailey pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s the problem, Mom. He’s not there. You’re not there.”

“But you don’t know that. He could walk in any time and then I’d have to see him and I might have to talk to him.”

Bailey stared at her mother. Where was reason? Where was logic? She tried to keep her voice level. “The only one of the family there is me, and I made a three-year-old cry today because I said she was wrong and that there were only six reindeer not eight!”

That got Tracy’s full attention again. She looked up, her brow furrowed. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because I couldn’t remember all the names, okay? I had Dasher and Blitzen, Prancer and Donder, but then I blanked out and called one Disco and another Asteroid. I decided I better quit while I was ahead.” The little girl’s mother had whisked the tot out of the store, leaving her basket full of Christmas cheer behind-and unpaid for.

“Dasher, Dancer, Donder, Blitzen, Comet, Cupid, Prancer, Vixen. And then Rudolph, of course, for those nonpurists.”

Bailey rolled her eyes. “See what I mean? You’ve got to come back.”

“We’ve already gone over that.”

“Then let’s go over it again, and start at the beginning. Please.” Bailey rescued the last carrot from her mother’s brutal clutches, biting into it herself.

“It started right after we dropped Harry off at college.”

Yesterday Bailey had called her brother and grilled him about the situation, but Harry was as mystified as she. Reluctant to put a damper on his first months away at college, big sister had promised him she would handle it-but that meant either getting to the bottom of the problem or getting through to her mother. “All right. You two dropped Harry off at college. Then a couple weeks later Dan left because…?”

Tracy cleaved a cabbage in two. “Because I didn’t notice his hair and his teeth.”

Bailey had to cough up a chunk of carrot. “What?”

Her mother’s knuckles went white on the knife. “He used something to get rid of the gray at his temples. He bleached his teeth!”

Okay. “That’s not a capital offense.”

“The capital offense was I didn’t notice, according to him. He came home one day and stomped into Harry’s room. I was sitting in there, just…just thinking…and he demanded that I look at him.”

“And you didn’t realize he’d gone George Hamilton on you?”

Tracy’s knife clattered to the cutting board. “I’d been busy. I’d been preoccupied. So I didn’t recognize the changes, okay? But Dan didn’t give me a second chance. He packed up his things and left the house, right then and there.”

Dan was an easygoing man. He’d married Tracy three years after her divorce and didn’t seem the least bit ego-diminished by leaving his job at a big-time brokerage house to run his wife’s family’s store alongside her. Though Bailey had always kept a wall between herself and her stepfather, she knew that had been her choice, not his. Dan had never resented having a stepdaughter and he’d appeared to love the life he’d made with her mother and their son, Harry.

None of this was making sense.

“Is it…” Bailey cleared her throat. “Is it another woman?”

Tracy stared at the cutting board, unblinking. “I didn’t see a gold chain around his neck, if that’s what you mean.”

A twinge of pain pierced Bailey’s right temple. Gold chain, another woman. Another woman, gold chain. Was this some sort of code she didn’t understand? A headache started blossoming, probably because the half of her brain that dealt with logic and reason was contorting like a pretzel trying to make sense of the irrational that had now become her family life.

Her calf itched and she flashed on that night she’d watched her mother sobbing in the dry bathtub. How could Tracy do this again? After Bailey’s father’s defection, why had Tracy let another man get close enough to mess with her heart? Bailey could remember endless weeks of her mother crying in the middle of the night-had Tracy completely blocked that from her mind?

There were non-risky ways to negotiate the world, maybe even to have a man in your life, but none of them involved leaving the safe side of the emotion superhighway. It was up to Bailey to yank her mother back to the sidewalk.

“Look, Mom, think of the big picture. The store-”

“I can’t go there.” Tracy retrieved the knife and started killing the cabbage.

“Mom-”

“If Dan’s going to go to the trouble of looking gorgeous, then I won’t chance seeing him!” She reached over to whack an innocent green onion for good measure. “And that’s final.”

Not to mention completely crazy. Trying to think through her headache, Bailey grabbed some cellophane off the counter and moved to stuff it in the garbage beneath the sink. The bag was near full, so she tied it off and stomped toward the side yard and the big can left there, grateful to work off some of her frustration in the brisk night air.

Maybe it would clear her mind enough to allow her sensible, rational self to formulate a new strategy for dealing with the situation.

At this point in the property, a narrow, hip-high hedge divided their yard from the Jacobsons’. And wouldn’t you know, Finn stood on the other side, beside his grandmother’s own can. The combined strains of “Frosty the Snowman” and “Away in a Manger” must have masked the sounds of her leaving her house. He didn’t seem to notice her presence as he broke down some boxes and stuffed them in the recycle bin.

Her frustration turned to something else as she looked her fill.

Wide shoulders, brawny arms, lean hips, long legs. As he moved, his T-shirt lifted, showing a brief slice of rippling ab muscles. She flashed back fourteen years, when he’d gone from the boy-she-loved-to-annoy to the boy-she-couldn’t-ignore. The first day he’d arrived for that particular summer he’d gazed at her over that very hedge, finding her on her back steps where she was coloring a beat-up pair of white canvas sneakers with a pack of Sharpie pens.

“Hello, pest,” he’d called out.

Her old bikinis had been tossed in the trash just that morning-the ones that had fit since she was eleven, but that didn’t now that she was fourteen. The tops of her new swimsuits had actual cups, and she had actual breasts to put inside them. Her hair was long, past her back strap, and she’d turned it into golden ripples with a new crimping iron the night before.

That spring, she’d taken custody of her mother’s Clinique Black Honey lip gloss, and loved the wet shine and darkened pink it gave to her mouth. About every twenty minutes she applied another layer, just as often as she took a brush to her gleaming length of hair.

She’d liked the Bailey she now saw in the mirror, and she admired that new Bailey’s reflection on a regular basis. Even her little brother had teased her about checking herself out in the reflective chrome on the refrigerator door handle and in the side mirrors of any vehicle she happened to pass.

So that day when she glanced up at Finn’s voice, she was ready for him to see that the “pest” had changed. She wasn’t a whole lot taller, but she’d stood anyway, eager to give him his first glimpse of the works. Call her vain.

She had been.

But she wasn’t prepared for Finn’s changes. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe he’d looked just the same the previous Christmas, and it was Bailey’s more mature eyes that now noticed the stretch of his T-shirt over his shoulders, the clean lines of his male face, the lean strength in his arms and legs.

The strange yet exciting expression in his dark eyes.

She’d prickled from her scalp to between her bare toes.

Half of her wanted to retreat. Half of her wanted to flirt. That half won. She’d sauntered over to him, feeling shaky inside and hot everywhere else.

With eight feet still separating them, the urge to back away had coursed through her again, but she was pulled forward by that serious, mysterious expression in his ever-watchful eyes. “Oh shit,” he’d whispered as she’d walked closer, her new hips swaying. “Oh shit.”

Maybe he’d had a premonition.

Maybe he had one now, fourteen years later. Because without warning, he looked up, pinning her with his one good eye. She was caught red-handed, drinking him in.

It was still there, as if fourteen subsequent New Year’s Eve balls had never fallen in Times Square. His dangerous male beauty, her attraction to it, that edgy sense of sex-in-the-offing that she hadn’t been experienced enough to recognize as a naïve young teenager. At twenty-eight she knew what it was.

Had already experienced it again with Finn, of course. On his grandmother’s front porch, at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, on each occasion she’d felt that fierce tug of physical awareness. It only ratcheted higher now, as without moving a muscle, without saying a word, his lashes swept down, his gaze running over her body.

Bailey froze as it seemed to strip her shirt from her shoulders, yank her jeans from her legs, burn away her bra and panties. With one look, making her naked for him. Again.

Her thigh muscles tightened. She crossed her free arm over her chest, reassured to feel cotton beneath her skin, but intent on hiding her tight, almost aching nipples.

“You scared to get too close, GND?” he taunted, a dark pirate with his eye patch and gleam of feral white teeth. “Surely you’re not afraid of me.”

She shook her head and forced her feet to venture closer. “Surely not.” Sexual attraction didn’t frighten her, a sensible, rational woman. What she was really afraid of she’d left behind ten years ago. Attraction wasn’t the same as emotion.

So when you looked at it that way, approaching Finn was perfectly safe.

Finn didn’t watch her toss the bag of garbage into the can and drop the lid. Instead he continued breaking down the boxes he’d dragged outside.

At the thump of plastic meeting plastic, he waited for her to walk away. Surely she’d be eager to distance herself from him and scurry back into her mother’s house, still spooked by the scarred man who had silenced her outside Gram’s. But her sand-colored boots stayed firmly fixed to the concrete on her side of the hedge.

Finn kept his mouth shut. Unlike the other night, when he’d visited a bar on his way home from the grocery store, now he was completely sober. No confessions, not even a little small talk, was going to spill from his trap tonight. Nothing off-limits was coming from his mouth this time.

“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

He glanced up. She was staring at the tallest, biggest box he’d yet to flatten. There was a photo on the outside of what it had contained-a five-foot-high chocolate fountain in the general shape of a Douglas fir.

“Is that thing for real?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“First the cookie Nativity scene, and now the Rockefeller Plaza of Christmas tree fountains. Someone must have a special admirer.”

“Special’s the word.” He could clear up exactly how and why, but he didn’t. Why shouldn’t he keep her guessing? Not to mention she had this funny little curl to her lip that matched the one she’d had the summer he’d arrived in Coronado wearing a braided thread bracelet made by a girl from home.

He’d snipped it off that night, but he wasn’t obligated to make things easy for Bailey any longer. Remember? He was a grown man now, not a half-tamed boy who wanted her more than another breath.

Though as she continued to stand there, he found he couldn’t continue to ignore her either. Where the hell had he left his secret agent super patience? Was that suddenly gone forever too? “Is something the matter?” he asked.

“No.” She glanced back at her mother’s house with a little grimace, then shrugged. “Just taking a moment to enjoy the strains of that new Christmas melody classic, ‘The First Santa Claus Is Coming to O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”

He wanted to laugh. “Neighborhood celebration getting to you?”

Her sigh whispered beneath the clash of carols in the distance. “I hate Christmas.”

A familiar refrain. He stuffed the last of the flattened fountain box into the recycle bin. “Tell me something about Bailey Sullivan I don’t already know.”

“Really?” Her eyes widened, all thick sexy lashes and unforgettable blue. “You want to talk?”

No.

Yet now that he’d thrown out the comment he couldn’t play coward. Anyhow, turnabout was fair play, and last night he’d given her the CliffsNotes of his own life story.

“I just got to thinking…if I left the wild side and went straight, maybe you, on the other hand, went crooked.” He looked over, curved his mouth in what he thought she might take as a smile. “You know, perhaps somewhere along the line little Miss Perfect fell off the great balance beam of life.”

“I was never Miss Perfect.” She was frowning.

“Could have fooled me.” He rocked on his heels, staring her down with his one eye. “But then again…you did, didn’t you?”

A shadow crossed her face and he dropped his gaze to adjust the placement of Gram’s cans. Pull back, pull back, he warned himself. Don’t get riled up, don’t give her a chance to get to you. Risking another look at her, he caught her watching him again.

Then she gave a little shrug. “Maybe I did change. Maybe I turned into someone with my own wild side.”

He snorted. “Wild? You wouldn’t know wild if it bit you on the butt.”

Another frown pulled her brows together and she stamped closer to the hibiscus hedge between them. “That’s what you did,” she hissed. “Remember, Finn? You bit me on a lot of places, including my butt.”

Hell. She had to remind him. There was no explaining away or excusing the primitive need teenage Finn had felt to mark Bailey’s perfect skin. Her neck, the inside of her thigh, the high curve of her round, pretty ass, because it was one of the few places a hickey could be hidden by her itsy bitsy, teeny-weeny bikinis that drove him so crazy.

He cleared his throat. “That was a long time ago.” He shifted the recycle bin two inches to the right. “We’re no longer two adolescents hopped up on hormones.”

“Is that what you’d call it?” She ran her forefinger over one of the yellow hibiscus flowers, its ruffles closed up tight for the night.

As if he’d confess to it ever being anything more. Not when he could also recall with perfect clarity the roadkill she’d made of his heart when he’d discovered she’d left for college early, despite their summer plans. At his autopsy, they’d find the four-chambered organ still flattened, without a skid mark in sight.

He ignored the old ache in his chest and went back to concentrating on gaining the advantage. “In any case, I’m more interested in this wild-thing Bailey you claim to be now.”

She shrugged again. “Okay, maybe wild is an overstatement in comparison to your checkered past, but I live a pretty full life.”

“Oh really?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’re a rigid, seventy-hour-a-week, all-work-no-play jobaholic.”

“No-”

“And that even the balls-of-steel senior partner at the firm you run trembles when you call his name.”

Her quick glance back at her house made it clear she supposed her mother had been filling him in. Then she put one hand on her hip. “Maybe he trembles for reasons you don’t know about.”

Oh yeah, like she was doing the horizontal tango with a white-haired lawyer who’d been married for fifty-three years. As if he’d believe that was a Bailey move. Finn gave her an appraising glance from the golden top of her head to her booted toes. “I bet your social life’s lousy.”

She exhaled an insulted huff and her other hand fisted on her other hip. “You think I can’t get a man?”

This was too easy. Maybe it was mean of him to needle her, and he didn’t know why it pleased him so much to make her mad, but he hadn’t had this much fun in months. “I know you won’t keep one.”

She huffed again. “Who cares when L.A. is chock-full of eligible bachelors?”

“The bachelor you spend most of your leisure hours with lives in the condo below yours and is gay.”

Her jaw dropped. “How-”

“Easy. The Secret Service’s Office of Protective Research keeps extensive files on anyone who threatens the security of the president or the country.”

A flush burned on her cheeks and her eyes sparked. “I have never threatened anyone or anything in my life!”

Finn lifted a hand. “Then, Bailey, so much for your claim of a bad-girl transformation.”

“I’ll show you a transformation.”

Then she did. She did it so quickly that he couldn’t leap away fast enough. One second she was glaring at him over the hedge and the next she’d grabbed him around the neck, yanked his head close, and sank her teeth into his bottom lip.

“That’s what you get,” she said, pulling back. “You wanted to take a bite out of me, so I took mine out of you.”

She continued to glower at him, her breasts heaving against a fuzzy white sweater. “Though a garden hose might have been a better weapon.”

“I’ll say,” Finn muttered, because he couldn’t let her have the last word.

Or the last kiss.

He grabbed her shoulders and hauled her against the low, narrow hedge. He pressed close to it too, not even noticing the rattle of leaves and the dig of branches on his way to her lips. Her body was rigid beneath his hands, but her mouth was hot. Soft and hot, and he almost wished for that threatened cold blast from the garden hose because he was teenage-horny again, his cock going hard to fight the denim of his jeans.

He pushed his tongue between her lips. She made a sound, but he didn’t care if it was a protest. She’d had her chance at punishment; this was his. The inside of her mouth was peppermint-sweet-as if she’d been sucking on a candy cane not long ago-and his eye closed at the intoxicating taste.

With her shoulders cupped by his palms and his tongue curling against the velvet of hers, time rewound. He was twenty again, nineteen, sixteen. The age he’d been that fateful day when he’d looked at her and the dark rebel inside him had recognized the golden girl who could be the calm to his hormonal storm. He’d cursed her, the world, fate, the moment he’d recognized it, but he’d been unable to take his feet off the path.

But it had never been so purely cerebral, he admitted, as he slanted his head, taking more of her mouth as he ran his hands over her sharp shoulder blades to the round globes of her ass. Not cerebral in the least. He’d been sixteen and he’d wanted sex too.

There were easier girls to get it from, he’d known that. Known them. It took time to persuade the good girls to put out, that was a given. It was going to take time to get Bailey to bed. But that hadn’t stopped him from still wanting her. From wanting, wanting, wanting her.

Now nearing thirty-one, Finn didn’t seem to have the patience of his teenage self. He found her waist and burrowed under the soft sweater to the sleek skin at the small of her back. Even that wasn’t enough, and as he tracked his lips from her mouth to her warm cheek, his fingertips tucked under the waistband of her jeans.

At the same time that he found her lobe and bit down, he shoved his hands lower to fill his palms with the naked, curved globes of her ass. Bless thong underwear.

She jerked, her skin goose-bumped against his hands. He gentled his lips on her ear and rubbed his nose against her soft hair. Her familiar perfume filled his head.

Like that, it was a dozen years ago again. Leaves rattled as he tried moving closer. Like then, always needing more of her sweetness and the fire he wanted to find beyond it.

“Finn…” Bailey whispered, her throaty voice shivering down his spine.

“What?” He pressed a kiss to the rim of her ear. Still aching like sixteen, still as mesmerized.

“Finn?”

“Mmm?” His mouth found the satiny skin beneath her jaw.

“Finn?”

He froze, his tongue against Bailey’s hot flesh. That wasn’t her voice calling his name.

It was part of his sixteen-year-old world, though.

And his thirty-year-old world too.

Gram.

He broke free of Bailey. Then of her spell.

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the hedge, and he wondered how he’d gotten so stupid. Why had he let his mouth get him into trouble again? His lips were throbbing, the whole of him was aching for more kisses.

Such a damn dangerous ache.

At the same moment they turned from each other. The older dark rebel and the wiser golden girl beating hasty retreats from the traitorous, beguiling past.

On his end, cursing all the way. He could only hope it wasn’t as it had been all those years ago…already too late.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 5

In Italian legend, La Befana is an old woman who brings gifts to children on Epiphany Eve. It is said that the Wise Men visited her on the way to Bethlehem, but she was too busy cleaning house to accompany them when invited. Later, when she regretted the decision and set out to find them and the Baby Jesus, she could not. The story goes that she continues to wander, leaving gifts for the children she does come across.