Must Love Mistletoe

Chapter 5

From the master bedroom, Tracy heard her daughter leave the house. That must mean it was morning.

She turned over in bed, drawing her knees to her chest. The orange sweat pants she wore had a hole in the knee, and she covered it with her palm, hunching her shoulders inside one of Harry’s discarded T-shirts. If she remembered correctly, it advertised the basketball tournament his team had played in last spring. He’d come home after painting signs for some student function with long drips of blue paint on the front and banished the garment to the rag bin.

She’d rescued it in June, never realizing what comfort it might bring her come autumn.

Thanks to Dan.

At the thought of him, she bolted up. She’d call the SOB, she decided, temper flaring. Give him a piece of her mind. Better yet, she’d go find him at that sex-in-the-singles-complex that he now called home. His car would be easy enough to spot.

Her stomach clenched and heat shot up her spine to her neck. That’s just what she’d do!

But then she remembered his newly brilliant teeth, his glossy hair, the tan he must be working on at the golf course now that he wasn’t working at The Perfect Christmas. And she thought of the hole in her sweat pants, the paint on her shirt, the dull color of her hair and her complexion.

She fell back to the bed, despondence blanketing over the anger, and she burrowed under its safe, familiar weight too. Sleep beckoned again.

She could taste it, a sweet, syrupy lozenge on her tongue. So, so sweet. Tracy’s limbs sank like anchors into the mattress while her mind drifted out on the calm morning tide…

Bells were ringing.

Tracy woke at the noise, and without thinking stumbled from the bed to walk, zombielike, toward the front door. Her fingers found the knob, and the cold metal roused her to awareness. Who…?

Through the sidelights, covered by gathered white sheer curtains, was the outline of a man. Short hair. Compact build.

Her heart jerked high, lodging in her throat. Dan. He’d come back to her.

When they’d first met, she’d hated men. Her divorce had blackened the edges of her heart forever, she’d thought, cauterizing it against any future mistakes. Then a friend of a friend introduced her to this lazy-smiling, easy-in-his-own-skin man at a party. She’d looked at him with instant suspicion, staring at the white wine he offered as if it were arsenic. But he’d worn her down, then won her over.

Twenty years later, he’d left her.

For that, she might have reverted to loathing all men again. Except when you had a son, she’d discovered, you lost your ability for nonspecific XY-chromosome hatred. So instead she just loathed Dan.

No! Her fingers tightened on the doorknob. She didn’t loathe him. She didn’t care that much. She wouldn’t. Ever. Twenty years ago, she’d taken a second leap of trust only to fall flat on her face again, but Dan couldn’t know that any part of her hurt.

Every part of her hurt.

Still, she steadied her breath, tightened down the shell of her pride, then pulled open the door to face him.

It wasn’t Dan.

The young man who it was, stared at her under yanked-high brows. “Uh…Mrs. Willis?”

Tracy swallowed the bitter pill of disappointment and put what little energy she had left into a smile. “Jeff.” Jeff Gable, a high school classmate of her son, Harry. “It’s good to see you.”

Jeff shoved his hands in his pockets. “Is Harry home?” His glance danced away, as if it embarrassed him to look at her.

Tracy curled her bare toes against the foyer carpet, remembering her misshapen sweat pants and baggy T. Her hand went up to smooth her rumpled hair. “No. He won’t be home from college until a few days before Christmas.”

“Oh.” Jeff shuffled back, as if to keep his distance from her. “I’m here for the month of December.”

She tried to remember what school he attended. It had consumed her last year-not only Harry’s college applications and essays, but all the tension and excitement of senior year and its effect on him and his friends. She’d been president of the Booster Club and secretary of the PTSA, and every week had been full of events to be attended, organized, or chaperoned.

She and Dan had adored every minute of it.

Maybe only she had adored it.

Jeff took another step away from her. “Are you sick?”

She blinked at him. Did she look sick? She thought of the orange sweat pants again. The hole in their knee. Of course she looked sick.

The boy grimaced. “I mean…you’re usually at The Perfect Christmas this time of year. I didn’t expect to see you at home.”

“Oh. Bailey’s at the store today. Harry’s older sister.” Guilt stepped forward, shouldering a place for itself among the other emotions crowding her chest. Bailey, who’d gone from five to forty in the space of a season. Tracy knew why, of course. As a little girl she’d borne witness to the end of her parents’ marriage. Neither Tracy nor her ex-husband had tried to protect her from the ugliness.

Tracy had leaned on her little daughter-all big dry eyes and starched spine-then.

As she was doing now.

More guilt.

But then it was swept away as over Jeff’s shoulder she glimpsed a familiar car cruising toward the house. Her heart jolted to her throat again and she grabbed Jeff ’s arm, dragged him inside, then slammed the door shut behind him.

The sweat pants. The T-shirt. The pillow-head hair. She couldn’t let Dan see her like this.

She couldn’t look at his face.

“We’re not here, Jeff.”

The heels of his sneakers thudded against the hardwood floor as he backed away. “Wh-what?”

Tracy had said something similar before. We’re not here, Bailey. She’d hidden from her ex, holing the two of them up in the house, locking the doors and telling her daughter to be quiet, quiet and good so that Tracy could avoid facing the man who was making her so miserable. “Never give your heart away,” she’d whispered to her daughter then.

Now she couldn’t regret the advice.

“Mrs. Willis?” Jeff Gable’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Do you, uh, need some help?”

Tracy sidestepped the young man to curl a finger around one of the window sheers and peek outside. The car was slowing, then it paused behind the one-presumably Jeff ’s-that was parked in the driveway.

“Mrs. Willis?”

The little-boy note in Jeff ’s voice got her attention. She glanced over at him, seeing the confusion on his face. Good God, what must he be thinking?

“I…um, wanted you to come in so I could send some Christmas treats home for your family.” It was the first thing that popped into Tracy’s mind, in case he was worried she was a serial killer or a Mrs. Robinson in the making.

And since she’d mentioned food, and he was a teenager, he grinned, relaxing. “That would be great.”

Which meant she had to lead him toward the kitchen.

There, she stood on the cool floor between the sink and the tiled island and tried to think what she could possibly put together in the way of “Christmas treats.” She found a paper plate first.

Then it was three crumb-dusted old Oreos from the bottom of the cookie jar. A handful of withered baby carrots. For the reindeer, she told herself. Two lonely martini olives from the test tube-like jar in the back of the fridge.

She found one foil-wrapped dinner mint mixed in with the pencils in the everything drawer. A lone freckled banana from the now-empty fruit bowl. Finally, a sprinkle of hardened raisins from the red box in the pantry.

To hide the pitiful sight, she covered it all with the last crumpled inches of the foil tube, then taped an even more pitiful smooshed red bow-also liberated from the everything drawer-on top.

The plate was just like her, she realized, blinking back a sudden sting of tears. Unkempt on the outside and a mix of old, lonely, and dried up on the inside.

How had this happened? Harry had gone, and no wonder Dan found nothing else to keep him at home.

She didn’t even have the will or the energy to loathe him anymore.

“Here, Jeff.”

He looked up from something he’d been fooling with on the counter. A little Christmas tree. Jeff had plugged it in and the tiny lights twinkled in the shadowed kitchen. Tracy vaguely remembered Bailey setting it down last night and even more vaguely remembered ordering two dozen for the store last spring.

When she still had a son and husband at home. When she had a purpose. An identity.

“This is nice,” Jeff said. “Maybe I’ll get my mom one for Christmas. Do you think she’d like it?”

She shrugged. What did she know about the tastes of Jeff ’s mom who was happily married, her home now complete with her son?

“Well, thanks for the plate,” he said. “I guess I should be going now, Mrs. Willis.”

“Of course,” she said, following him to the front door. “Of course you should be going.”

She waved to him as he drove off down the street. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself but couldn’t seem to help it. “You all seem to do that.”

“Where are those yummy little powdered sugar stars that are usually here?” Trin asked Bailey, frowning down at the hospitality table at the front of The Perfect Christmas. She rolled the stroller that held her sleeping son around to the other side. “And those tiny chocolate bells?”

“We’re doing things a bit different today,” Bailey answered, unpacking yet another box and hanging yet another angel on yet another tree.

“But nobody likes leftover Halloween candy at this time of year,” Trin complained, her forefinger making waves in the candy corn and jack-o’-lantern-shaped lollipops Bailey had dumped on the gilt-edged Santa tray.

“It was all I could find in the drawer in the back office, okay?” Bailey snatched a piece of sugary corn and tossed it into her mouth. She detested the chalky stuff, but damned if she’d let anyone know it. “I didn’t realize I had to put in a weekly order to get the usual from the baker and confectioner’s down the street.”

She wasn’t going to feel bad about it.

There was already plenty of “feeling bad” to go around.

Last night. Finn. Kissing Finn. She felt really bad about that. He’d been needling her, she knew it, but hadn’t been able to resist needling back. With her teeth.

And when she’d sunk them into his bottom lip, when she’d tasted him again after ten years…

She’d done it to prove a point, of course. To prove that she might have been a naïve teenager when they’d first kissed, but she was a grown-up now and could initiate whatever the hell she wanted. A kiss with teeth. With tongues.

When he’d touched hers last night she’d gone ready in one swift rush of wet heat.

And in that single moment he’d shown her he still had the upper hand when it came to her body’s responses.

Where that fit in with her sensible assertion that sexual attraction and emotional sloppiness were not one and the same she didn’t want to think too hard about.

“Still, you should have better giveaways,” Trin grumbled, continuing to dig through the candy. “Especially when I came all the way over here-”

“You live two blocks away.”

“-to renew our friendship only to find you won’t spill a sole small detail about what’s going on between you and the Fabulous Finn.”

His kiss was fabulous. And he was so strong. Stronger than she was. His grandmother had called his name and Bailey hadn’t heard it at first, she’d heard nothing over the rumbling-train beat of her heart. But if she had, she would have ignored it, all to stay longer with Finn. To touch Finn more. To give Finn anything he asked.

What a weakling she was. First, surrendering to pressure to come back to Coronado. And second, surrendering to the sexual temptation of having one more taste of her first lover.

This time, it had taken Finn to break them apart.

“All set.” The voice of Byron, the male half of her team of part-time sales kids, snagged her attention. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw him wrapping up a transaction at the counter. He slid the receipt into the store’s trademark bag and gave the shopper his usual dreamy smile. “Like, have a cool Yule.”

Trin’s gaze caught Bailey’s. Cool Yule? she mouthed, her dimple digging into her cheek.

“Now that you see what I have to deal with,” Bailey whispered back, “maybe you’ll stop whining about the quality of the free grub.”

Byron, his shoulder-length blond hair cemented by salt water into tight corkscrews, drifted in the wake of the departing shopper, his flip-flops flap-flapping against the soles of his tanned feet. He sniffed the air as the door opened.

When it closed behind the customer, he swung toward Bailey. “I gotta leave a half hour early today, boss lady. Surf’s up.”

“What?”

“Brontë!” He raised his voice. “Surf’s up!”

His female counterpart, down to the salt water- treated hair and the sandals, poked her head out of the back office. “Then you have to go home and get my wetsuit, By, I didn’t bring it with me.”

He nodded, and turned toward the front door. “Later, gators.”

“Wait a minute,” Bailey protested, stepping in front of him. There were browsers all over the store: gathered around the nearby tree that was dressed only in seashells, in the old kitchen where they kept the potpourri and holiday baking mixes, up the ornate staircase and in all the second-floor rooms, including the alcove devoted to Christmas dolls. “You can’t go now. And you guys can’t leave early.”

Byron just looked at her.

“I’m serious.” She narrowed her eyes and put the ice in her voice that made the two-hundred-dollar-a-billing-hour attorneys quake in their Prada loafers. “You and Brontë don’t get off until six o’clock.”

“But boss lady, it’s Christmas time.”

“Good, Byron,” she praised, nodding. It wasn’t clear to her if his brain was merely water-logged or if he was just plain dumb. “And we’re a Christmas store, so that means we’re busy and I need you to do your job.”

Byron gave her his puppy-dog eyes. They’d worked on her during his first couple of shifts, but now she knew better. He didn’t have a big paper due the next day or an important exam first thing in the morning. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t even enrolled in any institution outside of the School of Surf Wax.

So she wasn’t giving in again. She wasn’t giving in to one more thing! Not to impulse, not to hormones, not to puppy-dog eyes, emergency requests, or guilt-tinged obligations. She was here, saving the family farm, and wasn’t that enough?

The rattle of jingle bells drew her eyes to the door. An older man entered, just as “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” piped through the store’s speakers. Oh right, she muttered silently. Santa Claus, my sorry behind.

Instead of red felt and white fur, the man coming through the door wore a blue-and-gold cap that read “U.S. Navy Retired.” And she doubted he was bringing her anything she wanted for Christmas. Yesterday this very gentleman had phoned to set up this afternoon’s meeting, letting her know it was “imperative.”

“Hey,” Trin said, sotto voce. “Is it my imagination or what, but does that guy look like General Waverly from White Christmas? He’s got the exact same military posture and military haircut.”

Bailey looked over at her friend. “What are you talking about?”

“You know, the classic White Christmas. In the movie, there’s that old World War II general who Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye put on that show for in Maine.”

“Vermont.”

“I think it’s Maine.”

“Trust me,” Bailey said. “It’s Vermont.”

Trin scowled. “I thought you hate the holiday and everything that goes along with it.”

Turning away from her friend, Bailey forced a welcoming smile, though instinct was telling her she should be anything but. “Captain Reed,” she said with a little wave. “Or should I be calling you President?”

He strode toward her, chuckling. “Bailey, I’m the president of the chamber of commerce, not the United States, as you very well know.”

“Your orders sounded mighty presidential over the phone yesterday.” But when she’d asked him why they had to meet, he’d held out his reasons for the face-to-face.

“I like to do these things in person when I can,” he said, still smiling.

These things? That didn’t sound good. “Well, I don’t have much time, we’re busy here, and”-she broke off as she realized that Byron had slipped out after the newcomer’s arrival-“we’re shorthanded.”

Next chance she got, she was going to smear suntan oil on the surface of Byron’s old-school longboard. It was a surfer’s prank guaranteed to give him a cold dunking when he tried to stand on his first wave of the day. She hadn’t grown up half Gidget for nothing.

The captain drew out a folded piece of paper from the breast pocket of his sport coat. “Don’t worry, I won’t take up much of your time.”

Bailey eyed the paper. “What do you have there?”

“First off, I just want to extend the chamber’s appreciation for stepping forward, Bailey. We understand you have your own job, but this is important too. To your family and the community at large.”

She didn’t bother wondering how he knew so much about the circumstances. Coronado comprised a mere seventy-five hundred households-and due to the military presence, that meant significantly fewer were full-time civilians. Those civilians were the kind of people who reveled in the small-town atmosphere that included plenty of small-town gossip.

“We knew we could count on you, Bailey. We’re all glad you didn’t turn your back on The Perfect Christmas. It’s a landmark.”

“An institution.” She should have turned her back on it. That would have been the easier path. But the weight of tradition and her innate firstborn perfectionism had rendered her genetically incapable of allowing the decades-old family business to fail on her watch. She’d had to at least try to make it better.

“I’m doing my best until the twenty-fifth,” she said, making clear she had her limits, though. “After that…”

The captain beamed through her warning. Bailey supposed she was glad someone still felt like smiling. She could barely breathe for the weight of the albatross.

Which only got heavier as he held out the paper in his hand.

“What’s this?” she asked, afraid to take it.

He still wore his charming smile as he forced the sheet into her hands. “The chamber events scheduled for the store.”

“Events? What events are those?” she asked, but slowly opened the paper. It outlined the next days until Christmas.

Santa Storytelling Hours.

Christmas Movie Nights. Which apparently included dessert.

Tea for the walking tours on Saturday mornings.

Her head shot up. “We can’t possibly do this. I don’t have the time or the extra employees necessary.”

She’d pressed Byron and his twin, Brontë, to find her additional help, but they were more interested in the state of the surf than the state of the store’s staff. “I’m sorry, but The Perfect Christmas will have to back out of these events this year.”

He was already shaking his head. “I know it might be difficult, but the flyers have been posted all over town for weeks. Concierges in the big hotels have organized groups of interested guests to attend together. We can’t disappoint the tourists. It’s our livelihood.”

Behind her, Trin was whispering in appalled tones. “Bailey, he’s a veteran! You can’t let the general down. Who’ll bring snow to Maine?”

Vermont.

Albatross.

She tried picturing Byron in the dry-cleaner-wrapped St. Nick costume hanging in the back office. Yo, dude. Have yourself a cool Yule.

Bailey groaned. On her watch it was going to be the Big Kahuna playing the Big Claus. Terrific.

But despite that, with Trin whispering behind her and the chamber’s representative wearing an expectant smile in front of her, she discovered she couldn’t say no to the gen-captain. President. Whatever.

Whatever was wrong with her?

She still didn’t have the answer to that question at 11:58 p.m. that night. Back from the store but unable to sleep, she was wide awake when the phone rang in her old room. Channeling her inner teenager, she automatically picked up the receiver on the little table beside her bed.

Her spine jerked straight against her skinny pillow when she heard the voice on the other end.

And she couldn’t say no to that person either.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 6

In 1843, British businessman Sir Henry Cole asked artist John Calcott Horsley to print some Christmas cards. One thousand cards were printed in black and white and then colored by hand. The cards, which depicted a happy family raising a toast, were criticized by some for promoting drunkenness.