Their Christmas to Remember

by Amalie Berlin

“Hey.” He didn’t want her to go. And he really didn’t want her to go on these terms. “Stop. Just wait.”

  “I need to go home. I’m workin’ tomorrow.”

  “I know, I’m working tomorrow too.” He caught her around the waist when she reached the landing and found her panties. “You can stay. I can get you home early enough to change. You’re upset. I don’t know what just happened. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  But he was notorious for it. And despite all his talk about this being all right because it wasn’t a real relationship, he’d fallen right back into that pattern where as soon as he tried to get serious about something, about anything, he hurt the one he was with. As soon as he stopped trying to make people laugh, someone got hurt. Which should inform his decision about Lyons. Maybe she was right, and he should let his brother work things out on his own. But she obviously wasn’t working things out on her own. She was running.

  “I hate gettin’ up that early,” she muttered, but didn’t pull away from him.

  He wrapped his arms around her until they were locked together, back to front, and he could rest his chin on her shoulder. “I’m sorry I brought up something painful, Angel. I didn’t even get a chance to ask you to the winter ball on Saturday before I messed it up.”

  Her head drooped forward, and she shook it in a display of weariness that made him want to carry her right back upstairs.

  “I don’t know if we should go together.”

  It was a mess, and exactly the wrong time to push. “Let me drive you home.”

  She shook her head, then disengaged his arms from her waist so she could step into the panties he’d peeled off her. The panties that fit perfectly along the freckled proof she’d tanned in a bikini a few times in her life.

  She stepped into her trousers and shook her head. “No reason for both of us to go out in the cold, but you can call me a cab.”

  He had to remind himself he’d said he wasn’t going to push her tonight—twice—before he was able to nod and retrieve his own trousers and the phone he’d abandoned in shedding them.

  Tomorrow, after this had calmed down, he’d talk to her again.

  Or maybe it was time to speak with his brother about Angel, since it was just about as easy to get information about Angel from Angel as it was to get information from Lyons about Lyons. But she had talked about his brother when pressed and revealed a little more about herself along the way.

  Manipulative—a trait he hadn’t picked up from his mother, but now wished he had. Maybe Lyons would talk about Angel and reveal something Wolfe could use to help him too. Maybe it would even help their beleaguered relationship to speak about something else.

  He generally blindly stumbled a route through the blasted landscape of human emotions. No maps here. No real landmarks. Malfunctioning compass. Following this one light on the horizon was all he had, when everything was starting to feel important.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, after a day stuck in a cycle of questioning herself and her decisions, Angel stepped out of the treatment room where she’d just treated a copper-curled toddler who’d discovered a bead would fit wonderfully far up her nose, and hadn’t made it ten paces when the sound of two male Scottish voices stopped her dead in the hallway.

  Wolfe talking with Lyons. She could identify the sound of his voice, but not the words. She could also hear the strain, which was why she took another couple of steps closer. They were kind of, almost dating. If he was in distress, shouldn’t she help?

  “She’s using you, don’t you get that?” Lyons said, not exactly shouting, but even with the door half closed, she would’ve understood every word without purposefully eavesdropping, which she really shouldn’t be doing...

  The thought drifted off when Lyons’s words actually processed. When they did, something cold enveloped her, as surely as if she’d just fallen through ice.

  Lyons hadn’t said her name, but he was talking to Wolfe. This was about her. She was the one being accused of using him. She looked quickly down the hall and back, making sure no one else had come down the small, far-off hallway while her attention had been focused elsewhere. It was bad enough that she and Wolfe had already become part of the hospital gossip mill without Lyons making matters worse by throwing around such accusations. Any Sutcliffe employee would know he’d meant her.

  Swallowing down the acid rising in her throat took almost superhuman strength. She should stop listening; it wouldn’t be making her guts churn if she’d kept on walking. But then she couldn’t keep someone else from hearing either—as if she could now. No, they’d just see her lurking and have a real story to tell, not just some more of Lyons’s rantings to dismiss.

  Angel looked back the way she’d come, considering a different route to where she needed to go. If she took the stairs, she could go up to the next floor and down three hallways to the elevators, and then come back down. Then she wouldn’t have to stand here, where she might throw up, and she wouldn’t have to risk Wolfe seeing her, and knowing she’d overheard them fighting about her. Not that she could hear anything except urgent-sounding utterings now. Maybe they were wrapping it up. She should go before they came out and found her there.

  What possible reason could they even have to do this at work? She understood emotions running high and losing control, but Wolfe had told her how he hated workplace drama. It was why he didn’t usually date at work. If they were dating, which she wasn’t sure about. Did Lyons just not care about scandal?

  “She’s not innocent, no matter what her name is.”

  Lyons.

  Was Wolfe defending her? If he was, it was quieter.

  When was the last time someone had defended her? The thought almost brought a smile to her face and that lifting in her chest again. Hope stayed her feet. The hope that he felt this thing between them too. Maybe she could.

  “I can’t protect you forever. Someday you’ll have to grow up and see how the world works. How people truly are. Just ask her what she wants from you.” Lyons.

  “She doesn’t want anything. She doesn’t even matter.”

  Wolfe.

  That one was Wolfe, his voice finally rising enough for her to make out the words, and it was to shout about how little she meant to him? Her stomach lurched in a way the toddler’s bloody snot had failed to elicit.

  She’d known this would be short-term, having planned her move for a while, but last night had confused her. Made her want to change her plans. She even knew that Wolfe considered her an easy relationship to have because of the fact she was leaving, and there’d be nothing to tie him down in a couple more weeks. That had been before last night. Even if she’d panicked and fled, it hadn’t been because she regretted them being together. She’d run because she’d felt...too much. And a little freaked out by that. But now hearing him shout that she meant nothing?

  It took a couple of good swallows, ignoring the way her heart suddenly seemed out of rhythm and the light-headed sensation that came with it, for Angel to start moving again, back the way she’d come from to find those stairs.

  It was going to be bad enough to feel the eyes of her coworkers on her as she tried to pretend nothing had happened without suffering his heavy gaze as well. How many of them would agree with Lyons’s assessment of her character? Putting up walls was the only way she’d figured out how to get through. It had helped her survive the bullying that had come from being the poorest child in the school, and the daughter of a family of perpetually incarcerated petty criminals. Shut it all down, lock away the things she’d be judged for.

  All she had to do was slow her heart rate down or start moving slowly enough to keep up with the oxygen supply that flutter pumped, sort out her patients’ discharge—which should’ve already been done—attend her next patient and possibly steal a defibrillator for her handbag.

  She had some time to calm dow
n before she had to go to his church house and decorate the darned tree. Then find a way to be done with all this. She’d done enough.

  He wouldn’t care. She didn’t matter anyway.

  * * *

  Everyone drank wine at the holidays. Or some kind of liquor. Beer. Cocktails. Moonshine. Angel was sure of it. And now that she’d been thrust into full-on participation in the joyousness, it was practically expected she imbibe.

  Which was why she’d purchased three bottles of wine on her way home from work and had a small glass of each—to determine which she liked best—before calling the cab to take her to Wolfe’s church house.

  His church house of sin. Where things happened that didn’t matter.

  And when a girl got liquored up to go decorate a Christmas tree at a church house for the entertainment of ill children in the hospital, she wore her Sunday best. Including heels of some sort. The sort she’d selected were knee-high boots that both hid her knee bandage and went with the pretty white dress with winter blue flowers.

  Now, standing outside Wolfe’s front door, she couldn’t think of a single thing except his loud statement. She couldn’t seem to dismiss it, like that annoying jingle from that horrible toy commercial. Even the wine hadn’t turned down the volume. It completely canceled out her admittedly spotty ability to think of anything entertaining to say, or even pretend there was some way to go back to that grand room without losing her mind.

  To go where the window was—where he wanted to put the tree—meant she had to go where his bed was, where things happened that didn’t matter!

  It was a lot to ask.

  He hadn’t met her outside tonight, which should remind her exactly how low she rated. He’d been far more eager to see her prior to last night’s nothing-important-that-happened.

  It took nearly three minutes for Wolfe to make it to the door. She would’ve given up waiting and returned home if the cab hadn’t left.

  “Hi.” He looked a bit disheveled, his dark hair mussed in the front as it had become when she’d plowed her hands through the thick, wavy locks last night. And he wasn’t dressed up for this tree business, wearing a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved black V-necked sweater, showing off his broad shoulders, narrow waist and the tiniest bit of chest hair.

  Very freaking sexy. Bastard. And it probably counted as dressed up just because he looked so good.

  “I’m here to decorate, but I don’t want to talk about anything,” she announced—almost shouted—emboldened by the wine that she’d drunk to kill her feelings. Or she was just using it as an excuse now that an hour or so had passed.

  His perplexed blink only added coal to the boozy fire in her belly.

  Whatever. She brushed past him to get inside and shed her coat and get this nightmare over with. Nightmares always happened after you lost your coat or fell in your heels.

  He closed the door behind her, and then was there, helping her out of her coat like someone he cared about. “Everything all right?”

  No.

  And no.

  Further, no.

  And that wasn’t concern for her. It was simply civilized host behavior. Which was why she didn’t immediately recognize it—being a dumb hillbilly and all.

  She got her arms out of the sleeves, put her handbag on the table there and stepped over to summon the elevator.

  “You want to ride up?” He sounded so confused. Worried, her mind said, but that couldn’t be it. Tension. It was tension.

  “Yes.”

  There, she’d spoken.

  But the wine? Hadn’t helped a bit. It wasn’t going to make the evening easier. Nothing could make this evening easier. “I don’t want to go to the stairwell. I don’t want to go to the room, but that’s where the window is, unless you’ve decided to put it somewhere else.”

  He nodded slowly and, when the elevator door dinged, stepped inside and waited for her. “I already moved the bed out of the frame, set up the tripod and camera, and got the laptop booted for you to log in.”

  He didn’t comment on her lack of desire for the stairs. Or the bed. Or any of it. He just held the door. As she stepped into the small metal box, her heel caught on the threshold, and she stumbled, catching herself on the frame as he reached out to steady her, that look on his face turning to alarm.

  “Are you half-cut?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” she whispered. Loudly. While giving him her most baleful stare.

  No, this was not what the wine was supposed to do for her.

  “Drunk,” he filled in, his hands still out as if he was going to have to steady her even though her stumbling was more a fault of lazy walking than liquor.

  “No.” First answer. “Not anymore. Now I’m just kind of feeling sleepy. And...done.” She puffed. “Let’s just get this stupid thing over with, okay?”

  “You’re pissed, and you’re pissed. Got it.”

  The doors closed.

  He pushed the button, the only button, and it began to move.

  It was only one floor. An especially tall floor, granted, but it couldn’t take more than half a minute to get there. Half a minute wasn’t so long when he wasn’t reacting to her.

  “You going to tell me why you’re glaring daggers? Or am I to guess my brother did something again?”

  Her eyes started rolling before he was half through the question.

  “It was my department. You can’t have thought I wouldn’t...” She started to say overhear, the word was on her tongue, but why bother lying about this? “I was seeing a patient on the hall when you had your fight. I heard. So, let’s just get this over with.”

  He reached for her arm and looked so sincere. It was even in his voice, sincere and a bit bewildered, as if he couldn’t imagine what he’d have said that would make her cringe back from him. Or drive her to attempt an at-home wine-numbing session before she came over. “You know Lyons is an ass. We’ve talked about that.”

  Truth was, before he’d begun talking about how meaningless she was, she wouldn’t have thought it would bother her. Only once she’d heard those words from his mouth, it had. The hurt and ache still rang through her, and she couldn’t pretend not to understand why.

  She’d progressed well past a crush. The time with him—while short—had lit something in her, had made her happy after a long stretch of loneliness and occasional misery. When you put that kind of physical attraction with emotional attraction, true feelings were bound to develop, she told herself. But it didn’t help.

  “Yes, we have,” she agreed, then turned her arm so that his grip slipped off; the doors dinged and opened, and she stepped immediately out. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  All she had to do was turn a corner and walk through the massive arched doors toward the rose window, and she could do that.

  She heard him behind her, and the hair on her neck stood up from the weight of his stare, the proximity, the sensation he was going to grab her, and her own private hell of not knowing whether she’d let him. If she even had it in her to say no if he made a move. It was just too much to deal with in one day.

  She stepped around the corner, and the double doors stood open, allowing her to focus on the silhouette of the tree framed by the rose window at the far end of the gallery-style room.

  “Angel.” He grabbed her elbow and stopped her, turning her toward him. “I went to talk to him to figure out if I could help somehow. It started on the wrong foot and went downhill from there.”

  “I heard.” She pulled her elbow from his grasp and marched toward the tree. “Just turn on the dammed camera and let’s get this over with. Where are the lights? It’s supposed to start with lights.”

  He flipped on spotlights recessed in the ceiling to light the room up and she went to the laptop to login. The set of his jaw and his new glower said he at least felt something for her: anger.<
br />
  “I’ll get the fairy lights.”

  The quiet, even keel of his speech—lacking all his usual melody—said something else. That she’d wronged him. He was somehow the wounded party. Wounded party! She could feel the scowl her features had settled into, the muscles of her forehead burned like calves on a long-distance run, but she couldn’t get them to unclench.

  All she could do was go to the tree for him to hand lights over so they could wind them around, but every time he touched her hand, it sent a jolt of anger through her the wine utterly failed to dampen. Or maybe the wine was just gone. She really didn’t know, she didn’t drink that frequently, and never with the purpose of self-medicating her way through a Christmas tree decorating.

  “These lights are the multicolored kind,” he said to the camera, talking to the kids since she refused to respond anytime he tried to talk to her, other than jerking her hand away as if he were a deranged lava monster anytime they touched.

  He was narrating, but it wasn’t in the vicinity of cute or entertaining. By the time they reached the silver balls, she’d had enough. Her wine was definitely gone, and now she was just in the room, thinking about the sex. Thinking about the excessively good sex. And not the tree. And not the kids. But definitely about how meaningless it was. She was. All this was. He probably didn’t care, he’d never wanted to do all this anyway, so he was just good at acting. As he’d been good at acting last night.

  Breaking. Point.

  She hung a silver ball on the closest empty bough and, when she went toward the boxes of ornaments, just kept going. Past. Toward the stairs.

  She’d reached the first step down when he caught her. “Where are you going?”

  “Tell them I went to the outhouse and the hogs ate me.”

  “Huh?”

  Okay, maybe the wine hadn’t completely worn off. Or maybe it just gave the illusion of control to be the one to start making fun of herself before someone else got the chance.

  “You have to tell me what is wrong.” He gave her a little shake. “We’ve been over the Lyons thing. We’ve been over how awful I am at helping people. If you don’t tell me, I’ll be no use. And I want to be of use. I don’t like you looking like I just murdered your best friend.”