Cassie looked closer at the dear, old Santa before them, trying to peer beyond the white beard and thick hat to the face underneath. That voice . . . Those eyes . . . She vaguely recalled that same voice in the aquarium, those same sunny, clueless brown eyes. Sunny. Number 24. Not the worst guy she’d been on a date with. Not the best of the bad lot, either.
If he recognized her, he didn’t show it. Which meant he didn’t remember her. Based on her aquarium experience, she didn’t think he had the intellectual capabilities not to show it.
Cassie saw the girls’ eyes drift to her. “Delivery. Sure. That’d be . . . great.”
“Excellent.” Sunny-turned-Santa clapped his oversized black gloves. “Liberty Church is what my little elf tells me?”
Cassie’s surprise grew even more as she nodded. Who had put the fire department up to this? She hadn’t e-mailed Jim at the paper, hadn’t requested crews come in to see how successful the Leadership Club had been. But the girls had gone into just about every organization in town over the past two months, and there was no denying about half of the people in this mega city of 4,097 had heard of what was going on. Still, to know about helping with delivery? To know about such details . . .
“We’ll get right to it, then.” He fumbled with the knot on the trash bag. After a minute of struggling and saying a few words under his breath, he finally threw his gloves on the ground. “But first,” he continued, ripping the bag open and standing ceremoniously again, “do you know what I do every Christmas season before even thinking about putting any toys into my sleigh? I give each of my hardworking elves a very special present. And I’d venture to say that you girls have been very elfish lately. So—” He went back to the crumbled paper. “—would Rayne please step forward?”
Rayne’s eyes widened as she heard her name and stepped timidly out from the cluster.
Cassie crossed her arms, cracking a grin as she watched the crazy, gleeful man hand out presents to each of the twenty-two girls. Twenty-two presents. Her cheeks began to burn, both from the frigid air and the continuous smile, as she watched the girls rip open their gifts.
Whoever had been in charge had nailed it. Each and every one of them received a coffeeshop gift card. Cheap but shimmering lip balm smelling of cotton candy. Fuzzy socks. As Cassie watched Star pull a silver frame out of her bag, Santa spoke up, and Cassie realized he had his phone uplifted.
“Now, if you don’t mind, squeeze together for a photo, and my elf will make sure you each get a copy for your pretty frames.”
The girls only too eagerly agreed, several having already popped on the lip balm for shining smiles. And after some pleading, Santa himself jumped in the photo.
Three of Santa’s firemen helpers followed the starry-eyed girls inside, and as Cassie took up the rear, she felt a glove on her shoulder.
“Of course, Santa wouldn’t forget you.”
He winked, and left Cassie with a simple white envelope, following the group inside.
Cassie slit it open. She unfolded the papers, revealing the document stapled together. The header read: Complete Background Check: Timothy Jett Bentley.
6
Jett
“It was just too cliché to bring flowers, then. You had to throw in a fire truck.”
“Well, Miss Everson, if you recall, I did try flowers. The first time.”
“Touché.” Cassie managed to wince and grin simultaneously as she pushed up to the front of the ticket line. Condensation dripped from the tower of windows filling the front of Ripley’s Aquarium, heat from the bustling activity inside melting whatever frost tried to envelop them.
A sweet and almost eerie melody came through the speakers, of strings and keyboard interrupted at random intervals by a whale’s call.
She opened her purse.
“Allow me.” Jett lifted a credit card from his wallet and slid it toward Mrs. Leake, who sat there with a slight and telling smile across her lips. Had Bree not prepped him for every detail of the date Cassie had picked for them—including the involvement of Mrs. Leake, Bree’s own mother—he would’ve been suspicious then and there. Instead, he let the self-satisfaction simmer while the women started the show.
“No need,” Cassie countered, and bypassing her own wallet, she dug in her purse. She set two glass jars in front of his card.
The woman’s brows lifted as she picked up the one closest. The jar was filled with white chocolate, with three black buttons glued down the length, red string wound around the neck, and the sweet Merry Christmas message on the tag tied with baker’s string.
Mrs. Leake clucked as she admired it. “Well, isn’t that just adorable. Is that a snowman, Cassie?”
Cassie seemed to fight off a proud smile. “It is. The girls and I made sixty yesterday at the Haven. Will you pass this one along to Jeremy when you get the chance? He looks like he could use the sugar rush.”
Jeremy, sitting at the ticket counter beside Bree’s mother, was sweating in the thirty-degree weather as he printed a strand of tickets for a family of twelve—all while three of the children hung off his counter, a paper airplane flew dangerously close to his head, and the hand of an infant squatting on top of the counter inched slowly toward the scissors.
“I’ll be sure to,” Mrs. Leake said, then handed a ticket to Cassie.
Jett stepped forward. “Well, ma’am, it looks like I’ve forgotten my snowman jar at home. Do you still take debit?”
Mrs. Leake’s smile grew as she paused, her eyes scanning him top to bottom. Clearly, she had been briefed.
She pushed his card away and pressed the button. The ticket began printing.
“Save your money, honey. With any luck you’ll be needing it for a second date soon.” She gave Cassie a wink and handed him his ticket.
He dipped his head. “I’ll do my very best, ma’am.” With a jaunty grin toward Cassie, Jett opened the door and motioned for her to step through. “Shall we?”
Cassie’s cheeks started to pink, the light blush turning a shade darker as Mrs. Leake added loudly, “And young man? I believe the stingray exhibit is being cleaned this hour. You’d do best to skip right past it, avoiding it altogether.”
Jett grinned. “Cassie, did you hear that? Let’s be sure to stay far away from the stingrays.”
“Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Leake.” Cassie began to reach for his elbow as though to tug him out of earshot, then quickly pulled her hand back. Instead, she snagged a map off the round rack. As he watched her stand there, quietly scanning the pages as if it was her first time in the loud aquarium, Jett calmly took off his thin down jacket and laid it over one arm.
“Looks like the smaller fish are going to be this way,” she began.
“Mmm.” Jett nodded.
“And the sharks should be over there.” She pointed somewhere behind her.
“Can’t miss those.”
“And the penguin playhouse . . .”
Jett watched her finger sliding over the open brochure as if on ice skates. So, this was how Cassie Everson acted when she was nervous. He couldn’t recall her ever looking anything besides confident and oblivious to him through the black-and-white reels of his pubescent years. It was a nice feeling, knowing that he was making her nervous. That he was making her feel anything at all.
For a brief moment, he considered mentioning the loud yellow arrow to their right pointing them in the one and only direction.
But no, it was too much fun watching Cassie Everson scan her map. Too enjoyable seeing the little hints of care she put into this meeting, despite how nonchalant she was trying to be. The lightest shimmer of gold eyeshadow—made extra visible in how she was looking down and, more to the point, not at him. A white cable-knit sweater over dark-stained jeans. The twinkle of a silver chain with a single pearl, matching the simplicity of pearl studs on her ears. No tennis shoes this time, but a pair of Toms bearing, most festively, the design of thirty or so little nutcrackers throughout. All in all, she was stunning.
He
settled against the wall.
A middle-aged woman stood supervising around a shallow, oblong area of water to their left, the sign “Touch A Ray Bay” written in clear letters above her. A dozen kids and their families leaned over, hands in the water as stingrays surfaced and swept by. “Remember, kids,” she trilled merrily, wiggling her fingers in demonstration, “When sharks go by, fingers toward the sky!”
A parent hastily grabbed his daughter’s fingers as a fin swept past.
Huh. Seemed like an insurance oversight right there.
“I guess we should go, then.” Cassie continued to hold the map out in front of her like a platter.
He grinned. “I guess we should.”
Stiffly, Cassie began to move, and Jett let her lead the way. She stopped politely at the tank of piranhas, watching them with the same quiet intensity as a private stroll through a renaissance art tour. They moved on to a cluster of seahorses with curlicued tails wrapped around Caulerpa microalgae. Metallic-blue poison dart frogs, Japanese spider crabs the approximate size and stature of Gollum. A cerulean wall of jellyfish using jet propulsion to inch along their way. Snippets of conversation started and ended with the topic of water life and displays in front of them, the “Did you know . . .” followed by Cassie reading the signs beside clown triggerfish and regal blue tang. They ventured off topic long enough for her to ask him about his work and then to explain about hers in turn, but little beyond that.
He had to admit, she was really, really bad at this.
At last the hall split, and the option came to divert away from the stingray bay and into the penguin playhouse. Cassie beelined for the bay.
Well, at least he knew where he stood.
She stopped at the glass.
“So, Jett.” For the first time in ten minutes she looked straight into his eyes. It was almost startling. “I’ve learned from the background check about you passing drug tests and your previous employment. But you’re going to have to forgive me for bringing up the little issue of incarceration. Crossing it out and writing ‘nothing serious’ on the background check doesn’t quite cut it.”
She tilted her head slightly with an encouraging nod, like a mother readying to hear a child’s confession.
A stingray sailed past beside her, but her eyes stayed on his.
So, the inquisition had begun.
Bree had prepared him for this. After she herself had unloaded more questions than it took to get into the fire service, Bree had let him in on the details of the great Stingray Bay Inquisition. So earnest was Bree’s expectation of tonight, he had no doubt the diver waving heartily in the background was his undercover accomplice, the overenthusiastic best friend of Cassie herself.
His eyes flickered back to Cassie.
“I did spend twenty minutes in jail. Once.”
“And may I ask why?”
He tried, but couldn’t hold back a grin. “Evading an officer. More specifically, getting a KOM on Strava. I’m, uh, king of the mountain.”
She elucidated each word. “You are king of the mountain. I see.”
She carefully folded up the map and set it inside her purse. With her hands newly freed, she crossed them in front of each other and took a step toward the glass.
Wow.
Bree had warned him of her trigger finger, but clearly he had seriously underestimated the situation. He spoke quickly. “I was biking down a segment of the parkway one day—”
“What kind of bike?”
“Road bike, and an officer caught me going pretty fast—”
“How fast?”
Here, his face and tone always had difficulty showing any remorse. “Clocked me at fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two miles an hour? On a road bike?” A crack began to sliver across her forehead, revealing the merest glimmer of intrigue. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
She was impressed. Not fretting that he was reckless, not breaking into an emotional, womanly monologue about how dangerous road biking was, how one slick rock could’ve made his bike skid off and fly him into the trees. She wasn’t going to tell him about how that one sister’s-cousin’s-boyfriend’s-brother read in the paper once that some guy fell off his bike in Alaska and was immediately paralyzed from the neck down. Either she didn’t care about him enough to worry about his safety or—and what he felt more assured of—the littlest flicker of the real Cassie was coming out. The strong one. The competitive one.
Gaining confidence, he switched his jacket from one hand to another. “To be honest, I think I got a couple miles higher than that, but that’s what got put onto my ticket.”
She grinned openly now. “For racing on a road bike? I can’t believe they actually ticket for that.”
“Well, when the person you dethroned from the KOM is the officer who chased you down the mountain, they sometimes take it personally.”
She laughed then, the hazel in her eyes sparkling nearly as much as the glitter shadow above it. “And nothing else I should be aware of?”
“I’m still getting grilled? I sent you a background check. You know my credit score!”
She tipped her chin up. “Not as high as my 788, but you can’t be too picky these days.”
“Oh, good.” He inched a step toward her. “Then I can explain the alektorophobia.”
“The what?” She picked up on his sarcasm, her smile meeting her eyes.
An eager kid in a blue coat raced to the glass wall, knocking against her knees. She kept her eyes on him while stepping out of the kid’s way, her palm pressing against the glass.
“Fear of chickens. Terrible, horrible fear of chickens. Can’t even see eggs. IHOP is my nemesis.”
“IHOP,” she repeated, “is your nemesis.”
Jett saw Bree swimming over before Cassie did, and following his eyes, Cassie turned too. As if realizing she had touched a hot burner, Cassie’s hand slipped off the glass.
“Ready to move on?” she said hurriedly.
Jett grinned and planted his boots where they were. “Oh, look, Cassie. That diver’s coming our way.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Sure.” Jett pointed to Bree, now squarely in front of them. “Look, she’s waving at us. How nice.”
He started waving back heartily, and Cassie began alternating between what was obviously a wave and a clear false-alarm-go-away sign. Instead, to Cassie’s horror and Jett’s mirth, Bree put her fist to the window and banged against the glass.
Bree had been right. That definitely gathered a crowd.
“Bye-bye, now.” Cassie waved to the diver and, obviously at a point of desperation, slipped her arm around his elbow. “I’m starving. Do you want to get something to eat?”
Jolted by the sudden lock of their arms, his eyes broke from the glass down to Cassie. Back in his youth, she’d been the towering royal elf, Galadriel in bell-bottoms, the five-nine queen. Now he had over six inches on her, high enough to smell the coconut in her conditioner. Her eyes were begging, imploring him to move on, move away.
His smile gentled, voice softening. “You’re stealing my lines now, Cassie Everson.”
And as he urged her with a flick of his eyes to look through the glass, he watched her read the words scribbled across the underwater writing slate in Bree’s hands: Congratulations! You are our 100,000,000,000th visitors! Enjoy complimentary meal for two at The Cobbler’s Steakhouse. Reservations: 7 p.m.
“How many is that, Mom?” A kid tugged and pointed at the excessive zeros carried across the slate.
After one very, very long minute of reading and rereading the slate, Cassie looked up to Jett. There was an insuppressible grin and distinct sparkle in her eyes, as though he had at last pressed the right combination and the vault had clicked and opened. What had been the merest flicker of a dying bulb finally struck full power.
And all it took was dragging a thirty-five-thousand-pound fire engine across town, handing over every piece of his criminal and financial activity
of the last twenty-nine years, and convincing both her friend and his to join in on the fun.
“One hundred billionth visitors,” she said, her arm still looped around his. “That’s a very big deal.”
“Something worth celebrating as fast as possible, I’d imagine.”
He turned her to the hall, enjoying the press of her arm between his own and his side.
“In that case, it’s a good thing I know of a quick exit.” She danced them backward through the crowd to a small, unimportant back door.
7
Cassie
“Oh, that’s right. You hung out with Cole and Stephen on the football team.”
Jett spun his pasta around his fork, a wry grin on his face. “No.”
“I mean, Greg and Jamie from swim team.” Cassie smiled. “Remember how they always walked down the hall in their swim caps?”
Jett lifted his fork, his playful smile growing. “No.”
“The Carter brothers from band?” she asked, desperation rising.
“No.”
“Terry and the chess club?” she asked meekly.
Jett pointed his fork. “Bingo.”
“I knew it.” Cassie snapped her fingers triumphantly, then dropped her napkin over her empty plate. Both the heat from the restaurant’s crackling fire and the swimming conversation the last two hours was flushing her cheeks.
She practically started laughing before she could finish the next question. “Hey, do you remember that after-prom party at Drake’s where Greg Lynley dozed off and woke up floating on an air mattress in Drake’s pool?” Her laughter bubbled over into her words.
Jett grinned. Opened his mouth. Paused. “No.”
Her laughter stopped. “I thought the whole school was invited.”
“Of course you did. You are the Cassie Everson.” Jett wiped his mouth, then laid the crumpled napkin on his plate. Perhaps it was the fire beside them, but his face, too, looked flushed as he bantered back and forth with her, his back resting comfortably against the dining-room chair.
The Dating Charade Page 5