by Julie Miller
“Angelo, I can’t date you. Even if you are legal age. I wouldn’t jeopardize my job or your school year. And we don’t have a thing.” Daisy sputtered, replaying the year and a half she’d had Angelo in junior and senior English, trying to think of what she might have said or done that would have given him the slightest hint of encouragement. “I’ve always enjoyed having you in class. Just because I believe in your talents and abilities doesn’t mean I have those kinds of feelings for you.”
“But I have those feelings for you.” Angelo leaned toward her, his young face lined with hurt. “Then Albert said he saw you two making out.”
That peck on the lips at the game? That was all Albert could have seen. Nothing else had happened between her and Harry until they’d gotten home. How could one tentative kiss in a public place equate to so much anger and violence?
“Angelo, I could have died in that fire last night.”
“What fire?”
He didn’t know? She couldn’t help but notice he matched the vague description of the man Harry had seen running from the blaze—blue team coat, gold hat. “In the school basement, after the game.”
The teenager’s brown eyes widened with concern. “Are you okay? Is the school still there? We’ve got a home tournament next Saturday.”
More than her suspicion that he wasn’t a very good liar, Angelo’s sudden shift in loyalty to his true love—basketball—eased her fear that her student could be Secret Santa. The broken decorations were a temper tantrum, a child not getting his way and lashing out. Hormones. Crazy teenage hormones and a misplaced crush. Not some sick obsession that promised to hurt her. That was all this was, right? All the same, she had to ask, “Have you been sending me gifts?”
He shrugged, confused by the question. “I gave you Granny’s caramels.”
“No anonymous cards? Presents?”
“No, ma’am.” His concern had moved away from her. “Did the school burn down?”
She almost laughed. Almost. “No. You’ll still have to show up for class on Monday.”
Officer Cho interrupted the conversation. “Ms. Gunderson, I’m going to read Angelo his rights and put him in the back of the cruiser. No sense us all standing out in the cold. Since you seem to know him, do you want to handle this or would you like to press charges?”
“Press charges?” Angelo gasped. “Oh, hell no. I’ll get benched.”
He’d probably only get probation if this incident ever made it in front of a judge, but that could cost his chance at a good scholarship. The teacher in Daisy took over for the woman who’d been so worried and afraid. She squeezed Angelo’s arm, giving him her sternest teacher look. “You wait in the car with Officer Cho for now. Let me make a couple of phone calls to see if we can get this straightened out. But there will be consequences.”
Officer Cho nodded, turning Angelo toward the police car.
“Don’t call Granny,” Angelo begged. “Please, Ms. G. She will tan my hide and I’ll be hauling groceries and taking out trash for every old lady in my building for a month.”
Although she wasn’t a proponent of hide-tanning, the rest sounded like a fair trade-off. Daisy pulled her phone from the pocket of Harry’s coat. She had another idea, a consequence that would mean something to Angelo without jeopardizing his future. “I’ll see what I can do.”
An hour later, the sun was shining on her front porch. The daylight sparkled off the ice crystals in the snow and warmed the air to a tolerable twenty degrees. Officers Cho and Bulkey had left to file their reports, and Angelo was sitting in the passenger seat of Bernie Riley’s car, waiting for the basketball coach to drive him home. Coach Riley promised to have a heart-to-heart talk with his starting point guard about inappropriate crushes on English teachers, and how it was a bad idea to trash her Christmas decorations because he was jealous of the grown man paying attention to her.
Hopefully, Bernie would get started on that heart-to-heart soon. For now, the tall man was standing on Daisy’s porch, ignoring her surly house guest leaning against the white pillar behind him, thanking her for not pressing charges against his star player. “I’ll have him running extra laps and coming in early to practice his free throws. And I’ll make sure he’s back here this afternoon to clean up the mess he made,” Bernie affirmed, as if the idea had been his and not hers. “I’ll clear things with his grandmother, too. We’ll make sure he knows he’s done something wrong without involving the police and endangering his standing at school.”
“I appreciate you coming over, Bernie.”
“Not a problem. Always happy to help you out, Gunderson.”
He leaned in to give her a hug that felt awkward, not just because of the faintly pungent smell clinging to his clothes that stung Daisy’s nose, or the fact that she’d hugged him maybe once, at last year’s Christmas party—but because she was blatantly aware of Harry’s gray eyes drilling holes in the other man’s back. At least he made no effort to take him down as he’d reported to the police when Angelo had run from him earlier.
When Bernie pulled away and started down the steps, Daisy breathed a sigh of relief. But she regretted the momentary celebration when Bernie stopped on the bottom step and turned to face her. “Hey. I heard about those gifts you’ve been getting from your Secret Santa. The naughty ones.”
Naughty was a politically correct way to describe them, she supposed. Daisy hugged her arms around the front of Harry’s coat. “After the fire, I guess word has spread all over the school.”
“Pretty much.” Bernie reached up under his gold stocking cap and scratched his head, frowning before he smoothed it back into place. “I think you should know that I’m your Secret Santa.”
“What?” She gasped, instantly recoiling. “You’re Secret Santa?”
This time, Harry pushed away from the post. When he started down the steps after Bernie, she grabbed his arm. Although Harry halted at her touch, she slid her hand down to his and waited for him to lace his fingers with hers before she trusted that he was clearly in the moment with her.
“Let’s hear him out,” Daisy suggested.
Harry might be willing to listen, but he wasn’t about to step down from protecting her from a possible threat. Standing with his shoulder between her and Bernie, he did as she asked. “So talk.”
Bernie’s green eyes looked serious for a change, and his tone was surprisingly genuine. “I’m not the one giving you those things. Someone must be replacing my gifts. I put the envelopes in your mailbox and the gifts on your desk—but I told Stella to get you the things on your list. Chocolate. Gift cards for coffee. Ornaments.”
Daisy slipped her other hand down to hold on to Harry’s unwavering strength. “Your wife is giving me those gifts?”
“I don’t have time to shop.” Bernie shrugged. “I don’t like to shop. So she does all that for me. Wraps them up, sticks in the fancy cards. All I do is deliver.”
“Why would your wife do that?”
“I’m not saying she’s sending you those things. I mean, Stella gets crazy sometimes, but I don’t think she even knows what some of that stuff in the pictures is. I mean, it’s porn, right? She’s uh, she’s a lady.”
Daisy had a feeling any woman of any background would know exactly the kind of violence the images in those drawings depicted.
“How do you know what’s in the pictures?” Harry asked.
“Bosch and Gamblin were talking about it at the game last night.”
“Eddie and Mary told you?” Her friends had betrayed her confidence?
“I could tell there was something funky going on with the present you got yesterday. I thought Stella might be trying to make me look bad by giving you a lump of coal.” She should be so lucky. “I didn’t know there was something wrong with the gifts until I saw what happened in the school basement. I was down there this mornin
g after going over game tapes in my office. You must have been terrified. This morning I asked some people what was going on.”
“Some people?”
“I called Principal Hague and he explained what was going on. Now that announcement he made at the faculty meeting about appropriate gifts makes sense.” Bernie scratched under his cap again.
She felt the muscles in Harry’s arm tense a split second before it snaked out and he snatched the gold stocking cap off Bernie’s head.
“What the hell, dude?”
“You got a bad case of dandruff? Why do you keep scratching?” Harry put the cap up to his nose and instantly averted his face. “It smells like smoke and acetone.”
Bernie snatched the cap back and pulled it over his head. “I told you I was down in the basement this morning. The place still reeks. Hague said they’re airing out the whole school all weekend so we can get back in there on Monday.”
Daisy supposed that was a perfectly logical explanation for a man with a blue jacket and yellow hat—like the man Harry had seen running from the fire—to have clothes that smelled like the crime scene. Although logic wasn’t making it any easier to tamp down her suspicions about her colleague. “Where were you last night?”
“Coaching two ball games.”
Harry took a step closer. “What about afterward? When did you leave? With the players? Later than that?”
Bernie puffed up to his six and a half feet of height. “Are you accusing me of something?” He sidled closer to Daisy, and Harry shifted, keeping his shoulder and dark-eyed glare between them. “Look, I came here to help you out, not to be given the third degree by your bully boyfriend here.”
“Where were you?” Harry pressed. Had the smell of the cap triggered a bad memory? Was he getting angry again?
“None of your damn business.” Bernie looked straight at Daisy, ignoring Harry. “I just wanted you to know that I drew your name for Secret Santa, and that Stella has been buying the gifts. She has high-class taste. I’m sure she’s only getting you nice stuff. I don’t know how they’re getting swapped out for those other things or who’s doing it. But I didn’t want you to blame me. Or her.” His forehead wrinkled with a rueful expression. “She and I—we’ve been having some troubles lately. Heck, I even thought about taking you up on renting that spare room of yours for a few weeks instead of staying in a hotel.”
“A hotel?” Daisy knew she should feel sorry for Bernie instead of thinking that a struggling marriage could be a motive for either one of them to threaten her.
“Like I said, troubles. That room wouldn’t still be available, would it? I’ve been keeping a change of clothes on me and showering at the school locker room in the morning. It’d be nice to be in a house again.”
“She has a tenant,” Harry announced. He draped his arm over her shoulders and squeezed her to his side, warning Bernie that no other man was going to get close to her while he was around.
A twinge of discomfort pinged in Daisy’s memories and she quietly extricated herself from Harry’s grasp. Had being protective of her just taken a step over the line into Brock Jantzen land?
Bernie got the message loud and clear, instantly backing off from the possibility of moving in with her. “Yeah. Well, if I had known the kind of stuff you were getting, I’d have said something sooner.”
Daisy nodded, putting another step between her and Harry. “Thanks for letting me know.”
Perhaps Bernie still didn’t realize the depth of terror she’d been living with the past two weeks. “Guess that’s going to ruin the party for you next Saturday. It won’t be a surprise for you when we reveal who had whose name.”
She’d already had plenty of surprises this week. She glanced over at the back of Harry’s dark, close-cropped hair that she’d had such fun tickling her palms against last night. Only one of those surprises had been good. Harry Lockhart. The surprise of this relationship—if that was what it even was—was awkward. Difficult and uncertain. But a good surprise, nonetheless.
Cognizant of their audience here and in the car, Daisy tabled her analysis over what, exactly, Harry meant to her, and whether the reality of a relationship with a man struggling with PTSD was something she wanted to take on. She waved to Angelo and offered Bernie a smile. “Thanks for helping with Angelo. And I’m sorry to hear about you and Stella.”
“Thanks.”
“Talk to her,” Daisy suggested. “Listen, too. If you can communicate, you can solve just about anything.” She wondered if Harry was hearing any of that advice. “And—maybe you shouldn’t give me any more presents. Not even the big one for the party. Return it. Donate it to charity. Give it to someone else. If this guy doesn’t have that anonymous way to send me gifts, maybe he’ll stop.”
“If you say so.” Bernie strode around the clear path of the sidewalk and climbed into his car, doffing her a salute before driving away.
Harry watched the car all the way to the stop sign at the corner before looking up at her. “He won’t stop.”
Although she was the one wearing the coat, Daisy shivered and turned to the front door. “Thank you for those fine words of comfort.”
He caught her hand and stopped her. “This isn’t a joke. Perverts like that, they’ll find a way to get to you if that’s what they want. If you cut him off, if he thinks you’re on to him, he might escalate.”
“Someone locked me in a room and started a fire that could have killed me.” So much for subtle hints. Daisy tugged her hand free, regretting that she’d forgotten the soldier sorely lacking verbal communication skills after being with the passionate, bravely vulnerable man last night. “Things have already escalated.”
“Damn it, Daisy, I’m not making light of what happened.” When she snatched her hand from his, he fell back to the top step. “Don’t be a fool. What if Riley confessed to being your Secret Santa just to throw you off track so you wouldn’t suspect him? Why do his clothes smell like that fire? What if Angelo isn’t as innocent as you seem to think?”
“What if Stella Riley is so jealous of something she thinks I’ve done that she wants to torment me?” Daisy crossed the porch to look him straight in the eye. “I’m not stupid. You don’t think I’ve thought of any of that? All I have are suspects and threats. What I don’t have are answers. I don’t know who to trust anymore. This isn’t over. Not until I know who is doing this to me, and that creep is in jail. But I am—”
“—going to stay positive?” That was sarcasm, deriding her for the very trait he’d praised the night before.
“I was going to say I’m keeping my guard up.”
“You didn’t with me.” He threw his hands up. “You worry too much about everybody else. You’re too forgiving. You’re going to get hurt.”
“You’re being a jerk right now, you know that?” The differences between them had finally erupted into an argument that neither one of them could win. His heart might be in the right place, believing he was protecting her, but she couldn’t live her life being judged and criticized and ordered around. “Where’s my Harry? Where’s the man from those letters?”
He jolted back, as if she’d slapped him across the face. When he spoke again, it was a quiet, unemotional tone. “I warned you I wasn’t any good at this. I was a different man then.”
Daisy touched his chest, splaying her fingers until she could feel the strong beat of his heart beneath her hand. Her tone was hushed, too. “No. You’re the same man. That’s the man who was with me last night. But you went through something awful, more than a good man should have to bear. You just have to find him again.”
That muscle ticked beneath his eye again as he evaluated her words. “You don’t have to welcome me into your bedroom anymore, but I’m not leaving you unprotected. My gear’s already upstairs. I’ll sleep up there and start paying you rent.”
He
was serious about becoming her tenant, about taking a relationship that had heated to incendiary in the span of forty-eight hours back to let’s-just-be-friends. Her life was safer this way, right? Her heart most certainly was. She should be glad that one of them could think sensibly here. Instead, she felt hollow inside, as though she’d lost something that was more important than she realized. “If that’s how you want it.”
“That’s how it needs to be.”
The man needed his distance. He didn’t trust himself not to hurt her. But how was she ever going to accept that the man she’d fallen in love with didn’t want to be in a relationship? He didn’t believe he could be. “Harry—”
The dogs started barking inside the house, ending the conversation. All three of her fur-babies were at the storm door, telling her she had company. She recognized the bark. It was the I-spy-another-dog alert. Her neighbor, Jeremiah Finch, was strolling by with his Chihuahua, Suzy, on a long black leash. “Good morning, Daisy.”
“Good morning, Mr. Finch.” Harry didn’t turn, didn’t offer any polite greeting to the older man in his trim wool coat and neatly tied scarf. Harry snapped his fingers and used a hand signal to calm Caliban and Patch into a tail-wagging sit, leaving Muffy as the only noisemaker announcing their visitor. When Jeremiah stopped to let Suzy sniff out the new smells of all the visitors Daisy had had that morning, she moved off the porch to continue the conversation. “It’s shaping up to be the nicest day we’ve had in weeks. I’m glad you and Suzy are getting out.”
“I’m not sure I want to, even in the daylight.”
“What do you mean?”