Mistletoe'd!

by Cach, Lisa

“Do you think Alan will be sorry he let me go?” I asked, but the question was really meant for Ian. Are you sorry you didn’t come back last night? Are you sorry now that you lost your one chance to make love to me?

  “He’ll shoot himself.”

  “Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

  *

  “So you like hiking, too?” Kevin asked loudly, trying to be heard over the noise. “My friends and I take a weeklong trip in the Olympics every summer…”

  I listened with half an ear, my eye caught by Ian as he moved through my field of vision. He seemed at ease amongst all these strangers, many of whom were connected in one way or another with the university. I’d introduced him to several people, but then Carolyn had stolen me away and he’d been left to his own devices.

  He apparently had plenty of devices. He was at this moment charming our hostess, a cheerful middle-aged professor in the art department who came from family money and liked to spend it. She’d rented out the private nightclub at El Gaucho, in downtown Seattle, and we now all mingled in the dim room and held drinks in our hands while a band on the low stage played jazzed-up Christmas carols and old standards. Strangers in the Night was playing now. Long buffet tables held a changing array of appetizers, main courses, and desserts, and guests were keeping the bartenders busy at the long mahogany bar. A photographer maneuvered amongst the guests, her flashes catching people with their mouths full and drinks sloshing.

  I turned my attention back to Kevin, who had just asked me whether I liked to ski. He was a decent-looking guy, a little under six feet, a bit beefy and probably going to get a lot beefier as the years progressed, and with ruddy skin made worse by his being flushed and nervous. There was a trickle of sweat on his temple, and he seemed afraid to look at me. “I like cross-country skiing,” I said, “but downhill is a little too fast for me.”

  “Oh. I think I might like cross-country, if I gave it a chance. Maybe we should go sometime.” He took a big swallow of his beer.

  “That could be fun.”

  “Really?” he croaked, finally looking at me.

  “Sure.” Why not? He seemed like a nice enough guy. Normal. The type of guy who would have friends over to watch football, drink beer, and grill some bratwurst in the backyard. He seemed the polar opposite of intellectually pretentious Alan, who favored black turtlenecks as formal attire. Kevin had on a nice dark suit and a red-and-green Hawaiian tie with hula girls on it. We were struggling to find an easy area of conversation, but maybe that was due to the noise, and being forced to half-shout every word. “I should give you my e-mail address.”

  “I’ll find a pen,” he said, and dashed away.

  My eyes went again to Ian. Now he was talking to the waiter who was refilling one of the warming pans. They seemed to be getting on well. I tried to compare Ian to either Kevin or Alan, and failed. He was a creature apart. He was a playboy. A con man like any salesman. A charmer with the gift of gab.

  I shouldn’t like him. And I shouldn’t have mistaken his occasional flashes of vulnerability for an open heart that wanted love. No, my own heart would be safer in the hands of someone like Kevin.

  Speaking of which, what was taking him so long?

  I stood abandoned in the sea of people, and then I saw Alan, black turtleneck and all. He was looking at my chest, even while his arm was around a woman I’d never seen before. She didn’t notice, engrossed as she was in a conversation with another woman. His new girlfriend was cute and seemed a little funky, wearing a vintage dress. Her hair was cut in a short ragamuffin style, and I found myself liking her based on appearance alone.

  I hadn’t expected to like her. Nor had I expected the thought that now popped into my head: Couldn’t she find someone better to be with than Alan?

  I headed over to them. Alan’s eyes widened as I approached, as if wondering whether I’d noticed where he was staring and was going to come punch him in the face for it. It took a moment for me to realize he didn’t recognize me. He thought he’d been staring at a stranger’s breasts.

  Instead of the in-your-face triumph I’d expected to feel at a moment like this, I felt instead a queasiness in my gut. Had he ogled other women while I’d been with him? I felt a sudden stab of pity for his new girlfriend.

  “Merry Christmas, Alan,” I said.

  “Tessa?” His eyes bulged.

  The girlfriend turned away from her conversation and looked me over in alarm, her eyes uncertain, then turned to Alan for support.

  He ignored her, his arm dropping from around her waist. “I didn’t recognize you! You look incredible!”

  I smiled politely and held my hand out to the girl. “Hi, I’m Tessa.”

  She shook my hand, her grip damp and soft and weak. “I’m Amy. I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, and then winced at her own words. “Good things,” she amended.

  “Probably not all good,” I said lightly. “I love your dress. I’d guess about 1965?”

  Her brows rose in surprise. “Thanks! Oh, that’s right, you’re a costumer. Nineteen sixty-five, you think? The tag said 1950s.”

  “No, that neckline—”

  Alan interrupted our girl talk. “Are you here alone?”

  “Oh,” I said, waving a hand airily, “yes and no. I’m not with anyone, if that’s what you mean, but…” I saw Kevin approaching. “Kevin! I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.” I made the introductions as Kevin panted beside me, sounding like he’d run three blocks to find the pen and scrap of paper in his hand.

  The moment the introductions were complete, I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Tessa, darling, you’ve been ignoring me all night,” Ian said.

  I gaped at him, wondering what on earth he was doing.

  “Hello, I’m Ian,” he said, left hand still on my shoulder as he reached forward with his right toward Alan.

  “Alan,” Alan said, shaking his hand and looking bewildered, his gaze going from Ian to me to Kevin.

  Ian leaned forward and reached across me to Kevin, shaking Kevin’s hand and introducing himself.

  I stood amidst them like a doe in a meadow of stags, not quite sure how I’d managed to go so quickly from dateless spinster to hot babe surrounded by males. Amy was staring at me as if wanting to know what magic perfume I was wearing, and where she could buy some.

  “Ian is my housemate’s cousin from London,” I explained to my audience. “He’s stuck in town for a few days, so I invited him to come with me to the party.” Alan and Kevin started to relax at this news, but then Ian did his part to tense them up again.

  “I’m staying at her house. She’s been keeping me entertained so well that I don’t want to leave.” He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed, then kissed the side of my head. “She’s a treasure, this one is.”

  “Staying at your house?” Kevin echoed.

  I lifted Ian’s arm off my shoulders, but he dropped it to my waist. “He’s staying in his cousin’s room.” I pried Ian’s fingers from my side and he removed his hand—only to give my bottom a soft spank. “Ian!”

  “Sorry, darling. I forget myself.” He leaned toward Alan and said in a stage whisper, “But can you blame me?”

  I rolled my eyes and turned to Kevin, reaching for the pen and paper. “He’s plastered. Ignore him. Here, let me give you my e-mail address.”

  “Are you sure you should go home with him?” Kevin asked by my ear. “I don’t like to think of you alone with a drunk with… well, with that on his mind.”

  “Don’t worry; it’s all talk. He’ll pass out the moment we get home.”

  “I resent that!” Ian said loudly. “I can hold my liquor!” He swayed toward me, arms wide for an embrace. “Give me a kiss, will you?”

  Everything that happened next was a series of brilliant flashes, the motions of Ian, Alan, and Kevin all caught in frozen snapshots of white light from the photographer’s flash.

  Ian lurched and puckered. Alan abandoned Amy and lunged for Ian, reaching for his arm
s. Kevin pulled me aside and put his fist in my place, in the path of Ian’s face.

  Fist connected with face. Hands grabbed arms.

  A tangled mass of flying limbs as Ian fought back.

  Alan on the floor. Amy holding back her skirts as if not wanting to soil them on him. Kevin bending over in pain.

  All three on the floor.

  Nightclub bouncers pulling the men apart.

  The flashes stopped. The music stopped. Most of the conversation in the room stopped, except for whispering as those who had not seen the action told others what it was that was happening.

  The bouncers dragged all three men up the stairs to the street level. I went to the coat check at the bottom of the stairs to retrieve my coat and Ian’s, my body shaking and my mind focused only on getting out of there, finding Ian, and assessing the damage to his beautiful face. I could think of nothing else.

  “Was that all over you?” Carolyn asked, appearing at my side. Her husband had already run up the stairs, following his evicted cousin. “What did you do to Kevin? I thought he was sweet-tempered as a lamb. A little loud if he drinks too much, but—”

  “Men! Rutting stags!” I said, grabbing the coats and running up the stairs to find Ian. Don’t let him be hurt, please don’t let him be hurt, I prayed silently, and didn’t pause to wonder why it mattered so much.

  Chapter Ten

  I sat in the back of the taxi with my arms crossed, fuming. “Kevin probably thinks I have weirdness like this happening around me all the time. He’s not going to think I’m ready to marry and have kids.”

  “I was helping,” Ian said. He was sitting beside me, and there wasn’t a trace of alcohol on his breath. The man was stone-cold sober, and had been so the entire time. He thoroughly deserved the bloody nose that had just now stopped bleeding.

  “Helping! How were you helping?”

  “I was arousing his protective instincts. Encouraging him to action. He was standing there beside you like a frightened sheep, and needed a prod to act like a man.”

  “Getting into a brawl at a Christmas party is ‘acting like a man’?”

  “You’ll see. He’ll call you tomorrow to check up on you. You’ll tell him that you’re packing me off to the airport; you’ll thank him for keeping me off of you and say how no one has ever looked out for you that way before; and then he’ll ask you out and feel like a king when you say yes.”

  I grumbled sour nothings under my breath.

  The taxi driver got into a turn lane to get off Denney, the street we’d been traveling down. I suddenly realized that we shouldn’t have been on Denney to begin with—that we should have gotten on Highway 99 several blocks back. “What are we doing here?” I wondered aloud.

  “I told him to come here, before we got in,” Ian said.

  “Here? Where’s here?” I peered out the window and then saw it: Seattle Center, and the base of the Space Needle. “Oh, no. You don’t think that after what you did…”

  “It’s open until midnight.” He reached through the dividing window and paid the taxi driver, then opened his door.

  I stayed in place, only leaning forward to give the driver my address. “The Scot can stay here. Take me to—”

  “Tessa, please,” Ian said, bending down and leaning into the cab. He held his hand out for me. “I’m sorry that I upset you. I’m sorry that I embarrassed you. Please come with me to the top. It won’t mean anything if I go alone.”

  “It won’t mean anything with me there, either.”

  “It will,” he said quietly.

  I sighed and took his hand and slid out of the cab. His entreaty had touched me, despite my being furious with him. He’d behaved stupidly, immaturely, and he shouldn’t be rewarded for it, but if I was honest I could admit that there was a very small part of myself deep inside that was starting to giggle, thrilled to be the center of such a dramatic confrontation. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

  Ian kept hold of my hand, tugging me along. There was no line for the elevator ride to the top, and a minute later Ian was twenty-six dollars poorer, and we were zipping upward at a stomach-dropping speed. The elevators rode the outside of the Needle, their glass fronts giving a panoramic view as we rose above the city like birds taking flight.

  I was reluctant to show how much I was enjoying the ride and the view; I wasn’t a tourist, after all. “Was that really why you did it?” I asked. “Why you pretended to be drunk? You wanted to give Kevin a chance to act the hero?”

  “Maybe I just wanted to see what your weasel of an ex would do.”

  I cast him a glance and caught a wry smile on his lips. He bobbed his eyebrows at me with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes. I scowled, but felt a smile tug at my own lips, as well. “I think his girlfriend is going to break up with him.”

  “See, we’ve saved a woman from a terrible fate.”

  “You might have saved me from one, too,” I said, finally calm enough to look at things rationally.

  “What do you mean?”

  We reached the top and exited the elevator into a low-lit observation room. “Let’s go outside,” I said. “The view is a little better.”

  What had been a gentle breeze down on the ground was a cold wind up top. I turned my coat collar up against it and tucked my hands into opposite cuffs, muff-style. We circled the unoccupied deck, me pointing out what landmarks and geographical features I could, and then stopped and leaned against the rail, where we had the best view of both amber-lit downtown and Elliott Bay, with the lights of a ferry crossing the black water to Bainbridge Island. A half-moon played hide-‘n’-seek behind clouds drifting across the charcoal-blue sky.

  “What did you mean about saving you from a terrible fate?” Ian asked again.

  “Kevin. Hitting you. What kind of guy throws the first punch at a Christmas party?”

  “He might have had too much to drink.”

  “I don’t want to marry a violent drunk,” I said.

  “You don’t have to marry him. Date him for a while. Give him a second chance; he didn’t seem like that bad a sort. I’m rather glad he punched me. Shows protective instincts.” He shrugged. “At least you could have fun with him.”

  “I don’t know how to be like you, and just date for fun. I don’t know how to keep my heart from getting involved if I like someone, or how to have fun with a guy if I don’t like him.” I turned to face him. “How can you make love to someone if you don’t love them? I don’t think I could bear it.”

  “I always love the women I sleep with, in some way.”

  “But never enough to stay.”

  “Tessa,” he said, taking my face between his two warm hands and looking into my eyes. “I want to take you to bed so badly it makes my balls ache.”

  I blinked in surprise. “But—”

  “You have no idea how hard it was for me to stay away from you last night.”

  “But—”

  His fingers slid back into my hair, his thumbs rubbing circles on the rims of my ears. “It was that call from Lauren. She reminded me of my promise not to touch you. Did you know I promised her that?” He went on without waiting for an answer. “She read me the riot act when she began to suspect what I’d been up to with you. She told me exactly what you’ve just told me: You’re not the sort of woman who can be loved and left.”

  “What woman is?”

  “You know what I mean. It’s never fun and games for you. It means something. And if I’m not ready to give you what it means, then I have to keep my hands off.”

  “I don’t want you to keep your hands off,” I whispered.

  He released me as if my skin burned him and stepped back.

  “Don’t, Tessa. You don’t know how close I am to forgetting my nobler instincts.” He laughed, a short, dry cough of a laugh. “I don’t have many noble instincts, and when one appears it has a hard time surviving amidst the weeds.”

  “I know you’re leaving tomorrow,” I said slowly, sorting out my
own feelings as I spoke. All I was certain of was that I wanted him. Wanted him naked in my bed, making love to my body as no one had ever made love to it before. “I know we aren’t going to have a relationship, even if we have sex a dozen times between now and when you leave. And I still want you to touch me.”

  He shook his head, but there was no conviction in it. “I promised…”

  I closed the distance between us, his wavering giving me a confidence I didn’t know I had. “You didn’t create that scene at the party in order to help push me and Kevin together.” I laid my hands on his chest and leaned my lower body against him. “That wasn’t the reason.” I could feel the tension in his body, feel the rigidity of his stance. And I could feel something else that was rigid beneath the layers of cloth that separated us.

  “I couldn’t stand to see him with you,” Ian admitted hoarsely.

  “That was selfish of you.” I slid my arms around his back and then down to his butt, squeezing gently and pulling him closer against me.

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  I tilted my head up and spoke softly against the corner of his jaw, my lips brushing his skin. “Don’t think now.”

  A tremor ran through him. “I can’t,” he whispered. “Please, God, Tessa, I can’t. I swore I wouldn’t. You’d regret this tomorrow.”

  “You made a promise that you wouldn’t seduce me. There was no promise about allowing me to seduce you.”

  He brought his hands back up to my face, cupping it once again, but this time with a firmness that spoke of restraint more than tenderness. “Don’t tempt me. I will not hurt you.”

  “I won’t be hurt if you make one simple promise to me.”

  His thumb brushed over my lips. I drew it into my mouth for a moment and ran my tongue over it. “What promise?” he asked, his eyes half closing.

  “Promise me that you’ll never speak to me again after you leave. Never call me. Never e-mail me. Never ask Lauren how I’m doing. Promise that you’ll never set eyes on me again.”

  His eyes opened wide. “Why?”

  “Because if you promise me that, then I’ll know that there is no hope of anything between us. You’re not a stranger to me; I like you well enough to know that I would enjoy sleeping with you. But it’s the hope for something more between us that would hurt me afterward. The hope that you would change your mind about me, or that you’d call and want to talk, or maybe visit again. Or ask me to visit you in London. It’s the days I’d spend fantasizing about what our future together might be; that’s what would hurt. Because it would never come true. So promise me that I’ll never have contact with you again. Swear it on your mother’s soul. And then the night is ours.”