“Is that what you’d call it?” She ran her forefinger over one of the yellow hibiscus flowers, its ruffles closed up tight for the night.
As if he’d confess to it ever being anything more. Not when he could also recall with perfect clarity the roadkill she’d made of his heart when he’d discovered she’d left for college early, despite their summer plans. At his autopsy, they’d find the four-chambered organ still flattened, without a skid mark in sight.
He ignored the old ache in his chest and went back to concentrating on gaining the advantage. “In any case, I’m more interested in this wild-thing Bailey you claim to be now.”
She shrugged again. “Okay, maybe wild is an overstatement in comparison to your checkered past, but I live a pretty full life.”
“Oh really?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’re a rigid, seventy-hour-a-week, all-work-no-play jobaholic.”
“No—”
“And that even the balls-of-steel senior partner at the firm you run trembles when you call his name.”
Her quick glance back at her house made it clear she supposed her mother had been filling him in. Then she put one hand on her hip. “Maybe he trembles for reasons you don’t know about.”
Oh yeah, like she was doing the horizontal tango with a white-haired lawyer who’d been married for fifty-three years. As if he’d believe that was a Bailey move. Finn gave her an appraising glance from the golden top of her head to her booted toes. “I bet your social life’s lousy.”
She exhaled an insulted huff and her other hand fisted on her other hip. “You think I can’t get a man?”
This was too easy. Maybe it was mean of him to needle her, and he didn’t know why it pleased him so much to make her mad, but he hadn’t had this much fun in months. “I know you won’t keep one.”
She huffed again. “Who cares when L.A. is chock-full of eligible bachelors?”
“The bachelor you spend most of your leisure hours with lives in the condo below yours and is gay.”
Her jaw dropped. “How—”
“Easy. The Secret Service’s Office of Protective Research keeps extensive files on anyone who threatens the security of the president or the country.”
A flush burned on her cheeks and her eyes sparked. “I have never threatened anyone or anything in my life!”
Finn lifted a hand. “Then, Bailey, so much for your claim of a bad-girl transformation.”
“I’ll show you a transformation.”
Then she did. She did it so quickly that he couldn’t leap away fast enough. One second she was glaring at him over the hedge and the next she’d grabbed him around the neck, yanked his head close, and sank her teeth into his bottom lip.
“That’s what you get,” she said, pulling back. “You wanted to take a bite out of me, so I took mine out of you.”
She continued to glower at him, her breasts heaving against a fuzzy white sweater. “Though a garden hose might have been a better weapon.”
“I’ll say,” Finn muttered, because he couldn’t let her have the last word.
Or the last kiss.
He grabbed her shoulders and hauled her against the low, narrow hedge. He pressed close to it too, not even noticing the rattle of leaves and the dig of branches on his way to her lips. Her body was rigid beneath his hands, but her mouth was hot. Soft and hot, and he almost wished for that threatened cold blast from the garden hose because he was teenage-horny again, his cock going hard to fight the denim of his jeans.
He pushed his tongue between her lips. She made a sound, but he didn’t care if it was a protest. She’d had her chance at punishment; this was his. The inside of her mouth was peppermint-sweet—as if she’d been sucking on a candy cane not long ago—and his eye closed at the intoxicating taste.
With her shoulders cupped by his palms and his tongue curling against the velvet of hers, time rewound. He was twenty again, nineteen, sixteen. The age he’d been that fateful day when he’d looked at her and the dark rebel inside him had recognized the golden girl who could be the calm to his hormonal storm. He’d cursed her, the world, fate, the moment he’d recognized it, but he’d been unable to take his feet off the path.
But it had never been so purely cerebral, he admitted, as he slanted his head, taking more of her mouth as he ran his hands over her sharp shoulder blades to the round globes of her ass. Not cerebral in the least. He’d been sixteen and he’d wanted sex too.
There were easier girls to get it from, he’d known that. Known them. It took time to persuade the good girls to put out, that was a given. It was going to take time to get Bailey to bed. But that hadn’t stopped him from still wanting her. From wanting, wanting, wanting her.
Now nearing thirty-one, Finn didn’t seem to have the patience of his teenage self. He found her waist and burrowed under the soft sweater to the sleek skin at the small of her back. Even that wasn’t enough, and as he tracked his lips from her mouth to her warm cheek, his fingertips tucked under the waistband of her jeans.
At the same time that he found her lobe and bit down, he shoved his hands lower to fill his palms with the naked, curved globes of her ass. Bless thong underwear.
She jerked, her skin goose-bumped against his hands. He gentled his lips on her ear and rubbed his nose against her soft hair. Her familiar perfume filled his head.
Like that, it was a dozen years ago again. Leaves rattled as he tried moving closer. Like then, always needing more of her sweetness and the fire he wanted to find beyond it.
“Finn…” Bailey whispered, her throaty voice shivering down his spine.
“What?” He pressed a kiss to the rim of her ear. Still aching like sixteen, still as mesmerized.
“Finn?”
“Mmm?” His mouth found the satiny skin beneath her jaw.
“Finn?”
He froze, his tongue against Bailey’s hot flesh. That wasn’t her voice calling his name.
It was part of his sixteen-year-old world, though.
And his thirty-year-old world too.
Gram.
He broke free of Bailey. Then of her spell.
They stared at each other from opposite sides of the hedge, and he wondered how he’d gotten so stupid. Why had he let his mouth get him into trouble again? His lips were throbbing, the whole of him was aching for more kisses.
Such a damn dangerous ache.
At the same moment they turned from each other. The older dark rebel and the wiser golden girl beating hasty retreats from the traitorous, beguiling past.
On his end, cursing all the way. He could only hope it wasn’t as it had been all those years ago…already too late.
* * *
Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas
Facts & Fun Calendar
December 5
In Italian legend, La Befana is an old woman who brings gifts to children on Epiphany Eve. It is said that the Wise Men visited her on the way to Bethlehem, but she was too busy cleaning house to accompany them when invited. Later, when she regretted the decision and set out to find them and the Baby Jesus, she could not. The story goes that she continues to wander, leaving gifts for the children she does come across.
* * *
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 fl
aring. 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 complet
e 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.
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