Must Love Mistletoe

by Christie Ridgway

  So she dug her butt into the shifting sand and refused to be scared away.

  Finn said nothing more. Through the flames she saw him reach out to the pile of fuel and grab another piece. He tossed the length of wood into the blaze. It had twigs and leaves attached, and as they caught, they crackled with the sound of candy wrappers, then smoked like a wizard’s spell.

  But not the kind of alchemy that worked magic. Finn remained silent. She didn’t know what to say herself.

  Maybe companionship was enough.

  “Go home, Bailey.”

  He thought he didn’t even want companionship, then. But she was stubborn too. “I’m fine. The fire is keeping me warm.”

  More minutes of brooding silence followed. He drank. She waited. Then he picked up another length of wood and fed it to the leaping flames. Took another swallow. Added more wood to the fire.

  Finally Bailey couldn’t take the tension. “She was a wonderful woman,” she offered. “I’m sorry I didn’t know she was so ill.”

  He hesitated, flask in his right hand, wood in the other. Then his left arm dropped, the piece of fuel slamming into the fire.

  Sparks exploded, and Bailey flinched, but kept on talking anyway. “You didn’t say a word about that, Finn.” It was the first thing that had struck her when Trin told her the news. “You insisted she was going to get well. Didn’t you know—”

  “I know what the doctors said.” He hurled a second piece of wood into the blaze. Embers sprang high, as if trying to escape.

  “Then why—”

  “Because I didn’t want to think about it, all right?” He swigged from the flask, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Or believe it?”

  Another piece of wood crashed into the fire. Silver turned red as he brought the drink to his lips again.

  She dug her fingers into the sand, though the unstable stuff offered nothing solid to hang on to. “It’s no crime to grieve, Finn. Grief is normal, natural—”

  “Oh, I’m done with grief.” His voice was more caustic than the acrid smell of smoke in the air. “I’ve been living with it grinding my guts into sausage meat since I woke up in the hospital and found out that Ayesha was dead eleven months ago.”

  He tilted his head back and sipped again from the flask. “There’s nothing left inside of me for it to chew on.”

  The wind off the ocean fluttered the ends of Bailey’s hair. “Then you don’t need to be out here all alone. Let’s go back to my house…or to the bar. Tanner’s there.”

  “I can’t deal with Tanner’s guilt tonight too.”

  Oh, Finn. “Your grandmother wouldn’t want you to feel guilty. You know that. You know you didn’t have the power to stop what happened to her.”

  “But then there’s Ayesha.” He tossed another piece of wood into the crackling blaze even as he took another drink. “You can’t say I didn’t fail her.”

  Confused, Bailey shook her head. “What could you have done about that either?”

  “I was her supervisor.” He stared at his reflection in the surface of the flask. “I should have seen something. Sensed something.”

  She lifted her hand, sand sifting between her fingers. “You couldn’t have known about that assassin. You can’t read some murderer’s mind who shows up out of nowhere.”

  “Oh, baby, you’ve got it all wrong.” He shifted his gaze from the booze to spear a long, thin stick into the middle of the blaze and watch it light up.

  It looked like an accusing finger, she thought, and Finn had pointed it toward himself.

  “You’re right that I couldn’t know the assassin was going to pick that target, that day, that time,” he continued. “But I knew Ayesha. And I should have suspected what she might do.”

  “Her job.” Bailey heard the sharp edge in her voice. “You said she did her job.”

  “Yeah.” The stick was burning now like a tongue of flame. “But the problem is, see, I don’t know that her actions were dictated by the mission. There were other ways for it to play out that day which didn’t involve her standing up for that bullet. I wonder…was she thinking of me? Was she trying to impress me? Save me? I don’t know. But I should have seen, I should have sensed in those days and weeks before, that she wasn’t operating in pure agent mode. I should have worried about how far she would go for love.”

  The smoke was stinging Bailey’s eyes. Blinking them away, she had to clear her throat too. “How could you look into someone else’s heart?”

  “Easy.” His laugh sounded short and rough, and then he took a long draw from the flask. “I only had to look as far as my own. I was the same for you, Bailey, once upon a time. I would have done anything for you—hell, I did. I cleaned up my act, went to college, joined the Secret Service as my way of impressing you. A bullet? I would have taken that too.”

  “I…I don’t know what to say.” She didn’t want to think about all she’d lost by running away.

  “Good-bye will work.” He was staring down at the booze again. “Oh, that’s right, you tend to duck those.”

  It stung, but this time she wasn’t leaving, even though the smoke was making her chest feel tight now too. “That’s not fair. I came here tonight, didn’t I? I came to talk to you about how you feel. I came here to…to be your friend.”

  There was a charged moment of silence. Then he shot to his feet. Bailey twitched at his sudden movement, staring at him and how the light of the flames on his jeans and black sweatshirt made it appear as if he’d caught fire himself.

  “My friend?” he repeated, his tone incredulous as he stared at her through the leaping blaze. “You call yourself my friend? You want to know how I feel?”

  “Well, I…yeah.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, a dark sound that made her think of pirates again. Or devils. “Be careful what you wish for, baby.”

  Though it was clear that the alcohol, or his emotions, probably both, had caught up with him, Bailey needed to see this through. “I can take it.”

  “Then how about this.” He snagged another piece of thick wood and threw it into the blaze. More sparks exploded, flying upward. “I feel torn to pieces over Ayesha. I feel pissed off that I lost my eye and my ability to do the job I love.”

  More fuel was dumped on the fire, and pieces of ash swirled around him. “I hate that I couldn’t stop a disease that was leaching the life from Gram.”

  Turning, he dropped his flask to the sand, then bent at the waist to pull something from the hodgepodge of wood beside him. When he straightened again, she could see it was a full-sized Christmas tree—but an old one, its needles dried to a rusty brown. “I’m damn depressed that it’s the holidays and I can’t think of a single thing worth celebrating.” With one strong movement, he lifted the tree over the concrete ring and jammed its trunk into the sand and into the center of the leaping fire.

  As the needles burst into flame, crackling and popping, their corner of the beach turned bright as day. The heat forced Bailey to scoot back.

  But not far enough to miss Finn’s next words, harsher and more biting than all the others. “And at the top of my list, I feel like letting you know you’re not my friend. Friends are people I trust. And you just don’t qualify.”

  She was on her feet, backing away from the burn, but he still seared her.

  “You, Bailey, you are nothing to me.”

  * * *

  Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

  Facts & Fun Calendar

  December 23

  Guidelines from a department store Santa Claus training school include admonishing Santa not to leave his chair even if a child has an “accident” and to always keep gloves and beard scrupulously clean. They further advise that it never looks quite right for Santa to flirt with the elves.

  * * *

  Chapter 23

  Finn saw in another dawn. Three days ago it had been in Bailey’s bed, yesterday on the beach, today he sa
t on the wicker chair in the corner of Gram’s small porch. With his boots propped on the railing, he sipped another of the endless cups of coffee he’d been mainlining since dumping the last of his flask into the sand after running Bailey off.

  Bingeing on booze no longer appealed—and he hoped was no longer necessary.

  He took another swallow from his mug and paged through Desirée’s—aka the Mad Gift Giver’s—latest present. The poor little rich girl continued to come up with outrageous ways to assuage her guilt in the whole assassination debacle and to thank him for saving her father’s life—even though that father had little use and even less time for her.

  Sort of like someone else he knew.

  But he pushed that thought from his mind and turned another page, his gaze widening at the latest position detailed in the Kama Sutra pop-up book that had been left on the doorstep. A note in Desirée’s own handwriting guaranteed it was a one-of-a-kind faithful rendering of the ancient text on sexual behavior. “May it inspire you to great lengths for love,” she’d written in that perfect, boarding school handwriting of hers. He wasn’t sure she even realized the double-entendre.

  And love wasn’t something he wanted to be thinking about either.

  Despite himself, he glanced over at the house next door. Bailey’s Passat was still on the street. He couldn’t wait until she left town.

  Then he could hunker down to make it through Christmas. Gram had specifically prohibited a funeral or memorial service, so his parents had encouraged him to head out to the Midwest to be with the rest of the family, including his new nephew, but he’d taken a pass. He didn’t plan on wallowing his way through the holiday so much as it didn’t feel right to leave Gram’s home empty right now.

  Gram. Somehow, her memory didn’t hurt. That last morning, his sixth sense had failed him again. He’d had no clue that she’d pass on peacefully in her sleep, but he could accept that now. They’d had plenty of time to talk about her wishes and her attitude toward the end of life. More important, he could hear her telling him as clearly as if she were sitting beside him right now, over seventeen years she’d shared with him how to live it.

  A car clattered its way around the turn at the end of the block. Finn placed his feet on the ground and craned his neck to see what was happening as the junker came to a stop behind Bailey’s car.

  The passenger door popped open, and a young man unfolded from the seat. Then he ducked back in to pull out a backpack, two roly-poly duffels, and a shopping bag of wrapped gifts that he propped against the pole of the ribbon-bedecked mailbox. One more reach inside, and he drew out an extra-long sleeping bag that appeared to be stuffed from mummy toes to cinched neck with—Finn squinted as items spilled from a rip in the side—clothes. Having once been a college student himself, Finn hazarded a guess they were dirty clothes.

  The boy grinned at the driver and waved a good-bye. Harry, Finn thought, home at last.

  It was like that Christmas coffee commercial, when Peter arrives in the early a.m. to surprise sister and sleeping parents. But this prodigal son didn’t make it so far as the kitchen. Instead, suddenly the Christmas lights blazed on next door, and Tracy, Dan, and Bailey poured out of the front door and onto their porch.

  Finn drew deeper into his corner so they wouldn’t see him, but he watched the reunion. Dan grabbed his son first, clapping him on the back, the sound loud enough to wake the neighborhood. Tracy got him next. Harry swung his mother up, and she hugged him close with one arm around his shoulders. Her other arm curled out to her husband, inviting him into the embrace. What followed was a Willis family huddle.

  With Bailey smiling from several steps away.

  Finn couldn’t force his gaze off her. She looked rumpled and like the teenager he’d first fallen for in her flannel PJ bottoms and little T-shirt. The Christmas lights lent her blond hair some punky red, green, and blue highlights as she absently reached over to the wreath on the front door and straightened it to an even greater degree of perfection.

  The woman who had saved the day at her family’s store, the woman who had decorated the family’s house despite her avowed aversion to Christmas, stood alone, outside the circle.

  Get out before things get ugly.

  Bailey, always withdrawing before she got too close.

  Before anything could hurt too much.

  That fissure in his soul began to bubble again.

  Shit. Rubbing his chest, he squeezed shut his eye and felt that familiar ache in his facial bones. And here he’d thought the beach bonfire had purged all the pain out of him. He was sure after spilling all to Bailey that night that his emotions had finally been scraped clean.

  Anger, guilt, frustration, sadness consumed in the flames. It had been a hell of a way to release the coil of emotions that had put him in knots for months, but he’d thought that with Gram’s death and the subsequent confession time on the beach, it was all, finally, gone.

  That he was free. And back in cool, utter control.

  But now he realized he was still under the influence of one final emotion he didn’t want to feel—love.

  That night by the fire, he’d thought he’d told her the truth. You, Bailey, you are nothing to me, he’d said. And in his anger and hurt, he’d been desperate for that to be right.

  He opened his eye, his gaze zeroing in on Bailey. Still standing alone. As Dan and Tracy chattered to Harry, she moved into the deeper shadows of the porch.

  Just as Finn had hoped to hide how he felt about her.

  But it wasn’t going to work, was it?

  Gram’s voice sounded in his head. She’d already done it a few times in the past couple of days and he imagined she’d be doing it for a while yet. “There’s a reason we celebrate Christmas at the darkest time of the year, Finn,” he heard her saying, just as she had a few weeks before. “To remind us that hope and light will always arrive.”

  He didn’t know about hope and light. But he had held on to something for ten years—and this was just the right season to give it away.

  * * *

  Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

  Facts & Fun Calendar

  December 24

  Headline over an editorial in the September 21, 1897, edition of the New York Sun: “Is There a Santa Claus?”

  * * *

  Chapter 24

  The cyclone fence gate clanged shut, a depressing sound to go with the day’s weather. After weeks of clear afternoons, the sun had been no match for today’s thick fog. The dreary stuff weighted down roofs, wrapped itself around stoplights, wiggled between the leaves of the trees. It made it even easier for Bailey to turn her back on the mint-green stucco apartment complex she’d just visited. No, she wasn’t sad to leave the depressing place, just as she wasn’t going to be sad to leave anything else in Coronado.

  Telling herself she should be happy to check off one of the final impediments to her departure, she turned toward her car, then stumbled as she stopped short.

  “Watch out, GND,” Finn said, materializing out of the gray gloom. “If you trip and fall on Christmas Eve, it’ll mean a long afternoon in the emergency room waiting your turn among the results of all those family brawls and ugly scotch tape incidents.”

  “Who’s the cynic now?” she murmured, ducking her head to observe him through the shield of her lashes. Since that beach bonfire, his car had come and gone from his grandmother’s house and she’d seen people knock on the door with casseroles in hand and then go away without them, but she hadn’t seen Finn. Today he was all cool pirate again, his expression unreadable, even with bright presents stacked high in his arms.

  “It looks as if we both can be soft-hearted on occasion,” he said. “Unless you only dropped by our friend Angel’s place to debunk the Santa myth this time.”

  All I can tell you is that you just gotta believe.

  She’d told the little boy that, which meant she’d had to follow through with providing a small measure of Christmas magic, didn’t she? Gifts f
rom a couple of near-perfect strangers should do that.

  “The family isn’t home,” she told Finn, which she thought made the whole thing even better. Anonymous gifts were pretty darn close to Santa Claus, weren’t they? “But I left mine with the landlady and she promised to pass them along once they return later today.”

  “I’ll do the same,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.” With a businesslike nod, he started to move past her. As if they were near-strangers.

  “Finn.”

  He paused. “Yeah?”

  “Well…Um…” Bailey wiped her palms on her jeans and tried not to remember that this was the man who’d made love to her with such fierce tenderness that she could still feel the imprint of his mouth on the skin between her shoulder blades. She tried not to remember the heated scorn in his voice when he’d told her on the beach she was nothing to him. That he didn’t trust her.

  She’d known from the beginning he was a man without patience for pretending.

  “My mother wanted to invite you over for Christmas Eve dinner.” Bailey didn’t add that she’d immediately nixed the idea, but Tracy would be happy to add another plate to the table even now. “We’re having turkey and all the trimmings around five.”

  “You tell her thanks for me…but no.” He made to move off again.

  Move out of her life. Okay, she was the one leaving, but just like…like this?

  “Finn.”

  He turned again.

  And he was so beautiful to her, she didn’t think she could choke out a good-bye. Maybe she didn’t deserve one.

  “GND?”

  Bailey jerked the thoughts out of her head. Tried a smile. “Nothing. Just…nothing.”

  And the last she saw of him was the shrug as he walked away.