For This Christmas Only

by Caro Carson

  So, she returned the intimidating man’s scoff with one of her own. “That’s an incredibly high opinion you have of yourself. You’re certain that being seen just standing next to you is enough for a woman to make any man jealous.”

  Finished with his cuff, he crossed his arms over his chest once more.

  Mallory crossed her arms over her chest, too, but not to imitate him. She just wanted to tuck her hands under her arms for warmth. “It’s more likely a man would feel sorry for the woman standing next to you, with the way you’re giving her the silent treatment.”

  “I’m not giving you anything.”

  “I noticed.”

  “You walked up to me for a reason,” he said, still watching the fire. He had yet to spare a glance for the peon beside him. “It wasn’t because you had a sudden desire to talk about the weather. Then you leaned on me instead of a hay bale to get the sand out of your boots, yet you didn’t take them off. You barely bothered to brush off one. It’s obvious that you wanted someone to see you touching me. Once he did, you stopped. We’re done. Take your sandy boots elsewhere.”

  Her mouth fell open at his rudeness.

  After a moment of silence, he spoke again, sounding weary. “Did you think you were the first woman to try this with me?”

  Beyond him, the ringleader broke away from the other two and started walking toward her, shaking his head at her like she was a disobedient puppy. Her ruse hadn’t worked. The stranger beside her was too obviously not interested in her as a human being.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. It looked like she was going to spend her twenty-ninth birthday just like she’d spent her twentieth, yelling no and pushing away a college boy who’d then go tell his entire team what a bitch she was.

  She didn’t bother trying to hide her frustration. “I’m trying to fend someone off. Fend them off, not toy with them. Not make them jealous.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the ringleader hesitate. Arguing made her look like she knew this stranger well, didn’t it?

  The irony wasn’t lost on her, but it only fed her irritation. She shouldn’t have to play these games. “You know, if I could help out another woman just by letting her stand next to me for a few minutes, I would. I have, more times than most men seem to believe is possible. All you had to do was say, ‘Nice weather. Not too chilly.’ That was all that was being asked of you.” She raked her gaze over his oh-so-casual, oh-so-expensive clothing, from his shoulders to his boots. “Would it have hurt you to spare so little?”

  At last, a reaction: he clenched his jaw. “You want someone to think you have a male protector?”

  She blinked. “That’s kind of a medieval way to put it, but yes.”

  He finally looked down at her. His eyes were silver, startling—a mirror that reflected the flames. In one smooth motion, he uncrossed his arms, placed his hands on her waist and picked her up high enough that her head and shoulders were above his. She squeaked in surprise and grabbed his shoulders for stability, but he dropped her onto the stack of hay bales, leaving her sitting five feet off the ground with hay poking her rear right through her jeans.

  Oh, she didn’t have to fake an argument now. “What are you doing?”

  “You wanted safety. Done.” His gaze dropped to her feet as they dangled above the ground like a child’s. “And your boots won’t get any sandier.”

  “You idiot. Now I’m sitting up here where anyone I’m trying to avoid can see me.”

  “He’d already seen you, had he not?”

  She threw her hands up. “What now? I’m supposed to wait here until he comes to pull me down? You’ve made me more helpless. All you had to do was act like I’m your girlfriend, not a bale of hay. Really, was that so difficult for you? Really?”

  The fire framed him from behind. It gave him a dark-angel kind of appeal, a sinfully handsome Lucifer with striking eyes. She glanced toward the last spot she’d seen the trio—they’d stopped and were huddled over one glowing cell phone screen—and back at him.

  He turned around. She thought he was going to walk away, but instead, he leaned back against the hay bales. Her stack of hay bales—so she wriggled back and pulled her right knee out of his way. He rested against the hay bale, its edge just below his shoulder blades, which meant she now was sitting with a man’s shoulders between her knees.

  Mallory gaped at the back of his head.

  “But—” she started.

  She stopped. But what, really? With his shoulders between her knees, it certainly looked as if they knew each other well.

  Fine, then. She rested her forearms on top of his head, like he was that executive desk she’d have someday.

  “What,” her desk asked, sounding furious, “are you doing?”

  “I’m acting like you’re my boyfriend.”

  “You’ve never had a boyfriend, have you?”

  She stuck out her tongue at the top of his head. “You’ve never been one, have you? You seem to think sticking me on a pile of hay bales and turning your back on me is a normal thing to do on a date, but let me tell you, it’s not.”

  He spoke through gritted teeth. “There wasn’t time to buy you flowers.”

  She snorted, unwillingly amused, even as she kept an eye on the trio. They were all looking at her once more, clearly shocked that she hadn’t lied, although she had. They turned to go, but first, the ringleader hit his hero pose, holding her mitten up high in one fist, then flipping her the bird with his other hand.

  She stayed cool, even blasé, as she lazily raised one hand and flipped him the bird right back.

  She was hoping he’d be so incensed, he’d throw her mitten down. Step on it, leave it the dirt, I don’t care. I can wash it. Please, leave my mitten behind. Please, please, please...

  They left with her mitten. She’d lost the game. It was utterly unfair.

  You must continue to play when the game isn’t fair, or you’ll never win.

  She had to come up with a plan for replacing that mitten.

  From across the sandy courts and the open field, she heard the string quartet playing “Good King Wenceslas.” Mallory knew the lyrics by heart, of course. When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fuel. She knew how the poor man felt, hoping he could find what he needed for free. If she could find a pair of mittens on the ground...

  That was it. Tomorrow, she’d check the lost-and-found box in her dorm building. A set of gloves or mittens could have been there long enough that they were now free for the taking. If not, she’d check the lost-and-found box in the College of Business’s main building, where she worked. If not there, then she’d check every building on campus until she found an abandoned pair. The stolen one had matched her ski hat, but she’d have to take what she could get now. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  A beggar.

  Her plan was to beg for mittens. The truth of it weighed her down. She’d never impress E.L. Taylor or any other investor. She was worse than a beggar; she was weak. She’d spent the better part of her birthday evening letting three guys dictate where she’d go. Make that four guys—she hadn’t decided to sit on these hay bales.

  The violin notes carried on the night air. One tear broke free from Mallory’s lower lashes, making a warm run down her chilled cheek.

  That fourth man grumbled up at her. “How much longer is this date going to last? It’s like having a damned bird nesting on my head.”

  She chuckled despite herself, but the sound hiccupped and ended with something like a sob.

  “Are you—are you crying on me?”

  She shook her head no, which made a few more tears roll down her cheeks, but he couldn’t see that. He could only hear her voice, and since her voice would give her away, she stayed silent.

  Never look back. She’d pushed so hard to be here. She’d suffered through lectures from her brother and his wife.
Gotten guilt trips from every other relative. Driven from Ohio to Texas in a hand-me-down car, then sold it to buy the annual meal plan at the college dining facility.

  She’d burned all her bridges.

  And for what? The coming Executive-in-Residence had sent his preferred schedule to the business college this week. The only courses Mr. Taylor would be teaching were exclusively for MBA students, not for those finishing their bachelor’s degrees. Not for her, the woman who’d hugged his book to her chest in the middle of the night and vowed that she would be a success someday.

  Her plan hadn’t accounted for the possibility that she’d be denied access to Mr. Taylor as a professor. But her plan hadn’t totally failed her, either. She’d seen Mr. Taylor’s schedule because she worked in the administrative offices of the College of Business. She had that job because she hadn’t been weak.

  The financial aid she was receiving required her to work on campus. She’d been assigned a job bussing tables in the student dining facility. Collecting dirty dishes didn’t fit any of her plans, so she’d gone over her financial aid contract with a businesswoman’s sharp eye. The work-study program was ostensibly designed to give students experience related to their field of study, and she’d found a single sentence in the document that stated students could suggest their own jobs. So, dressed like the young and successful CEO she would be someday, Mallory had walked into the College of Business’s administrative offices to ask where she could best help them.

  They’d created a position for her, an assistant to the administrative assistants. A secretary for the secretaries, essentially. She wanted to believe they’d hired her because she exuded that Taylor-coached confidence, but she suspected the permanent admins had merely been happy to get a student as old as she was. Maturity had, for once, been an advantage.

  Maturity and confidence were getting harder and harder to hold on to. A minute ago, she’d just flipped off the mitten-stealing trio.

  Because I had a plan. I wanted them to be so angry, they’d throw my mitten down.

  So many plans. So much stress. But if she hadn’t had a plan, then she wouldn’t have pushed herself to scramble for her office job. If she hadn’t done that, she’d have zero opportunity to speak with E.L. Taylor this coming semester. She couldn’t take his class, but she could leverage her job to gain access to Mr. Taylor. She’d look for opportunities to deliver his messages or print out his lesson plans. She’d stay alert, she’d hustle, and she’d make those opportunities happen.

  Just thinking about it made her feel exhausted.

  Two years of hoping and planning had really been two years of running into obstacle after obstacle. The cost of the textbooks and the dining plan, for example, had been a staggering five thousand dollars. Since practically everything in the town of Masterson was within walking distance from the campus, selling her old car had been the right solution. Now, she never had to fear where her next meal would come from, three meals a day, seven days a week, not until after she received her diploma. She hadn’t run into that obstacle. She’d surmounted it. That was what E.L. Taylor would want her to tell herself.

  But...

  But, just for tonight, as she stared at the flames of a Yule log, she wanted to stop trying so hard. She wanted to stop pretending she was unfazed by every obstacle. She had doubts. Doubts about her plan. Doubts about her future. Doubts about herself.

  The man she was resting on looked like he’d weathered so much, nothing could faze him. Were all these disappointments and worries, her self-doubts and stolen mittens, weathering her, too? Making her hard? Did she want to become that tough?

  The alternative was to let her life be steered this way and that at the whim of others. That hadn’t been a happy life, either, and she’d chosen to leave it.

  Never look back.

  The stranger didn’t ask her anything else. He just stood there like a rock, so she kept leaning on him, not like a child sitting on her father’s shoulders, not like she was getting a piggyback ride, just...leaning on him as she sniffed back her tears and did her calm yoga breathing.

  He took off his gloves and held them up. “Here.”

  Surprised, she took them, wiped her cheeks, and gave them back, dangling them in front of his face.

  “Put them on.” He sounded like he couldn’t believe he had to spell it out. “Your hands are freezing.”

  She sat up straight, embarrassed that her freezing fingertips had been brushing his forehead. The gloves were like a second skin on him, so they weren’t too terribly loose on her. Her fingers slid into the luxurious warmth gladly.

  Now that her arms were off his head, he ran his hand through his hair, as if that would restore order to the untamed layers. He turned just enough to look at her out of the corner of his eye. “How much longer are we going to be here?”

  She rubbed her gloved hands together. “You should have asked me that a minute earlier. I’m not really incentivized to send you and your warm gloves away now.” She leaned to the side a bit, so he could see her expression and know that she was only teasing.

  He remained serious. She felt a moment of concern for him. Poor man, so grim. Hardened.

  Relax. Smile. You need to have some fun.

  On the other hand, maybe he was content just as he was. If he didn’t want to smile, he didn’t have to smile.

  She sighed as she sat up straight again. “I’m just kidding. You were a very effective imaginary boyfriend. They’ve gone.”

  He faced forward once more.

  She frowned at the back of his head. Maybe he thought she needed more time to compose herself. It was embarrassing to realize she probably hadn’t fooled him about the crying any more than she’d fooled him about getting sand out of her boots. Only a few tears had actually fallen silently, rather attractively, like an actress’s single tear in a black-and-white movie. At least Mallory hoped so. At any rate, she’d sniffed most of her tears back, not sobbed them all out. If he assumed she needed more time to pull herself together, he assumed wrong.

  “They actually left a little while ago.” She didn’t want to admit that being tossed onto a haystack had done the trick. “I didn’t mean to keep you this long.”

  “I know.”

  She waited, but that was all he had to say.

  She rolled her eyes behind his back. “So...should I leapfrog over your head now, or would you care to move aside, so I can jump down? Take your time deciding. My fingers aren’t warmed up yet.”

  He stepped to the side, but before she could wriggle to the edge of the stack to drop to the ground, he kicked the heel of his boot back into the hay to make a step and hoisted himself onto the stack next to hers, a six-foot-something man landing right beside her. Had this been a movie, she would have been Debbie Reynolds, aghast that Gene Kelly had just dropped out of nowhere into her convertible.

  This man had such a physical presence. He was big, and he was built. He had a body that vaulted to the top of a tall stack effortlessly, a body that had picked her up like she weighed no more than a bag of sugar. A muscled, masculine body.

  Bodies. It had been so long since she’d thought about bodies as anything but frail. Injury, cancer, extreme old age—she’d worried about those bodies for so long. It had been the career she’d fallen into, easing their aches and pains, finding ways to get them to eat when they weren’t hungry and drink when they didn’t thirst, to walk when walking hurt.

  At the university, she was surrounded by bodies that were so jarringly at the other end of the scale. Barely out of adolescence, they filled college classrooms with more energy than they could contain, boisterous bodies that could withstand the abuse of all-night study sessions and day-long keg parties.

  The man beside her was neither of those extremes. He had strength and control, a man who had a body that he could rely on to perform. Need to lift a woman over his head? Done, without thinking twice ab
out it. His demeanor wasn’t arrogance, perhaps, but confidence that he could handle whatever physical task he needed to.

  She let her eyes roam over his shoulders, his thighs, his hands. The confidence that made him look untouchable to men would make women wish he wanted, needed, to touch them. Mallory had no doubt he knew how to handle that kind of physicality, too. Some people just had sex appeal, and they never really lost it, Paul Newman with silver hair and laugh lines.

  Her fake boyfriend had it in spades, but no silver hair, not yet. Not for a while. He looked to be in his early thirties, a body near the same age as her own. He was just right for her.

  For me?

  What could she possibly do with a man whose body was...oh.

  He turned to her, and it was a fresh little shock to look him full in the face. His days-old beard looked rough and dark, his hair fell forward after he’d pushed it back, but he was undeniably handsome. Had this been a movie—

  He smiled at her, a polite, practiced, obligatory stretching of the lips, and she felt a little déjà vu.

  Strange. If she’d seen him before, she wouldn’t have forgotten him. No woman would. Yet there was something vaguely familiar about his stiff smile, except nothing about this man fit the word vague.

  “You must want to get back to the festival,” he said, a surprisingly courteous hint for her to be gone. “Your family or friends must wonder where you’ve gone. Your real boyfriend, perhaps.”

  Now he wanted to make polite small talk? She was used to him being all broody and curt. Her sudden sexual awareness of him—of her own body—made her broody and curt, too. “If I had a real boyfriend here, I wouldn’t have needed to borrow you, would I?”

  His smile became just a tiny bit more real at her comeback.

  She looked away, hoping this flushed feeling inside wasn’t a visible blush on her face. She was a grown woman sitting next to a grown man, not a flustered teenager who didn’t know how to respond to a cute boy in class.

  “I came by myself tonight,” she said, determined to sound her age. “There’s nothing at the fair for me.”