For This Christmas Only

by Caro Carson

  Oh, Eli, Eli. Why couldn’t you have been real, instead of Taylor?

  “Mallory.”

  She whirled around, hiding the card behind herself.

  There, straight out of the pages of Forbes, stood the country’s most successful venture capitalist, E.L. Taylor.

  The beard was gone. His hair was styled very well, shorter, devastatingly perfect for his strong features and newly revealed jawline. He wore impeccably tailored slacks, a bespoke dress shirt—it had to have been tailored for him, to fit the width of his shoulders and taper to his waist so well. His watch was understated, for a Rolex.

  The last trace of Eli was gone.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked curtly.

  She did not know this man. In voice, in demeanor, in appearance, he was the E.L. Taylor. This was the legend she’d toiled for two years to meet.

  Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.

  Mallory challenged the one and only E.L. Taylor. “You first. What are you doing here?”

  “They’re locking up the building tonight for the rest of the year. I came to get my gloves.” His voice was flat. He owed no explanations to a peon in a cubicle.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, trying to sound unemotional and flat, just like her former hero, “I have things to do.”

  “Do you need a ride this evening? You have extra bags.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll—I’m just going to leave them here until next semester.”

  It had been the smallest hesitation, but he narrowed his eyes for a moment. He took in her casual clothing—more comfortable for sleeping in—and the grocery bag. Then he crouched down, a flex of masculine thighs and backside in those civilized slacks, and looked under her desk.

  “You decided to keep a bedroll in your cubicle until January, with a stash of granola bars. Why?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Answer me.”

  “I already did.” Mallory found that very satisfying to say. She’d have to adopt that unnecessary question thing from her hero. Former hero.

  “The dorms close today, too, I assume. Most people who find themselves homeless would choose to sleep in their cars. Why don’t you?”

  She laughed at his audacity. What did he know about homelessness? “I would have to own a car. My grandfather’s car was my one-way ticket to school from Ohio. Then it became a year’s meal plan at the dining facility.”

  “The dining facility which will be closed until January.”

  She owed him no explanation. He could glare at her all he wanted to. She would not flinch.

  But then, to her shock, he smiled that one-tenth of a smile. “Mallory Ames, you are not the paragon I thought you were. You are stubborn to an asinine degree, and you need to learn how to ask for help.”

  “I’m doing very well. I don’t need help.”

  “Don’t prove my point so quickly.” His lips quirked—quirked, the jerk. “You have nowhere to stay, and I’m renting a six-bedroom house just outside town. I won’t make you ask. I’ll just answer you. Why yes, I do have a spare room. You’re welcome to use it. I happen to have my car today instead of the motorcycle, so grab your stuff. Let’s go.”

  She didn’t move. “That would violate a fraternization policy.”

  “You’re not my student. You haven’t even signed up for one of those mentorship coffee-and-donut gigs. I suspect that when it’s my turn to be the speaker for the Thursday guest lecture series, I will stand behind that podium, and you will not be in the theater.”

  The mentorship coffees were exclusively for graduate students and well-heeled alumni. Mallory had volunteered to serve the coffee as a way to be in the room where it happened, as the saying went. She’d un-volunteered after the dean had shaken Eli’s hand.

  “The semester hasn’t started. I’m not on the faculty yet. Do I need to keep demolishing your stubborn opposition to the offer of a place to sleep for the winter break? A place, I might add, that won’t be having its electricity shut off? Winter is cold, even in Texas. The house is big enough that you can continue to avoid me with very little trouble.”

  Mallory tried to come up with a brilliant counter to his offer, but that tenth of a smile made him look like Eli, distracting her from the debate.

  “If you don’t accept this offer, then, at some point in the next week, you will be caught by a security guard on his rounds. Being charged with trespassing is not nearly as good a story as being charged with public indecency.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “But I am right.”

  “I can’t live with you. Let me be the one to point out that we’ve kissed. It’s too personal.”

  He tipped his head to the side, looking more relaxed, not less, now that she’d addressed the elephant in the room. “Kissing generally is.”

  “This isn’t going to be that weekend in your bed you described.”

  “There are six bedrooms, Mallory. I won’t go into any but my own. Since we’re being refreshingly blunt here, if you choose to go into mine, I won’t kick you out.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “I’m not.” He picked up her bedroll, grocery bag and backpack. That tenth of a smile took on a shade of sadness. “I told you that you’d never see me the same way again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Learning Objective: Identify the similarities and differences between an established business entity and your own prospective company.

  —Senior Year Project by Mallory Ames

  The house wasn’t the grandiose palace Mallory had been expecting.

  It was a sprawling split-level which spread along its piece of the lakeshore from one wooded boundary to another, taking up almost all of its cleared lot the way a teenager stretched out on a twin bed that was just a little too small for him. There were formal living rooms, two of them, as well as a more casual family room, a sunroom, a game room, two offices, a home gym and a massive back porch. Stairs led up to some rooms and down to others. Passages connected the wings that had been added as the house had grown over the years. Just as he’d promised, Mallory was able to avoid her host without any effort at all.

  The only indication he was aware of her presence was a note she’d found on the kitchen counter: Eat something besides granola bars. Help yourself to anything. The kitchen gets restocked on Wednesdays. She’d made herself an omelet and left the handwritten note on the counter, aware that just a month ago, she would have been thrilled to have an E.L. Taylor autograph, let alone an entire note. Now, it was just a note from a guy who’d left half a pizza in the fridge.

  He’d written on the cardboard box, too. Yes, I have had pizza around the world, and yes, this one is very good. Reheat in the oven. Don’t microwave. Ruins it.

  On her third night in the house, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the power went out.

  Mallory took the book she’d been reading—a sweet Christmas novel, a respite after reading so many textbooks this semester—and her cell phone to use as a light, and tiptoed out of her bedroom. She began making her way to the downstairs family room, the one room in the house that had any holiday decorations, for a little ambiance while she finished her novel.

  The family room was divided from the kitchen by a breakfast bar with eight barstools. The kitchen and family room combined to make one open space, but it still felt more cozy than the rest of the house, particularly because there was a fireplace in the family room.

  The mantel had been decorated with ornaments and garlands that exuded all the holiday warmth of a department store display. Mallory was certain the decorations had been part of the kitchen restock. Some enterprising company probably included it with their regular December deliveries: a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk, a six-foot garland, four bows.

  The fireplace had also been stocked with kindling and
a charmingly photo-ready pile of logs. This storm was the perfect time to use it. The fire would provide light to read by, so she could save her cell phone battery. If the power stayed out for a long time, the fire would keep the room from getting too chilly. Besides, Mallory hadn’t had the chance to build a real log fire in years. If she was going to live here for two weeks, she might as well enjoy the amenities.

  She reached the half staircase that led from the hallway with all of the bedrooms down to the family room. Her flannel nightgown covered her from her neck to her toes, so she was warm. More importantly, the nightgown was super modest. If she encountered the other resident of this massive house, she wouldn’t be embarrassed by anything other than the flannel’s pink bunny print.

  She stopped on the stairs. There was already a fire burning, but nobody was around.

  It was irresponsible to light a fire and leave. It didn’t seem like something the brilliant E.L. Taylor would do. She took the last step down and tiptoed toward the kitchen, thinking he might be there, but it was only a black space. All of the appliances with their glowing digital clocks and touchpads had died with a crack of lightning.

  “What are you doing?”

  Mallory spun around with the book clutched to her chest. She could see over the back of the couch, now that she was in the room. Taylor was stretched out on it, staring at the fire, not at her.

  “You scared me to death,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything, so after standing there awkwardly for a moment too long, Mallory turned to go back up the stairs.

  “You should stay and read by the firelight.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the fire, but he’d seen her book with that super peripheral vision, apparently.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” she said.

  “Please. Intrude.”

  There was something in that please that made her step closer to get a better view of him over the back of the couch. “Are you okay?”

  He shut his eyes, blew out a breath, then turned his face toward her and opened his eyes. “Yes.”

  She looked at his face and thought, No.

  She should go. She was trying not to dwell on either Eli, who’d never been real, or Mr. Taylor, whom she avoided like the plague, but she never stopped thinking about this man, for better or worse. Sharing this room with him wasn’t going to make her think about him any more than she already did, so she might as well stay near the fire. Her bedroom was pitch-black and would soon grow cold.

  She held up her book. “The couch is the closest to the light, and you’re kind of hogging it.”

  He sat up.

  Mallory sat down.

  They remained side by side in silence for an eternity. Mallory went through the motions of reading her book although she was far too aware of him, the physical presence of the man next to her, his body strong and healthy, his whole demeanor unhappy.

  “You’re staring,” he said, without looking away from the fire. His five-o’clock shadow was just enough to add a touch of Eli to his appearance.

  “My book is boring. There’s nothing else to look at.”

  Do you miss being Eli? Do you miss holding hands with a girl in a blue ski cap?

  She needed to stop thinking like that. It was like asking an actor if he missed being a movie character. E.L. Taylor had given an Oscar-worthy performance, but he was not Eli.

  “I don’t know what to call you,” she said. “Mr. Taylor in the office, of course. What should I call you here? E.L. Taylor is a mouthful. Do you go by E.L.?”

  “Just Taylor.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can call me Eli.”

  She closed her book. “I don’t think you’re trying to be mean right this moment, I really don’t, but it’s not nice for you to remind me what a sucker I was. I’m not going to keep calling you by a fake name. It’s not cute.”

  “It’s not a fake name. I was Eli growing up. I still am, to my immediate family. If I see them.” He closed his eyes and turned his head from the fire toward her again, such an odd way to look from one thing to another, but the end result was the same, Paul-Newman-blue eyes gazing into hers.

  “I don’t know why I told you Eli when you asked me my name, but it wasn’t intended to trick you into being a sucker. You weren’t one, anyway. A sucker gets taken advantage of and loses something of value. Their money, their car. There has to be something they get suckered out of.”

  “I didn’t know who you were. You took advantage of that by staying anonymous.”

  “To get what from you? What did I trick you out of?”

  My heart.

  With the firelight on his face and the shadow on his jaw, he looked so much like Eli, it hurt. She wished she didn’t still like him as Taylor.

  She pulled up her feet to sit cross-legged, smoothing pink flannel bunnies over her knees. “You amused yourself at my expense.”

  “Mallory.” He said her name with such disappointment, like she was a student he’d expected to give a better answer. “When I read that wish and saw my own name, did I strike you as being amused?”

  “Can’t you see what a fool you made of me? I told you all my plans and all the flaws in my plans, all the mistakes I made. I laid it all out for the man who wrote ‘Never divulge more details than necessary.’ Your book taught me to anticipate what might go wrong, so I would never be taken by surprise. How did my face look when I realized which office you were being shown into? I’m floundering now. I broke all the rules that had been working for me, and I don’t know how my plan is going to turn out.”

  “That book wasn’t intended to dictate your life.”

  “Yes, it was. It’s an advice book. You can’t conduct your business one way and your personal life another. Either you believe in moving forward, or you don’t. You believe in setting goals, or you don’t. You make hard choices, or you don’t.”

  He sat forward, elbows on his knees, and scrubbed his face with both hands. “I wish I’d never written that book. It’s caused me nothing but grief.”

  How could he hate a book that had been so important to her? A book that he wrote?

  “It made you a lot of money. It made you famous enough to be on TV, and that made you even more money. You dated beautiful, famous women. A rock star. A supermodel.”

  “Like I said, nothing but grief.” He kept his head in his hands, but another smile touched his lips. “I see you’ve been doing your research.”

  Busted.

  For two years, she’d only researched him by reading articles and interviews in her local library’s copies of Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She hadn’t been interested in his personal life. That would not help her move forward with her plan, and she’d been so very strict with herself about putting all her effort toward her goals.

  But after Eli had walked into the dean’s office and shocked her to her core, she’d made up for lost time. The first candid shirtless photo she saw had made her jaw drop. How unfair that the one day of her life she’d gotten to sit on his lap, they’d been in winter coats.

  Tonight, he wore long plaid pajama bottoms and a close-fitting, short-sleeved T-shirt, exposing his arms to her sight for the first time. He looked great in photos, but being only a couch cushion away as those defined muscles bunched and flexed and stretched the sleeve of that T-shirt was something else—the difference between looking at a photo of a tropical ocean and actually standing on the shore with her toes in the hot sand. She didn’t touch the water either way. But, in person, the possibility was right there, if only a wave would lap a little higher on the shore.

  Most of the photos had been taken at black-tie events. The man looked good in a tux. So did the women who got to be by his side. He didn’t need a caregiver from Ohio as a girlfriend.

  Pretend you’re equals.

  She shrugged and waved one hand, a princess in pink bunny print.
“Feel free to research me back.”

  “How?” He dropped his hands and sat back. “I can’t just look at a thousand photos of you on the internet. I tried.”

  “You tried?”

  “Of course. I came up empty. I have to do my research some other way.” He turned sideways on the couch and laid his arm across the back of it, giving her all of his attention, while she split hers between his blue eyes and those incredible arms.

  “I have to look at you whenever I can in real life instead of photos. It’s not often enough.” He tapped his temple. “But I’ve got pictures up here of Mallory crossing the campus in her blue jeans. I see Ms. Ames killing it in the office in her pencil skirt. I can tell a lot about the kind of day you’re having by the way you walk.”

  She frowned. “When do you see me walk?”

  “When you leave the office, you take the sidewalk that goes past the east side of the building. My side. On the days I pretend I have a reason to come into the office, I wait for you to walk by before I leave, except that one night. You were still there, but the janitor had started cleaning the offices, so I finally left, but I sat in my car a while, waiting for you to come out. You didn’t. I went back in and found you and Irene in my office.”

  Mallory could still taste the fear that she’d been on the brink of losing everything. “I was being fired. You were very smooth with your excuses.”

  “You played along flawlessly. I thought it was better to give her a story she could accept. I know how the rumor mill would have worked if I’d told her it was none of her damned business how you’d gotten my gloves, which is what I wanted to say.”

  “I didn’t thank you then. Let me thank you now. Without that job, I would have lost my financial aid package. I would have had to drop out.”

  “You will never have to drop out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  They stared at one another through one lightning flash. Another.

  Taylor dropped his gaze to his thigh and flicked imaginary lint from his plaid flannel pants. “There’s money in your student account, if you need it. If you don’t, let it sit. The school will give you the remaining funds when you graduate and they close out the books.”