For This Christmas Only

by Caro Carson

  “I don’t need it.” She’d worked for two years to achieve success on her own terms, and now the man who’d inspired her to do so was telling her she could give up, take some free money and be just fine?

  Aren’t you proud of me for doing this, E.L. Taylor? I made a plan exactly the way you taught me to. Do you think I can’t complete it?

  “I can do this,” she said. “I am doing this.”

  “It’s just twenty grand.” He spoke evenly, but he sounded angry.

  “Twenty grand?” It was a breathtaking amount. She could move out of the subsidized dorm, rent an apartment, and still have enough to buy a used car and more. “I can’t accept that much. I can’t accept any amount.”

  He laughed, sort of. “You’re consistent. You didn’t want me to give you money for hot chocolate, either. Take the money. It won’t hurt me. Good God. I hit the half-billion mark this year.”

  She sucked in a quick breath. Five hundred million dollars? It was an unfathomable amount of money.

  “And still, people I care about won’t take my money. I have to pay bills for them when they aren’t looking.” He drove his hand through his hair. “Why won’t any of you take the money? It isn’t tainted. I haven’t made it by doing anything illegal or immoral. I won’t miss the money.”

  “The point isn’t that the money won’t affect you,” Mallory said. “It affects me.”

  The rain pelted the windows, a force of nature that dumped water whether the people below wanted or needed it. She’d be a fool not to use the money, but it didn’t make her instantly happy. Twenty thousand was a sudden deluge in a land where she’d painstakingly constructed irrigation ditches in the sand.

  “‘Never let anything take you by surprise,’” she quoted. She laid her hands in her lap, palms up, empty. For now. “I failed to predict the possibility of an influx of cash at this stage of the plan. I’m a terrible student of E.L. Taylor, it turns out. He tested me, and I wasn’t ready for it.”

  Taylor sounded resigned. “You’ll modify your plan, and you’ll use it to its best effect. That’s the way you are. It’s been refreshing to know a woman who’d prefer college tuition instead of another set of earrings.”

  “Twenty-thousand-dollar earrings?” She sounded sour. Jealousy was not her best self. “Be real.”

  He lifted the hand that had been resting beside her shoulder, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, then gently touched the shell of the ear he’d bared. “Yes, for real. But those women have slept with me.”

  “Unlike me.” Her voice was supposed to sound firm, not husky. Not jealous.

  “You and I are something different. What’s between us isn’t courteous, consensual sex.”

  “What is between us?”

  She wouldn’t have dreamed she’d be asking this even a half hour ago, but this storm, that Please, intrude, his frustration that money wasn’t a simple gift for her and for others—people I care about—combined to make an invulnerable man seem vulnerable. It crept into her heart just enough to make her feel a little vulnerable, too.

  “I don’t know what we have, Ms. Mallory Ames. I haven’t put a name to it, have you?”

  “No, Mr. E.L. Taylor, I have not.”

  His voice was quiet, reflective. “If we shared a bed, I think we’d be lovers, not people who date and have sex when their schedules allow. We’d want each other every night. We’d share our days, a meal, a conversation, anticipating those nights.” He leaned closer and gently pressed his thumb on her lower lip, the way she’d done to him as they’d shared the tree branch. It was, she realized now, a touch that was more intimate to receive than to give.

  “I can only learn so much from seeing you on a faraway sidewalk. If I want to know more about you, and I do, then I have to talk to you on stormy nights. I have to listen to what you say, and what you don’t, and watch the expressions on your face as you do and don’t tell me about yourself. I need to learn you differently than I’ve learned anyone else in my life, because there’s more here, and it’s very real. I want to be with you just like this tonight, to talk with you like a lover, even if you never become my lover.”

  His fingers trailed over her hair. Her heart tripped and her skin heated, a familiar sensation, so like her night with Eli when she’d fallen under his spell in the shadow of the massive tree, when he’d told her she could do with him as she pleased. Anything we haven’t done yet, or everything we already have.

  It had sounded so sensual despite being in the middle of a park, no place for a seduction, so they’d broken their mood with a laugh, agreeing that it was a bad time and place to play that game. She hadn’t known there was another game being played simultaneously, that the man toying with her had been E.L. Taylor, pretending to be someone else.

  He touched, very precisely, the imitation pearl stud in her earlobe, one he could and would so easily replace with a real pearl, for any lover.

  He was toying with her again. She knew for a fact he could manipulate others, he could sound sincere when he was not, he could fake anything.

  She stood and snatched up her book. “I’ve had enough of that game. You’re very good at it. Stop practicing on me.”

  “No—Mallory, stay.”

  “Really, Eli?” Damn it—that shadow of a beard. “I mean, really, Taylor? Good night. I leave you to your fire and all of the abject misery that comes with writing a wildly successful book and hitting the half-billion mark and—and having sex with glamorous women you shower with twenty-thousand-dollar earrings. You poor man, it all sounds so grim.”

  As she headed for the stairs, her peripheral vision was just good enough to see Taylor fall back on the couch to resume his sprawling position in defeat.

  She made her way back to her bed by the flashes of lightning, pushed open the door and dove for the mattress, landing facedown so she could muffle her cries in the bedding, and nobody would know how weak she was, except herself.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Learning Objective: Describe the effect which a volatile market would have on your business.

  —Senior Year Project by Mallory Ames

  Taylor jackknifed upright, awakened by the hideous crack of thunder. He tried to get his bearings in the darkness. He was still on the sofa. The room was black except for the orange glow of a few dying embers. There was no storm outside the window, but he’d heard thunder.

  Not thunder. There’d been an explosion. He was supposed to be doing something, a task that meant life or death. What the hell was it?

  Water was part of it, he knew that, so he stumbled in the darkness from the couch to the kitchen island to the sink, knocking over a bar stool on the way. He couldn’t stop to pick it up—he needed to do something with the water.

  He cursed out loud, and the sound of his voice was real. He held on to the edge of the sink and turned on the tap. The water felt real. The dream—it had been the dream again, of course. It always started the same, with him in the air, unable to muster any vestige of awe at the dark landscape below as he watched the headlights of miniature cars traveling in straight lines, exactly as he’d felt on a real September night.

  Then a propeller had stopped spinning, black water had come rushing into focus. Terror. He’d seen clearly—too late, too late—that he’d lost everything important to his soul years before he’d lost his life in a single second of deafening impact. Regret.

  Only he hadn’t died.

  He’d come to just seconds later. Water had been pouring into the broken cockpit, bringing with it a rush of cold, clean-washed air, which he’d been so desperate to inhale below the toxic smoke of the burning fuel that had cost him $150. He’d clawed his way out of his seat belt and ducked under the water.

  He cracked his head on the plane’s controls, reached out blindly, felt a human body, a leg in jeans. The pilot was here. The pilot wasn’t moving—was he dead, this suppos
ed friend, this person from his past? Taylor couldn’t let the body burn up.

  He groped frantically in the dark, lungs bursting under the water, but there was no air above the water, either, so he kept going until his hand hit the pilot’s seat belt buckle. He could feel the heat of the fire right through the water. God—God, I’ll boil alive.

  With an explosive effort that drew out every last bit of energy remaining in every last cell of his body, he launched himself over the controls toward the pilot’s missing door. His head broke the water’s surface, his lungs sucked in the unbreathable black smoke, and he rolled onto his back, dragging the pilot’s body with him. Taylor’s arm was his oar, his hand was the blade. Catch, stroke, recover, catch, stroke, recover—the rhythm must be kept while muscles strained. Ignore the pain, cross the finish line, break that record, more, faster, take the pain, winning is everything. The air became breathable, the fire more distant, with every stroke of the oar, every pull of his shoulder muscles.

  Then the fire went out. Through the grit in his eyes, he strained to see the plane, but it had vanished. The water was black, the air clear. The plane must have sunk, and Taylor would sink, too, if he stopped for even one stroke, weighed down by the lifeless body he was dragging along. Catch, stroke, recover.

  His ears were ringing from the sound of metal sheering on impact. He couldn’t hear the sound of his own strokes, his own grunts of exertion. He didn’t hear the woman in the canoe until she was on top of him, a little grandma who paddled like hell while Taylor hung onto a rope she’d wrapped around his arm, once they’d both realized he was too exhausted to lift the pilot’s body into the boat, too exhausted to climb in himself without letting go of the pilot.

  “Are you okay? I heard you crash into something and shout.”

  Taylor gripped the edge of the sink. He could hear. He could hear the woman speaking.

  “Taylor, do you hear me? Are you sleepwalking? Hey, Eli. It’s me.”

  The ringing in his ears cleared instantly, for it was only a phantom from the crash that had left him deafened for days. A phantom could not exist in reality, and reality had just walked up to his side, a barefooted woman wearing a nun’s habit made of flannel with pink bunnies.

  Pink bunnies. Mallory. Oh, thank God.

  He let go of the sink and grabbed Mallory for dear life, hauling her against his chest and burying his face in her hair. The long strands tickled his nose as he breathed in too hard, too fast. They stuck to his wet cheeks—damn it, his cheeks were wet—and he welcomed that nuisance, he craved that touch that could do him no good, except to bring him back to his body and his place in the world, in this kitchen, holding Mallory.

  He was alive.

  Now, what was he going to do about it?

  * * *

  “You’re doing a shot of tequila?”

  The disbelief in Eli’s voice sounded better to Mallory than the anguish had.

  She kept an eye on him as she sliced a lime into quarters. She’d picked up the toppled bar stool and pushed him onto it a little while ago, after he’d told her the terrible story about the plane crash. She’d stoked the fireplace to get some light and heat in the room, hurrying because she didn’t want to leave him at the cold breakfast bar, alone.

  As soon as she was within arm’s reach, he’d pulled her close to stand between his knees, and he’d kept his arms looped around her waist. He’d watched the fire as he’d told her about the pilot who couldn’t walk. She’d felt his crushing guilt in every word, and she’d held his head in both of her hands as she’d pressed her cheek to his, smooth against rough. The warm tears had been hers, that time.

  “You’re really doing a shot of tequila?” he asked again.

  Mallory pushed aside the lime slices and plunked a bottle of very high-end tequila on the breakfast bar. “I assume that is a rhetorical question.”

  She watched Eli’s face, but the fire was behind him, so it was hard to see if she’d gotten even a tenth of a smile.

  Relax. Smile. You need to loosen up.

  If she wasn’t able to help him smile, that was okay. He was allowed to feel any way he wanted to feel as far as she was concerned. He’d survived a wreck, a fire, a near-drowning.

  She felt raw enough just hearing about it, just holding him through the memory of it. This man, who’d been so important to her in one way for two years, might never have become important to her in a different way this December. He could have ceased to exist. She would have spent her twenty-ninth birthday hiding in a festival crowd she didn’t want to be in. She would have had no one to tell her Cinderella wasn’t as self-reliant as she was. She wouldn’t have known what it was like to kiss a man with her heart wide open under a starry sky.

  He was right: it had been the kiss of a lifetime. She’d almost never had it. That alternate Mallory wouldn’t have known what could have been.

  She sat on the bar stool next to his and put her head on his shoulder. He didn’t move away or shake off her touch.

  “Why haven’t I heard about this? Wasn’t it in the news?”

  “I kept it out. It’s not good for business.”

  She picked her head up. “How do you keep something like that a secret? Aren’t there official investigations?”

  “There are. Money fixes things.” He put one finger under her chin and gently closed her mouth. “Legally. Reports can be redacted for the public for all kinds of excuses that lawyers are paid well to come up with. It’s a business investment to have them do it. The news would have hurt a dozen fledgling companies who are depending on my reputation in order to get off the ground.”

  She’d accused him of not knowing how to correctly fake it ’til you make it, but he knew how. He had to do it, or other people with dreams like hers would suffer.

  She ducked her chin, embarrassed that she hadn’t seen this before. “‘Never show weakness.’ You have to appear invulnerable all the time.”

  “E.L. Taylor does, yes. That’s part of my job, but I’ve been just the same as you.”

  She raised her head at that. “I’m embarrassed I ever tried to say we were equal-ish.”

  “We’re two peas in a pod. I told you my book wasn’t intended to apply to your personal life, but I was applying it to mine, too. I was so focused on creating E.L. Taylor and then maintaining E.L. Taylor that I lost touch with my family. I can barely remember people I was friends with when I was younger. Eli Taylor forgot that being the invincible E.L. Taylor was a job, not a life.”

  He laced his fingers in between hers. “This girl in a blue ski cap sat on a hay bale next to me once, clapping her boots together to get the sand off them, and she said she was pretending all the time, too. But she’s not my equal. She’s wiser. Already cautious about spending an entire life pretending to be someone she isn’t. She told me that being who you really are, flaws and all, might be a better way to live, but if you never try it, you’ll have wasted your only chance to find out.”

  She nodded, too touched to speak. He remembered everything she said. He paid attention to her. He treated her like a lover whether or not she ever slept with him.

  “The moment before I knew I was going to die, my thought was, ‘I wasted it.’ I’d gotten to live for thirty-two years, but I’d wasted them. I wasn’t leaving behind anyone who would grieve for me. I know that sounds selfish, but that means I hadn’t invested myself in other people. Their businesses, yes, but not people. No one would miss me at a family dinner, because I never visited my family anymore, anyway. No one would miss my sense of humor, because I never relaxed enough to be even mildly funny with anyone.” He picked up their joined hands and rubbed her knuckles along his jaw as if it were the greatest luxury in the world to do so. “No one would miss holding my hand. I’d wasted my life.”

  “But now you won’t.”

  “You’d think I’d be like Scrooge after the ghosts visited. He saw the err
or of his ways, threw open the windows on Christmas morning and everything was fixed, just like that. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. But I found a decent therapist. I’m making progress.”

  “Progress? Even when I didn’t know you were E.L. Taylor, you were very E.L. Taylor-ish. How are you going to stop being that?” She used their hands to push him in the shoulder. “You’re not going to swagger into the office and leave all the women sighing in little melted puddles anymore?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not kidding. You definitely have swagger. You should keep that part.” He had the sexiest tenth of a smile she’d ever seen, and she was getting to see it right now. It made her heart hop and flutter. She didn’t waste any energy trying to stop that unstoppable hop.

  “I made progress because I made contact with my sister. We’ve texted this week.”

  That was sobering. “That’s the first time you’ve talked to her since September?”

  He let go of her hand and picked up a lime slice, evaluating it in the firelight. “The first time in more than a year. They’re almost eleven years younger than I am.”

  “They? Two sisters?”

  “A brother and a sister. Twins. When I went off to college, they were starting third grade. They turned twenty-one in October. Decided to do it in Vegas.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “I didn’t go. It was after the crash, but...” He set down the lime. “See? It’s not like a magic wand just fixes everything.”

  “Cinderella never knew how easy she had it.”

  “You’re mildly funny,” he said, and she smiled, since he couldn’t. “I didn’t want to fly. The therapist said that was normal. It won’t be an issue unless I get to the point I think I’ll never fly again, but for now...normal. But that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t see them. It’s awkward to be around them. I don’t know how to make up for so much neglect.