“So what is your idea of fun?”
He slid her a look. “Girl, don’t even go there.”
She planted her arms over her chest. “I am going there. Tell me the best thing you ever did for fun.”
Hard choices. The time he and his brother had decorated their very cute Grade Ten teacher’s thirty-foot pine, top to bottom, with all her underwear? Maybe that hadn’t been so fun. His mother had cried when the police showed up on their doorstep.
The Puerto Vallarta all-inclusive—board-surfing, parasailing, girls in bikinis everywhere and an all-you-could-drink bar?
It seemed, in retrospect, fun but mindless. Besides, Brian had broken his leg in Mexico, and their mother had cried again, because of the medical bill.
He decided he wasn’t about to tell her a truth he was growing more aware of all the time. The best thing he had ever done was walk through the doors of the Secret Santa Society, into that secret and magical place built by the spirit of Christmas: love and generosity in such massive abundance as to be nearly blinding.
“I just can’t figure out what the attraction of us is,” she said. “We’re not exciting. We’re hardly even interesting.”
He looked at her and realized she just didn’t have any idea at all. His whole life seemed like it had been uninteresting until the exact moment he’d walked through that door into the world Kirsten had made.
All the things he and his brother had gotten into, they all seemed like childish high jinks now. Not that he would take back a moment of it, but something in him was ready to move on. To grow up.
He was not sure if Brian was still around if that would have ever happened. They egged each other on, they fed off each other’s energy, they kept each other company. When one of them had gotten a girlfriend, the other one had usually managed to wreck it somehow, always thinking that girl wasn’t just right, wasn’t good enough.
What would Brian think of Kirsten?
A keeper. He almost heard his brother’s voice, his laughter when their mother nagged them to settle down. Ma, we’re looking for keepers, just like you.
Well, you aren’t going to find anything worth keeping in the trashy places you’re looking, their mother had shot back, there’s a nice girl at church… but before she got any further Brian had laughed and gone and picked her up and twirled her around until she was laughing helplessly, too.
He felt that ache when he thought of his brother’s laughter. And his mother’s. It felt as if it would swamp him, but he looked at Kirsten’s eyes, and the emotional sea inside him seemed to calm.
“I used up all my need for excitement,” he said slowly, and then he knew he was going to tell her.
That he was ready to speak of this thing, to trust all of himself to her.
“You know that accident I told you about?”
She nodded.
“My family had a crab boat in Alaska. My dad was raised there, we always went back for the two crab seasons, king crab and snow crab. Do you know anything about crab fishing?”
She shook her head.
“It’s cold, it’s hard, it’s dangerous. The Bering Sea is probably the most dangerous water in the world. And still, it’s thrilling. Bringing a boat into Dutch Harbor so loaded that if you put one more crab on it, it would capsize, is like winning the lottery. Same adrenaline rush, same reward.
“In April this year, snow crab, we’d already brought our boat in, fully loaded, once. A storm was coming, the season was close to ending. I didn’t want to go back out. We’d cashed in a record catch. Over three hundred grand in crabs.
“My dad wasn’t greedy. But crab fishing is like gambling. It’s a high. And he always had this grab-life-with-both-hands attitude. He and my brother overruled me and my mom. She always came along to cook, to look after her boys.
“One hundred and eighty miles out in the Bering Sea, The Queen of Treemont , named after my mom, went down.
“All souls lost,” he said. “All souls lost.”
The night seemed to have grown quieter. The snow was falling more heavily.
“Weren’t you on it?” she finally whispered. “Didn’t you go back out?”
“Oh, yeah, I was there. I survived. Thanks to a survival suit, I was pulled out of the water by a rescue chopper after six hours in a storm-tossed sea. But my soul was lost that night as surely as theirs were. They were my soul, Kirsten.”
“I understand,” she said quietly.
And oddly, he knew she did. So many people claimed to understand, to know what he was going through. But nobody really did.
But when he looked into her eyes, and saw them blurred with tears that were slipping down her cheeks, he knew she understood. Not what it was like to be him.
What it would be like to love him.
He felt driven to continue, to spill all of this thing that had set like an anchor inside of him, dragging him to the bottom.
“I never saw one of them out there in the water that night. I did not have a chance to save them, and had I known they were all gone, I would have let go instead of hanging on. So many days I regret living. I feel rage at them.”
It was the first time he’d said that. Instead of making him feel intensely guilty, he felt free. He felt good that he was trusting Kirsten with all of him, even a man who could feel rage at a dead family.
“What would you say to them if you could?” she whispered.
Ah, a chance to tell them one last time, that he loved them. No. He was determined to give Kirsten all of him.
“What would I say? I’d scream at them. How could you go without me? How could you be all together and leave me alone?”
He was done speaking. He felt heavy with it, and yet, relieved in some way, too. He had thought, when he spoke of this, the dam within him would burst and what was behind it would come rushing out and destroy.
But he could feel the dam bursting, and it felt as if it was love pouring out. Years and years of the love of a strong, strong family. He remembered his mother’s hand on his brow when he was sick, his father’s hand on his backside after they broke Mr. Theodore’s front picture window for the third time. He remembered his brother, two years older than him, Brian’s hand in his as they made that long walk to Michael’s first day of school.
She reached up and kissed him, and he tasted the salt of her own tears. He kissed her back, gently at first, but then all that was within him, he gave to her. Sorrow, anger, joy, memories.
She took a step back from him.
And he was pretty sure neither of them knew if she was ready for anything quite so real and quite so raw as Michael Brewster.
Kirsten could barely see him through her tears. How could he suffer something like this and still be able to go and buy a little girl who dreamed of Disneyland everything that was needed to keep a dream alive? How could he do that when his own dreams had been so shattered?
He could do it because he was Michael.
Michael who made everyone laugh, and who hated Christmas music, and who danced with Lulu, and who could put together—or wrap—any odd gift that came through that door. Michael who could turn an old wreck of a flat deck into a real Santa’s sleigh.
Michael who was challenging her, every single day, to let go of her stranglehold on control, to risk a little of her heart.
He had told her he was unavailable, and she had tried so hard to believe him. But she sensed in this confidence he had shared with her tonight, something new, something changing, something that could not be put back the way it was before once it had changed.
He was a man who would take everything a woman had to give. He was a man who would even take things that she did not have to give.
She knew she was standing on a precipice, right now, in this snowstorm with Michael. His inner storm was calming, she could feel that. But her own felt as if it was just beginning.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against her ear. “I need to go. I want to be alone.”
She looked at him and saw his nee
d to be alone was not about her. It was about him. She could see the memories swimming through his eyes, and she knew how he wanted to be with them.
Kirsten was aware she wanted to be alone as much as he did. She needed time to puzzle over the last days, to puzzle over how she was feeling.
She didn’t want to be swept away by emotion.
She wanted to decide where her life was going, what risks she was ready to take.
So even though she knew the most sensible thing would be for both of them to be alone, she could not look at the starkness in his face and be sensible.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go for a coffee?” she asked, but she heard the tentativeness in her own voice.
“Not tonight,” he said. “I’m going to take a rain check.”
She turned and walked away from him, aware he watched her as she fitted her key into her lock, still protecting her, even as he embraced the storm of his own feelings. She cleared the windshields with the wipers, rather than getting out and brushing them off. She was aware of needing to run away from her own emotion as she spun the car around and drove away from him.
In her rearview mirror, he was a lonely figure being lost in the snow, and yet she felt a thousand times more lost than him. What did it mean that he had confided in her? That he had made himself so vulnerable to her? Could it possibly mean that he might feel more for her than she had ever believed could be possible? Was she worthy of his trust? And was she ready for it?
CHAPTER SEVEN
MICHAEL watched Kirsten drive away, then shoved his hands in his pockets, trudged through the thickening snow toward the car he and his brother had shared so many good times in…tonight he would open the photo albums he had been avoiding. Tonight, he would remember and embrace the love that had been the lifelong gift from his family. He would make a choice to live in that love rather than in the pain of those final moments.
He had shared his deepest, most painful moments and memories with Kirsten. It had felt like a relief to tell her, it had felt as if finally, after months lost in the storm, he had glimpsed safe harbor. In Kirsten, he had glimpsed safe harbor.
And he knew he was going to be cashing in that rain check for a coffee, even though in Kirsten’s world, coffee would mean coffee, he knew that. He knew it even though when she had kissed him the message of her lips had been primal. Live.
Whether she knew it or not, and she probably didn’t, she was inviting him to live again. Fully. And maybe to love, though the truth was he did not know how you would go about loving a girl like Kirsten.
Slowly, came to mind. No fast moves.
And he knew what being alone, so far, had solved for him—absolutely nothing.
He liked the contradictions of her—her eyes promised him safe harbor, and yet something about her also promised a kind of adventure that was brand-new to him.
A new adventure beckoned. And like the best of adventures it terrified, too. And that combination of curiosity and terror made it irresistible to a heart that he recognized was healing…
Fourteen days until Christmas…
“Hey,” Michael said, casually, a few days later as they were locking up, “how about that coffee you promised me?”
Ever since he had spilled his guts to her, something in him was more relaxed, more open. Ready.
She didn’t like spontaneity, and he smiled at her expression.
“At my house?” she asked.
He could clearly see she was doing inventory of her house, deciding if it was tidy enough. He hoped it wasn’t. Untidy would tell him a whole lot more about her!
“That sounds good,” he said. “I’ll just follow you in my car.”
Her apartment building was what he expected—a secondfloor walk-up in a well-kept brownstone. The front door of her suite opened into a living room that was pure Kirsten—neat and tidy, after all. There was a lace doily on the coffee table, an ugly hand-knitted afghan thrown over a white couch. No one who knew the first thing about real men would buy a white sofa.
A book lay open, spine up, on a side table. He caught a glimpse of it—a lady in a low-cut red dress, head thrown back, bosom thrown forward, vampirelike man posed over her neck.
He felt his pulse quicken. Was there a secret side to Kirsten much bolder than he had ever imagined? It was going to be hard to go slowly if he started thinking she had secret desires.
Kirsten saw the direction of his gaze. She scooped up the book as if it was X-rated underwear, and put it behind her back.
“Is that your book club selection?” he asked innocently.
Just to remind him who she really was, she blushed her pure-as-the-driven-snow blush. “No. Lulu gave it to me. Insisted I read it. Her favorite book. It’s not to my taste.”
“It looked like you were halfway through it,” he pointed out.
“In case Lulu asks me!”
“Oh, of course. Maybe I should have a look at it, too. Just to give me more things to talk to Lulu about.”
Kirsten glared at him, pointed to the couch. “Have a seat,” she ordered. “I’ll go make us coffee.”
She marched out of the room, the offensive but half-read book clutched to her bosom.
Michael suppressed a grin and looked around. He suspected she had never had a man in this apartment. It had been an act of trust for her to invite him here, and he probably did not deserve it. He had never been in a woman’s apartment at this time of night for just coffee in his life. The fact of the matter was Kirsten was going to require him to be a better man.
Her couch looked tiny and frail, confirmation that no one over a hundred and fifty pounds had ever sat on it. Better not to sit.
Michael prowled her small living room, trying to get a glimpse of who she was. But aside from that book, the room was predictable.
There was a feeling of something missing, and he realized what it was: there were no photos. His own house, decorated by his mother, had school pictures of him and his brother from age six on up, on every available wall. Family photos, awards, souvenirs from trips, his mother had seen wall space as a personal challenge. It had to be filled, most of it with mementos of her sons, her husband, her life.
Kirsten had a few generic prints, an oak tree with the sun setting behind it, a beach scene with an empty boat. No family photos. A dining room that looked as if it was never used adjoined the living room and he wandered in. A huge glass china cabinet, darkened, dominated the back wall. He went to it, touched a switch, and the case lit up, showcasing her Little in Love collection. It was ghastly and he turned the light back off hastily and retreated back into the living room. He realized what else was missing.
No Christmas tree. No lights. No wreaths. No candles. No candies. No wrapping paper. No ribbons.
“Do you want regular or decaf?”
He heard her clanking around in the kitchen and went through the door she had gone through, leaned against the jamb and watched her. The kitchen was tiny, but it was still a moment before she realized he was watching her. It made her nervous, making him think, again, she hadn’t done much entertaining of the opposite sex in her little apartment.
For some reason that pleased him inordinately, even as it served as a reminder. Best behavior, Brewster. Which meant no suggesting a glass of wine instead of coffee.
“Decaf.”
She spooned grounds into the tiniest coffee machine he had ever seen. Nope, she didn’t do much in the way of entertaining. And certainly not morning-after entertaining, though he’d known that even before he’d seen the dead giveaway of the coffee-for-one maker.
Uncomfortable with his scrutiny, she spilled the cream, which she was putting into a dainty glass cream holder. The pink had not receded from her cheeks from his discovery of her reading material and now it darkened.
“Not much in the way of Christmas spirit in this place, Ms. Santa.” He looked around her tiny kitchen. No sign of Christmas in this room, either, but at least it was cozy and used, spices lined up neatly on top of the s
tove, a café style table with this morning’s newspaper open on it under a window with bright yellow-checked curtains.
“The elf was supposed to come and decorate,” she told him, concentrating furiously on the cream, which was evading her nervous efforts to wipe it up. “But as you well know, no elf.”
He took pity on her when it looked as if she was going to knock over another teacup, took the rag from her hand and wiped up cream.
“Oh!” The blush deepened when he accidentally touched her hand, and let his knuckle rest against her forefinger for a breath, a second, a blink.
Strange, he’d had moments with women that would have made that one seem downright laughable in the sexy department.
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