Mistletoe Cinderella

“This cosmetic habit of yours is thoroughly distracting,” he told her. “I never know what you’ll taste like. It’s like dating a woman who wears staid business suits with naughty lingerie underneath. A man could go crazy wondering what’s next to her skin. A whisper of ivory silk or a leopard-print thong?”

Chloe’s cheeks flamed pink. Had he offended her with the analogy?

After a moment, she smiled. “I’m glad I distract you. Even if it is just my makeup.”

He echoed what she’d once said to him in his apartment. “It’s not ‘just’ anything. It’s you.”

“Thank you for asking me to come with you today,” she said. “I…wanted to see you.”

“Ditto. And I don’t trust myself to decorate the condo by myself. You saw what happened when left to my own devices.” He gave an exaggerated shudder, listing some of the feng shui terms she’d taught him. “Elements in conflict, ‘secret arrows’ every place you look…catastrophe. Save me from myself.”

“Don’t worry, my assistance is yours as long as you want it.” Opening her door, she added softly, “I plan to see this through.”

As they crossed the asphalt toward the massive shopping complex, Chloe asked, “So, which of the eight areas do you want to really focus on? Harmonious balance is key, but what are your immediate goals? Wealth? Career? Love? I’ve…been surprised that there’s no girlfriend in your life. There’s not a girlfriend, right?”

“What the hell kind of guy do you think I am?” Dylan was incensed. He’d kissed Chloe on multiple occasions-not brief pecks of greeting or farewell, either. Deep soul kisses that had shaken him. He knew players who had “girlfriends” in cities up and down the Eastern Coast, but that had never been his style.

She bridged the gap between them, taking his hand. “I’m sorry. That came out sounding like, I don’t know, an accusation. It was just a surprise.”

He grunted, not mollified. It was ironic that she suspected him of being untrustworthy, the kind of guy who would nonchalantly cheat on a woman.

“You’re smart and funny and successful,” she continued. “The best-looking guy I’ve ever seen in real life and not on a movie screen. In short, a man some single women would commit unholy acts to meet.”

It was difficult to stay angry after praise like that. She thinks I’m smart? Rationally he’d known for years that dyslexia was a reading disorder and no reflection of actual intelligence. He was not stupid, but he had to remind himself of that routinely.

He held open the heavy glass door for her. “You asked about the area I’m most interested in? Knowledge. With the right knowledge, the information and wisdom to make good decisions, it seems like a lot of the other areas would fall into place.”

For instance, should he play it safe and keep his lucrative job in Atlanta, the city that had become home over the past few years? Or throw that away on Coach B.’s whim and return to the place that held some of his ugliest memories?

“Good thinking,” Chloe said approvingly. “Of course, some people feel that too much knowledge can be dangerous. Just ask Adam and Eve.”

“I’ll take my chances. Ignorance gets good PR, but I don’t think it’s as blissful as people say.”

Chloe had pulled a little memo pad out of her purse. He watched over her shoulder as she jotted down colors that he assumed were applicable to wisdom: yellow, brown and other earthy tones, blue.

“You have that small bookshelf in your living room. We could move it to the knowledge area. And we should find you a great lamp while we’re here.” She tapped her temple. “For enlightenment.”

“It disturbs me that I can’t tell if you’re being sincere or if you’re just making bad puns.”

She gave him a cheeky smile. “Can’t I do both? Oh, we should go down that aisle. Vases!”

“I hear vase and my only two associations are priceless Ming, which is not in our budget, and girly bud vases. I’m evolved enough that I don’t think I have to decorate in leather and moose heads to prove anything, but-”

“Nothing pink and curvy and filled with flowers?” Chloe rolled her eyes. “Duh. Trust me, Echols.”

Paradoxically, he did.

AFTER DYLAN’S wholehearted appreciation last time, Chloe had briefly considered bringing another key lime pie with her to dinner at his place. Instead, she’d opted to make the drive to Atlanta with a bottle of white wine. She was going to need a little liquid courage for after they’d eaten, and there was the hope that wine would mellow Dylan before she dropped her bombshell.

While he sauteed the shrimp, she found a corkscrew. Chardonnay helped get me into this mess, chardonnay can help get me out.

“Can I pour you a glass of this?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks, but just one. I still have to do my broadcast later.” He sounded endearingly disgruntled. “Trust me, I would much rather be here with you than delivering the sports news alongside Grady Medlock.”

She clucked her tongue sympathetically. “He’s still being a jerk?”

“At this point, jerk would be a step up. He disliked me from the word go, but the hostility’s gotten more personal.”

“How so?” She settled on a stool, observing him cook for the sheer joy of watching his body move. Poetry in motion had always sounded like a cheesy cliche no one but professional ballroom dancers could ever live up to, but Dylan made her rethink her cynicism.

He took his wine, casting her a sheepish glance. “You asked earlier about my being single? I wasn’t until recently, right before the reunion as a matter of fact. I was dating a woman named Heidi. She expressed keen interest in helping me maintain friendships with my former teammates, saying that it wasn’t healthy to shut myself off from people close to me in a dark time.”

Advice that might arguably have some merit to it, but Chloe sensed from his tone that Heidi had not turned out to be entirely altruistic.

“On about three-quarters of our outings, she made sure we met buddies at a club or we double-dated with another Braves player. Then when she found the one she wanted, she broke up with me with a Dear John e-mail telling me to have a nice life.”

“That’s awful!” Chloe was outraged on his behalf. “The social-climbing witch.”

“No argument here. Don’t worry, I didn’t languish around the condo heartbroken. Mostly I felt dumb for having been so blind. She was clearly manipulative in retrospect, and I must have been brain-dead to get close to her in the first place.”

And how is he going to describe me “in retrospect”?

When she blanched, he added, “We weren’t that close, really. I’m making this sound more important than it was. The reason it has anything to do with Grady is because he has a thing for our makeup artist, who’s made it clear she wouldn’t mind my asking her out-”

“A woman with taste,” Chloe decreed.

“But she didn’t make an issue out of it before because she knew I was seeing Heidi.”

“So now that you’re a free agent, she’s doing nothing to conceal her feelings, which is getting you even more enmity from Grady?”

“In a nutshell. That must be one of the benefits of being self-employed. No annoying co-workers. No office politics.” He reached for the soy sauce and sprinkled a liberal amount over the shrimp and seasoned vegetables steaming in the pan. “Did you know from the beginning you wanted to work by yourself? I’d imagine it could get lonely, not having colleagues to chat with over break or join for drinks at the end of a long week. You miss out on the time-honored tradition of griping about your boss because you are your boss.”

“It’s not lonely.” Much. “After all, I have my clients and the people I’m trying to win over as clients. To some extent, I get to control how much I interact with others and choose the days when I want to be a hermit. I’m not very social by nature.”

“Not what one would expect to hear from a former cheerleader,” he remarked, stirring chopped mushrooms into the stir-fry.

The ginger-scented perfume of dinner cooking would have made her stomach gurgle in happy anticipation if it weren’t already tied up in so many knots. She’d planned to tell him tonight. Was it too blunt to respond with, “Yes, but I was never a cheerleader because I’m not the person you’ve thought I was for the past three weeks-more