mean.”
A twinge of pain pierced Bailey’s right temple. Gold chain, another woman. Another woman, gold chain. Was this some sort of code she didn’t understand? A headache started blossoming, probably because the half of her brain that dealt with logic and reason was contorting like a pretzel trying to make sense of the irrational that had now become her family life.
Her calf itched and she flashed on that night she’d watched her mother sobbing in the dry bathtub. How could Tracy do this again? After Bailey’s father’s defection, why had Tracy let another man get close enough to mess with her heart? Bailey could remember endless weeks of her mother crying in the middle of the night-had Tracy completely blocked that from her mind?
There were non-risky ways to negotiate the world, maybe even to have a man in your life, but none of them involved leaving the safe side of the emotion superhighway. It was up to Bailey to yank her mother back to the sidewalk.
“Look, Mom, think of the big picture. The store-”
“I can’t go there.” Tracy retrieved the knife and started killing the cabbage.
“Mom-”
“If Dan’s going to go to the trouble of looking gorgeous, then I won’t chance seeing him!” She reached over to whack an innocent green onion for good measure. “And that’s final.”
Not to mention completely crazy. Trying to think through her headache, Bailey grabbed some cellophane off the counter and moved to stuff it in the garbage beneath the sink. The bag was near full, so she tied it off and stomped toward the side yard and the big can left there, grateful to work off some of her frustration in the brisk night air.
Maybe it would clear her mind enough to allow her sensible, rational self to formulate a new strategy for dealing with the situation.
At this point in the property, a narrow, hip-high hedge divided their yard from the Jacobsons’. And wouldn’t you know, Finn stood on the other side, beside his grandmother’s own can. The combined strains of “Frosty the Snowman” and “Away in a Manger” must have masked the sounds of her leaving her house. He didn’t seem to notice her presence as he broke down some boxes and stuffed them in the recycle bin.
Her frustration turned to something else as she looked her fill.
Wide shoulders, brawny arms, lean hips, long legs. As he moved, his T-shirt lifted, showing a brief slice of rippling ab muscles. She flashed back fourteen years, when he’d gone from the boy-she-loved-to-annoy to the boy- she-couldn’t-ignore. The first day he’d arrived for that particular summer he’d gazed at her over that very hedge, finding her on her back steps where she was coloring a beat-up pair of white canvas sneakers with a pack of Sharpie pens.
“Hello, pest,” he’d called out.
Her old bikinis had been tossed in the trash just that morning-the ones that had fit since she was eleven, but that didn’t now that she was fourteen. The tops of her new swimsuits had actual cups, and she had actual breasts to put inside them. Her hair was long, past her back strap, and she’d turned it into golden ripples with a new crimping iron the night before.
That spring, she’d taken custody of her mother’s Clinique Black Honey lip gloss, and loved the wet shine and darkened pink it gave to her mouth. About every twenty minutes she applied another layer, just as often as she took a brush to her gleaming length of hair.
She’d liked the Bailey she now saw in the mirror, and she admired that new Bailey’s reflection on a regular basis. Even her little brother had teased her about checking herself out in the reflective chrome on the refrigerator door handle and in the side mirrors of any vehicle she happened to pass.
So that day when she glanced up at Finn’s voice, she was ready for him to see that the “pest” had changed. She wasn’t a whole lot taller, but she’d stood anyway, eager to give him his first glimpse of the works. Call her vain.
She had been.
But she wasn’t prepared for Finn’s changes. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe he’d looked just the same the previous Christmas, and it was Bailey’s more mature eyes that now noticed the stretch of his T-shirt over his shoulders, the clean lines of his male face, the lean strength in his arms and legs.
The strange yet exciting expression in his dark eyes.
She’d prickled from her scalp to between her bare toes.
Half of her wanted to retreat. Half of her wanted to flirt. That half won. She’d sauntered over to him, feeling shaky inside and hot everywhere else.
With eight feet still separating them, the urge to back away had coursed through her again, but she was pulled forward by that serious, mysterious expression in his ever-watchful eyes. “Oh shit,” he’d whispered as she’d walked closer, her new hips swaying. “Oh
Maybe he’d had a premonition.
Maybe he had one now, fourteen years later. Because without warning, he looked up, pinning her with his one good eye. She was caught red-handed, drinking him in.
It was still there, as if fourteen subsequent New Year’s Eve balls had never fallen in Times Square. His dangerous male beauty, her attraction to it, that edgy sense of sex-in-the-offing that she hadn’t been experienced enough to recognize as a naive young teenager. At twenty-eight she knew what it was.
Had already experienced it again with Finn, of course. On his grandmother’s front porch, at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, on each occasion she’d felt that fierce tug of physical awareness. It only ratcheted higher now, as without moving a muscle, without saying a word, his lashes swept down, his gaze running over her body.
Bailey froze as it seemed to strip her shirt from her shoulders, yank her jeans from her legs, burn away her bra and panties. With one look, making her naked for him. Again.
Her thigh muscles tightened. She crossed her free arm over her chest, reassured to feel cotton beneath her skin, but intent on hiding her tight, almost aching nipples.
“You scared to get too close, GND?” he taunted, a dark pirate with his eye patch and gleam of feral white teeth. “Surely you’re not afraid of me.”
She shook her head and forced her feet to venture closer. “Surely not.” Sexual attraction didn’t frighten her, a sensible, rational woman. What she was really afraid of she’d left behind ten years ago. Attraction wasn’t the same as emotion.
So when you looked at it that way, approaching Finn was perfectly safe.
Finn didn’t watch her toss the bag of garbage into the can and drop the lid. Instead he continued breaking down the boxes he’d dragged outside.
At the thump of plastic meeting plastic, he waited for her to walk away. Surely she’d be eager to distance herself from him and scurry back into her mother’s house, still spooked by the scarred man who had silenced her outside Gram’s. But her sand-colored boots stayed firmly fixed to the concrete on her side of the hedge.
Finn kept his mouth shut. Unlike the other night, when he’d visited a bar on his way home from the grocery store, now he was completely sober. No confessions, not even a little small talk, was going to spill from his trap tonight. Nothing off-limits was coming from his mouth this time.
“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
He glanced up. She was staring at the tallest, biggest box he’d yet to flatten. There was a photo on the outside of what it had contained-a five-foot-high chocolate fountain in the general shape of a Douglas fir.
“Is that thing for real?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“First the cookie Nativity scene, and now the Rockefeller Plaza of Christmas tree fountains. Someone must have a special admirer.”
“Special’s the word.” He could clear up exactly how and why, but he didn’t. Why shouldn’t he keep her guessing? Not to mention she had this funny little curl to her lip that matched the one she’d had the summer he’d arrived in Coronado wearing a braided thread bracelet made by a girl from home.
He’d snipped it off that night, but he wasn’t obligated to make things easy for Bailey any longer. Remember? He was a grown man now, not a half-tamed boy who wanted her more than another breath.
Though as she continued to stand there, he found he couldn’t continue to ignore her either. Where the hell had he left his secret agent super patience? Was that suddenly gone forever too? “Is something the matter?” he
