“Mmm?” His mouth found the satiny skin beneath her jaw.
“Finn?”
He froze, his tongue against Bailey’s hot flesh. That wasn’t her voice calling his name.
It was part of his sixteen-year-old world, though.
And his thirty-year-old world too.
Gram.
He broke free of Bailey. Then of her spell.
They stared at each other from opposite sides of the hedge, and he wondered how he’d gotten so stupid. Why had he let his mouth get him into trouble again? His lips were throbbing, the whole of him was aching for more kisses.
Such a damn dangerous ache.
At the same moment they turned from each other. The older dark rebel and the wiser golden girl beating hasty retreats from the traitorous, beguiling past.
On his end, cursing all the way. He could only hope it wasn’t as it had been all those years ago…already too late.
In Italian legend, La Befana is an old woman who brings gifts to children on Epiphany Eve. It is said that the Wise Men visited her on the way to Bethlehem, but she was too busy cleaning house to accompany them when invited. Later, when she regretted the decision and set out to find them and the Baby Jesus, she could not. The story goes that she continues to wander, leaving gifts for the children she does come across.
Chapter 5
From the master bedroom, Tracy heard her daughter leave the house. That must mean it was morning.
She turned over in bed, drawing her knees to her chest. The orange sweat pants she wore had a hole in the knee, and she covered it with her palm, hunching her shoulders inside one of Harry’s discarded T-shirts. If she remembered correctly, it advertised the basketball tournament his team had played in last spring. He’d come home after painting signs for some student function with long drips of blue paint on the front and banished the garment to the rag bin.
She’d rescued it in June, never realizing what comfort it might bring her come autumn.
Thanks to Dan.
At the thought of him, she bolted up. She’d call the SOB, she decided, temper flaring. Give him a piece of her mind. Better yet, she’d go find him at that sex-in-the-singles-complex that he now called home. His car would be easy enough to spot.
Her stomach clenched and heat shot up her spine to her neck. That’s just what she’d do!
But then she remembered his newly brilliant teeth, his glossy hair, the tan he must be working on at the golf course now that he wasn’t working at The Perfect Christmas. And she thought of the hole in her sweat pants, the paint on her shirt, the dull color of her hair and her complexion.
She fell back to the bed, despondence blanketing over the anger, and she burrowed under its safe, familiar weight too. Sleep beckoned again.
She could taste it, a sweet, syrupy lozenge on her tongue. So, so sweet. Tracy’s limbs sank like anchors into the mattress while her mind drifted out on the calm morning tide…
Bells were ringing.
Tracy woke at the noise, and without thinking stumbled from the bed to walk, zombielike, toward the front door. Her fingers found the knob, and the cold metal roused her to awareness. Who…?
Through the sidelights, covered by gathered white sheer curtains, was the outline of a man. Short hair. Compact build.
Her heart jerked high, lodging in her throat. Dan. He’d come back to her.
When they’d first met, she’d hated men. Her divorce had blackened the edges of her heart forever, she’d thought, cauterizing it against any future mistakes. Then a friend of a friend introduced her to this lazy-smiling, easy-in-his-own-skin man at a party. She’d looked at him with instant suspicion, staring at the white wine he offered as if it were arsenic. But he’d worn her down, then won her over.
Twenty years later, he’d left her.
For that, she might have reverted to loathing all men again. Except when you had a son, she’d discovered, you lost your ability for nonspecific XY-chromosome hatred. So instead she just loathed Dan.
No! Her fingers tightened on the doorknob. She didn’t loathe him. She didn’t care that much. She wouldn’t. Ever. Twenty years ago, she’d taken a second leap of trust only to fall flat on her face again, but Dan couldn’t know that any part of her hurt.
Every part of her hurt.
Still, she steadied her breath, tightened down the shell of her pride, then pulled open the door to face him.
It wasn’t Dan.
The young man who it was, stared at her under yanked-high brows. “Uh…Mrs. Willis?”
Tracy swallowed the bitter pill of disappointment and put what little energy she had left into a smile. “Jeff.” Jeff Gable, a high school classmate of her son, Harry. “It’s good to see you.”
Jeff shoved his hands in his pockets. “Is Harry home?” His glance danced away, as if it embarrassed him to look at her.
Tracy curled her bare toes against the foyer carpet, remembering her misshapen sweat pants and baggy T. Her hand went up to smooth her rumpled hair. “No. He won’t be home from college until a few days before Christmas.”
“Oh.” Jeff shuffled back, as if to keep his distance from her. “I’m here for the month of December.”
She tried to remember what school he attended. It had consumed her last year-not only Harry’s college applications and essays, but all the tension and excitement of senior year and its effect on him and his friends. She’d been president of the Booster Club and secretary of the PTSA, and every week had been full of events to be attended, organized, or chaperoned.
She and Dan had adored every minute of it.
Maybe only she had adored it.
Jeff took another step away from her. “Are you sick?”
She blinked at him. Did she look sick? She thought of the orange sweat pants again. The hole in their knee. Of course she looked sick.
The boy grimaced. “I mean…you’re usually at The Perfect Christmas this time of year. I didn’t expect to see you at home.”
“Oh. Bailey’s at the store today. Harry’s older sister.” Guilt stepped forward, shouldering a place for itself among the other emotions crowding her chest. Bailey, who’d gone from five to forty in the space of a season. Tracy knew why, of course. As a little girl she’d borne witness to the end of her parents’ marriage. Neither Tracy nor her ex-husband had tried to protect her from the ugliness.
Tracy had leaned on her little daughter-all big dry eyes and starched spine-then.
As she was doing now.
More guilt.
But then it was swept away as over Jeff’s shoulder she glimpsed a familiar car cruising toward the house. Her heart jolted to her throat again and she grabbed Jeff ’s arm, dragged him inside, then slammed the door shut behind him.
