Must Love Mistletoe

The sweat pants. The T-shirt. The pillow-head hair. She couldn’t let Dan see her like this.

She couldn’t look at his face.

“We’re not here, Jeff.”

The heels of his sneakers thudded against the hardwood floor as he backed away. “Wh-what?”

Tracy had said something similar before. We’re not here, Bailey. She’d hidden from her ex, holing the two of them up in the house, locking the doors and telling her daughter to be quiet, quiet and good so that Tracy could avoid facing the man who was making her so miserable. “Never give your heart away,” she’d whispered to her daughter then.

Now she couldn’t regret the advice.

“Mrs. Willis?” Jeff Gable’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Do you, uh, need some help?”

Tracy sidestepped the young man to curl a finger around one of the window sheers and peek outside. The car was slowing, then it paused behind the one-presumably Jeff ’s-that was parked in the driveway.

“Mrs. Willis?”

The little-boy note in Jeff ’s voice got her attention. She glanced over at him, seeing the confusion on his face. Good God, what must he be thinking?

“I…um, wanted you to come in so I could send some Christmas treats home for your family.” It was the first thing that popped into Tracy’s mind, in case he was worried she was a serial killer or a Mrs. Robinson in the making.

And since she’d mentioned food, and he was a teenager, he grinned, relaxing. “That would be great.”

Which meant she had to lead him toward the kitchen.

There, she stood on the cool floor between the sink and the tiled island and tried to think what she could possibly put together in the way of “Christmas treats.” She found a paper plate first.

Then it was three crumb-dusted old Oreos from the bottom of the cookie jar. A handful of withered baby carrots. For the reindeer, she told herself. Two lonely martini olives from the test tube- like jar in the back of the fridge.

She found one foil-wrapped dinner mint mixed in with the pencils in the everything drawer. A lone freckled banana from the now-empty fruit bowl. Finally, a sprinkle of hardened raisins from the red box in the pantry.

To hide the pitiful sight, she covered it all with the last crumpled inches of the foil tube, then taped an even more pitiful smooshed red bow-also liberated from the everything drawer-on top.

The plate was just like her, she realized, blinking back a sudden sting of tears. Unkempt on the outside and a mix of old, lonely, and dried up on the inside.

How had this happened? Harry had gone, and no wonder Dan found nothing else to keep him at home.

She didn’t even have the will or the energy to loathe him anymore.

“Here, Jeff.”

He looked up from something he’d been fooling with on the counter. A little Christmas tree. Jeff had plugged it in and the tiny lights twinkled in the shadowed kitchen. Tracy vaguely remembered Bailey setting it down last night and even more vaguely remembered ordering two dozen for the store last spring.

When she still had a son and husband at home. When she had a purpose. An identity.

“This is nice,” Jeff said. “Maybe I’ll get my mom one for Christmas. Do you think she’d like it?”

She shrugged. What did she know about the tastes of Jeff ’s mom who was happily married, her home now complete with her son?

“Well, thanks for the plate,” he said. “I guess I should be going now, Mrs. Willis.”

“Of course,” she said, following him to the front door. “Of course you should be going.”

She waved to him as he drove off down the street. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself but couldn’t seem to help it. “You all seem to do that.”

“Where are those yummy little powdered sugar stars that are usually here?” Trin asked Bailey, frowning down at the hospitality table at the front of The Perfect Christmas. She rolled the stroller that held her sleeping son around to the other side. “And those tiny chocolate bells?”

“We’re doing things a bit different today,” Bailey answered, unpacking yet another box and hanging yet another angel on yet another tree.

“But nobody likes leftover Halloween candy at this time of year,” Trin complained, her forefinger making waves in the candy corn and jack-o’-lantern-shaped lollipops Bailey had dumped on the gilt-edged Santa tray.

“It was all I could find in the drawer in the back office, okay?” Bailey snatched a piece of sugary corn and tossed it into her mouth. She detested the chalky stuff, but damned if she’d let anyone know it. “I didn’t realize I had to put in a weekly order to get the usual from the baker and confectioner’s down the street.”

She wasn’t going to feel bad about it.

There was already plenty of “feeling bad” to go around.

Last night. Finn. Kissing Finn. She felt really bad about that. He’d been needling her, she knew it, but hadn’t been able to resist needling back. With her teeth.

And when she’d sunk them into his bottom lip, when she’d tasted him again after ten years…

She’d done it to prove a point, of course. To prove that she might have been a naive teenager when they’d first kissed, but she was a grown-up now and could initiate whatever the hell she wanted. A kiss with teeth. With tongues.

When he’d touched hers last night she’d gone ready in one swift rush of wet heat.

And in that single moment he’d shown her he still had the upper hand when it came to her body’s responses.

Where that fit in with her sensible assertion that sexual attraction and emotional sloppiness were not one and the same she didn’t want to think too hard about.

“Still, you should have better giveaways,” Trin grumbled, continuing to dig through the candy. “Especially when I came all the way over here-”

“You live two blocks away.”

“-to renew our friendship only to find you won’t spill a sole small detail about what’s going on between you and the Fabulous Finn.”

His kiss was fabulous. And he was so strong. Stronger than she was. His grandmother had called his name and Bailey hadn’t heard it at first, she’d heard nothing over the rumbling-train beat of her heart. But if she had, she would have ignored it, all to stay longer with Finn. To touch Finn more. To give Finn anything he asked.

What a weakling she was. First, surrendering to pressure to come back to Coronado. And second, surrendering to the sexual temptation of having one more taste of her first lover.

This time, it had taken Finn to break them apart.

“All set.” The voice of Byron, the male half of her team of part-time sales kids, snagged her attention. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw him wrapping up a transaction at the counter. He slid the receipt into the store’s trademark bag and gave the shopper his usual dreamy smile. “Like, have a cool Yule.”

Trin’s gaze caught Bailey’s. Cool Yule? she mouthed, her dimple digging into her cheek.

“Now that you see what I have to deal with,” Bailey whispered back, “maybe you’ll stop whining about the quality of the free grub.”

Byron, his shoulder-length blond hair cemented by salt water into tight corkscrews, drifted in the wake of the departing shopper, his flip-flops flap-flapping against the soles of his tanned feet. He sniffed the air as the door opened.

When it closed behind the customer, he swung toward Bailey. “I gotta leave a half hour early today, boss lady. Surf’s up.”

“What?”

“Bronte!” He raised his voice. “Surf’s up!”

His female counterpart, down to the salt water- treated hair and the sandals, poked her head out of the back office. “Then you have to go home and get my wetsuit, By, I didn’t bring it with me.”

He nodded, and turned toward the front door. “Later, gators.”

“Wait a minute,” Bailey protested, stepping in front of him. There were browsers all over the store: gathered around the nearby tree that was dressed only in seashells, in the old kitchen where they kept the potpourri and