Must Love Mistletoe

protecting others. This morning he’d made breakfast for his recuperating grandmother. This afternoon he’d read The Polar Express to half-a-dozen children. Tonight…tonight a dark pain etched his face.

He didn’t come straight out and ask for help, though. He didn’t touch her again. Still, her pulse synced with his erratic heartbeat and her mouth went dry with sympathetic distress. Despite how reckless she knew it was of her, how unlike her usual keep-your-distance self, she allowed his unspoken need to find its way inside her.

Oh God.

It was so risky to care like this.

But she couldn’t seem to help herself.

“All right,” she heard herself whisper. Her hand reached from his heart to cup his cheek. “I’ll be there with you.”

He turned his face to press a swift kiss on her palm. “I had no right…”

She tried to rub his burning kiss away on her thigh. “Damn straight, you didn’t,” she agreed, doing her best to sound brisk instead of broken-down as she tugged him in the direction they’d been going. “But let’s get it over with.”

He waited until they were hailed by an older couple in the waiting area of a trendy steak-and-seafood place to drop the next bombshell.

His mouth touched her ear.

Goose bumps raced down her neck.

“I meant,” Finn said, his breath hot and smelling faintly of cinnamon. “I had no right to tell them you’re my fiancee.”

Later she would kill him, she decided. Later when she didn’t notice that his entire body had turned to steel and that the grimacelike smile he gave to Ayesha Spencer’s parents looked as if it would crack open his face.

Her mother, a beautiful black woman with skin as supple as a teenager’s, touched the temple beside Finn’s eye patch and blinked away tears. Her father, a tall, spare man with red hair going gray and pale blue eyes, hung onto Finn’s outstretched hand as if it could rescue him from dangerous, deep waters.

Then they turned to Bailey. She was hugged by them both. Exclaimed over as a “beauty” with “such a lovely smile.” Ayesha’s parents were effusively glad to know that Finn had found someone “new.”

That was her first hint.

Throughout the rest of the meal other clues couldn’t be ignored. They shared with her pictures of their daughter, and Bailey realized among the photographs Mrs. Spencer carried in her wallet was one of Finn and Ayesha. It looked to be a picnic setting and they were in swimsuits, his arm around her shoulders, her face turned up to his.

The older couple told Finn in detail about the marble headstone they’d placed on her grave and the memorial scholarship they’d set up at Ayesha’s high school. From his jacket pocket, Mr. Spencer pulled out a folded Orioles baseball cap.

“It was hers,” he said, fondling it as he would a child’s hair. “I thought you might like to have it, but not if…” His gaze moved from Finn’s face to Bailey’s.

Her “fiance” took the hat, mumbled something, and signaled the waiter for another round.

None of them ate very much. Finn drank.

Three-quarters through the saddest evening of her life, Bailey got desperate enough to redirect the conversation and start talking about The Perfect Christmas. They actually ended up the evening laughing-well, she laughed and so did Ayesha’s parents-when she told them about the surf-crazy sales help, this year’s piratical Santa, her Retired Citizen Service Patrol buddy who met her at the door of the shop when she closed each night and walked her to her car, watching her drive away only after he checked her for parking infractions with his official measuring stick.

It was closing in on midnight when the two couples went through a round of fragile hugs on the sidewalk. Then Bailey and Finn headed off in the opposite direction from the Spencers.

Nothing was said between them. After a few minutes, she took a peek at him, trying to gauge his sobriety. Throughout the evening he’d been drinking steadily, but tonight there was none of the sloppy-drunk St. Nick in the Finn that was keeping pace beside her.

Tension continued to radiate from him. His hands in his pockets, he walked with his head down, apparently oblivious to the other people on the crowded sidewalk. They gave him a wide berth, his dark mood sending out clear warning beacons. A young guy traveling in the opposite direction tapped Bailey’s shoulder as he passed, and Finn snarled at him, shooting out a hand to pull her close to his side.

Her stomach jumped at the viselike grip of his hand on her upper arm. He left it there, keeping her near as he towed her along, his knuckles pressing into the soft side of her breast. She tried pulling away, but he drew her close again, his fingers just that much tighter.

And then, despite every reason why not, her nipples reacted to the firm touch, stiffening against the fabric of her push-up bra. A pulse started beating low in her belly. As goose bumps broke out over her skin, she tried sucking in a calming breath, but that only expanded her chest, pushing her flesh more insistently against his fingers.

They tightened again on her arm, then…pressed back?

No. It had to be an accident. But another round of prickly heat washed over her flesh. Her thin shawl was caught on her elbows and she wished she’d worn something heavier, a sweater, a coat-thick wool to smother all her suddenly leaping nerve endings.

As they continued walking, one of the fingers circling her arm straightened, then stroked against the side of her breast.

Bailey’s breath caught in her lungs.

That wasn’t a mistake. He did it again.

She flicked him a sideways glance. His expression was closed, and she was on his left side so couldn’t read anything in the patch that covered his eye. He caressed her once more.

Her knees melted.

“Okay?”

His tense, low-voiced question shivered down her spine. Okay? She was simmering like soup in a pan and he wanted it that way. He couldn’t pretend not to know what he was wreaking with those secret strokes.

“Bailey? Okay?”

What was she supposed to say? I sat through a dinner that made me want to cry and now I’m walking down the street and needing you and that makes me want to cry too.

Honesty didn’t seem the right way to go, but she had to come up with something. She looked down at her bare hands for inspiration and said the first dumb thing that popped into her dizzy brain. “I’m thinking I don’t have so much as a promise ring, let alone one that proclaims we’re engaged.”

Finn’s step hitched. His jaw hardened.

Bailey felt like an idiot. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” Then she sighed, knowing there was no joke, no laugh, nothing that would make walking down the street with this elephant between them possible Sighing, she stopped short to turn and grip the lapels of his coat.

“I’m confused, Finn.”

“About?”

The dinner we just had? And now your hand teasing my breast? “You and Ayesha,” she said. “The two of you…” Stupid how hard those words were to say. But of course he’d moved on with his life. She cleared her throat. “The two of you were in love, right?”

He was staring down at her fingers on his coat. “What makes you say that?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Spencer couldn’t have made it any clearer without taking out an ad.”

There was a long silence, then he dropped her arm.

“You’re wrong. They’re wrong. Sort of.” His gaze focused over her head, down the dark street. “She had feelings for me. Maybe…” He shrugged. “But we worked together and I didn’t think it was a good idea to take things in that direction.”

“So you didn’t have feelings for her?”

“Damn it!” The barked words caused a passing couple to give them a startled glance, then hurry off. His fingers curled into fists. “Do we have to do this? Do we have to talk now?”