“Yeah, well.” It was he who let go this time, he who moved off to make his way down the porch steps with a box of lights, his destination the ladder she’d propped against the side of the house.
She had to trot to catch up with him. Her fingers curled around the sides of the ladder as he started to climb. “What are you talking about? What’s this job?”
“There’s a local company. They have contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Over the past couple of months they’ve been giving me the big recruiting rush. I’ve decided I should hear what they have to say.”
Her jaw dropped. “Oh. I, uh, thought you were pretty into working for the Secret Service.”
“We get pretty tight because of the long hours and all the travel.” His long arm stretched to loop the string of lights on the hooks screwed into the eaves. “You follow a diplomat around for a month. Then you’re working the Super Bowl for a couple of weeks, next you’re called on to chase down some loon who’s been sending the White House threatening letters. The saying goes that if the Secret Service wanted you to have a family, then they would have issued you one.”
“You…” Bailey’s chest ached, just a little. “You want a family?”
“That’s not the point.” Finn descended the ladder and she moved aside for him to adjust its position.
He was tense again; she could tell from his jerky movements and the closed expression on his face as he climbed back up. Which meant she shouldn’t press for more, she told herself. A sex fiend didn’t need to know the interior landscape of the object of her lust.
“Well, what
“I don’t know if I can work for the Service anymore.” He continued stringing lights, as if the admission meant nothing to him.
Bailey stared. “Why?”
“The job requires skills I’ve…lost.”
Whoa, that was news. “Like what?”
“My observational skill, for one,” he replied, his voice matter-of-fact. “You’ve seen it a hundred times, the president or some important dignitary doing the grip-and-grin along a rope line, Secret Service at his or her shoulder. Agents have to be observant enough to detect the first sign of trouble. Missing an eye, I’m not so good at that.”
The cool way he said it abraded her nerve endings. “But…but…” She craned her neck to get a read of his face. “There’s got to be other duties-”
“Sure. Desk job. Counterfeit work.”
That wasn’t so much to his taste, obviously. “But you said ‘skills.’ Your vision, that’s one skill. What else have you lost?”
He didn’t bother looking at her. His voice went cold and hard. “Nothing you can give me, GND.”
The simple words hit her square in the chest.
When it came to any man!
Rattled, but determined to hide the fact from him, Bailey retreated from the ladder and moved toward the front of the house. Maybe a glass of water or one of the Christmas cookies she’d brought home from the bakery would settle her back down.
A luxurious motor home rolled to a stop across the street. That wouldn’t have caught her attention without the pumping strains of “Start Me Up” blasting from the half-open driver’s window. Her stomach clenched, tight enough to make her belly ache along with her chest.
A man with a lion’s mane of gray hair leaped out, exuding enough energy and charisma to replace his beloved Mick on any concert stage. “Bailey!” he crowed as he jogged across the street.
She hadn’t seen or spoken to him in two and a half years.
“How the hell are you, little girl?” He enfolded her in a sinewy embrace.
Her mouth moved into a smile. It always did. Even when she’d been dragging his suitcase to the car for him as he prepared to leave her forever, she remembered smiling at her daddy.
She’d smiled at him maybe a dozen times since: often at Christmas when he’d drop by without warning. Once on her mother’s birthday-he’d mixed it up with Bailey’s. At her high school graduation.
Her father moved back, clapping his palms together in his hearty way. “Surprised, huh?”
Her smile flitted again. “Surprised.”
“But tell me this is a good time to visit.” He propped his fists on his hips.
“A great time. It’s always great to see you.”
It was always great to be reminded of the hard lessons of a lifetime, she told herself, especially when the two men who had meant the most in hers were suddenly so close again.
Taking a step away from her father, she checked over her shoulder. Finn was still high on the ladder. The distance from the both of them made it easier to breathe.
England’s King Henry III was known to put a merchant out of business if he didn’t like the size of his end-of- year cash gift.
Chapter 18
Finn watched Bailey close the door to The Perfect Christmas, the bells on the handle chiming cheerfully, in direct contrast to the scowl on her face. “Thank God that’s over,” she said, peering through the glass at the thirty four-year-olds marching down the short front walk. “I’ll need at least the next hour until we open to wipe their finger smudges off everything.”
She made her way toward his place by the cash register, then stopped short by one of the round display tables, her scowl deepening. “Will you look at this? Somebody mixed up the reindeer ornaments. Now the antlered ones and the ones without antlers are all mixed up.”
Finn rubbed his chin. “I think I noticed a few of your, uh, guests playing with them. They wanted to start some reindeer families.”
Bailey looked up. “What?”
“How else are you going to make reindeer babies?”
Shaking her head, she started resorting the ornaments into their side-by-side baskets. “Who invited the little Santaholics anyway?” she muttered. “It’s not as if any of them had a dime in their itty-bitty pockets to spend. We need cash flow, not a crowd of penniless browsers.”
Preschoolers, penniless browsers. Okay. Finn swallowed his grin and threaded his way through the displays. God, he couldn’t resist her, not her smiles, not her scowls, not even her bad temper over being stuck with the store this Christmas. Yeah, he was still having his own bad moments, times when he felt like he was an eyelash away from putting his fist through a wall, but just a stroke of Bailey’s skin, the touch of her lips eased his edginess.
She was the channel for all his frustrated energy.
Standing behind her, he brushed the hair away from her nape so he could kiss the soft, warm skin, and tried to keep the laughter out of his voice. “Wouldn’t that be you?”
Her fingers went lax at the touch of his lips. She leaned her head back against his chest and he kissed her temple and then licked the lobe of her ear. She shivered. “Wouldn’t that be me, what?”
