Must Love Mistletoe

Lunch money?

Anything close to qualifying as “breakfast” in his stomach?

With a sneer, Tracy watched the other woman stretch out on the lounger. Yeah, wouldn’t that be the life? she thought.

And then realized it could be her life.

The store was running along fine without her. The zombie teenager was a college student living on his own. Most of the five bedrooms and four bathrooms at 631 Walnut went unused. Unneeded.

Like herself?

Brushing away the paralyzing thought, she turned from the pool and scanned the nearby doors. Dan had given her his condominium number when he’d first moved out. She’d never thought of needing to know it.

She’d never forgotten it either.

Determining it to be in the next building, she set forward on heavy legs, nodding as she encountered other people along the path. Ignoring their curious glances.

What, didn’t she make the height requirement for all the fun rides here in DivorceLand?

Up ahead, a door on the ground floor opened. A man slipped out, the back of his hair in a pillow-mussed disarray. She watched as he spoke to the lush-bodied, dark-haired woman who stood on the other side of the threshold, holding a short apricot-colored robe closed at the throat.

It looked as if these two had just taken their turn on the Sex-o-Coaster.

The man, wearing long, silky basketball shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops, turned to leave.

Tracy gasped.

Dan’s head whipped her way. Their gazes met.

What had the woman at the campground said?

I never trust a single one of them.

He shoved a hand through his already messy hair. Bedhead hair. “Trace.” He hurried toward her and she found herself frozen, staring at his tan, muscular legs, seeing him swimming laps in that pool. Visualizing him pulling himself up and over the side to lie wet and gorgeous on the lounger beside that woman and her magazine.

Or that woman in her apricot robe.

“What are you doing here?” Dan said. “Has something happened? Is someone hurt?”

She shifted her gaze to his face. Concerned eyes. “What?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I was fixing Brenda’s shower. It wasn’t draining. Were you looking for me at my place? Tracy?”

When she didn’t answer, he touched her right arm.

She gasped again, in pain this time, and rocketed back.

“What’s happened?” His gaze traveled down to her hand. “And why the hell are you carting around a crowbar?”

Her fingers tightened on the heavy metal. Why was she carrying it? Why had she brought it with her? She’d walked past the Volvo without that burning compulsion she’d felt to damage her Kevin’s Corvette. But surely she didn’t have it to hurt Dan, though thinking of him riding the rails with that…that bitch by the door made her want to do something violent.

“Trace?” Dan stepped closer. His fingertips brushed her cheek in a gesture so tender that tears stung her eyes. “What’s going on? What’s with the crowbar? You can tell me.”

She could tell him, she realized, as the emotion that had broken free of her locked heart at the campground rose from her leaden feet and heavy legs to fill her chest. He had been fixing that woman’s shower drain. It was the kind of thing Dan would do. Cheating on her was not.

“Trace?” His voice sounded bewildered and just the tiniest bit scared.

As she’d been when he’d left her. Or the shell that had been she. When Harry had gone to college she’d felt as empty as his bedroom, with only that stony nut of her heart rattling around inside her bones for company. That’s how small and hard it had become, over all the years of protecting herself from getting hurt again.

But instead of opening up to Dan she’d closed further in, and lost him in her blindness to his hopes, dreams, and dissatisfactions.

She held the crowbar out to him. “It’s evidence,” she said. Did he understand it was all who she was? The best, the worst, the pain, the joy, the criminal, the saint? “It’s evidence that I have a heart after all. That there’s life still in me. That I want to spend the rest of it with you.”

That she could bounce.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 20

The first outdoor electrically lighted Christmas tree on the West Coast was at the Hotel del Coronado in December 1904.

Chapter 20

Finn’s cell phone rang at four in the morning. He fumbled to find it on his bedside table, then flipped it open. The GND.

“Is something the matter?” His voice was surly, but damn, he was surly. Not only had he been sleeping when thirty minutes ago he’d thought it was impossible, waking up only reminded him of the hell of a mess the Girl Next Door had gotten him into. At that absolute worst time of his life, he realized he was still in love with her. “What do you want?”

“I’m being very naughty. Want to come join me?”

“What?” He held the phone away from his ear to stare at it. There was a slap-happy-not sultry-note to her voice that told him the kind of naughty she meant wasn’t the kind of naughty he wouldn’t be able to resist. “No.”

“Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”

“I’m not.” But the accusation jabbed a sore spot. Among his other worries, he’d been wondering about his stubborn reluctance to consider altering his career path since losing his eye. Was refusing to resign from the Secret Service a stick-in-the-mud move? The job could never be what it once was for him.

“Come on, Finn.” Her voice beguiled. “Look out your window.”

Gritting his teeth at his own weakness, he swung his legs off the bed. Striding to the glass overlooking the street, he slipped on his eye patch. Outside, the block was dark, all the residents and the long lines of visitors to the many Christmas displays snugly tucked in their beds with their sugarplum dreams. Where he should be.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“I’ll wave. See me now?”

There she was, dressed in pants and a parka, on the lawn across the street. He squinted. “What the hell are you doing?” It looked as if she was replacing the reindeer in a sleigh display with plastic elves from a different decorative setup a few doors away. With the elves at the end of the reins it was a weird, somewhat kinky, effect, until he saw she’d replaced Santa with Rudolph as well.

Or maybe that made it even kinkier.

“GND-”

“You once called me little Miss Perfect and I have to prove to you I’m not.”

He sighed, even as he pulled on a pair of jeans and slipped his feet into running shoes. “You’re proving you’re nuts.”

“Christmas does that to me.”