Must Love Mistletoe

woman, an angel, a baby in a cradle. Baby Jesus.

A whole, to-human-scale Nativity scene of gingerbread.

Bailey had to blink a few times to believe her eyes. “Someone has a Neiman Marcus catalog and a triple- platinum AmEx card,” she said.

He said nothing. In silence he stacked the cookies on the lawn, shoved the packing material into a garbage bag, then finally broke down the wood carton, piling the pieces far enough away to create getaway space for her.

Getaway. Great. Perfect. All that she would have asked Santa for if she’d ever had the chance to believe in him.

But the craziness of the family business during December had prompted her parents to forgo the usual fantasy for their child. With Santa visits part of The Perfect Christmas’s holiday schedule, instead it had made sense for them to explain that the man in the red suit who spent afternoons in their store was an out-of-work navy vet and that the character who supposedly left gifts on Christmas mornings for good little girls and boys was none other than their mommies and daddies.

But shhh! she had to keep the secret for everyone else.

So she was good at keeping quiet and she continued the practice as she ducked into her car, turned the key, then slipped it into reverse.

Not putting voice to her questions for Finn didn’t make them disappear, though. Just as wishing her memories of him to a cobwebbed shelf in the back corner of her brain didn’t immediately send them there either.

But the fact that he didn’t appear the least bit affected by her presence-or their past-should make the banishments not far off. Just, say, five minutes away.

Before that could happen, though, a knock on her driver’s door window made her jump. The one-eyed pirate who was moments from being out of her mind forever was giving her another expressionless look from his one dark eye.

Bailey unrolled the window, trying to appear as if she’d already forgotten who he was and what they’d once meant to each other.

It certainly appeared as if he had.

“Yes?” she asked. “Did you want something?”

“Just checking.”

She frowned at him. “Checking for what?”

“That you’re still into skipping good-byes.” And then he turned, leaving without another word.

She put the pedal to the metal and got out of there as quick as she could too.

Her palm smacked the steering wheel as she drove off. He had to do it, didn’t he? Just when she was sure she could parlay his disinterest into her own, he had to make that little crack.

God, she hoped it was a wear-her-heels-down day at the store. Not just because they needed the business, but because without that, she was lost. Without a steady stream of spending customers, it was a damn certainty she wasn’t going to be able to think of anything or anyone but Finn.

Finn Jacobson stalked back into his grandmother’s kitchen, pissed off at himself for making that last remark- almost as pissed off as he was at Bailey. The fact that he was feeling anything toward her at all made his back teeth grind and the bones around his missing eye ache like a bitch.

On his way to the refrigerator, he kicked the leg of a wooden chair, shoving it toward the farmhouse table. Then he jerked open the door to reach for a beer and had to swallow his curse as Gram nearly caught him at it when she came through the other door.

“Finn?” Her frail-too frail-hands stroked the velour of her holiday-red sweatsuit. Her lipstick matched, and with her white hair and white running shoes she looked like a sporty Mrs. Claus. Sporty, but not yet one hundred percent recuperated from the pneumonia that had hit her hard last month. She was on the road to recovery, though.

“Morning, Gram,” Finn said, wrapping his fingers around the half-and-half instead. Then he poured her a cup of coffee and added a dollop of the cream, just as she liked it. Still, his actions were jerky, and he knew his brusque tone would only make her worry. “Wrong side of the bed.”

From the corner of his one eye, he made sure she settled safely into her chair, then placed her cup in front of her. She smiled at him. “You spoil me.”

“That’s why I’m here.” After she’d been released from the hospital last week, he’d packed up enough from his downtown San Diego loft to stay through Christmas. The field office had been ecstatic over short-tempered Finn using some of his pile of vacation hours-hell, they’d been this close to ordering him out anyway, even though it hadn’t been long since his return from medical leave. His parents had been relieved to give over his grandmother’s care to him. They were already at his sister’s awaiting the birth of the first grandchild-a son.

Though Gram insisted she didn’t need a keeper, the fact was, when he was a teenager he had needed one, and it was Gram who had volunteered for the job. He owed her-and maybe one other-for all that he’d become.

So he also owed it to her to plaster over that eleven-month-old crack in his soul and the simmering emotions it laid bare. Without finding a way to control his feelings, he’d end up killing himself by either drinking too much or driving too fast. Even if he managed to survive his sins, he owed his colleagues too. He couldn’t return to his job unless he could return to his former professional, cool self.

“Did I hear someone at the door?”

“Mmm.” He didn’t want to rehash the visit with himself, let alone with his grandmother, so he ignored the question and tried de-growling his voice. “Mom called this morning. She reports she bought the prodigy-yet-to-be- born some sort of infant computer and educational software yesterday. Dad purchased a football, baseball mitt, and, his concession to the Midwest, an ice hockey stick.”

His grandmother sipped at her coffee. “No drum set?”

God, she knew how to get to him. He almost found himself smiling. “Now how did you know that was what I sent for my nephew’s first Christmas?”

“Your parents will be amused.”

“You think?” Finn doubted it. They’d likely shudder at the bad memories the gift would evoke. The fact was, he’d caused his family buckets of anxiety as an adolescent hellion. At thirteen he’d started smoking cigarettes and hanging out with a new neighbor who had a band, a van, and a fake ID. Finn had been big for his age and the other guy had probably thought him nearer his grade than he actually was-or maybe the guy just appreciated Finn’s talent with drums. He’d actually sucked…but then they all did, all of them who made up Corpses in Heaven.

At their wits’ end that summer vacation, his parents had sent him from home in Northern California to his grandmother’s to get him away from his older friend and Finn’s first brushes with the law. One dose hadn’t cured him. By fifteen, along with the local cops, he’d considered himself a regular Bad Ass and his folks starting sending him to his grandmother’s every summer and Christmas. They’d realized that even a Bad Ass had a soft spot, and Finn’s was his gram. He was named for her husband, his Grandpa Finn, and though he barely remembered the man, Finn and Gram formed a two-member mutual admiration society.

His long bleached hair, his steel earrings, the skulls and other symbols he’d self-tattooed on his knuckles-she’d seemed amused by them. She was tolerant of him in every way except the cancer sticks. And because he hated upsetting her, during the weeks he spent at her house he would not only stop smoking but also try shedding his urban street image and begin fitting in with the Coronado sorta-suburban, sorta-surf-dude society-as well as anyone could, anyway, who had that scruffy hair, those steel earrings, the tattooed knuckles.

Then once Bailey Sullivan accepted him, the rest of the kids did too.

The name must have floated from his mind into Gram’s. “I thought I heard Bailey’s voice,” she said. “It was like old times.”

“It was her,” he admitted, turning his back to reach for his own coffee cup when a beer still sounded so much better. Or whiskey. “I guess she’s home for a visit too.”

“Imagine that.”

Yeah, imagine. He hadn’t even bothered to consider it when he’d moved in at Walnut Street a few days ago. Just as he’d never imagined on that first visit at Bad Ass thirteen that he’d get tangled up with super-insider, super-perfect, Coronado’s super It Girl Bailey Sullivan.

Teen tease. Ice princess. Girl next door. His first lover. His first love.

She been all these to him at one time or another.