“You can be a sentimental mess. I won’t judge.”
“It’s just that I care. My whole life, I just wanted to care about me and my own baggage and duty and responsibility. I didn’t know how to care about other people,” he declared, a little too loud but not afraid to let the entire world know his secret. “And now I understand what it means to. I care about you. And this stupid holiday. And your town.”
“So,” Kate breathed on his skin. “Do you think you could give us back the festival?”
“Come again?”
He hadn’t quite heard her. Or, at least, he couldn’t have heard her right. Why on earth was she still talking about the festival? They were together. The town clearly didn’t mind functioning without the festival. They should have been walking on cloud nine, apart from every worry and care of the mortal, un-in-love world. She must have said something else.
“If you get it now, don’t you think you could consider giving us the festival back?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You took it away because you didn’t understand what it means. Now that you get it, I thought maybe you could, y’know. Help us out.”
“Help you out.”
He separated the words. Help. You. Out. Each of the words, he understood individually. In that order, they no longer made sense.
“Yeah.” She nodded.
“I didn’t cancel the festival because I don’t get Christmas,” he explained. In one motion, he extricated himself from their sideways embrace so he could get a good look at her. He turned his back on the singing town. The skin just under his collar started burning. “I cancelled the festival because it’s a financial liability.”
“Right, but it pays back in what it gives to the town. And the people who visit. Like you.”
His stomach dropped.
“Oh.”
“What?”
He saw her clearly for the first time, and he saw himself. The world—spinning with joy only a minute ago—screeched to a slamming halt. Vertigo overtook him. He blinked to steady his vision.
Once, he’d gone on a field trip to a 3-D planetarium on a school field trip. The shock of taking off the glasses during the middle of an illusion had rocked him.
He felt that same way now. All of his illusions and understandings about Kate Buckner turned out to be nothing more than blurry projections, useless colors splashed on a paper-thin screen. Fake. Incorrect. Pathetic of him to buy into it. God, it hurt.
“I’m an idiot,” he declared, meaning it in every sense of the word even as it stabbed him to say so.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yeah. I am.” Swallow. Breathe. Don’t raise your voice. Just state the facts. Letting go of your tight control over yourself is what got you in this mess in the first place. “You’re a liar.”
“Me?”
She had the good sense to balk at the accusation, but Clark didn’t buy it, just like he shouldn’t have bought anything she sold him all day. The first thing he would do when he got back to Dallas was head straight for the optician’s office. Only a blind man couldn’t see the con played out so deliberately in the lithe body of this beautiful woman.
“You’re good, don’t get me wrong. But how did I not see straight through you? You were using me.”
“Using you?”
“Don’t play dumb,” he snapped. His entire body ached with the pain and the weight of it; it consumed him too much to keep from barking at her. “I see it now. You wanted to wrap me around your finger, giving me all of this garbage about not wanting me to be alone because you thought you could manipulate me. You made me start to…feel for you so you could use me to get your festival back.”
“I didn’t—”
“Not even a little?”
She stammered. Staggered backward. That told him plenty, but not nearly enough to bring him the pain necessary to break away from her. He’d need to hear it from her lips, to hear the confession of the betrayal before he could trust himself not to fall into her arms again. The irrational, stupid part of him that got him into this mess in the first place wanted nothing more than for her to tell him it was all a misunderstanding and explain how none of his suspicions were correct. The smart, detached part of him knew he needed to cut this cancer out before it infected all of him. He’d been right all along. Love—if it existed at all, and that wasn’t even something he was sure of—was a tumor, not a cure.
“I wanted to be close to you.”
One of his assets as a businessman was his ability to see a situation clearly and choose a plan of action. Kate’s motives, cutting as they were, made perfect sense. They were logical. He saw the path through them clearly.
“So you could use me to get what you wanted. You are a liar.” He repeated it and watched it slice straight through her. Now he questioned everything he knew. Were those tragic stories about her family even real, or did she make them up for sympathy? The ornaments, did she make up those stories about them on the spot? Did he know anything real about her, or had he been falling for a fiction this entire time?
“I’m not a liar. I just needed to do what was best for my town!” She raised her voice. Clark didn’t give her
