Christie Ridgway (6 page)

“Before a couple of other agents tackled him, the gunman got off his next bullet. It shattered my left orbital bone, destroying my eye in the process.” He knew he sounded offhand about it. It made everyone more comfortable that way. “Hence your old friend Finn is now Finn the Fucked-up Pirate.”

He watched her swallow, then again. Bailey, obviously, finally, thankfully, silenced.

Tucking his whiskey and his wine under his arm, he at last turned from her and hurried off. He’d revealed more than he liked, damn it all, but at least it was something that shut her up long enough for him to make his escape.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 4

In the sixteenth century, devout Germans brought decorated trees into their homes. If trees were hard to come by, they built Christmas pyramids of wood and decorated them with evergreens and candles. Not until the mid-1800s, however, did Christmas trees become popular in the U.S., thanks to the influence of Queen Victoria and her German husband, Prince Albert.

During hours lying in bed and hours working in the store, Bailey had tried to absorb what her bad-boy boyfriend had made of his life. Finn Jacobson, college graduate, Secret Service agent, man seriously wounded in the line of duty. My God! Who would have guessed?

She hadn’t.

Not only was she embarrassed by her original assumptions, she felt shaken by the truth. She’d seen that video of the assassination attempt a number of times—it was one of the biggest news stories of the year, probably because it was so dramatically caught on tape.

The cameraman had won accolades for his work. Not only had he captured all the action, but he’d done a superb editing job as well. The version played by the networks always faded out on a pair of shattered sunglasses lying in a puddle of crimson. Those were Finn’s, she now realized. Both the glasses and the blood.

Replaying it in her mind as she drove home from a fourth long day at The Perfect Christmas, Bailey felt yet another wave of nausea roll through her stomach. What had happened eleven months ago made her sick…and sad.

And more determined than ever to stay clear of Finn.

Sympathy over what had happened was normal, of course. But she was in downright danger of becoming sloppy over it. And long ago she’d made the choice not to be sloppy over any man.

Inching along behind the lookie-loos ogling Walnut Street’s Christmas excess, Bailey knew that the permanent solution to avoiding the man living next door meant forcing another confrontation with her mother. This time, she told herself, she’d talk until her mother truly comprehended the predicament she and The Perfect Christmas were in.

Bailey was a sensible, rational person. Tracy was an logical, reasonable woman. Surely some straight talk between the two of them would rouse her mother from her stupor or depression or whatever it was and get her behind back into the store.

And Bailey back to her Los Angeles life.

Ten minutes later, she let herself into the house. “Mom?”

“In here,” came from the kitchen.

Squaring her shoulders, Bailey strode into the room. Surrounded by a plethora of vegetables, Tracy was tearing lettuce into tiny shreds and dropping them into a wooden salad bowl. In the last couple of days she’d abandoned the comfort of pasta foods and was going strictly rabbit. Just that was enough to depress anybody.

With a casual movement, Bailey set onto the counter the eleven-inch Christmas tree she’d brought home from the shop. The tiny pine needles looked real enough and it was decorated with firefly-sized lights as well as pine cones and glass ornaments no bigger than M&M’s. She plugged it in without comment, though hoped it would remind her mother of what was waiting for her just a few blocks away.

“How was your day?” her mother asked without looking up, on obvious maternal autopilot. She appeared rumpled and drowsy, as if she’d slept the day away wearing yet another pair of ragged sweats.

Bailey glanced at the little tree, then took a breath, preparing herself to hit the situation head-on. “It was
your
day, Mom, remember? I’m away from
my
life to run
your
store.”

“It’s the family store,” Tracy replied, matter-of-fact.

Dead end there, Bailey thought. She tried another tack. “Okay, but Dan—”

“You saw him?” her mother interrupted, chin jerking up. “What did he want?” Color suddenly flagged her pale cheeks, and she seemed to find a surge of energy as she grabbed a carrot and began attacking it with a grater.

Bailey watched the violent process with dawning alarm. “No, I haven’t seen him. Not yet. But Mom, face it. You can’t hide here any longer taking your emotions out on defenseless vegetables. You need to talk to Dan.”

The carrot was quickly decimated to the size of a mini gherkin as her mother’s color faded and her mouth set in a stubborn line. “I don’t see why.” She picked up another innocent root and took it down to midget proportions too.

Bailey cooled her impatience. “Then at least you have to come back to the store.”

“No,” Tracy said.

“Mom—”

“I’m
not
going to talk with him and I’m
not
going to the store. Not if
he’s
going to be there.”

Frustrated, Bailey pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s the problem, Mom. He’s not there. You’re not there.”

“But you don’t know that. He could walk in any time and then I’d have to see him and I might have to talk to him.”

Bailey stared at her mother. Where was reason? Where was logic? She tried to keep her voice level.

“The only one of the family there is
me
, and I made a three-year-old cry today because I said she was wrong and that there were only six reindeer not eight!”

That got Tracy’s full attention again. She looked up, her brow furrowed. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because I couldn’t remember all the names, okay? I had Dasher and Blitzen, Prancer and Donder, but then I blanked out and called one Disco and another Asteroid. I decided I better quit while I was ahead.”

The little girl’s mother had whisked the tot out of the store, leaving her basket full of Christmas cheer behind—and unpaid for.

“Dasher, Dancer, Donder, Blitzen, Comet, Cupid, Prancer, Vixen. And then Rudolph, of course, for those nonpurists.”

Bailey rolled her eyes. “See what I mean? You’ve got to come back.”

“We’ve already gone over that.”

“Then let’s go over it again, and start at the beginning. Please.” Bailey rescued the last carrot from her mother’s brutal clutches, biting into it herself.

“It started right after we dropped Harry off at college.”

Yesterday Bailey had called her brother and grilled him about the situation, but Harry was as mystified as she. Reluctant to put a damper on his first months away at college, big sister had promised him she would handle it—but that meant either getting to the bottom of the problem or getting through to her mother.

“All right. You two dropped Harry off at college. Then a couple weeks later Dan left because…?”

Tracy cleaved a cabbage in two. “Because I didn’t notice his hair and his teeth.”

Bailey had to cough up a chunk of carrot. “What?”

Her mother’s knuckles went white on the knife. “He used something to get rid of the gray at his temples.

He bleached his teeth!
”

Okay. “That’s not a capital offense.”

“The capital offense was I didn’t notice, according to him. He came home one day and stomped into Harry’s room. I was sitting in there, just…just thinking…and he demanded that I look at him.”

“And you didn’t realize he’d gone George Hamilton on you?”

Tracy’s knife clattered to the cutting board. “I’d been busy. I’d been preoccupied. So I didn’t recognize the changes, okay? But Dan didn’t give me a second chance. He packed up his things and left the house, right then and there.”

Dan was an easygoing man. He’d married Tracy three years after her divorce and didn’t seem the least bit ego-diminished by leaving his job at a big-time brokerage house to run his wife’s family’s store alongside her. Though Bailey had always kept a wall between herself and her stepfather, she knew that had been her choice, not his. Dan had never resented having a stepdaughter and he’d appeared to love the life he’d made with her mother and their son, Harry.

None of this was making sense.

“Is it…” Bailey cleared her throat. “Is it another woman?”

Tracy stared at the cutting board, unblinking. “I didn’t see a gold chain around his neck, if that’s what you mean.”

A twinge of pain pierced Bailey’s right temple. Gold chain, another woman. Another woman, gold chain.

Was this some sort of code she didn’t understand? A headache started blossoming, probably because the half of her brain that dealt with logic and reason was contorting like a pretzel trying to make sense of the irrational that had now become her family life.

Her calf itched and she flashed on that night she’d watched her mother sobbing in the dry bathtub. How could Tracy do this again? After Bailey’s father’s defection, why had Tracy let another man get close enough to mess with her heart? Bailey could remember endless weeks of her mother crying in the middle of the night—had Tracy completely blocked that from her mind?

There were non-risky ways to negotiate the world, maybe even to have a man in your life, but none of them involved leaving the safe side of the emotion superhighway. It was up to Bailey to yank her mother back to the sidewalk.

“Look, Mom, think of the big picture. The store—”

“I can’t go there.” Tracy retrieved the knife and started killing the cabbage.

“Mom—”

“If Dan’s going to go to the trouble of looking gorgeous, then I won’t chance seeing him!” She reached over to whack an innocent green onion for good measure. “And that’s final.”

Not to mention completely crazy. Trying to think through her headache, Bailey grabbed some cellophane off the counter and moved to stuff it in the garbage beneath the sink. The bag was near full, so she tied it off and stomped toward the side yard and the big can left there, grateful to work off some of her frustration in the brisk night air.

Maybe it would clear her mind enough to allow her sensible, rational self to formulate a new strategy for dealing with the situation.

At this point in the property, a narrow, hip-high hedge divided their yard from the Jacobsons’. And wouldn’t you know, Finn stood on the other side, beside his grandmother’s own can. The combined strains of “Frosty the Snowman” and “Away in a Manger” must have masked the sounds of her leaving her house. He didn’t seem to notice her presence as he broke down some boxes and stuffed them in the recycle bin.

Her frustration turned to something else as she looked her fill.

Wide shoulders, brawny arms, lean hips, long legs. As he moved, his T-shirt lifted, showing a brief slice of rippling ab muscles. She flashed back fourteen years, when he’d gone from the boy-she-loved-to-annoy to the boy-she-couldn’t-ignore. The first day he’d arrived for that particular summer he’d gazed at her over that very hedge, finding her on her back steps where she was coloring a beat-up pair of white canvas sneakers with a pack of Sharpie pens.

“Hello, pest,” he’d called out.

Her old bikinis had been tossed in the trash just that morning—the ones that had fit since she was eleven, but that didn’t now that she was fourteen. The tops of her new swimsuits had actual cups, and she had actual breasts to put inside them. Her hair was long, past her back strap, and she’d turned it into golden ripples with a new crimping iron the night before.

That spring, she’d taken custody of her mother’s Clinique Black Honey lip gloss, and loved the wet shine and darkened pink it gave to her mouth. About every twenty minutes she applied another layer, just as often as she took a brush to her gleaming length of hair.

She’d liked the Bailey she now saw in the mirror, and she admired that new Bailey’s reflection on a regular basis. Even her little brother had teased her about checking herself out in the reflective chrome on the refrigerator door handle and in the side mirrors of any vehicle she happened to pass.

So that day when she glanced up at Finn’s voice, she was ready for him to see that the “pest” had changed. She wasn’t a whole lot taller, but she’d stood anyway, eager to give him his first glimpse of the works. Call her vain.

She had been.

But she wasn’t prepared for Finn’s changes. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe he’d looked just the same the previous Christmas, and it was Bailey’s more mature eyes that now noticed the stretch of his T-shirt over his shoulders, the clean lines of his male face, the lean strength in his arms and legs.

The strange yet exciting expression in his dark eyes.

She’d prickled from her scalp to between her bare toes.

Half of her wanted to retreat. Half of her wanted to flirt. That half won. She’d sauntered over to him, feeling shaky inside and hot everywhere else.

With eight feet still separating them, the urge to back away had coursed through her again, but she was pulled forward by that serious, mysterious expression in his ever-watchful eyes. “Oh shit,” he’d whispered as she’d walked closer, her new hips swaying. “Oh
shit
.”

Maybe he’d had a premonition.

Maybe he had one now, fourteen years later. Because without warning, he looked up, pinning her with his one good eye. She was caught red-handed, drinking him in.

It was still there, as if fourteen subsequent New Year’s Eve balls had never fallen in Times Square. His dangerous male beauty, her attraction to it, that edgy sense of sex-in-the-offing that she hadn’t been experienced enough to recognize as a naïve young teenager. At twenty-eight she knew what it was.

Had already experienced it again with Finn, of course. On his grandmother’s front porch, at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, on each occasion she’d felt that fierce tug of physical awareness. It only ratcheted higher now, as without moving a muscle, without saying a word, his lashes swept down, his gaze running over her body.