Christie Ridgway (8 page)

Through the sidelights, covered by gathered white sheer curtains, was the outline of a man. Short hair.

Compact build.

Her heart jerked high, lodging in her throat. Dan. He’d come back to her.

When they’d first met, she’d hated men. Her divorce had blackened the edges of her heart forever, she’d thought, cauterizing it against any future mistakes. Then a friend of a friend introduced her to this lazy-smiling, easy-in-his-own-skin man at a party. She’d looked at him with instant suspicion, staring at the white wine he offered as if it were arsenic. But he’d worn her down, then won her over.

Twenty years later, he’d left her.

For that, she might have reverted to loathing all men again. Except when you had a son, she’d discovered, you lost your ability for nonspecific XY-chromosome hatred. So instead she just loathed Dan.

No! Her fingers tightened on the doorknob. She didn’t loathe him. She didn’t care that much. She wouldn’t. Ever. Twenty years ago, she’d taken a second leap of trust only to fall flat on her face again, but Dan couldn’t know that any part of her hurt.

Every part of her hurt.

Still, she steadied her breath, tightened down the shell of her pride, then pulled open the door to face him.

It wasn’t Dan.

The young man who it was, stared at her under yanked-high brows. “Uh…Mrs. Willis?”

Tracy swallowed the bitter pill of disappointment and put what little energy she had left into a smile.

“Jeff.” Jeff Gable, a high school classmate of her son, Harry. “It’s good to see you.”

Jeff shoved his hands in his pockets. “Is Harry home?” His glance danced away, as if it embarrassed him to look at her.

Tracy curled her bare toes against the foyer carpet, remembering her misshapen sweat pants and baggy T. Her hand went up to smooth her rumpled hair. “No. He won’t be home from college until a few days before Christmas.”

“Oh.” Jeff shuffled back, as if to keep his distance from her. “I’m here for the month of December.”

She tried to remember what school he attended. It had consumed her last year—not only Harry’s college applications and essays, but all the tension and excitement of senior year and its effect on him and his friends. She’d been president of the Booster Club and secretary of the PTSA, and every week had been full of events to be attended, organized, or chaperoned.

She and Dan had adored every minute of it.

Maybe only she had adored it.

Jeff took another step away from her. “Are you sick?”

She blinked at him. Did she look sick? She thought of the orange sweat pants again. The hole in their knee. Of course she looked sick.

The boy grimaced. “I mean…you’re usually at The Perfect Christmas this time of year. I didn’t expect to see you at home.”

“Oh. Bailey’s at the store today. Harry’s older sister.” Guilt stepped forward, shouldering a place for itself among the other emotions crowding her chest. Bailey, who’d gone from five to forty in the space of a season. Tracy knew why, of course. As a little girl she’d borne witness to the end of her parents’

marriage. Neither Tracy nor her ex-husband had tried to protect her from the ugliness.

Tracy had leaned on her little daughter—all big dry eyes and starched spine—then.

As she was doing now.

More guilt.

But then it was swept away as over Jeff’s shoulder she glimpsed a familiar car cruising toward the house.

Her heart jolted to her throat again and she grabbed Jeff ’s arm, dragged him inside, then slammed the door shut behind him.

The sweat pants. The T-shirt. The pillow-head hair. She couldn’t let Dan see her like this.

She couldn’t look at his face.

“We’re not here, Jeff.”

The heels of his sneakers thudded against the hardwood floor as he backed away. “Wh-what?”

Tracy had said something similar before.
We’re not here, Bailey.
She’d hidden from her ex, holing the two of them up in the house, locking the doors and telling her daughter to be quiet, quiet and good so that Tracy could avoid facing the man who was making her so miserable.
“Never give your heart away,”

she’d whispered to her daughter then.

Now she couldn’t regret the advice.

“Mrs. Willis?” Jeff Gable’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Do you, uh, need some help?”

Tracy sidestepped the young man to curl a finger around one of the window sheers and peek outside.

The car was slowing, then it paused behind the one—presumably Jeff ’s—that was parked in the driveway.

“Mrs. Willis?”

The little-boy note in Jeff ’s voice got her attention. She glanced over at him, seeing the confusion on his face. Good God, what must he be thinking?

“I…um, wanted you to come in so I could send some Christmas treats home for your family.” It was the first thing that popped into Tracy’s mind, in case he was worried she was a serial killer or a Mrs.

Robinson in the making.

And since she’d mentioned food, and he was a teenager, he grinned, relaxing. “That would be great.”

Which meant she had to lead him toward the kitchen.

There, she stood on the cool floor between the sink and the tiled island and tried to think what she could possibly put together in the way of “Christmas treats.” She found a paper plate first.

Then it was three crumb-dusted old Oreos from the bottom of the cookie jar. A handful of withered baby carrots.
For the reindeer,
she told herself. Two lonely martini olives from the test tube–like jar in the back of the fridge.

She found one foil-wrapped dinner mint mixed in with the pencils in the everything drawer. A lone freckled banana from the now-empty fruit bowl. Finally, a sprinkle of hardened raisins from the red box in the pantry.

To hide the pitiful sight, she covered it all with the last crumpled inches of the foil tube, then taped an even more pitiful smooshed red bow—also liberated from the everything drawer—on top.

The plate was just like her, she realized, blinking back a sudden sting of tears. Unkempt on the outside and a mix of old, lonely, and dried up on the inside.

How had this happened? Harry had gone, and no wonder Dan found nothing else to keep him at home.

She didn’t even have the will or the energy to loathe him anymore.

“Here, Jeff.”

He looked up from something he’d been fooling with on the counter. A little Christmas tree. Jeff had plugged it in and the tiny lights twinkled in the shadowed kitchen. Tracy vaguely remembered Bailey setting it down last night and even more vaguely remembered ordering two dozen for the store last spring.

When she still had a son and husband at home. When she had a purpose. An identity.

“This is nice,” Jeff said. “Maybe I’ll get my mom one for Christmas. Do you think she’d like it?”

She shrugged. What did she know about the tastes of Jeff ’s mom who was happily married, her home now complete with her son?

“Well, thanks for the plate,” he said. “I guess I should be going now, Mrs. Willis.”

“Of course,” she said, following him to the front door. “Of course you should be going.”

She waved to him as he drove off down the street. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself but couldn

’t seem to help it. “You all seem to do that.”

“Where are those yummy little powdered sugar stars that are usually here?” Trin asked Bailey, frowning down at the hospitality table at the front of The Perfect Christmas. She rolled the stroller that held her sleeping son around to the other side. “And those tiny chocolate bells?”

“We’re doing things a bit different today,” Bailey answered, unpacking yet another box and hanging yet another angel on yet another tree.

“But nobody likes leftover Halloween candy at this time of year,” Trin complained, her forefinger making waves in the candy corn and jack-o’-lantern-shaped lollipops Bailey had dumped on the gilt-edged Santa tray.

“It was all I could find in the drawer in the back office, okay?” Bailey snatched a piece of sugary corn and tossed it into her mouth. She detested the chalky stuff, but damned if she’d let anyone know it. “I didn’t realize I had to put in a weekly order to get the usual from the baker and confectioner’s down the street.”

She wasn’t going to feel bad about it.

There was already plenty of “feeling bad” to go around.

Last night. Finn. Kissing Finn. She felt really bad about that. He’d been needling her, she knew it, but hadn’t been able to resist needling back. With her teeth.

And when she’d sunk them into his bottom lip, when she’d tasted him again after ten years…

She’d done it to prove a point, of course. To prove that she might have been a naïve teenager when they’

d first kissed, but she was a grown-up now and could initiate whatever the hell she wanted. A kiss with teeth. With tongues.

When he’d touched hers last night she’d gone ready in one swift rush of wet heat.

And in that single moment he’d shown her he still had the upper hand when it came to her body’s responses.

Where that fit in with her sensible assertion that sexual attraction and emotional sloppiness were not one and the same she didn’t want to think too hard about.

“Still, you should have better giveaways,” Trin grumbled, continuing to dig through the candy. “Especially when I came all the way over here—”

“You live two blocks away.”

“—to renew our friendship only to find you won’t spill a sole small detail about what’s going on between you and the Fabulous Finn.”

His kiss
was
fabulous. And he was so strong. Stronger than she was. His grandmother had called his name and Bailey hadn’t heard it at first, she’d heard nothing over the rumbling-train beat of her heart. But if she had, she would have ignored it, all to stay longer with Finn. To touch Finn more. To give Finn anything he asked.

What a weakling she was. First, surrendering to pressure to come back to Coronado. And second, surrendering to the sexual temptation of having one more taste of her first lover.

This time, it had taken Finn to break them apart.

“All set.” The voice of Byron, the male half of her team of part-time sales kids, snagged her attention.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw him wrapping up a transaction at the counter. He slid the receipt into the store’s trademark bag and gave the shopper his usual dreamy smile. “Like, have a cool Yule.”

Trin’s gaze caught Bailey’s.
Cool Yule?
she mouthed, her dimple digging into her cheek.

“Now that you see what I have to deal with,” Bailey whispered back, “maybe you’ll stop whining about the quality of the free grub.”

Byron, his shoulder-length blond hair cemented by salt water into tight corkscrews, drifted in the wake of the departing shopper, his flip-flops flap-flapping against the soles of his tanned feet. He sniffed the air as the door opened.

When it closed behind the customer, he swung toward Bailey. “I gotta leave a half hour early today, boss lady. Surf’s up.”

“What?”

“Brontë!” He raised his voice. “Surf’s up!”

His female counterpart, down to the salt water– treated hair and the sandals, poked her head out of the back office. “Then you have to go home and get my wetsuit, By, I didn’t bring it with me.”

He nodded, and turned toward the front door. “Later, gators.”

“Wait a minute,” Bailey protested, stepping in front of him. There were browsers all over the store: gathered around the nearby tree that was dressed only in seashells, in the old kitchen where they kept the potpourri and holiday baking mixes, up the ornate staircase and in all the second-floor rooms, including the alcove devoted to Christmas dolls. “You can’t go now. And you guys can’t leave early.”

Byron just looked at her.

“I’m serious.” She narrowed her eyes and put the ice in her voice that made the two-hundred-dollar-a-billing-hour attorneys quake in their Prada loafers. “You and Brontë don’t get off until six o’clock.”

“But boss lady, it’s Christmas time.”

“Good, Byron,” she praised, nodding. It wasn’t clear to her if his brain was merely water-logged or if he was just plain dumb. “And we’re a Christmas store, so that means we’re busy and I need you to do your job.”

Byron gave her his puppy-dog eyes. They’d worked on her during his first couple of shifts, but now she knew better. He didn’t have a big paper due the next day or an important exam first thing in the morning.

As far as she could tell, he wasn’t even
enrolled
in any institution outside of the School of Surf Wax.

So she wasn’t giving in again. She wasn’t giving in to one more thing! Not to impulse, not to hormones, not to puppy-dog eyes, emergency requests, or guilt-tinged obligations. She was here, saving the family farm, and wasn’t that enough?

The rattle of jingle bells drew her eyes to the door. An older man entered, just as “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” piped through the store’s speakers.
Oh right
, she muttered silently.
Santa Claus, my
sorry behind.

Instead of red felt and white fur, the man coming through the door wore a blue-and-gold cap that read

“U.S. Navy Retired.” And she doubted he was bringing her anything she wanted for Christmas.

Yesterday this very gentleman had phoned to set up this afternoon’s meeting, letting her know it was

“imperative.”

“Hey,” Trin said, sotto voce. “Is it my imagination or what, but does that guy look like General Waverly from
White Christmas
? He’s got the exact same military posture and military haircut.”

Bailey looked over at her friend. “What are you talking about?”

“You know, the classic
White Christmas
. In the movie, there’s that old World War II general who Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye put on that show for in Maine.”

“Vermont.”

“I think it’s Maine.”

“Trust me,” Bailey said. “It’s Vermont.”

Trin scowled. “I thought you hate the holiday and everything that goes along with it.”

Turning away from her friend, Bailey forced a welcoming smile, though instinct was telling her she should be anything but. “Captain Reed,” she said with a little wave. “Or should I be calling you President?”