Mistletoe and Margaritas (3 page)

“Not that I’m not having a great time but how much longer?”

“Maybe ten minutes. After they clean up this mess, but before some kid makes the next one.”

It was closer to forty minutes before they were able to sneak goodbyes in and make their escape. They both buckled their seatbelts with a sigh of relief and then Justin pulled out of the driveway and took a right.

Claire closed her eyes and tried to tell herself it was no big deal. Turning right led to the back roads that led to Dunkin’ Donuts, where Justin would grab a coffee. Then that back road led into a bigger back road which led back to home. A road that went right by the house she couldn’t bear to look at.

She’d been so excited about signing the papers for their dream home she’d called Brendan three times in the span of a half hour the day of the closing. To ask if he was on his way. To tell him to hurry up. He’d laughed at her and told her she was worse than a little kid on Christmas morning. Then he’d told her he loved her and he wouldn’t be late.

The State Police said speed was definitely a factor in the accident that turned Brendan’s Camry—and Claire’s life—upside down. The roads were slippery and he’d been driving too fast for the conditions. Because he’d loved her and he’d promised he wouldn’t be late.

She’d walked away from the house. Walked away from everything and everybody as she sank into a black pit of despair and guilt she couldn’t kick her way free of.

It was Justin who’d taken her hand and wouldn’t let her drown. Justin who’d refused to accept that it was her fault Brendan was dead and who’d washed her face with a cold washcloth when she cried so hard she threw up. He’d told her over and over it was an accident until she finally started believing it herself. And he didn’t leave her side until she agreed to drag herself out of her apartment and go out with him for some cheeseburger therapy.

They’d come out of those dark days better friends than they’d ever been and not a day went by she wasn’t thankful she had Justin in her life. And she was thankful enough today she decided not to stand in his way if he wanted a coffee.

She felt the truck pulling off the road and opened her eyes just as he jerked the wheel around and did a U-turn in the road. “What are you doing?”

“With all those kids, I didn’t get a chance to take a leak before we left and I’ll never make it to Dunkin’ Donuts. I’ll stop at the gas station up the street and I can grab a coffee there, too, before we jump on the highway.”

He’d remembered and now he was lying. She thought she should call him on it—tell him it was okay and it was just a house. But she’d had just about enough for today, so she let him get away with it.

When the day came she
did
go looking for another man, she hoped she could find one as good as Justin. Only without the whole
best friend
thing.

Having the garage door open let in the morning chill, but it let out the four-stroke exhaust as Justin revved the engine of his snowmobile, warming it up so he could transfer it to the trailer for the riding season. When he could sneak a free day, all he had to do was hook the trailer up to the truck and drive to a trailhead.

Once he’d loaded his machine up, he pulled back the cover on the sled in the back corner of his garage. It wouldn’t go on the trailer and the registration sticker was long expired, but Justin set the choke and fired it up anyway.

It was Brendan’s sled and he couldn’t bring himself to sell it, but he couldn’t let it sit and gather dust, either. So he kept it covered, did the maintenance it really didn’t need and ran the engine every so often. Now, listening to his best friend’s pride and joy, he wondered if it was time to let it go. If Claire could take off her wedding ring, he could pass the sled on to a new owner.

He’d have to talk to her about it, of course. Technically, she owned it. But she had no interest in snowmobiling and, since her apartment didn’t come with any garage space, she’d asked Justin to hold on to it. So that’s what he’d done.

The cell phone vibrated in his pocket, so he hit the kill switch on the sled and pulled it out, thankful for any distraction right now. He smiled at the name on the screen and flipped the phone open. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetie. Are you busy?”

“Never too busy for you. Where are you?”

“I don’t know. Del, where are we?” Justin heard the low rumble of his father’s voice. “He says we’re about four hours away from Branson, Missouri. We’re going to spend a few days there and then head down to Texas.”

“You guys don’t even like country music,” he said as he put a red thumbtack into Branson on the huge map hung on the garage wall. Then he took a fine-tipped permanent marker and wrote in the date.

“I know, but your father heard there’s a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum there, so off we go.”

That had been their motto—Off We Go—since they’d sold the house to Justin, bought an RV and hit the road a year and a half before. After decades of hard work and accumulating stuff, they’d made the decision to have the mother of all yard sales, gave away what was left over and became nomads.

At the time, Justin had been sharing an apartment with a guy he didn’t like and that was so small most of his stuff was still at his parents’. Since he didn’t seem any closer to finding a wife or starting a family, buying the house he’d grown up in seemed like a good idea. And they’d given him a helluva deal on it, too.

“How’s Claire?” his mother asked as he walked through the mudroom that connected the garage to the kitchen.

“She’s good. I’m taking her to get her Christmas tree in a while.”

“Give her our best, of course. Anything else interesting going on? The house okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Ma. I can’t think of anything that’s changed since the last time I talked to you.”

Except Claire’s newly bare ring finger, of course, but he was trying to convince himself it didn’t mean anything and therefore wasn’t newsworthy.

“Your father’s pulling into a gas station and you know how he is. He makes me turn off the cell phone while he pumps gas, even when I stay in the RV.”

“Better safe than sorry.” He rolled his eyes, thankful she couldn’t see him do it. “Tell Dad I said hi and I love you both.”

“We love you, too, sweetie. I’ll talk to you soon.”

After they hung up, he dropped a couple slices of bread into the toaster, then smeared the popped toast with peanut butter. He’d need the protein to survive Christmas tree shopping with Claire. Her taste in decorations ran to
Better Homes and Gardens.
Her budget and her apartment didn’t.

If there was one thing he knew for sure, it was that the first tree she tried to buy would be at least eight feet tall.

Claire took one look at the Douglas fir and fell in love. “This is my Christmas tree.”

“No, it’s not.” Justin nudged her, but she planted her feet. “Keep walking.”

“What’s the matter with this one?”

“It’s too big.”

“There’s no such thing as a too-big Christmas tree.”

He eyeballed the fir, then shook his head. “Even trimmed up, this is at least an eight-foot tree.”

“I have an eight-foot ceiling.” She folded her arms, determined to be stubborn about it, but he laughed at her.

“You have sloped ceilings. The only place it’s eight feet is smack dab in the center of the living room.”

“Then I’ll put it there.”

“And when you call me because you couldn’t tether it and Moxie pulled it over swinging from the branches, I’ll laugh before I hang up on you.”

“But—”

“Keep walking, Rutledge.”

“Maybe I could tether it—”

“No, you can’t tether it to the ceiling.”

“Grinch,” Claire muttered. After a final, mournful glance at the Christmas tree of her dreams, she kept walking.

After fifteen minutes, he’d vetoed several more trees and Claire’s holiday mood was slipping like a thirty-year-old transmission. “What’s the matter with this one?”

“When you touched it, half the needles fell off. It must have been cut in an earlier batch because it’s not going to last and you’ll end up with lights hanging off naked branches.”

She flicked one of the branches and watched the needles flit to the ground, hating when he was right. “So my friend Penny was asking about you.”

“Not interested.”

That was as far as she usually would have taken it, but she hated the way his expression closed off and felt an urge to poke at him a little. Plus, maybe if he was seeing a friend of hers she’d stop having decidedly nonplatonic thoughts about him. “You could ask her to Cal’s Christmas party tonight. It’s last minute, but pretty casual.”

“You’re going with me to Cal’s. Like always.”

And he’d crash on her couch, like always. The problem was the fact she didn’t always have hot, sweaty dreams about him. She didn’t always toss and turn thinking thoughts she had no business thinking about him.

“Whatever,” she said. “I told her I liked her too much to hook her up with you, anyway.”

He turned to scowl at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I like Penny. Why would I set her up with a guy that’s going to take her out a few times and then dump her?”

“What makes you think I’d do that?”

“It’s what you always do.”

“That’s a pretty rotten thing to say.”

“It’s the truth, and you know it.”

He turned his back on her, then walked to a stand of four-foot trees, which made her sigh. She knew he was being practical—he did practical so well—but these trees weren’t going to be gracing the pages of magazines any time soon. “This one’s good.”

What it lacked in height, the tree made up for with full, symmetrical branches and needles that didn’t scatter when she breathed on them. “At least I won’t need a stepladder to put the star on top.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Leaving the lot attendant to wrap the tree in netting, Claire and Justin made their way through the crowd to the cashier at the back of the lot. Pinned to the stack of wooden crates serving as a makeshift stand for the cash box were sprigs of mistletoe bound by red string. On impulse, Claire grabbed one and added it to her total.

“What’s that for?” Justin demanded as she shoved her change in her pocket.

“It’s mistletoe.”

“I know what it is. Why did you buy it?”

“Because it’s a Christmas decoration and because it’s fun. Same reason you have a snow globe with a picture of your snowmobile in it.”

“I have a snow globe with a picture of my sled in it because you gave it to me last Christmas. And I don’t kiss a girl every time I shake it and make the snow fly. You’re supposed to kiss somebody under the mistletoe.”

That was true, which meant she really needed to have a talk with her subconscious. First sex dreams and now an excuse to kiss a guy in her apartment. “I thought it would look cute. Stop overanalyzing my impulse buy.”

“Who are you planning to kiss?”

“Moxie,” she snapped, just to shut him up.

They found her wrapped tree and, after showing the attendant her receipt, she took the light end—careful not to bend the top branch where the star would rest—and Justin took the heavier base end and they carried it to his truck. He probably could have just swung the thing over his shoulder and carried it alone, but she liked to at least pretend to do her share. He took the heavy end again to carry it up the stairs to her apartment and then helped her center it in the stand she already had waiting.

When he started working on tethering the tree to the wall, necessary thanks to Christmas trees bringing out Moxie’s inner kitten, Claire went to the kitchen to wash the sap off her hands. Unfortunately, the kitchen was more of an area than an actual room, which meant she could see him from the sink. Tethering the tree required a lot of leaning and stretching and the leaning and stretching kept making his T-shirt ride up, and she wondered how she’d never noticed how incredibly sexy the small of his back was.

And now that she was looking, that exposed strip of skin wasn’t the only thing sexy about him. There was the way he filled out his blue jeans. The way his broad shoulders moved under his T-shirt. The way his hair curled just a little at the base of his neck because he was overdue for a haircut. And when he turned and grinned at her, she went ahead and mentally penciled that in at the top of the list.

“Moxie would need a chainsaw to take this sucker down now.”

She tried, as a rule, never to compare Brendan and Justin, other than a natural curiosity at times as to how two such opposite men had been best friends for almost their entire lives.

Justin was worn jeans and faded T-shirts, usually with a hole at the back of the collar where the tag sometimes stuck out because rather than grab the hem, he took off his shirts by grabbing the back of the neck, bunching the fabric and hauling it over his head. If she needed a repair done, Justin would load the supplies in his truck, show up and get it done in exchange for food and all the iced tea she could pour. He liked country music and liked to watch movies at home, where he could pop the button on his jeans and put his feet on the coffee table.

Brendan was khakis and button-down shirts. He listened to classic rock and loved going to the movie theater to experience films the way the directors intended him to. If a repair needed doing, he would call somebody to fix it, write the check and then take Claire out someplace on the town so the construction wouldn’t bother her.

Such different guys with an unbreakable bond. And they both meant everything to her.

“You want me to hang that mistletoe?”

“No, thanks. I’ll hang it somewhere later.” If he hung it, then he’d end up standing under it and she might be tempted to kiss him.

“This is the part where you offer me food,” he reminded her.

“We’ll be at Cal’s party in a few hours and there’s always tables of food.”

“The keywords being
in a few hours
.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled open the refrigerator. “I don’t have much. Haven’t worked up the ambition to go grocery shopping in a while. Deli meat. A leftover chicken breast. It was a little dry the first time around, so I don’t think a microwave is going to help it any. I could slice it thin, maybe. Make a sandwich with lots of mayo.”

“You got any chocolate pudding?” His voice so close to her ear made her jump.

He was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder. With one hand on the open door and the other braced on the fridge itself, she was trapped by his body and awareness of it crackled through her like an August wildfire.

It had to be that stupid dream, she told herself. Now that she knew her body was thinking about sex again, she was fabricating desire where it didn’t exist. She didn’t feel that way about Justin.

He moved closer, trying to see around her, and when his hip bumped hers, it took every ounce of self-control she had not to react. Okay, so maybe she felt that way about Justin a
little.
But it would pass. As long as he didn’t catch on, things wouldn’t get weird and eventually her body would find somebody else to lust after.

She hoped.

“Next right,” Justin told the cab driver, who put on his turn signal and slowed the car. Then he sent a quick text to Claire to let her know they’d arrived.

Neither of them were big drinkers, but the booze flowed freely at Cal’s Christmas parties and Justin would have at least a couple of beers and Claire would have some kind of sparkly, fruity drink. Before Brendan’s accident, he would have risked it, telling himself two drinks was nothing. But, even though alcohol wasn’t a factor in the accident, Justin had been the one to visit the impound and collect any personal items from the mangled wreck that had been Brendan’s car. Since then, he did what he could to make sure his family wouldn’t have to do the same.

When the cab was in Park, Justin got out and walked around to open Claire’s door for her just in time to see her making her way carefully down the staircase in red high heels he’d never seen before. And, holy crap, her legs. He’d seen her legs before. Kicking around in shorts and flip-flops. Hell, he’d even seen them at the beach a time or two, when she wore nothing but a modest, one-piece suit.

But they looked different tonight. He’d never seen her long, curved-just-right legs going on for what looked like forever, from her short black skirt to those red high-heeled shoes that would make any hot-blooded male instantly hard just because they were red high-heeled shoes.

“You ready?” she asked, and he realized he’d watched those amazing legs walk right up to him and stop.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, thinking maybe being concerned for her health would sound like a legitimate excuse for the staring.

She hesitated, looking like she was going to say something but changed her mind. Then she shook her head. “Not really.”

“The dress code for Cal’s party’s pretty casual.”

“So I felt like dressing up a little.” Her hair was up in some sparkly red clip thing and she had on just enough makeup to keep his gaze bouncing between her gorgeous eyes and a mouth just begging to be kissed.