Once Upon a Christmas Eve (11 page)

Arms stretched above him, he slipped the string into the clips under the high window frame. “I know you're not. And I know it's hard for you not to be generous,” he admitted, his tone utterly patient. “But that generosity is
what prevented you from qualifying for a loan and having to go with a partnership instead.”

“I wasn't being generous.” The realization that he was looking out for her lingered. So did the undeniable draw of that knowledge. Yet, the hard-core businessman in him clearly didn't allow him to see what seemed so apparent to her. “I was just being fair.”

“You can't afford to be that ‘fair,'” he pointed out, then asked for another string of lights.

Since she couldn't effectively argue his logic, she didn't try. She just handed him what he'd asked for, then took over clipping the string down the side of the frame and along the bottom of the window behind the trees when he got to where she could reach it herself.

“Does the franchise clause have to stay?” Surely that could go, she thought. The only bistro she wanted was the one she had now.

“You want that clause,” he assured her. “Franchising can make you a wealthy woman.”

“I don't need to be wealthy,” she insisted, wondering if it was his expression or her nerves that seemed a little tight when she reached the side of the window and he took over. “I just need to earn enough for me and my baby to be comfortable.”

“You'll be more comfortable with a bigger nest egg. And, probably,” he muttered, his back to her, “a bigger nest.”

She already had plans to move to the two-bedroom apartment down the hall. When she told him that, his response was to meet her eyes, shake his head at what he apparently considered her lack of grander foresight, snap in the last light and say, “What's next?”

She told him they needed to do the window on the side.

“Then, what about the lease on the space next door?”
she asked, moving on to the expansion as they carried box and ladder around the corner. “Do you deal with that or do I?”

“Our office will take care of it.”

He set the ladder in place, climbed up. With him near the top rung, her eyes were even with his boots as she held up lights. “And the contractor?”

“Scott will handle that,” he said over the tick of tiny bulbs bumping glass. “You'll just need to oversee the design.”

Scott. She kept forgetting about him. She hadn't forgotten the information he'd imparted about his partner, though, spare as it had been.

“He called yesterday.” Just after she'd removed his roses from the bar because they'd started to fade. “He wanted to make sure all my questions were being answered, and to tell me to call him if there was anything I didn't understand.”

What he'd actually said was that he wanted to make sure his partner was treating her right, and that she shouldn't let Max's workaholic tendencies intimidate her. According to him, Max often forgot that the rest of the world didn't live, eat and breathe expansions and acquisitions. He'd assured her he'd be back toward the end of the week. Then, the two of them could start working together.

She wasn't especially looking forward to that. Probably, she thought, because the man still sounded interested in pursuing her along with her business. Yet, he was part of the company to which a huge part of herself would soon belong. It only made sense to know more about him.

Since she'd mentioned Scott, Max hadn't said a thing as he continued tackling her chore for her.

“Does he have family here?”

He gave the string a tug. “A stepmother.”

The loose end of the string had caught on one of the little fir trees. She unsnagged it. “Did he lose his father, too?”

The lights seemed to tick against the glass more sharply.

“Years ago.”

“Are they close?”

“Who?”

“Your partner and his stepmother.”

“Not especially,” he muttered, sounding as if he might be understating considerably.

“Does he have other family?”

Looking up, she saw the underside of his strong jaw tighten.

“If you have questions about Scott, you'll have to ask him.”

“Then, what about you? Do you have family here?”

From his hesitation, it seemed he didn't like that question, either.

“No, I don't,” he said and clipped in two more lights.

“They must be in Los Angeles, then.”

He aimed a frown at her upturned face. “Why do you think that?”

“Your website said you earned your MBA at UCLA. I thought maybe you grew up there.”

“I grew up in a lot of places.”

“So you have family in different cities?”

He'd reached the end of the string. Or, maybe, it was his rope. With his frown deepening the creases in his forehead, he climbed down the ladder and took the bundle of lights she held. Once that was strung they'd be finished.

The almost comfortable ease they'd managed as they'd worked on the front window had vanished like smoke in the wind.

“Are you using the back door or the front?” he asked, totally ignoring her question.

“Back.”

“I'll put these up. You take the box inside and I'll bring the ladder. It's starting to rain.”

It seemed to Tommi that there was nothing quite so deafening as the sound of a slammed door. Especially when standing right in front of it.

It was barely raining at all. Just a few little drops that hardly qualified as a sprinkle, much less anything requiring escape.

Escape from her was clearly what he wanted as he turned away. From her questions, anyway.

He just as clearly expected her to take the hint.

The man had no idea how tenacious she could be when she really wanted something.

“You did the high parts,” she reminded him, taking the lights back to finish them up herself. “I can do the rest. And, by the way, I've answered every question you've asked me.” Clips snapped as she secured green wire. “You know everything about me from my checking account balance to something my family doesn't even know.”

“I need to know who we're doing business with,” he defended.

“So do I,” she defended, right back. “I need to know who I'm doing business with, too.”

She glanced around to see a muscle in his jaw jerk. She had a point and he knew it. He didn't like that she had one, either. She just couldn't begin to imagine why that was.

Looking caught, not liking it, he finally conceded.

“What do you want to know?”

“About your family,” she said, trying not to sound exasperated. “About where you're from.”
About your personal life, or if you even have one,
she thought. “Something that
tells me who you are besides a fabulously successful investor who tracks down properties for big corporations.”

Max wasn't sure if the twitch at the corner of his mouth was a smile or a grimace. He liked the compliment. He liked the way her frustration with him animated her expression. What he didn't care for at all was how she kept walking all over the graveyard of a past he'd laid to rest long ago.

“It's actually the other way around. The investment part is a sideline.”

It seemed to be all she could do not to roll her eyes. Exasperation fairly leaked from her fine pores.

“As for the rest of it,” he conceded, keeping it simple, “my mother is dead, I never knew my father and I have no idea what family is supposed to be.” The whole concept had eluded him. He knew nothing of how that dynamic worked. “If it's blood relatives you're talking about, I imagine I have them somewhere, but I don't know who they are. As for anyone else who might have once qualified, I had a wife who left after six months about twenty years ago. I grew up in Nevada and Southern California. Scott has always lived in Washington,” he added, since she was, rightfully, entitled to background on both of them, “but like I said before, you'll have to ask him about the rest of it.”

Tommi was still focused on what he'd said about his parents. And his wife. From the sounds of it, he'd been abandoned in one way or another by the very people who could well have mattered to him the most.

She also had the feeling she now understood why he'd been so adamant about a man's obligation to his offspring. His father had also abandoned his mother and left her to raise him alone.

“You said you grew up in lots of places,” she quietly reminded him. “What kind of work did your mother do?”

Of all the things she could have asked, Max hadn't seen that one coming. The women who'd prodded him about his past inevitably asked about his ex.

“She cleaned.”

“Cleaned?”

“Hotel rooms during the day. Offices at night. For a while, she cleaned private houses. It depended on what kind of agency hired her.”

“Why did you move so much?”

“Because she was looking for a way out.” He realized that now, though he hadn't at the time. “We moved to Las Vegas because she heard the casino hotels paid more.” It had been the same for Tahoe. “When that didn't work—” for reasons he'd never known and never asked “—we moved…somewhere else,” he concluded, because he really didn't want to think about the homeless shelters they'd stayed in on occasion, too.

What he would never forget, though, was what he'd glimpsed of how others had lived. When she'd been afraid to leave him alone, his mom had snuck him inside some of the casino hotel rooms and the houses she'd cleaned while the owners were away. No doubt that was what had gotten her fired on more than one occasion.

It was what he wasn't saying that Tommi heard. His mother hadn't had many options. She worked hard and for not much money. She'd done what she had to do.

She'd been looking for a way out, he'd said.

“Was she very young?” she asked, realizing that she might well have been.

The same distance she'd sensed in him the other day suddenly threatened to lock into place. “She was sixteen when she had me. She had to drop out of school.”

“And the woman you married?” she ventured, wanting to change the direction of his thoughts even as her own
remained on his mom. Sixteen was still a child. And she'd been alone with a child of her own. “You said she left?”

“We shouldn't have married in the first place.”

Though he offered the admission grudgingly, it was easier to talk about his ex. He figured he owed Tommi at least as much as she'd given him, anyway. It couldn't have been easy for her to confide that what had happened with her child's father should never have happened at all. He was painfully familiar with that sort of guilt-inducing hindsight, but at least he wasn't having to live with any life-changing consequences.

“We were young. After Mom died, I didn't have anybody and Jenna didn't seem to, either. Three months after our trip to the justice of the peace, her old boyfriend decided he wanted her back.” She hadn't needed Max anymore. End of story. “It was as much my fault it didn't work as it was hers.”

“You're very generous,” Tommi murmured.

“I'm not being generous.” He wasn't about to take that sort of credit. Not from her. He didn't deserve it. “Marrying her had just been a way to make sure she stayed with me. Obviously, that rationale proved flawed.”

His cynicism didn't surprise Tommi. Neither did the way he brushed right over the admission of how very alone he must have felt, and how badly he'd wanted a connection to someone—to someone who was family.

It was no wonder he didn't like the holidays. The people who would have made them special were gone.

“How old were you when you lost your mom?”

“Eighteen. Look,” he muttered. He'd gone far enough. He had no desire to revisit the months he'd taken care of his mom after she'd come down with pneumonia and become too sick to work. Or, with how he'd struggled after she'd died to find places to live while he put himself
through school. He especially didn't like the inexplicable feeling that considering all that was exactly what he should do, though he had no idea what purpose it could possibly serve.

“It's raining. We should get this stuff inside and finish working out the agreement. I know you want to get back to the guy you want to hire as soon as you can.”

It finally had started to rain, heavily enough that Tommi flipped up the hood of her jacket as she grabbed the now-empty storage tub. She wasn't sure if she felt chastised by the abrupt way he'd closed the door on something he clearly hadn't intended to share, or bad for the pain those memories must have once caused.

He wasn't a man who invited sympathy. Still, as he collapsed the ladder and they headed for the alley and the bistro's back door, she knew how lost she would feel without the familial connections that sometimes drove her crazy. Because of that, it wasn't hard to imagine how awful it would be to live without a connection to any family at all.

She pushed back her hood as they walked inside. “I'll take that,” she said, reaching for the ladder.

“Just tell me where you want it.”

“I need it so I can put this back up on the shelf.”

She'd lifted the red plastic container.

He promptly took it from her.

“I've got it. Just tell me where you want it.”

His tone might have sounded casual if not for the faintly clipped edge to it. Just as conscious of the subtle restiveness in his manner, she motioned quickly to the small utility room. As he turned into the neatly organized space, she backed into the deserted and thoroughly scrubbed kitchen.

The only sounds in the room were the rattle of the ladder
bumping the mop bucket Mario had used last night when they'd cleaned up. The scents of cleaner and bleach still lingered. Grabbing a clean white hand towel from the stack on a metal rack, she held it out to Max the moment he turned from the little room.