Once Upon a Christmas Eve (19 page)

He was cheating himself of so much. Acutely conscious of his withdrawal from her as he picked up his coat, she was as certain of that as she was the knot of hurt living just below her heart.

“Don't worry about me, Tommi. I'm fine with what I do.”

There was nothing for him to figure out. Max felt utterly convinced of that as he pulled on his overcoat. He had the life he wanted. Heaven knew he'd worked hard enough to attain it. Even the breakup of his partnership didn't threaten him the way she did. He'd seen companies split and parcel out into bigger and better operations. He'd steered some of those clients on to even more lucrative paths himself. But she'd been poking at the foundations of the carefully constructed life he'd so deliberately built pretty much since he'd met her.

“I have to go.” He hated the way she'd pulled from him before. Certain she'd only do it again, knowing he'd lost any right he had to touch her, he moved to the back door so she wouldn't have to lock the front behind him. “You take care of yourself.”

Tightening her grip on her arms, she gave a little nod. “You, too.”

He turned then, walking away from the wounded look in her eyes and the brave little smile she'd clearly hoped would mask it. His defenses locked and loaded, he wouldn't let himself consider the odd little void opening in his chest. He just let himself out, drove off and waited for the sense of reprieve he'd fully expected to feel.

The relief didn't come that day, though.

Or the next.

Still, his sense of self-preservation insisted that it would
come. He just needed to get to New York to look at those offices, and sign the notice of intent he'd had his attorney draw up about the split Scott had to know was coming. Once he was buried in work, he was sure the void would disappear.

 

Christmas Eve had once been Tommi's favorite time of year. That had been when her family had gone to services together, then returned home for a festive supper before she and her sisters would each open one gift—which, suspiciously, always turned out to be pajamas. Their parents and, later, her mom, had saved the main opening of presents for Christmas morning. But the eve had always seemed like a big present in itself; the official beginning of what all the preparation had been about.

It was just now six o'clock, but she could have already joined Bobbie and her almost-new family for whatever traditions they would create that evening. Or gone to her mom's where her other sisters would be helping with preparations for Christmas dinner.

Instead, hating that she felt so empty when she had so much to be grateful for, Tommi had made a mental leap past Christmas altogether and focused on Bobbie's wedding the day after. On the cake, anyway. She missed the man she'd so carelessly fallen in love with far too much to think about the more romantic aspects of the event. Missed him, wished she'd never met him, and felt hugely grateful to him for the funding and ideas for her business that she'd never have considered on her own.

The bistro was closed. It had been all day. And all day, she had been mixing and baking layers of carrot, chocolate and orange gateau. The combination would have sent food critics into a culinary tailspin, but it perfectly suited her sister's sometimes indecisive, always eclectic tastes.

With the layers baked and in the freezer because they were easier to frost frozen, she was working on the roughly two hundred royal icing snowflakes that would cascade down tiers of buttercream when her cell phone chimed.

Thinking it would be her mom checking to see if she'd made enough progress to change her mind about coming over, she wiped her fingers, dug beneath her apron and pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her gray sweat-pants. The beauty of having the day off and working alone was that she could work in comfort. She hadn't even bothered with makeup.

“Since I had to call your cell, I take it you're not home.”

At the sound of Max's voice, her pulse gave an unhealthy jerk. “I'm in the bistro.”

He hesitated. “The bistro is closed.”

“How do you know that?”

“What are you doing there?” he asked, ignoring the question. “When you didn't answer your home phone, I figured you were out doing whatever it is people do the night before Christmas.”

He knew the bistro was closed. There was only one way he could know that for certain.

With her phone to her ear, she pulled off her apron and walked into the dark dining area, letting the door swing closed behind her. Without illumination from the kitchen, the only light in the interior came from the glow of tiny white lights outlining the front and side windows and the rows of little trees in the planters below them.

“I'm working on my sister's wedding cake,” she said, moving between the pale shapes of the cloth-draped tables. “She's getting married the day after tomorrow.” She looked out the front window. Icy rain blew at an angle through
the halos of the streetlamps as she scanned the cars parked along the curbs.

His black Mercedes coupe was there. But he wasn't in it. “Where are you?” she asked.

She couldn't help the hesitation in her tone. Or the hope she didn't want to feel. Knowing his penchant for working through weekends and evenings, and having encountered his ambivalence about the holidays, it was entirely probable that he was there on business.

After the walls he'd thrown up before he'd walked out six days and roughly three hours ago, not that she'd kept track, she just couldn't imagine what he wanted that couldn't have been accomplished by messenger or telephone.

“Max?” she asked.

“I'm here. I'm coming around back.”

She lifted the Closed shade to see him walking toward the bistro, his dark hair whipping in the wind, his cell phone to his ear.

He must have been in the entryway to her apartment building in the middle of the block. Noticing the movement of the shade, he slowed his pace. A heartbeat later, she saw him lower his phone just before her connection went dead.

Dropping her own phone back into her pocket, she had the door open by the time he reached it to let him in from the cold.

The freezing air came in with him, making her shiver before she locked out the chill and turned to where he'd stopped six feet away. In the silvery illumination of the lights twinkling through the window, she watched him push his fingers through the dampness glinting in his hair. With his dark parka open in seeming defiance of the weather,
he looked very large, very commanding and, even in that shadowy light, almost as tense as she suddenly felt.

“I won't keep you,” he promised. “Since you have family, I figured I'd have a better chance finding you home tonight than I would tomorrow. I just wanted to give you this.”

From his jacket's inner pocket, he withdrew what looked like rolled paper tied with a shiny ribbon.

It was too dark to see what it was where they stood. Taking what he'd handed her, she moved to the wine bar and flipped the switch that illuminated the red pendants and white spots over its gleaming granite surface. In that soft light, she slipped off the thin silver ribbon and uncurled two sheets of paper.

One was a photocopy of a real estate offer and acceptance. The other, a copy of a memo to someone named Alissa Arnold, Esq.

Her glance caught on “Partial transfer of title to Thomasina Grace Fairchild” in the subject line.

That was as far as she got before, puzzled, she looked up.

“What is this?”

“It's the first Christmas present I've given anyone on my own in about twenty years.” The corporate stuff didn't count. That was business. Though this had to do with her business, as far as Max was concerned, it was strictly personal. “I'm sorry I can't give you the actual deed yet. But I didn't realize what I wanted to give you until a few days ago.” Four days ago, to be exact, when he'd been standing in the middle of a prime piece of Manhattan real estate wondering when what he had would ever be enough.

“The deal still has to close,” he explained, “and there will be some legal work involved separating out parts of the property, but that first page shows that my offer on this
building has been accepted. Margie found out it was for sale when I asked her to go ahead with the lease for the space next door. I didn't know what another buyer would do with it, so I called from New York on Monday and bought it myself.

“That second copy,” he said as her mouth fell open, “is a memo to my attorney about deeding the bistro, the space next door and the top floor to you. You need a bigger place, so I'll put in an elevator and convert all that unused space to a penthouse. That way you'll have room for a nanny. Since you'll own it outright, you won't have to pay any more rent.”

She sank to a stool at the middle of the bar. “You're giving this all to me…for Christmas?”

Her caution had merged with disbelief and no small amount of confusion. Max felt pretty sure that confusion existed for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was his acknowledgment of a holiday that had held no joy for him in longer than he'd cared to remember.

But he had remembered, anyway. She'd more or less made it impossible not to.

“I thought I'd try it your way. You said it took a long time after you lost your father to really look forward to the holidays,” he reminded her. “But seeing everyone else happy made you happy, too. I think I'm beginning to see how that works.”

He'd done what he had because he wanted what she'd found.

Apparently realizing that, something soft tempered the disbelief in her expression. “But you bought the whole building?”

His shrug wasn't anywhere near as casual as it appeared. “I decided not to move to New York. I'm just going to see what plays out splitting the partnership and concentrate
on investments like this. I know how you feel about your neighbors and how they feel about all the condominium conversions around here. You can tell Syd he can stop worrying. The apartments won't be converted to condos.”

The papers she held had curled back into themselves. Holding them in one hand, she clasped them to the soft fleece between her breasts..

“Oh, Max. Thank you for that. And for this,” she added, folding her free hand over the other to clutch his gift more tightly. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

In the subtle lighting, her skin looked as pale and smooth as alabaster, her features as delicate as a cameo. Without makeup, her hair in a careless knot and wearing a sweatshirt that looked big enough to swallow her whole, she looked more like a child than a woman who would soon have one. Torn between the need to touch her and the need to pace, he opted for the latter. The last time he'd reached for her, she'd pulled back from him. The last thing he wanted was to ruin what he was trying to do.

“There's one more thing.” His motivations had been unfamiliar, but discussing property had kept him close to his comfort zone. About to move light years beyond it, he clamped his hand over the muscles knotted at the back of his neck.

“I blew off what you said about something driving me. But the more I tried to not think about it, the harder it got to convince myself you were wrong.”

He walked to the end of the bar, turned when he reached it. “You said you didn't know if I was looking for something or running away from it.

“I know which it is,” he admitted, torn between a lifetime of self-defense and the need to let some of it go. He'd always known. He just hadn't considered what it had cost him until she'd caused him to face what he now stood to
lose. “I've spent the last twenty years of my life running from the first eighteen.”

He had wanted to move as far and as fast as he could from the life of struggle he'd grown up with. He'd allowed her glimpses of that life, grudgingly, and with as little detail as possible, so he'd never told her how he hated never knowing a real home of his own back then.

He now owned four, two of which he set foot in only when he took clients to Aspen or Carmel.

He hadn't mentioned that, growing up, they'd never had a car.

He now collected them. He had a Cobra, two Jags and an Aston Martin lined up like trophies in a climate-controlled garage on his Carmel estate, attended by his caretakers there.

He belonged to yacht and country clubs. He had a sailing sloop and interests in hotels and restaurants he once never could have afforded to stay or eat in, and companies that produced goods he never could have afforded to buy.

He brushed past those details, though, as he paced past her, still working at the knots. They weren't important. What was so significant to him was the insight of the woman who apparently knew him better than he'd known himself. It was because of her that he'd found himself in a room at the Plaza making a list of his acquisitions and discovered that much of what he owned were things he'd all but forgotten, took for granted, rarely used or otherwise ignored. It had been the next morning, in the processes of preparing to acquire more in the form of an office he didn't need that her words had slammed his priorities into place.

Whichever it is, I suspect it won't let you stay still long enough to enjoy whatever it is you have at the moment.

“I've spent all those years getting more. More property,
more money, more possessions. More business,” he had to add, since that was what allowed it all. “But you were right. I don't enjoy what I have. I just get it, get out and move on.”

Because there was always more to be had, more to store up, more to keep him from winding up like his mom—or like one of the homeless guys the kindhearted woman quietly watching him occasionally fed. His need to never know that spiraling lack of control had driven him ever since.

“So now I have everything I could possibly want.” Coming to a halt a foot in front of her, he dropped his head, rubbed at his neck again. He hated the thought of what that need for control may have cost him. “Except for what you showed me is missing.