Christie Ridgway - Must Love Mistletoe

“So, sweetheart, you don’t know me so well after all, do you?”

She rubbed at her forehead with her free hand, and he realized he was still holding her other one. He couldn’t seem to let it go. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Tanner. Tanner was involved with-”

“Don’t mention it if you see him.” Finn dropped her wrist and shoved his fingers in his pocket. It was time they both went to bed.

But she was frowning now and rubbing her forehead as if coaxing a memory to the surface. “That assassination attempt.”

Finn took a step around her. “As I said, don’t mention it if you see him.”

She caught his elbow in her own viselike grip and turned him toward her again. “Finn?”

Secret Service agents were known for their flat, cool stares. He could still do it one-eyed. “What now?”

Her gaze cataloged every feature of his expressionless face. Then her hand tightened on him as she spoke. “What did that have to do with you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Finn,” she whispered.

He didn’t like that odd gleam in her eyes, or that she was touching his arm again, or the fact that he wanted to bury his face in her blond, glittering hair and lose himself in her scent. Damn those whiskeys!

“There’s nothing more,” he ground out, wrenching his arm from her grasp.

“There’s more. I know you, Finn.”

She didn’t, goddamn it. No one knew him anymore, least of all himself. He’d been a damn fine agent, dedicated to the job, one who never wearied of the constant training and the constant stress of searching for that one face in the crowd. Cool and collected in his dark suit and his dark glasses. But his usual detachment was so damn hard to find and hold on to now.

“You were there,” Bailey said. “Somehow. Somewhere. I’m trying to think…I’ve seen the video.”

“The whole damn world has seen the video.” Though the Secret Service had studied the tape over and over, it had also played for months on the news channels, the entertainment channels, everywhere.

“Until then I didn’t know that the Secret Service had a Dignitary Protection Division.”

Finn half turned, looking off down the dark street. “Besides the president and family and the vice-president and family, we’re charged with protecting foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S. Prince al-Maddah was assigned some of our best agents.”

“And the agents saved him.”

Seeing red, he rounded on her. He couldn’t help himself. “Is that all you remember?”

Her eyes went big again, but he couldn’t bleed the bitterness from his voice. “An agent lost her life, Bailey. An agent on my detail.”

“A woman,” she said.

“Ayesha Spencer. She was twenty-five years old and her name was Ayesha Spencer. When the murderer took his first shot, she did exactly as she’d been trained to do-stood tall and made herself a target for the gunman-then took a bullet in the neck, above the protection of her Kevlar vest.”

“Like I said, I’ve seen the video. She was a hero.”

“But green as grass and wholesome as apple pie to boot,” he couldn’t stop himself from muttering, though he managed to stop the next words from rolling out. Shouldn’t I have sensed something was about to go down?

Hell!

He was supposed to be icing all this emotion over, but the feelings continued boiling up inside him.

The Secret Service had an in-house team of shrinks who’d have happy hard-ons if only he’d let them out in a session, but that wasn’t going to happen. He could take care of himself. Service training involved learning to discern warning signs of severe stress, and he’d self-diagnosed himself just fine, thank you very much.

He’d prescribed the cure too. These few weeks with Gram, getting her well again, and then he’d be as good as before too.

“So you were there,” Bailey said. “Where, Finn?”

“You’ve watched the video,” he answered, suddenly too tired to avoid talking about it any longer. “The Service kept my name out of the press, and it’s mostly my torso caught on film. I’m the one you see shoving the prince into the limo. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder to check if the enemy was closing in.”

“Go on.”

“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.