None of this was making sense.

“Is it…” Bailey cleared her throat. “Is it another woman?”

Tracy stared at the cutting board, unblinking. “I didn’t see a gold chain around his neck, if that’s what you mean.”

A twinge of pain pierced Bailey’s right temple. Gold chain, another woman. Another woman, gold chain. Was this some sort of code she didn’t understand? A headache started blossoming, probably because the half of her brain that dealt with logic and reason was contorting like a pretzel trying to make sense of the irrational that had now become her family life.

Her calf itched and she flashed on that night she’d watched her mother sobbing in the dry bathtub. How could Tracy do this again? After Bailey’s father’s defection, why had Tracy let another man get close enough to mess with her heart? Bailey could remember endless weeks of her mother crying in the middle of the night-had Tracy completely blocked that from her mind?

There were non-risky ways to negotiate the world, maybe even to have a man in your life, but none of them involved leaving the safe side of the emotion superhighway. It was up to Bailey to yank her mother back to the sidewalk.

“Look, Mom, think of the big picture. The store-”

“I can’t go there.” Tracy retrieved the knife and started killing the cabbage.

“Mom-”

“If Dan’s going to go to the trouble of looking gorgeous, then I won’t chance seeing him!” She reached over to whack an innocent green onion for good measure. “And that’s final.”

Not to mention completely crazy. Trying to think through her headache, Bailey grabbed some cellophane off the counter and moved to stuff it in the garbage beneath the sink. The bag was near full, so she tied it off and stomped toward the side yard and the big can left there, grateful to work off some of her frustration in the brisk night air.

Maybe it would clear her mind enough to allow her sensible, rational self to formulate a new strategy for dealing with the situation.

At this point in the property, a narrow, hip-high hedge divided their yard from the Jacobsons’. And wouldn’t you know, Finn stood on the other side, beside his grandmother’s own can. The combined strains of “Frosty the Snowman” and “Away in a Manger” must have masked the sounds of her leaving her house. He didn’t seem to notice her presence as he broke down some boxes and stuffed them in the recycle bin.

Her frustration turned to something else as she looked her fill.

Wide shoulders, brawny arms, lean hips, long legs. As he moved, his T-shirt lifted, showing a brief slice of rippling ab muscles. She flashed back fourteen years, when he’d gone from the boy-she-loved-to-annoy to the boy-she-couldn’t-ignore. The first day he’d arrived for that particular summer he’d gazed at her over that very hedge, finding her on her back steps where she was coloring a beat-up pair of white canvas sneakers with a pack of Sharpie pens.

“Hello, pest,” he’d called out.

Her old bikinis had been tossed in the trash just that morning-the ones that had fit since she was eleven, but that didn’t now that she was fourteen. The tops of her new swimsuits had actual cups, and she had actual breasts to put inside them. Her hair was long, past her back strap, and she’d turned it into golden ripples with a new crimping iron the night before.

That spring, she’d taken custody of her mother’s Clinique Black Honey lip gloss, and loved the wet shine and darkened pink it gave to her mouth. About every twenty minutes she applied another layer, just as often as she took a brush to her gleaming length of hair.

She’d liked the Bailey she now saw in the mirror, and she admired that new Bailey’s reflection on a regular basis. Even her little brother had teased her about checking herself out in the reflective chrome on the refrigerator door handle and in the side mirrors of any vehicle she happened to pass.

So that day when she glanced up at Finn’s voice, she was ready for him to see that the “pest” had changed. She wasn’t a whole lot taller, but she’d stood anyway, eager to give him his first glimpse of the works. Call her vain.

She had been.

But she wasn’t prepared for Finn’s changes. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe he’d looked just the same the previous Christmas, and it was Bailey’s more mature eyes that now noticed the stretch of his T-shirt over his shoulders, the clean lines of his male face, the lean strength in his arms and legs.

The strange yet exciting expression in his dark eyes.

She’d prickled from her scalp to between her bare toes.

Half of her wanted to retreat. Half of her wanted to flirt. That half won. She’d sauntered over to him, feeling shaky inside and hot everywhere else.

With eight feet still separating them, the urge to back away had coursed through her again, but she was pulled forward by that serious, mysterious expression in his ever-watchful eyes. “Oh shit,” he’d whispered as she’d walked closer, her new hips swaying. “Oh shit.”

Maybe he’d had a premonition.

Maybe he had one now, fourteen years later. Because without warning, he looked up, pinning her with his one good eye. She was caught red-handed, drinking him in.

It was still there, as if fourteen subsequent New Year’s Eve balls had never fallen in Times Square. His dangerous male beauty, her attraction to it, that edgy sense of sex-in-the-offing that she hadn’t been experienced enough to recognize as a naïve young teenager. At twenty-eight she knew what it was.

Had already experienced it again with Finn, of course. On his grandmother’s front porch, at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, on each occasion she’d felt that fierce tug of physical awareness. It only ratcheted higher now, as without moving a muscle, without saying a word, his lashes swept down, his gaze running over her body.

Bailey froze as it seemed to strip her shirt from her shoulders, yank her jeans from her legs, burn away her bra and panties. With one look, making her naked for him. Again.

Her thigh muscles tightened. She crossed her free arm over her chest, reassured to feel cotton beneath her skin, but intent on hiding her tight, almost aching nipples.

“You scared to get too close, GND?” he taunted, a dark pirate with his eye patch and gleam of feral white teeth. “Surely you’re not afraid of me.”

She shook her head and forced her feet to venture closer. “Surely not.” Sexual attraction didn’t frighten her, a sensible, rational woman. What she was really afraid of she’d left behind ten years ago. Attraction wasn’t the same as emotion.

So when you looked at it that way, approaching Finn was perfectly safe.

Finn didn’t watch her toss the bag of garbage into the can and drop the lid. Instead he continued breaking down the boxes he’d dragged outside.

At the thump of plastic meeting plastic, he waited for her to walk away. Surely she’d be eager to distance herself from him and scurry back into her mother’s house, still spooked by the scarred man who had silenced her outside Gram’s. But her sand-colored boots stayed firmly fixed to the concrete on her side of the hedge.

Finn kept his mouth shut. Unlike the other night, when he’d visited a bar on his way home from the grocery store, now he was completely sober. No confessions, not even a little small talk, was going to spill from his trap tonight. Nothing off-limits was coming from his mouth this time.

“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

He glanced up. She was staring at the tallest, biggest box he’d yet to flatten. There was a photo on the outside of what it had contained-a five-foot-high chocolate fountain in the general shape of a Douglas fir.

“Is that thing for real?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“First the cookie Nativity scene, and now the Rockefeller Plaza of Christmas tree fountains. Someone must have a special admirer.”

“Special’s the word.” He could clear up exactly how and why, but he didn’t. Why shouldn’t he keep her guessing? Not to mention she had this funny little curl to her lip that matched the one she’d had the summer he’d arrived in Coronado wearing a braided thread bracelet made by a girl from home.

He’d snipped it off that night, but he wasn’t obligated to make things easy for Bailey any longer. Remember? He was a grown man now, not a half-tamed boy who wanted her more than another breath.

Though as she continued to stand there, he found he couldn’t continue to ignore her either. Where the hell had he left his secret agent super patience? Was that suddenly gone forever too? “Is something the matter?” he asked.

“No.” She glanced back at her mother’s house with a little grimace, then shrugged. “Just taking a moment to enjoy the strains of that new Christmas melody classic, ‘The First Santa Claus Is Coming to O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”

He wanted to laugh. “Neighborhood celebration getting to you?”

Her sigh whispered beneath the clash of carols in the distance. “I hate Christmas.”

A familiar refrain. He stuffed the last of the flattened fountain box into the recycle bin. “Tell me something about Bailey Sullivan I don’t already know.”

“Really?” Her eyes widened, all thick sexy lashes and unforgettable blue. “You want to talk?”

No.

Yet now that he’d thrown out the comment he couldn’t play coward. Anyhow, turnabout was fair play, and last night he’d given her the CliffsNotes of his own life story.

“I just got to thinking…if I left the wild side and went straight, maybe you, on the other hand, went crooked.” He looked over, curved his mouth in what he thought she might take as a smile. “You know, perhaps somewhere along the line little Miss Perfect fell off the great balance beam of life.”

“I was never Miss Perfect.” She was frowning.

“Could have fooled me.” He rocked on his heels, staring her down with his one eye. “But then again…you did, didn’t you?”

A shadow crossed her face and he dropped his gaze to adjust the placement of Gram’s cans. Pull back, pull back, he warned himself. Don’t get riled up, don’t give her a chance to get to you. Risking another look at her, he caught her watching him again.

Then she gave a little shrug. “Maybe I did change. Maybe I turned into someone with my own wild side.”

He snorted. “Wild? You wouldn’t know wild if it bit you on the butt.”

Another frown pulled her brows together and she stamped closer to the hibiscus hedge between them. “That’s what you did,” she hissed. “Remember, Finn? You bit me on a lot of places, including my butt.”

Hell. She had to remind him. There was no explaining away or excusing the primitive need teenage Finn had felt to mark Bailey’s perfect skin. Her neck, the inside of her thigh, the high curve of her round, pretty ass, because it was one of the few places a hickey could be hidden by her itsy bitsy, teeny-weeny bikinis that drove him so crazy.

He cleared his throat. “That was a long time ago.” He shifted the recycle bin two inches to the right. “We’re no longer two adolescents hopped up on hormones.”

“Is that what you’d call it?” She ran her forefinger over one of the yellow hibiscus flowers, its ruffles closed up tight for the night.

As if he’d confess to it ever being anything more. Not when he could also recall with perfect clarity the roadkill she’d made of his heart when he’d discovered she’d left for college early, despite their summer plans. At his autopsy, they’d find the four-chambered organ still flattened, without a skid mark in sight.

He ignored the old ache in his chest and went back to concentrating on gaining the advantage. “In any case, I’m more interested in this wild-thing Bailey you claim to be now.”

She shrugged again. “Okay, maybe wild is an overstatement in comparison to your checkered past, but I live a pretty full life.”

“Oh really?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’re a rigid, seventy-hour-a-week, all-work-no-play jobaholic.”

“No-”

“And that even the balls-of-steel senior partner at the firm you run trembles when you call his name.”

Her quick glance back at her house made it clear she supposed her mother had been filling him in. Then she put one hand on her hip. “Maybe he trembles for reasons you don’t know about.”

Oh yeah, like she was doing the horizontal tango with a white-haired lawyer who’d been married for fifty-three years. As if he’d believe that was a Bailey move. Finn gave her an appraising glance from the golden top of her head to her booted toes. “I bet your social life’s lousy.”

She exhaled an insulted huff and her other hand fisted on her other hip. “You think I can’t get a man?”

This was too easy. Maybe it was mean of him to needle her, and he didn’t know why it pleased him so much to make her mad, but he hadn’t had this much fun in months. “I know you won’t keep one.”