Christie Ridgway: Must Love Mistletoe

The sooner she could escape from all of it.

Despite her time in the shower, the whirr of the blow dryer, and then the rattle she made in the kitchen getting coffee and toast, neither mother nor even sound emerged from the master bedroom. Once dressed, complete with Christmas apron and striped stocking cap, Bailey let herself out the front door, resigned to the next resort of spending yet another day in sole charge of the store.

Her feet stuttered to a halt. The next resort would have to wait until she first made contact with the nitwit who’d left a refrigerator-sized wooden carton on the street, directly behind her Passat.

The folded invoice inside the plastic sleeve stapled to the pine slats confirmed her un luck was holding…the address was that of Mrs. Jacobson. If Bailey was going to do all that getting on and tackling she had planned, she first would have to knock on the one door she particularly didn’t want to open.

Her feet dragged as she headed down the sidewalk and up the front walk of the other house. She might have excused herself that it was too early in the morning to disturb any occupants, but the unmistakable mingled scent of coffee and bacon had made its way to the front porch. Someone was up and cooking breakfast at the Jacobsons’.

Taking a breath, Bailey rapped on the wood. It didn’t take long to hear the approach of footsteps on the other side. The door swung open.

Itwon’tbeFinnitwon’tbeFinn itwon’tbeFinn .

It…wasn’t?

The T-shirt was the same, the broken-down blue jeans, the battered motorcycle boots. But this wasn’t a teenage juvenile delinquent. This looked more like an adult delinquent, someone who spent time on a chain gang, or bounced other bad guys out of rowdy bars, or ran security for Hell’s Angels events.

He was certainly no boy and no angel himself, not with those wide, I-work-out shoulders, mussed black hair-sans the bleach overlay-and dark stubble. This man didn’t wear her first lover’s steel earrings, but instead a black eye patch covered one of his brown eyes.

Finn’s eyes.

She took a step back.

A smile flitted over his face. Finn’s smile. The uncovered eye didn’t betray a flicker of emotion or familiarity, though. “Is it Girl Scout cookie season too?”

He didn’t recognize her! The man who had been Finn, the pirate that was this Finn, didn’t realize she was the grown-up girl next door. To him, apparently, ten years was distant history.

Okay.

That was good, easier, fine. She could at least pretend the same. It wouldn’t be hard anyway, since he seemed so different than she expected.

Who was she kidding? Second only to prison convict, she’d have bet the farm that Finn would turn pirate.

She gestured behind her. “There’s a package on the street with this address,” she said, in the tones of a polite stranger. “It’s blocking my car.”

His eyebrows shot up and he moved out the door and past her, leaving his scent in the air. The Finn she remembered had smelled like Irish Spring. This Finn smelled shower-fresh too, but with a subtler scent that tickled her nose. Following him out to the street, she rubbed it. As her hand came down, her fingers brushed the nametag pinned to her apron.

BAILEY

(Yes, like George!)

Damn Finn. He knew exactly who she was. Even if she didn’t look exactly as she had at eighteen, he wouldn’t have forgotten her name .

She snatched the dopey hat off her head and combed her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. He wasn’t looking at her, though. Instead he strode straight to the carton, ripped the invoice from its plastic, and unfolded the thin sheet.

He cursed like a pirate too.

Then he glanced over at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this out of your way.”

She smiled sweetly. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this out of your way, Bailey . The name’s Bailey Sullivan.”

His gaze flicked to her nametag, back to her eyes. “I can read.”

But he couldn’t remember?

She remembered everything .

The sullen expression on his thirteen-year-old face the first summer he’d been packed off to his grandmother’s. The outrage that had replaced it when Bailey had accepted her best friend’s dare and squirted him, long and cold, with the garden hose.

The summer she was fourteen and she cajoled him to the beach with her every afternoon. His kiss one July day-her first. She hadn’t known to open her mouth for his tongue, and her skin had heated like sunburn when he whispered the instruction. Then his tongue had touched the tip of hers and he’d tasted like pretzels and Pepsi and salt water. Going dizzy, she’d clutched his bare shoulder, her fingertips grazing across gritty golden sand sprinkled on his damp tanned flesh.

Two years after that, the darkness of her backyard and the ghostly glow of the soccerball-sized hydrangeas. The fresh scent of night-blooming jasmine. The flinch of her stomach as his bony boy fingers touched her belly skin on their first, bold approach to her breast. The instant pebbling of her nipple beneath her neon bikini top and her naïve, desperate hope he wouldn’t notice.

He had.

“Something wrong?” he asked now.

He’d always paid such close attention.

She tossed her hair back and crossed her arms. “Nothing access to my car won’t fix right up.”

“Give me a sec.”

She let herself watch him stride off, his long legs so familiar, the wide plane of his back and his heavy-muscled shoulders so not. What had he done to earn that beefcake physique? What had he done with his life? What had happened to his eye?

Did he ever hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and in his memory smell the fruity coconut-oil scent of suntan lotion? Would he then recall the way he rubbed it on her shoulders and then the small of her back, his fingertips sliding under her bikini bottoms to tease the round globes of her butt and then trace the half-hidden bumps of her tailbone?

He’d been such a bad boy.

Her bad boy.

But the bad boy had grown into a one-eyed stranger who was already back with a hammer and who didn’t appear interested in talk.

Or interested in her.

So she clapped her mouth shut too and watched him break open the big crate.

Then felt her jaw drop as out of frothy curls of shredded paper he drew a shrink-wrapped gingerbread cookie. A life-sized, frosted-in-colorful-detail sheep. Followed by a calf, a chicken, two lambs. Then it was figures. A man, a woman, an angel, a baby in a cradle. Baby Jesus.

A whole, to-human-scale Nativity scene of gingerbread.

Bailey had to blink a few times to believe her eyes. “Someone has a Neiman Marcus catalog and a triple-platinum AmEx card,” she said.

He said nothing. In silence he stacked the cookies on the lawn, shoved the packing material into a garbage bag, then finally broke down the wood carton, piling the pieces far enough away to create getaway space for her.

Getaway. Great. Perfect. All that she would have asked Santa for if she’d ever had the chance to believe in him.

But the craziness of the family business during December had prompted her parents to forgo the usual fantasy for their child. With Santa visits part of The Perfect Christmas’s holiday schedule, instead it had made sense for them to explain that the man in the red suit who spent afternoons in their store was an out-of-work navy vet and that the character who supposedly left gifts on Christmas mornings for good little girls and boys was none other than their mommies and daddies.

But shhh! she had to keep the secret for everyone else.

So she was good at keeping quiet and she continued the practice as she ducked into her car, turned the key, then slipped it into reverse.