Tanya Michaels: Mistletoe Cinderella

“I…” Her gaze was troubled, the internal debate clear in her eyes. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I should go, Dylan.”

Damn .

It wasn’t until she’d safely put a few stairs of distance between them that she said, “But I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow! We’ll talk more then.”

He watched her go to her car. It was on the tip of his tongue to call out Wait, Chloe, but if he did, he’d never know that she respected him enough, cared about him enough, to tell him the truth herself.

HER FIRST REAL DATE with Dylan Echols. Well, date might be too strong a term, but this would be their first meal in public. Chloe’s heart thudded madly in her chest. She’d agreed because it was so early in the day and the restaurant was on Dylan’s route back to the freeway, practically the outskirts of Mistletoe. Statistically this was the least likely place and time for her to run into people she knew. Still, her mouth was dry and her palms were damp.

How the hell did people commit crimes? If she were even pondering something illegal and happened to pass a police officer, she’d be seized with the uncontrollable urge to turn herself in. What you’re doing to Dylan is a crime. You have to tell him the truth. She realized that. It had been unfair to ever rationalize that he didn’t need to know, even though she’d never dreamed that their acquaintance would continue and evolve.

But she’d let it go on so long. How could she explain what she’d done in a way that didn’t make her sound pathological? In a way that didn’t make him never want to speak to her again?

“C.J.! Over here.” He waved from a back booth. Was it her guilty conscience, or did his voice boom extra-loud as he signaled her?

She hurried to sit across from him, her back to the restaurant’s entrance. “Morning. Before I forget, here are some more URLs I wrote down for you.”

As he took the sheet of paper torn from a memo pad, his thumb swirled over her palm, pressing gently against pressure points she hadn’t known were there. It shouldn’t have been any more sexual than two kids holding hands, but she nearly trembled at the contact. Sitting with him last night on Barb’s front porch, Chloe had yearned for more physical contact. She’d bolted in part because she didn’t trust herself alone with him. She’d been infatuated with him in high school, but the feelings that had seemed so all-encompassing at the time were nothing compared to the rising desires of an adult woman who’d come to know Dylan more intimately.

A curly-haired waitress wearing a faded uniform and funky green horn-rimmed glasses took their orders. After she’d gone, Dylan held up the list Chloe had made of sites and brief notations about each.

“Thanks for these. You sure are going to a lot of trouble.”

“Not really.” The very fact that Chloe had the time to devote to Dylan and his condo was a glaring neon arrow pointing to her lack of love life. Friends like Natalie spent leisure hours getting ready for dates, going to movies with new boyfriends, shopping for anniversary and Valentine’s Day gifts. Chloe spent her free time watching reruns of House . She suspected, though, that even if her Web site business kept her so busy that she put in sixty-hour weeks, for Dylan she would have made the time. “Besides, I’ve been enjoying myself. The site listed at the bottom of the page is entirely too much fun. You can scan in a photo of your room and mess with colors and stuff. The models are crude, but if you’re at all a visual person-”

“Oh, I am.”

“Most men seem to be,” she agreed. “When I did student tutoring-”

He raised an eyebrow and looked as if he might interrupt. Chloe hastily tried to recall what kind of student Candy had been. Plenty of cheerleaders and varsity athletes had been on the honor roll, but the idea of Candy selflessly helping her peers was laughable.

She spoke faster, trying to prevent an interruption even though she’d momentarily lost her train of thought. “I found that guys always absorbed the point faster when they had a diagram or map or illustration. I got really interested in the different ways people learn.”

Dylan’s expression had changed from questioning to thoughtful, and he nodded.

“It’s about knowing how each person gets the best results,” she continued. “Like, some people do better with music playing in the background while others need the quiet to focus. Some you joke with to cajole results, others…Well, you get the idea. You’d tell me if I was boring you, right?”

“You’re not. Quite the opposite,” he said. “I was thinking that you did an amazing job with my mom last night.”

Chloe flushed with pleasure, but didn’t feel she could take credit for Barb. “She was a quick study. Since my parents moved into the senior living complex, I’ve started offering short computer tutorials to the residents there. They’re not exactly part of the Internet generation, but they still want to be able to access digital pictures of the grandkids and look up occasional recipes on the Web. It’s all basic. You could teach it just as well as I could.”

He shook his head. “I worry that we fall back on what we know. Whether we want to or not.”

“What do you mean?”

“For example…” He stared beyond her, collecting his thoughts. “I’ve heard children of alcoholics are more likely to become alcoholics themselves even though that sounds counterintuitive. You’d think that someone who had witnessed that kind of destruction would be the last person to put their own loved ones through it.”

“A girl who grew up in my neighborhood used to nag her mother to stop smoking. She even got in trouble once for hiding her mom’s cigarettes. Ironically, whenever I see her now, she’s smoking outside the Dixieland Diner. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly,” he said grimly.

But Chloe was still confused. What trait was Dylan concerned that he might have picked up, might pass on? The teacher who’d probably made the biggest impact on him was Coach Burton, who was beloved around these parts. And Barb Echols obviously adored her son. Five minutes in the same room with them confirmed that. Chloe frowned, searching her memory banks for any impression of Michael Echols. When she’d brought up the subject of Dylan’s father previously, he’d shut her down. She’d assumed that was Dylan’s reaction to his father’s death, but now she wondered.

“With your interest in learning styles,” Dylan asked, “did you ever think about becoming a teacher yourself? Schools can always use good instructors who are attuned to their students and flexible with their teaching styles.”

“Actually, I was an education major for all of one semester, not that it mattered since I was only getting started with core classes at the time.”

“What made you change your mind?”

The reason sounded so lame she hated to say it, but she owed him the truth about something . “Performance anxiety, the idea of standing up in front of an entire class. One-on-one tutoring was a different story. I don’t do well in front of crowds. At least, not alone,” she added quickly, before he asked any questions about cheerleading. “When I was doing something on a team, the pressure wasn’t the same.”

That was what had appealed to her about the Academic Decathlon, where they all sat onstage together and could confer over the answers, versus the debate team, which involved individual turns standing at a podium.

“I can understand the comfort of being surrounded by a team,” Dylan commiserated. “I think that’s been affecting me lately. For more than a decade, I had one team or another. Some of the guys who play for Atlanta still call me, but they have crazy schedules and it’s uncomfortable now that I’m a civilian.”