Tanya Michaels: Mistletoe Cinderella

“It’s not lonely.” Much. “After all, I have my clients and the people I’m trying to win over as clients. To some extent, I get to control how much I interact with others and choose the days when I want to be a hermit. I’m not very social by nature.”

“Not what one would expect to hear from a former cheerleader,” he remarked, stirring chopped mushrooms into the stir-fry.

The ginger-scented perfume of dinner cooking would have made her stomach gurgle in happy anticipation if it weren’t already tied up in so many knots. She’d planned to tell him tonight. Was it too blunt to respond with, “Yes, but I was never a cheerleader because I’m not the person you’ve thought I was for the past three weeks-more wine?”

Lord, the poor man would join a monastery. This bimbo Heidi had just done a job on his trust, and now Chloe was going to follow it up with identity theft? At the very least he’d require two forms of ID and a federal background check on the next woman he invited to dinner.

“Ready to eat?” he asked her.

She smiled weakly.

Though she took the first bite just to be polite, the balance of peppers and garlic-a kick without overwhelming the more delicate flavors-soon seduced her. “When I was rattling off your attributes in the parking lot this morning, I forgot to highlight the fact that you can cook.”

“Only about four complete meals,” he said modestly.

“Maybe, but when they’re this good, you can just keep cooking them over and over and nobody would mind. At least with shrimp and veggies, I can enjoy them without feeling I have to do a marathon on the treadmill. My mother cooks old-school-everything has half a pound of butter or bacon grease added for flavoring. She is perplexed by this wacky, newfangled thing we kids call ‘cholesterol.’ I mentioned to her that Nat’s mom was doing the South Beach Diet, and Mama misinterpreted that to mean Mrs. Young was on vacation.”

He grinned at her anecdotes, but there was a serious note in his voice when he asked, “Was it hard growing up with such a generation gap?”

As much as her parents loved her, it seemed ungrateful to complain.

“Plenty of kids had it more difficult than I did, but their age did factor into things,” she admitted. “They didn’t think they’d have children, and Mama encountered some difficulties with such a late-in-life pregnancy. They were hyperprotective. Not just in a ‘your curfew is sundown’ kind of way, but hovering. Maybe that’s why I’m a self-contained non-people person.”

“A lot of kids start to chafe under too many restrictions. Did you ever rebel?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I got highlights once.”

“Wild woman.”

“I didn’t really do the angry teen bit. I loved my parents, and they loved me…almost to the point of neurosis. Right up until middle school I think Mama was afraid that if she let me out of their sight I might have some horrible asthma attack. I used to wonder what it would have been like if I’d had a sibling and wasn’t living under the magnifying glass by myself. Being the only recipient for their attention got a little intense sometimes.”

“I’m with you on that.” Dylan stabbed a shrimp with his fork but didn’t lift it to his mouth. He glared at his plate, as if seeing something she couldn’t.

“You felt smothered, too?” She actually thought Barb had done a laudable job making sure Dylan and Chloe had some time alone the other night. Of course, Barb had also suggested pulling out baby pictures and sports mementos. Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged her.

But Dylan was shaking his head, making it clear she’d misdiagnosed the problem. “My father was ashamed of me,” he stated calmly. “Being the only recipient for his disapproval could definitely get intense.”

Her knee-jerk reaction was to insist that there was no way his father had been ashamed of him-the man would have to have been crazy. Half the town of Mistletoe was glowingly proud of Dylan. How could his own flesh and blood be so unnaturally different? But beneath Dylan’s neutral expression was a gravity that made it clear he believed his words and hadn’t arrived at the conclusion lightly.

Her second reaction was to pronounce his father an idiot, but it seemed wrong to speak ill of the dead.

“I’m dyslexic,” Dylan said by way of explanation.

“I didn’t know that!”

He smiled wryly. “Is there any reason you should have?”

“No, of course not.” It had been a silly response to his declaration, but it seemed bizarre when she knew so many details about him-his favorite dessert, his baseball stats, even what his bedspread looked like-not to know something that had obviously been a defining factor in his life.

“School was a struggle for me,” he said.

She experienced a surge of guilt, recalling her own feelings of adolescent inadequacy and her misplaced certainty that people like Dylan Echols had it easy. If nothing else, tutoring Natalie and seeing her friend’s tears of frustration over math should have disabused her of that notion.

“If you were struggling, it didn’t show. Other students, even teammates of yours, had noticeable difficulties in some of their classes. Or with girlfriends. Or with their parents divorcing or losing jobs or whatever. You always seemed to have everything so together.”

His laugh was hollow. “Then I’m definitely not who you thought I was.”

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Was now the time to tell him she wasn’t who he thought, either? It seemed tactless to interrupt what he was trying to share with her to make her own revelation. She was incredibly touched that he would tell him about his dyslexia and his father, which were both clearly difficult subjects for him.

“You think your dad was bothered by your dyslexia?”

Dylan pushed his plate away. “I think my father saw me as an extension of himself. Mom said he was so proud for the first three years. He had his own boy, a strapping lad! When I pitched a no-hitter, he lived vicariously. But any time I got in trouble or flunked a spelling test or got sent to the principal’s office in grade school because I was making jokes, I was an embarrassment to him.”

“Then I feel sorry for him for the way he screwed up having a decent relationship with you.” And now, with Michael Echols dead, it was too late. She suddenly felt motivated to call her parents on the way home tonight, just to say she loved them.

“As I get older and look back with more perspective, I try not to take it personally. I don’t think he was kind in general,” Dylan said. “He ran roughshod over Mom, but she mostly learned to let him have his way and keep the peace. I wasn’t so diplomatic.”

Recalling his earlier question about her own youthful rebellions-of which there were none-she hazarded a guess. “You sought out trouble?”

“Until seventh-grade baseball,” he affirmed. “I knew that if I got suspended, no more playing. After middle school was high school and Coach Burton, who kept me on the straight and narrow. He’s the one who told me the great Nolan Ryan was dyslexic.”

Even if Dylan’s career had been cut short, it sounded as though baseball had saved him. It gave her a new appreciation for organized sports.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “It sounds like a poor-me sob story, doesn’t it?”

“No! And I’m honored that you’re confiding in me.” Everything he said made her admire him even more.

“You just really impressed me with what you said over breakfast the last time I saw you, about how teaching kids depends on finding the right way to get through to them. That a student isn’t stupid simply because he doesn’t digest information the same way other pupils do. I wish more people had expressed that sentiment to me when I was younger.”