Christine Rimmer - Scrooge and the Single Girl

Will went on scowling. Good gravy. How could she ever have imagined she might get something going with him?

And okay, she’d admit it. At one time—up until just a couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact—she’d cherished the doomed hope that she and Will might get it together.

They had seemed to have a lot in common. Both from the same hometown, which was New Venice, Nevada, in the Comstock Valley, about twenty miles away from this dreary old house, down a number of twisting, turning mountain roads. They had both settled, at least for now, in Sacramento. And then there was the most obvious connection: his two brothers had married her two best friends.

And also, well, she might as well admit it. She’d been blinded for a while there by the kinds of minor details that have made women fools for certain men since the dawn of time. Blinded by things like his good looks and his social veneer—okay, it was hard to believe, looking at him now, but Will Bravo could be a major charmer when he chose to be. And along with the charm, he had that slightly dangerous rep as one of those yummy bad Bravo boys. Oh, and she mustn’t forget his impressive professional credentials: Will was an up-and-coming attorney on the Sacramento scene. For a while there, she’d dared to imagine that just maybe Will Bravo could turn out to be the man of her dreams.

But not anymore. Her eyes were wide open now. She saw him for what he really was: sour, sad and angry. Lost and alone—and determined to stay that way.

So let him. Tomorrow, when the storm was over, she’d pack up her Toyota, put Missy in her carrier and make tracks for home.

“Jillian,” he said in a low, warning tone.

She set down her glass and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “All right. It was like this. I needed an isolated cabin for a holiday piece I’m working on.”

He was staring at her, a sneering curl to his mouth. She knew what he thought of her. That she was shallow, one-dimensional, flighty in the extreme.

Far be it from her to disappoint him. “Originally, of course, I imagined a place with cable and central heat and a nice view of Lake Tahoe. One with a fully equipped kitchen and chef-quality appliances.” She waved her fork airily. “Unfortunately, it’s just been too crazy lately. One project after another, if you know what I mean. By the time I got around to making the arrangements, options were limited. More than limited. I couldn’t find a place.”

“So you called my mother.”

“No. First, I called Celia.”

He blinked. Then he gave out grudgingly, “Makes sense.”

And it did. Celia Tuttle, who was now Celia Bravo, had spent most of her working life as a personal assistant, first to a television talk-show host and then to the man who was now her husband, Will’s brother, Aaron. It was part of Celia’s job to know how to find just about anything anyone might need on very short notice.

“Celia reminded me about this house,” Jilly told him.

“And suggested that you give Caitlin a call.” He was getting the whole thing into perspective now, she could see it in his face. He was accepting the fact that she had been tricked every bit as much as he had.

Caitlin Bravo was a hopeless matchmaker when it came to her sons. And Aaron and Cade were all taken care of now. Only Will had yet to find a wife.

The son in question nodded wearily. “Okay. You called Caitlin. She offered you this place.”

Jilly nodded. “Your mother was smart. She played it just right. She told me all about how primitive the setup would be, reminded me of all the old stories about your grandmother.” The house had once belonged to Caitlin’s mother, Mavis McCormack, known to everyone in Will and Jilly’s hometown as Mad Mavis. People whispered that Mad Mavis’s ghost still haunted the old house. “But somehow,” Jilly added, “your mother forgot to mention that you would be up here, too. Isn’t that surprising?”

“Not in the least.” Will stared at the woman across the table from him. She’d taken off her big coat and her funny hat, shoved up the sleeves of her red-and-green turtleneck and dug right into the food he’d offered her. She had wild brown hair with gold streaks in it and sparkly gray-blue eyes under thick, straight, almost-black eyebrows—eyebrows so heavy they should have bordered on ridiculous. Yet somehow, they didn’t. Somehow, they looked just right on her.

Attractive? All right, he’d admit it. She was a good-looking woman. If you liked them slightly manic and obsessively upbeat. She had her own business—Image by Jillian, it was called. She counseled fast-track execs and other professional types on how to dress for success—business casual, with flair. She also wrote an advice column, Ask Jillian. The column had started out as a weekly, but recently it had gone to Monday through Friday in the Sacramento Press-Telegram.

Yeah, he knew all about Jilly Diamond. His mother had made sure of that.

“I’m here every year,” he reiterated grimly. “And Caitlin knows it.” He was thinking that he wouldn’t mind strangling Caitlin as soon as he could get his hands on her. He was thinking that she deserved strangling. After all, he’d made it crystal clear to her that Jillian Diamond was not the woman for him.

The woman who wasn’t for him said, “Well, Caitlin didn’t tell me you’d be here, or I promise you, I wouldn’t have come.”

At first, he’d thought otherwise. The last time he’d seen her, at that party of Jane and Cade’s a couple of weeks ago, he could have sworn she was interested. It hadn’t been anything obvious. Just the feeling that if he looked twice, she would, too.

He didn’t have that feeling anymore. Now, she looked no happier to be stuck with him than he was to have found her at his door.

And that was absolutely fine with him.

He heard a strange, soft rumbling sound and saw something furry in his side vision. Her cat. It had emerged from the bathroom and was sitting beside his chair, looking up at him, eyelids lowered lazily, an expression of near-ecstasy on its spotted face, its orange, black and white tail wrapped around its front paws. The rumbling sound, he realized, was coming from the cat. The damned animal was purring so loudly, he could hear it over the howling of the wind outside.

Jillian said, “Okay, Will. Now you tell me. What are you doing up here all alone for the holidays?”

He turned from the scary look of adoration in the cat’s amber eyes and gave it to her straight. “I hate the holidays. I want nothing to do with them. I accept the fact that there’s no way I can avoid this damn jolly season altogether. But I give it my best shot. I decorate nothing. I don’t send a single Christmas card. I shop for no one. And I keep my calendar clear from the twenty-second on. I come up here to my eccentric dead grandmother’s isolated house. I remain here until January second, without television or an Internet connection, with only a transistor radio to keep up with the weather reports and my mobile phone in case of emergencies.” He indicated the Dostoevsky at his elbow. “I catch up on my reading. And I do my level best to tell myself that Christmas doesn’t even exist.”

She stared at him, one of those too-thick eyebrows lifting. He waited for her to ask the next logical question, which was “Why?” When she did, he would tell her to mind her own damn business.

But she didn’t ask. She only said, softly, “Hey. Whatever launches your dinghy.”

They did the dishes together, not speaking. She washed and he dried.

As he hooked the dishtowel on the nail above the sink, he said, “There’s a bedroom down here, off the living area. I’m in there. You get the upstairs all to yourself.” He gestured at the door beside the one that led to the bathroom.