Christie Ridgway (7 page)

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.”

She huffed again. “Who cares when L.A. is chock-full of eligible bachelors?”

“The bachelor you spend most of your leisure hours with lives in the condo below yours and is gay.”

Her jaw dropped. “How—”

“Easy. The Secret Service’s Office of Protective Research keeps extensive files on anyone who threatens the security of the president or the country.”

A flush burned on her cheeks and her eyes sparked. “I have never threatened anyone or anything in my life!”

Finn lifted a hand. “Then, Bailey, so much for your claim of a bad-girl transformation.”

“I’ll show you a transformation.”

Then she did. She did it so quickly that he couldn’t leap away fast enough. One second she was glaring at him over the hedge and the next she’d grabbed him around the neck, yanked his head close, and sank her teeth into his bottom lip.

“That’s what you get,” she said, pulling back. “You wanted to take a bite out of me, so I took mine out of you.”

She continued to glower at him, her breasts heaving against a fuzzy white sweater. “Though a garden hose might have been a better weapon.”

“I’ll say,” Finn muttered, because he couldn’t let her have the last word.

Or the last kiss.

He grabbed her shoulders and hauled her against the low, narrow hedge. He pressed close to it too, not even noticing the rattle of leaves and the dig of branches on his way to her lips. Her body was rigid beneath his hands, but her mouth was hot. Soft and hot, and he almost wished for that threatened cold blast from the garden hose because he was teenage-horny again, his cock going hard to fight the denim of his jeans.

He pushed his tongue between her lips. She made a sound, but he didn’t care if it was a protest. She’d had her chance at punishment; this was his. The inside of her mouth was peppermint-sweet—as if she’d been sucking on a candy cane not long ago—and his eye closed at the intoxicating taste.

With her shoulders cupped by his palms and his tongue curling against the velvet of hers, time rewound.

He was twenty again, nineteen, sixteen. The age he’d been that fateful day when he’d looked at her and the dark rebel inside him had recognized the golden girl who could be the calm to his hormonal storm. He

’d cursed her, the world, fate, the moment he’d recognized it, but he’d been unable to take his feet off the path.

But it had never been so purely cerebral, he admitted, as he slanted his head, taking more of her mouth as he ran his hands over her sharp shoulder blades to the round globes of her ass. Not cerebral in the least. He’d been sixteen and he’d wanted sex too.

There were easier girls to get it from, he’d known that. Known them. It took time to persuade the good girls to put out, that was a given. It was going to take time to get Bailey to bed. But that hadn’t stopped him from still wanting her. From wanting, wanting, wanting her.

Now nearing thirty-one, Finn didn’t seem to have the patience of his teenage self. He found her waist and burrowed under the soft sweater to the sleek skin at the small of her back. Even that wasn’t enough, and as he tracked his lips from her mouth to her warm cheek, his fingertips tucked under the waistband of her jeans.

At the same time that he found her lobe and bit down, he shoved his hands lower to fill his palms with the naked, curved globes of her ass. Bless thong underwear.

She jerked, her skin goose-bumped against his hands. He gentled his lips on her ear and rubbed his nose against her soft hair. Her familiar perfume filled his head.

Like that, it was a dozen years ago again. Leaves rattled as he tried moving closer. Like then, always needing more of her sweetness and the fire he wanted to find beyond it.

“Finn…” Bailey whispered, her throaty voice shivering down his spine.

“What?” He pressed a kiss to the rim of her ear. Still aching like sixteen, still as mesmerized.

“Finn?”

“Mmm?” His mouth found the satiny skin beneath her jaw.

“Finn?”

He froze, his tongue against Bailey’s hot flesh. That wasn’t her voice calling his name.

It was part of his sixteen-year-old world, though.

And his thirty-year-old world too.

Gram.

He broke free of Bailey. Then of her spell.

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the hedge, and he wondered how he’d gotten so stupid.

Why had he let his mouth get him into trouble again? His lips were throbbing, the whole of him was aching for more kisses.

Such a damn dangerous ache.

At the same moment they turned from each other. The older dark rebel and the wiser golden girl beating hasty retreats from the traitorous, beguiling past.

On his end, cursing all the way. He could only hope it wasn’t as it had been all those years ago…already too late.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 5

In Italian legend, La Befana is an old woman who brings gifts to children on Epiphany Eve. It is said that the Wise Men visited her on the way to Bethlehem, but she was too busy cleaning house to accompany them when invited. Later, when she regretted the decision and set out to find them and the Baby Jesus, she could not. The story goes that she continues to wander, leaving gifts for the children she does come across.

From the master bedroom, Tracy heard her daughter leave the house. That must mean it was morning.

She turned over in bed, drawing her knees to her chest. The orange sweat pants she wore had a hole in the knee, and she covered it with her palm, hunching her shoulders inside one of Harry’s discarded T-shirts. If she remembered correctly, it advertised the basketball tournament his team had played in last spring. He’d come home after painting signs for some student function with long drips of blue paint on the front and banished the garment to the rag bin.

She’d rescued it in June, never realizing what comfort it might bring her come autumn.

Thanks to Dan.

At the thought of him, she bolted up. She’d call the SOB, she decided, temper flaring. Give him a piece of her mind. Better yet, she’d go find him at that sex-in-the-singles-complex that he now called home. His car would be easy enough to spot.

Her stomach clenched and heat shot up her spine to her neck. That’s just what she’d do!

But then she remembered his newly brilliant teeth, his glossy hair, the tan he must be working on at the golf course now that he wasn’t working at The Perfect Christmas. And she thought of the hole in her sweat pants, the paint on her shirt, the dull color of her hair and her complexion.

She fell back to the bed, despondence blanketing over the anger, and she burrowed under its safe, familiar weight too. Sleep beckoned again.

She could taste it, a sweet, syrupy lozenge on her tongue. So, so sweet. Tracy’s limbs sank like anchors into the mattress while her mind drifted out on the calm morning tide….

Bells were ringing.

Tracy woke at the noise, and without thinking stumbled from the bed to walk, zombielike, toward the front door. Her fingers found the knob, and the cold metal roused her to awareness. Who…?