Oh my God
. Arching against him, Mandy wrapped her arms around his neck and held on for dear life as those hands—big, powerful, long-fingered hands that somehow managed the trick of staying warm without gloves—worked their magic on her breasts, knuckles and thumbs teasing her nipples to exquisite awareness, a state that had nothing to do with the cold. Because even though the temperature must be dipping well below twenty, Mandy had never felt so hot, so wet, or so alive in all her years. And if the hard ridge of jeans-clad erection pressing into her was any indication, her “partner in crime” was feeling pretty lively, too.
Wrenching his mouth away, he pulled back to look at her. “Sorry, but I just had to do that.” Gaze holding hers, he hesitated. “Actually, I’m not really all that sorry.” He took another deep breath and admitted, “Actually, I’m not sorry at all.” The sheepish bad-boy look he sent her had her heart skipping beats and the wetness seeping through the crotch of her silk panties.
She ran her tongue over her bottom lip, sensitized from the contrast between cold air and hot kisses, and admitted, “I’m not sorry, either.” If she was sorry about anything, it was that they were stopping.
He lifted her chin on the edge of his hand. Thumb stroking the edge, he said, “Then come home with me. Along with making great coffee, I make amazing cinnamon rolls and a pretty decent spinach-and-feta omelet.”
Mandy stared up at him, his tousled hair backlit by ambient light, his chiseled features a mask of shadows, and realized she was more tempted to say yes than ever before in her life. She’d never before engaged in casual sex, let alone a one-night stand, but an encounter with a sexy stranger had been figuring into her fantasy life more and more of late. Josh didn’t exactly qualify as a stranger, but she’d only known him a couple of hours. Even so, in many ways she felt more connected to him than she did many of the friends she’d grown up with, which was crazy when she considered she didn’t even know his last name let alone why he’d decided to up and move from Boston to Baltimore. If she took him up on his invitation, she’d likely find out the answer to that question and so much more—what the hard body wrapped around hers looked like beneath his clothes; how and where he liked to be touched, tasted, sucked; what his favorite positions were and how he moved in bed…slow and steady or fast and hard or some combination of the two.
But tomorrow wasn’t just any day. It was Christmas. She tried to imagine waking up in a stranger’s bed on Christmas morning and then slinking home in the wee hours before her family stirred, sin oozing from her every pore, and somehow she just couldn’t. Yet standing before her was the hands-down best Christmas gift she’d ever gotten even if it—he—didn’t come wrapped in a bow.
She stepped back from his embrace, her every corpuscle quivering like the Jell-O cubes she’d starved herself on as a teenager. “I like you, Josh. I like you a lot. I like kissing you and well, I’m pretty sure I’d like doing, um…other things with you, too but…” In the wake of his steady-on gaze, her voice trailed off, small and weak and anything but sophisticated and self-assured.
The corners of his mouth flattened. “But?”
“Well, tomorrow is Christmas and my folks are…well, kind of traditional.” Talk about an understatement. She might as well say the Pope was
kind of
Catholic.
He shook his head, his hair mussed from the wind and her fingers. “You’re right. I was being selfish. Of course you’d have plans.” He looked sad suddenly, and she was reminded that in all likelihood he didn’t have anywhere to go.
Like Christmas tree lights, the idea, the solution, came to her in a flash as though someone had flipped on an invisible switch. Maybe she didn’t have to choose after all? Maybe she could have her holiday hunk
and
the holiday at the same time.
“Why don’t you come over to my folk’s? My mom has a big open house for family and friends and neighbors starting around two.” Subjecting him to her big, rowdy Polish-American family would be a gamble, but then again he’d as good as said he didn’t have anyone to be with or anywhere to go. “No pressure,” she added quickly, not wanting to scare him off. “I’ll introduce you as a friend I met on the job. I just don’t think anyone should be alone on Christmas.”
He stroked the side of her face, the tenderness of the gesture as much a turn-on as his passionate kisses. “You’re sweet to include me in your plans, and I really appreciate the invitation…”
When he left the sentence unfinished, it was Mandy’s turn to interject. “But?”
“The thing is I’m not…I’m not so good at parties.”
That took her aback. “But you’re a bartender.”
He hesitated, and then shrugged. “Mostly I get bookings through an event planning service like the one tonight. I have a regular gig a couple nights a week at a bar in Canton but even then most of the time bar patrons want to tell you all about themselves, not the other way around.”
“So you’re saying you’re shy?” Prone to shyness herself, she couldn’t entirely strip the skepticism from her voice.
He must have picked up on it because for the first time since initiating that sexy kiss, he shifted away. “Uh, I guess you could say that. But give me your number, and I’ll call you.”
I’ll call you
—otherwise known as Famous Last Words. How many times in her adult life had a guy said “I’ll call you,” only never to be heard from again? Saying “I’ll call you” was a lot like telling a retail clerk you’d “have to think about it” so you could get the hell out of the store before you were cornered into buying the vintage lava lamp or butt ugly couch. Basically, “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.”
To save face, she decided to play along. “Sure, that’d be great.” Fingers clumsy from the cold, she took out one of her department issue business cards and handed it to him.
He slipped the card into his back jeans pocket, and for the first time she noticed the pager he wore at his waist. That was an odd accoutrement for a bartender. Before she could ask him about it, he looked back at her, serious expression catching at her heart.
“Hey you, if I say I’m going to call, it means I’m going to call, okay?” He laid a broad palm on either side of her face and gently turned her to look at him. “Look, Mandy, I like you. I like you a lot, and what’s more, I’d like to put in the time to get to know you better. Is that so hard to believe?”
It was and yet how she wanted to believe—in him, in herself, and more than anything, in magic moments that led to fairy-tale endings.
As if in answer, a church bell chimed, striking out the hour. Twelve o’clock. No longer Christmas Eve but Christmas Day.
Josh smiled. “Merry Christmas, Mandy.”
She smiled back. “Merry Christmas, Josh.” And it was a merry Christmas, not to mention the hottest, sexiest holiday she’d ever had.
He leaned in to kiss her again. This time when their mouths met it was definitely good-bye or at least goodnight, a feather-light caress that had her heart melting to the gooey consistency of a chocolate chip cookie still warm from the oven.
Something cold and wet struck her nose. Josh must have felt it too because they stopped kissing at the same time to look up. Above them, fat, feathery snowflakes fell fast and furious. Snow on Christmas Day. If that wasn’t a positive sign, what was?
She turned back to Josh. His shoulders wore a sprinkling of pristine white powder that made her think of the glitter that her mom had once glued to the wings of her angel’s costume for the fourth grade Christmas pageant. Back then she’d believed in angels and miracles and the special magic of Christmas snow. Could it be time to believe again?
Speaking her thoughts aloud, she said, “A white Christmas, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
He shook his head, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “Oh, it gets better, Mandy. It gets lots better. I have a hunch this New Year is going to be the start of something wonderful, a fresh start in more ways than one.” He kissed the tip of her nose before stepping back. “I’ll call you after the holiday. In the meantime, have a good one—and drive safely.”
She hesitated, not sure of how much to say, of how much to hope. “Okay, you too,” she said and then turned to open the car door.
Hands shoved into his pockets, he waited until she was safely inside the car with the engine started before turning to go, one hand raised in a wave. Watching him fade to black, his tight Bon Jovi butt filling out the seat of those jeans in just the right way, his booted feet leaving impressively large prints in the powdering of snow, she vented a sigh.
It might be a record cold night, but there’s no need to switch on the heater, that’s for sure.
Backing out of the space, she caught a glimpse of a smile, hers, in the rearview mirror and shook her head. Maybe her luck wasn’t changing for the better; maybe it already had.
But for first time in a long while, maybe forever, feel like the best is yet to come. Embracing power of positive thinking, am keeping cell phone close at hand so as to be ready when, not if but when, He calls.
Please, dear God, let him call. Let him call soon…
Still, Grady was the CFO. Josh had agreed to check out a few things behind the scenes, namely the accounts on which Tony served as project manager. Once he started digging, it wasn’t long before he hit pay dirt—literally. No run-of-the-mill embezzler, Tony was a high-level Mafia plant. He’d used his marriage to a Thornton as his entrée into the firm and had been feathering his nest—his crime family’s nest—by selling WiFi networks to corporate clients at triple the cost, and then funneling the illegal profits back to the mob. The depth of the deception still blew Josh away. Not sure where to turn, he’d contacted the FBI’s Boston field office. The feds had lost no time in faking Josh’s death, assigning him a new identity as Josh Thorner, and relocating him to Baltimore. Three days later, Grady had turned up as a floater on the Charles River.
As far as the public was concerned, Joshua Sedgewick Thornton the Third had drowned in a tragic sailing accident that summer. At first Josh had objected to the ruse until his FBI contact, Special Agent Walker had pointed out that playing dead was his best guarantee of staying alive.
Looking back over the past six months, he admitted that in all likelihood Walker had been right. And though Baltimore wouldn’t have been his top pick for a relocation locale, once you went underground, geography pretty much lost its meaning.
As for bartending, he’d been skeptical at first of the Bureau’s choice of temporary occupation, but the service industry had proved to be the perfect cover. Bar patrons might share every detail of their lives, no matter how embarrassing or minute, but they rarely thought to ask questions about yours. Beyond that, he couldn’t help appreciating the honest, hands-on nature of the work. In a bar, a satisfied customer was just that—no if, ands or buts. If someone didn’t like the product, they told you so to your face, and you had the chance to make things right then and there—no corporate backstabbing or political infighting to navigate. At the end of the day, or rather, night, you left work behind and went home with a head uncluttered by spreadsheets or quarterly productivity reports. If it weren’t for the estrangement from his family and friends, and the guilt he felt about letting them believe he was dead, he would be savoring his sabbatical from the dog-eat-dog world of corporate America.
Other than his FBI contacts, the only person who knew he was alive was his former fiancée, Tiffany, and given the unsavory circumstances surrounding the disclosure, his secret should certainly be safe with her. On his way to rendezvous with the two agents assigned to protect him, he hadn’t been able to resist stopping off at the Beacon Hill town house they shared to let her know he was okay. He’d entered through a rear door, the sounds of a woman’s whimpering drifting down the back stairs. Thinking she must have heard the bogus bad news already, he took the stairs two at a time and rushed into the bedroom—and found her sprawled atop the sheets, the curly brown head of the lawn care kid wedged between her splayed thighs.
Sickened, he’d backed out of the room before the kid had registered his presence. An hour later, he was hunkered down in the back seat of a car with two FBI agents driving south toward Maryland. Even after six months, the gut-dropping feeling of walking into that room never entirely left him, replaying in his head like a bad TV rerun and putting him squarely off women—until tonight.
Mandy Delinski was someone very special. He’d felt that from the moment he’d locked eyes with her across the crowded museum event, and their coffee date had only enhanced the attraction. Gorgeous, curvy ladies with passions for old movies, Art Deco and Death by Chocolate ice cream didn’t just walk into a guy’s life every day of the week. Beyond her obvious physical attributes and their shared interests, there was something about her that tugged at him, a crazy dead-on chemistry he’d never felt before in his thirty-two years of planetary living. Her full figure molded to his body like a custom-made glove and man-oh-man, could the woman kiss. He knew he must be wearing the lion’s share of the fiery red lipstick that had accentuated her luscious mouth and rather than rush to wipe it off, he couldn’t stop grinning—or fantasizing about where those red-hot kisses could lead, namely to a thorough, head-to-toe exploration of every amazing inch of her.
So far the only thing about her he wasn’t head-over-heels crazy about was her job. With her cop’s training, she’d been all too quick to pick up on the mismatch between his supposed shyness and his bartending occupation. When, not if, he saw her again, he’d have to be more careful, at least until he testified. The trial was scheduled for January second and afterward he would have his life back. It was too soon to know how a certain lovely lady cop from Baltimore might fit into his future, but he didn’t intend to let her slip away without first exploring the possibilities.
Coming up on his car, a beat-up Buick he’d named Betsy because it was the automotive equivalent of a swayback mule, a vehicle so antiquated even the lowliest carjacker could be counted on to pass it by, he slipped the key into the door lock. Typically it took at least three failed tries before the engine would start, and with the extreme cold temperature, it would more likely take four. Yanking open the rusted door, he admitted that what he’d done tonight went against the three cardinal rules Walker and his colleague, McKinney, spoke of as The Holy Trinity of witness protection. “Don’t give out personal information, no matter how innocuous, to anyone you meet—and that includes admitting you’re a federally protected witness. Don’t make contact with family or friends or coworkers back home under any circumstances—and that includes your mother calling for you on her deathbed or your childhood dog getting run over by a truck. And above all, don’t get personally involved.”
He’d settled onto the cracked leather seat and reached up to adjust the rearview mirror to check out his lipstick status when he felt something cold and hard jam into the back of his head.
“Well, well, Thornton, what’s a nice Boston Brahmin like you doing in a crap blue-collar town like this?”
The gravelly voice coming from his back seat sent Josh’s heart dropping to Betsy’s rusted floorboards. He looked into the rearview mirror and glimpsed a man’s partial profile, the skin pitted with acne scars. The slicked-back dark hair, deep-set eyes, and craggy features, including an obviously broken nose, fit the Hollywood stereotype of a Mafia hit man.
Futile as it was, he found himself saying, “Whoever you are, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
A belly laugh erupted from the vicinity of the back seat. “Oh, I don’t think so. Your hair may be longer and you’re definitely dressing down these days, but it’s you, no doubt about it. Joshua Thornton the Third.”
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…
“What do you want with me?”
His life, of course, but the longer Josh kept him talking, the longer he had to go on breathing. And life, every freezing, fearful second of it, had never felt more precious. Ordinarily he might have held on to the hope that someone, anyone, might happen by. But it was after midnight on Christmas and the normally bustling downtown bar district was deserted. Unlike George Bailey in his favorite Christmas movie,
It’s a Wonderful Life,
there would be no guardian angel sent down to save Josh in the nick of time. This was real life, not reel life.
And the reality was he was about to die.
The hit man leaned in, the warmth of his exhaled breath striking the back of Josh’s neck, an eerie contrast to the icy pistol butt prodding his skull. “Put the key in the ignition and drive.”
“Why should I? Either way, I’m a dead man.”
“True, but if I do you here, I’ll have to pay a call on your cop girlfriend afterward. By the way, nice lipstick, Romeo.” A beefy hand adorned with several chunky gold rings reached around, slapping his cheek.
Face stinging, Josh froze. He was going to die, that was a given, but how could he take Mandy down with him? He’d made choices along the way, including ignoring Walker’s third rule and asking her out, but she was an innocent bystander. Now that he’d gotten her caught up in the web of his fucked up life, he owed it to her to try and save her.
The thug knocked the pistol into his head again, hard enough this time that he forced back a groan. “Clock’s ticking. It’s your call, rich kid. What’s it going to be?”
Beneath his leather jacket, Josh felt the sweat running down his ribs. Without answering, he stuck the key in the ignition and turned it clockwise.
Just his luck, old Betsy fired to life on the very first try.