Christie Ridgway - Must Love Mistletoe

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…?

Through the sidelights, covered by gathered white sheer curtains, was the outline of a man. Short hair. Compact build.

Her heart jerked high, lodging in her throat. Dan. He’d come back to her.

When they’d first met, she’d hated men. Her divorce had blackened the edges of her heart forever, she’d thought, cauterizing it against any future mistakes. Then a friend of a friend introduced her to this lazy-smiling, easy-in-his-own-skin man at a party. She’d looked at him with instant suspicion, staring at the white wine he offered as if it were arsenic. But he’d worn her down, then won her over.

Twenty years later, he’d left her.

For that, she might have reverted to loathing all men again. Except when you had a son, she’d discovered, you lost your ability for nonspecific XY-chromosome hatred. So instead she just loathed Dan.

No! Her fingers tightened on the doorknob. She didn’t loathe him. She didn’t care that much. She wouldn’t. Ever. Twenty years ago, she’d taken a second leap of trust only to fall flat on her face again, but Dan couldn’t know that any part of her hurt.

Every part of her hurt.

Still, she steadied her breath, tightened down the shell of her pride, then pulled open the door to face him.

It wasn’t Dan.

The young man who it was, stared at her under yanked-high brows. “Uh…Mrs. Willis?”

Tracy swallowed the bitter pill of disappointment and put what little energy she had left into a smile. “Jeff.” Jeff Gable, a high school classmate of her son, Harry. “It’s good to see you.”

Jeff shoved his hands in his pockets. “Is Harry home?” His glance danced away, as if it embarrassed him to look at her.

Tracy curled her bare toes against the foyer carpet, remembering her misshapen sweat pants and baggy T. Her hand went up to smooth her rumpled hair. “No. He won’t be home from college until a few days before Christmas.”

“Oh.” Jeff shuffled back, as if to keep his distance from her. “I’m here for the month of December.”