Christie Ridgway - Must Love Mistletoe

When she’d thought about finding him, she’d never thought about what she would say once she did.

Comfort, she told herself. She was here to offer sympathy, provide support, be his friend.

Somehow make the loss easier for him.

Flames glinted against the flask again as he brought it to his mouth for another swallow. “Go away.”

She jerked at the sudden sound of his hard voice, and flashed back to poor Desirée and her reaction to Troy’s rejection. But it wasn’t the same at all, she thought. The sexual, romantic part of her relationship with Finn wasn’t unrequited, it was O-V-E-R.

So she dug her butt into the shifting sand and refused to be scared away.

Finn said nothing more. Through the flames she saw him reach out to the pile of fuel and grab another piece. He tossed the length of wood into the blaze. It had twigs and leaves attached, and as they caught, they crackled with the sound of candy wrappers, then smoked like a wizard’s spell.

But not the kind of alchemy that worked magic. Finn remained silent. She didn’t know what to say herself.

Maybe companionship was enough.

“Go home, Bailey.”

He thought he didn’t even want companionship, then. But she was stubborn too. “I’m fine. The fire is keeping me warm.”

More minutes of brooding silence followed. He drank. She waited. Then he picked up another length of wood and fed it to the leaping flames. Took another swallow. Added more wood to the fire.

Finally Bailey couldn’t take the tension. “She was a wonderful woman,” she offered. “I’m sorry I didn’t know she was so ill.”

He hesitated, flask in his right hand, wood in the other. Then his left arm dropped, the piece of fuel slamming into the fire.

Sparks exploded, and Bailey flinched, but kept on talking anyway. “You didn’t say a word about that, Finn.” It was the first thing that had struck her when Trin told her the news. “You insisted she was going to get well. Didn’t you know-”

“I know what the doctors said.” He hurled a second piece of wood into the blaze. Embers sprang high, as if trying to escape.

“Then why-”

“Because I didn’t want to think about it, all right?” He swigged from the flask, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Or believe it?”

Another piece of wood crashed into the fire. Silver turned red as he brought the drink to his lips again.

She dug her fingers into the sand, though the unstable stuff offered nothing solid to hang on to. “It’s no crime to grieve, Finn. Grief is normal, natural-”

“Oh, I’m done with grief.” His voice was more caustic than the acrid smell of smoke in the air. “I’ve been living with it grinding my guts into sausage meat since I woke up in the hospital and found out that Ayesha was dead eleven months ago.”

He tilted his head back and sipped again from the flask. “There’s nothing left inside of me for it to chew on.”

The wind off the ocean fluttered the ends of Bailey’s hair. “Then you don’t need to be out here all alone. Let’s go back to my house…or to the bar. Tanner’s there.”

“I can’t deal with Tanner’s guilt tonight too.”

Oh, Finn. “Your grandmother wouldn’t want you to feel guilty. You know that. You know you didn’t have the power to stop what happened to her.”

“But then there’s Ayesha.” He tossed another piece of wood into the crackling blaze even as he took another drink. “You can’t say I didn’t fail her.”

Confused, Bailey shook her head. “What could you have done about that either?”

“I was her supervisor.” He stared at his reflection in the surface of the flask. “I should have seen something. Sensed something.”

She lifted her hand, sand sifting between her fingers. “You couldn’t have known about that assassin. You can’t read some murderer’s mind who shows up out of nowhere.”

“Oh, baby, you’ve got it all wrong.” He shifted his gaze from the booze to spear a long, thin stick into the middle of the blaze and watch it light up.

It looked like an accusing finger, she thought, and Finn had pointed it toward himself.

“You’re right that I couldn’t know the assassin was going to pick that target, that day, that time,” he continued. “But I knew Ayesha. And I should have suspected what she might do.”

“Her job.” Bailey heard the sharp edge in her voice. “You said she did her job.”

“Yeah.” The stick was burning now like a tongue of flame. “But the problem is, see, I don’t know that her actions were dictated by the mission. There were other ways for it to play out that day which didn’t involve her standing up for that bullet. I wonder…was she thinking of me? Was she trying to impress me? Save me? I don’t know. But I should have seen, I should have sensed in those days and weeks before, that she wasn’t operating in pure agent mode. I should have worried about how far she would go for love.”

The smoke was stinging Bailey’s eyes. Blinking them away, she had to clear her throat too. “How could you look into someone else’s heart?”

“Easy.” His laugh sounded short and rough, and then he took a long draw from the flask. “I only had to look as far as my own. I was the same for you, Bailey, once upon a time. I would have done anything for you-hell, I did. I cleaned up my act, went to college, joined the Secret Service as my way of impressing you. A bullet? I would have taken that too.”

“I…I don’t know what to say.” She didn’t want to think about all she’d lost by running away.

“Good-bye will work.” He was staring down at the booze again. “Oh, that’s right, you tend to duck those.”

It stung, but this time she wasn’t leaving, even though the smoke was making her chest feel tight now too. “That’s not fair. I came here tonight, didn’t I? I came to talk to you about how you feel. I came here to…to be your friend.”

There was a charged moment of silence. Then he shot to his feet. Bailey twitched at his sudden movement, staring at him and how the light of the flames on his jeans and black sweatshirt made it appear as if he’d caught fire himself.

“My friend?” he repeated, his tone incredulous as he stared at her through the leaping blaze. “You call yourself my friend? You want to know how I feel?”

“Well, I…yeah.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a dark sound that made her think of pirates again. Or devils. “Be careful what you wish for, baby.”

Though it was clear that the alcohol, or his emotions, probably both, had caught up with him, Bailey needed to see this through. “I can take it.”

“Then how about this.” He snagged another piece of thick wood and threw it into the blaze. More sparks exploded, flying upward. “I feel torn to pieces over Ayesha. I feel pissed off that I lost my eye and my ability to do the job I love.”

More fuel was dumped on the fire, and pieces of ash swirled around him. “I hate that I couldn’t stop a disease that was leaching the life from Gram.”

Turning, he dropped his flask to the sand, then bent at the waist to pull something from the hodgepodge of wood beside him. When he straightened again, she could see it was a full-sized Christmas tree-but an old one, its needles dried to a rusty brown. “I’m damn depressed that it’s the holidays and I can’t think of a single thing worth celebrating.” With one strong movement, he lifted the tree over the concrete ring and jammed its trunk into the sand and into the center of the leaping fire.

As the needles burst into flame, crackling and popping, their corner of the beach turned bright as day. The heat forced Bailey to scoot back.

But not far enough to miss Finn’s next words, harsher and more biting than all the others. “And at the top of my list, I feel like letting you know you’re not my friend. Friends are people I trust. And you just don’t qualify.”

She was on her feet, backing away from the burn, but he still seared her.

“You, Bailey, you are nothing to me.”

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 23

Guidelines from a department store Santa Claus training school include admonishing Santa not to leave his chair even if a child has an “accident” and to always keep gloves and beard scrupulously clean. They further advise that it never looks quite right for Santa to flirt with the elves.

Finn saw in another dawn. Three days ago it had been in Bailey’s bed, yesterday on the beach, today he sat on the wicker chair in the corner of Gram’s small porch. With his boots propped on the railing, he sipped another of the endless cups of coffee he’d been mainlining since dumping the last of his flask into the sand after running Bailey off.

Bingeing on booze no longer appealed-and he hoped was no longer necessary.

He took another swallow from his mug and paged through Desirée’s-aka the Mad Gift Giver’s-latest present. The poor little rich girl continued to come up with outrageous ways to assuage her guilt in the whole assassination debacle and to thank him for saving her father’s life-even though that father had little use and even less time for her.

Sort of like someone else he knew.

But he pushed that thought from his mind and turned another page, his gaze widening at the latest position detailed in the Kama Sutra pop-up book that had been left on the doorstep. A note in Desirée’s own handwriting guaranteed it was a one-of-a-kind faithful rendering of the ancient text on sexual behavior. “May it inspire you to great lengths for love,” she’d written in that perfect, boarding school handwriting of hers. He wasn’t sure she even realized the double-entendre.

And love wasn’t something he wanted to be thinking about either.