’Tis the Season

by Judith Arnold

  CHAPTER TEN

  JENNIFER PEEKED around Evan’s partially open office door and sent him a smile that was uncharacteristically kittenish. “Evan? Have you got a minute?”

  No, he didn’t have a minute. The Friday after Thanksgiving was the biggest retail shopping day in the United States. His phone hadn’t stopped ringing since he’d arrived at the office—despite Heather’s filtering all the calls and forwarding him only the most imperative ones. Right now, he was on the line with the manager of his Hartford store, he had a supplier from Springfield on hold and he was trying to stave off pandemonium in the Providence store, where a shipment of graphite tennis rackets that was supposed to have been delivered two hours ago was still unaccounted for.

  He truly had no time for Jennifer. He also had no time for distracting thoughts of Filomena, but he’d spent far too much of his morning thinking about her. If he could burn so much mental energy on her, he supposed he could spare Jennifer the minute she was asking for.

  He beckoned her inside, then resumed his phone conversation. “All right, if you can’t move all the ice skates today, you’ll sell them tomorrow. Just make sure you don’t wind up with only size fourteens and size twos. Call the distributor directly if you’ve got to. Tomorrow’s sales are going to be as important as today’s. Okay? Bye.” He clicked to the other line, told the supplier from Springfield to get the damned rackets down to Providence or he’d never do business with him again, slammed down the phone and lifted his weary eyes to Jennifer.

  She was still smiling. Something had to be wrong. “I hope you’re not going to badger me about the Pep Insoles,” he warned her. “Because if you are, I swear I’ll fire you.”

  She shook her head and moved a few steps closer to his desk. “I was just wondering if you’d mind terribly if I accompanied Tank Moody to the Bridgeport store next week.”

  “You mean, you want to go instead of me?”

  “We haven’t had a chance to talk about it,” she said, shifting her weight from one high-heeled foot to the other, her hips shimmying within the confines of her conservative blue wool suit. “But things went very well with him on Tuesday. I thought, since he and I seem to have developed a certain rapport, we might as well not tamper with a good thing.”

  “You liked his limo, huh?” Evan teased.

  To his surprise, Jennifer blushed. “All I’m saying is, we worked well together.”

  They worked well together? It wasn’t as if they’d been on a mission to parachute behind enemy lines and liberate a double agent being held captive by terrorists. All they’d done was travel to a store, where she’d made Tank comfortable while he’d chatted and flirted with customers. Evan knew exactly what the task had entailed, since he’d done duty as Tank’s escort the week before.

  More than the high color in Jennifer’s cheeks tweaked Evan’s curiosity. He noticed a glimmer in her eyes, bright and giddy. She shifted her weight again, as if standing still was impossible for her.

  He recognized that restlessness, that oddly frenzied light in her eyes. He’d seen it before—with Debbie. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the hots for Tank,” he groaned.

  “I don’t,” she said fiercely.

  “Because if you run off with him—” his voice grew gruff, the words rubbing over scar tissue “—forget about getting fired. I’ll kill you both,” he said, tempering his words with a weak grin.

  “Why would I run off with him? I feel nothing for him but rapport.”

  “That’s a terrific euphemism, Jen.”

  “He isn’t married, is he?”

  “You’d better ask him before this ‘rapport’ goes any further.”

  “I will, when we go down to Bridgeport.” She paused, assessing Evan. “So, it’s all right with you if I accompany him, then?”

  “As long as you don’t do anything stupid,” he warned. She wasn’t his wife, after all. She was just his vice president. His conscience, his nag, his nemesis. His right hand.

  “Thanks.” She practically skipped back to the door. “You and I can talk about Pep Insoles after the new year, all right?”

  A silver lining to this new storm cloud, he thought acerbically as she left, closing the door behind her. His phone was ringing, but he ignored it as he tried to assimilate the new situation she’d just presented him with.

  Jennifer and Tank. The thin, poised, brilliant executive and the huge, affable football star. The Waspy white woman and the African-American hunk. The Wharton Business School graduate and the Heisman Trophy shortlister from the University of Nebraska.

  Evan shuddered. Not that he had anything against Tank, or Jennifer, or a romance between the two. It just kicked up some dust, that was all. It stirred up bad memories.

  “Evan?” His door swung open and Heather filled the doorway, glaring at him. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  “I didn’t feel like it,” he grunted. “Who was it?”

  “Marty in New Haven. He’s got extra skates he can send up to Hartford if you want him to.”

  “Great. Call him back and tell him to work it out directly with Frank. They don’t need me approving every little inventory swap.”

  Heather pursed her lips. “Are you okay?”

  “Never been better,” he lied, then flipped open one of several folders on his desk and pretended to be engrossed in its contents.

  Lips still pursed, Heather pivoted and closed the door, leaving him in solitude.

  He sank back in his chair and closed his eyes. The hell with Jennifer and Tank. They were both adults. They could take care of themselves. They could break each other’s hearts if they cared to. As long as they couldn’t break his, he’d be fine.

  His thoughts veered to Filomena. Again.

  Unlike Tank and Jennifer, Evan and Filomena didn’t have to worry about potential heartbreak. His heart wasn’t involved. Friendship was the only thing going for them. Friendship and a job. Right?

  Wrong.

  She had insisted on staying with Gracie and Billy for the day, since the day after Thanksgiving was a school holiday for them. But she’d refused to accept any compensation from Evan for the day’s baby-sitting. She’d told him she would take them to a movie—no, she’d assured him, she wouldn’t mind sitting through some nauseatingly cute kid-flick. Billy could invite his friend Scott to join them, if he wanted. And of course, if Billy brought Scott, Gracie could bring a friend, too.

  Such generosity went beyond mere friendship. And her refusal to let him pay her implied that it went way beyond her job.

  He recalled the packages of leftovers she’d sent him and the kids home with last night, arguing that they had to haul off some of the food because it would spoil before she’d be able to eat it all. He recalled standing next to her at her kitchen sink last night, drying the dishes she washed, toweling off her good silver and seeing it gleam in the overhead light. He recalled what she’d told him about the death of her parents and the botched finances her mother had left behind.

  He thought about her having to sell her old family home, and about her scholarly life back in New York City. She had nothing to keep her in town anymore, no reason to stay. Her life was somewhere else.

  He should have been focusing on the skate shortage and the delayed shipment of tennis rackets. He should have been worrying about his trusted VP’s brain suffering a meltdown over a football star. But all he could think about was Filomena’s imminent departure from Arlington, and the loss he would feel once she was gone.

  For the first time since Debbie had walked out on him, he wanted a woman to stay.

  It was crazy. They weren’t madly in love. That one kiss had barely gotten started before she’d brought it to a halt. Passion didn’t burn like a wildfire between them. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

  He’d like to get his hands on her, sure. He’d like to peel off all those layers of apparel she wrapped herself in. He’d like to kiss her deeply, use his tongue, his fingers, his…well,
everything. He wanted to see how a woman like Filomena would look naked, climaxing. Would she moan or cry out, or just gasp? Would she clutch his shoulders, close her eyes, wrap her legs around him and whisper his name?

  And what kind of idiot was he, torturing himself with images like that? It wasn’t going to happen. She’d made that very clear.

  He shook his head and forced himself to stare at the budget records in the folder that lay open on his desk. He had work to do—and it was thanks to Filomena that he’d be able to do it without juggling child-care arrangements.

  His phone rang again. Forget about her, he ordered himself, but even as he reached for the receiver and punched the button to connect him with his caller, he knew he wasn’t going to put Filomena out of his mind.

  He couldn’t.

  BY THE TIME he got home, he felt wrung out from the demands the day had placed on him. His earlobe ached from having the phone jammed against it for so much of the day. His head throbbed. His thumb hurt from his having slammed it in a desk drawer while he’d been juggling three calls simultaneously.

  His house was empty and dark, and that made him feel even worse.

  Only for a minute. Then he realized that if Filomena and the kids weren’t at his house, they were probably at hers. Even though he wanted nothing more than to stagger into his den and collapse on the couch, he could handle driving to her house. His reward would be to see her and his kids together.

  Thinking that way was trouble. As dangerous as it was to view Filomena as a woman he wanted to make love with, it was even riskier to think of her as someone he wanted his children to bond with.

  But he’d been playing it safe ever since Debbie had left. Maybe he’d been playing it safe even before Debbie had left, establishing himself at Champion Sports, assuming the reins, buying a nice house and settling down to raise a family, when all she’d wanted was glamour and thrills.

  As he backed out of his driveway and pointed his car in the direction of Filomena’s house, he shoved thoughts of Debbie out of his mind. They were replaced by thoughts of the Daddy School class he’d taken. The teacher had discussed the importance of listening to your kids, really listening. It occurred to Evan that it was just as important for him to listen to himself.

  He listened, really listened.

  What he heard—what he’d been hearing since Thanksgiving, since before Thanksgiving, in fact—what he’d been hearing in a faint whisper ever since the first time he’d seen Filomena, was that he wanted her in his life. He didn’t want her to go. Even though that was her plan, even though she intended to sell her house and resume her old life with the new year…

  He didn’t want her to go. His heart was shouting it at him, and he was listening.

  Flurries swirled like talcum powder through the sky as he turned onto Poplar Ridge Road. He cruised along the dark, winding lane, watching for the stone columns that marked her driveway. He felt a surprising surge of energy as he steered onto the gravel path, his senses honed, his posture aggressive and his vision sharp.

  He didn’t want her to go.

  The hell with friendship and a job, he thought. He’d struck out plenty of times during his years playing baseball, but if you were going to strike out, it was always better to go down swinging. And he was going to swing for the stands, for the sky, for the moon.

  Her windows were filled with welcoming light as he steered around the circle at the head of the driveway. He got out of his car, turned the collar of his blazer up after a few snowflakes nipped at his neck, and climbed the front steps. He rang the bell, and when the door swung open and he saw Filomena standing on the other side, her hair long and loose past her shoulders, her eyes luminous, her lips widening in a smile, he felt a gust of energy burning from his toes up his legs, up his spine to his brain, spreading heat through him, spreading certainty.

  “Did you get my message?” she asked, stepping away from the door and waving him in.

  “What message?”

  “I left a message on your answering machine that we’d be here.”

  “I didn’t even go inside my house. It looked dark, so I came straight here.” Because he’d known she would be here. Because his instincts had told him. Because everything was coming together, like the perfect swing to the perfect pitch, the ball hitting the fat heart of the bat and soaring over the fence.

  As he moved farther into her house, he heard Billy and Gracie squabbling. It didn’t sound serious. “It’s called pointy-something,” Billy was saying, “and people think it’s for Christmas because it’s green and red. It has nothing to do with Christmas trees.”

  “They’re helping me decorate the house,” Filomena explained, leading him into the living room. Billy and Gracie shared the space with what appeared to be a small farm’s worth of greenery—poinsettias, arrangements of pinecones and branches, clusters of holly tied with red ribbons. The carved mantel was festooned with pine boughs. The windowsills each held a red candle in a candlestick nestled in holly. A sprig of mistletoe dangled in the doorway between the living room and the dining room.

  Evan was happy to see his kids—but for one brief, shameless moment all he could think of was how he might be able to maneuver Filomena into that doorway, under the mistletoe.

  “I told them I wasn’t going to have a tree, so we decided to do this, instead,” she explained.

  “What do you think, Daddy?” Gracie asked, bounding across the room and leaping into his arms. “Doesn’t it smell good?”

  “It sure does,” he agreed, swinging her high. The room smelled like a forest, clean and tangy. It smelled like life bursting through the first snow. It smelled like Christmas, like home.

  “Your hair is wet,” Gracie said as he adjusted her against his chest. “Is it raining?”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s snowing.”

  “Snowing!” Billy whooped, racing to the nearest window and peering out. Gracie wriggled in Evan’s arms until he put her down, and she charged across the room to join her brother at the window.

  “Just flurries,” Evan whispered to Filomena.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered back. “It’s the first snow of the season.” Her smile squeezed his heart. Her body—hidden beneath an oversize red sweater and loose-fitting jeans—tempted him. A pine needle was trapped in her hair, and he freed it, letting his hand dawdle for an extra moment, savoring the silky black softness. Just touching her that way, unraveling the stiff green needle and holding it in his palm so she could see it, made him feel unbearably close to her.

  It had been so long since he’d felt close to a woman, really close. Close enough to trust her with his children. Close enough to share a holiday meal with her. Close enough to want to share much more with her. “You’re probably ready for me to get the kids out of your hair, too,” he joked, just to clear his head of romantic mush.

  She smiled. “They’ve been great. We saw a wonderful movie about a talking dog, and then we went to that nursery on the western end of Newcombe and bought all these Christmas plants and decorations, and we’ve been decorating the house. They might be sick of me, but I’m not sick of them.”

  His kids would never be sick of Filomena. He couldn’t imagine it. “You know,” he ventured, keeping his tone casual, “I just happen to have tons of food in my refrigerator. Leftover turkey and cranberry sauce, stuff like that. I could broil it all up and make a meal. Why don’t you join us?”

  Her eyes flashed. With apprehension or pleasure—or maybe both, he didn’t know. “Evan, I—”

  “Okay. I won’t broil it,” he promised, cutting her off before she could decline the invitation. “I’ll let you in on a secret—I know how to use a microwave. Don’t tell the kids, because if they find out, they’ll expect more of me than broiled whatever for dinner every night.”

  She smiled again, almost in spite of herself. “I’d love to have dinner with you, but—”

  “Great.”

  She glanced toward the children, who were press
ed to the window, jabbering about how many inches of snow the trivial flurries might produce. Then she hooked her hand around Evan’s elbow and ushered him out of the living room—right under the mistletoe, but she was moving so quickly he couldn’t take advantage of that. She dragged him through the dining room and into the kitchen, two rooms removed from the kids, and released his arm. “Evan,” she said, then fell silent.

  God, she was beautiful. Her complexion had a golden undertone, even this late in autumn, when any lingering summer tan should have faded. Her lashes were as thick as mink, her lips the color of coral. The only thing that kept him from pulling her into his arms was the suspicion that she was trying really hard to keep her distance from him. Anything he did to close that distance would seem like coercion to her.

  “Dinner,” he said, fighting to keep his hands at his sides. “That’s all I asked you for.”

  “Since I arrived in Arlington, I’ve had more dinners with you than I’ve had alone.”

  “Would you rather be eating alone?”

  She offered a hesitant smile. “No. But that’s the problem. I’m afraid…”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Becoming attached to you,” she said bluntly.

  Too late, he thought. It was way too late to worry about becoming attached.

  He stretched his brain to come up with the right response, one that would reassure her. “Last night you told me about how your parents had all these friends, lifelong friends from all walks of life who’d come to your Thanksgiving dinners. Right? Well, that’s like you and me, Fil. We’ve become friends. Maybe we’ll turn out to be lifelong friends.” Maybe more, he added silently. “So why shouldn’t we eat together while you’re in town? What’s the harm in it? It beats eating alone.”

  Sighing, she studied him pensively.

  “Maybe you could bring along some of that leftover pumpkin pie,” he added, refusing to acknowledge her misgivings. “I notice you unloaded a lot of turkey on me, but you kept all the pie for yourself.”

  “I tried to give you some pie,” she reminded him with a grin. “You refused it.”