Mistletoe'd!

by Cach, Lisa

  “I’ve been in love before. I even thought of marrying once or twice,” he said lightly.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I said, and resumed walking with him at my side. “I meant that you’ve never been with a woman you’ve felt would always be there for you; someone who would take you for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, come hell or high water—”

  “Is that in the vows?”

  “Should be. But do you see what I mean?”

  “You’ve never found that either. You’d be married if you had. Maybe some of us aren’t made to have a ‘happily ever after.’”

  “Don’t say that,” I said softly. His words struck too close to my own fears.

  “I didn’t mean you. I meant myself.”

  “You! You’re not weird. You should be able to find someone.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “I’ll bet you’ve been looking at entirely the wrong sort.”

  He gave me a look. “Why do you say that?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on. Handsome men go for beautiful women. And you’ve already said how much sex appeal means to you. It hardly seems like the basis for a solid relationship.”

  “I’d like to see the relationship that survived without a good dose of sexual attraction.”

  “I’m not going back to our underpants discussion.”

  “Do you know, I think you’re a bit of a snob, Tessa.”

  “What?”

  “An antisex snob. You think that sexy people have inferior characters.”

  “I do not!”

  “Which is ironic, as you yourself have a certain smoldering sexiness, under those hideous clothes.”

  I gaped at him, feeling both gratified and insulted. “I don’t think sexy people are inferior,” was all I could think to say.

  “Then why else would you assume that any sexy woman I pursued would by definition make a poor mate? Would you make a poor mate?”

  “I’m not sexy,” I grumbled, hoping he’d argue the point. I wanted to be sexy. “I’m pretty sometimes, but not sexy. But that’s not what I meant in the first place! I meant that the women you probably pursued were party girls, out to have fun.”

  “Ah. So now we see where the true snobbery lies.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, my darling Tessa. Women who drink and dance and have sex do not make good mates. No matter that they may be smart and accomplished; if they go out and have fun, they’re bad. I knew this was a puritan country, but—”

  “No! I meant…” But I didn’t know anymore what I’d meant. I had a sour suspicion that my words had been based on the secret resentment that the nerdy like me have of those who are exuberantly social and know how to let loose and have a good time. I was, I had to admit, jealous even of women who could have a fling with a man and not hate themselves for it in the morning. “I only meant that perhaps the women you’ve pursued are not ready yet to settle down,” I said weakly.

  He shrugged and grinned. His arm went around my shoulders again and he pulled me against him in a quick sideways hug. “I shouldn’t have given you such a hard time. Yes, there were a lot of party girls; yes, some of them were not the sort to bring home to Mother; but there were several who were charming and intelligent, and who left me to marry another within a year.”

  “Why did they leave you? Besides your argumentativeness, that is.”

  He dropped his arm off my shoulders and gave me a light, flirtatious pat on the butt.

  “Hey!” I said, and hoped he’d do it again.

  “Naughty chit,” he said, mock scowling, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

  “Spank me!” I pleaded.

  His eyes widened.

  My own widened, and I could feel a horrible false grin stretch across my mouth. Had I really said that aloud?

  “You like that, do you?”

  “Kidding! Just kidding!”

  He raised one brow. “Were you?”

  I felt a warming in my loins. “Of course! I’m not into violence!”

  “It’s not violent when it’s done correctly. The idea isn’t to hurt; it’s to arouse.”

  “You mean you’ve done it?” Some of my embarrassment gave way to intrigue.

  “The Kama Sutra has pages and pages on the different ways to bite and spank and scratch for pleasure.”

  “I don’t want to be bitten.” But to be bent over the edge of the bed, his bare hand on my ass, his palm almost touching my sex each time he lightly swatted me… Oh, good lord. I could feel myself getting damp. I swallowed and squeaked out, “You didn’t answer my question. Why did the women leave you?”

  His eyes swept briefly over my chest. My jacket was unzipped, my hardened nipples visible under my T-shirt. Please let him think it’s the cold doing it.

  He put his hands in his pockets. “I couldn’t give them what they wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  He shrugged. “Commitment. A house and children. The rest of my life.”

  I felt something sink inside me. Some small, burgeoning seed of hope that Ian might… that I might.,. But no.

  He must have seen the look on my face. “You would have left me, too,” he said.

  I smiled weakly. “I would never have gotten involved with you to begin with. If there’s no prospect at all of a future with a man, then what’s the point?”

  “A good time. The pleasure of each other’s company.”

  It was said nonchalantly, but I examined his expression, looking for some hint of whether he meant that as an invitation to me. I could see no sign of it. “Then why not promise forever?” I asked.

  He was silent for half a block. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted, sounding surprised at his own answer. “Isn’t that strange? I truly don’t know why I never could take that final step. I had reasons at the time, but it was never anything insurmountable. Fear, maybe?”

  “Fear of what?”

  “Of making the wrong choice. Of meeting someone a year later and realizing that she was the one I should have waited for.”

  “Then maybe you’ve never met the right person.”

  “Maybe I have,” he said softly, and my heart skipped a beat. “But maybe I was too blind to recognize her, and let her go.”

  Well, he obviously wasn’t talking about me, then. “Then I suppose you’re doomed to live a sad life of degenerate bachelorhood,” I said lightly. “You’ll grow a paunch and take to wearing Brylcreem, open-necked shirts, and a tan, and spend your vacations seducing wealthy old women on the Riviera.”

  He laughed. “I’m not going to be a gigolo. No, I’ll be a grouchy old man who pinches the bottoms of young women and gets slapped for the effort.”

  “As well you should!” I said, laughing.

  “Here’s a shop for you,” Ian said, pulling me to a stop in front of a window.

  We’d come a fair distance during our conversation and were now in the heart of the city, the brick buildings of Pioneer Square having given way to larger, newer buildings that at street level housed clothing stores and jewelers and small restaurants. The window we’d stopped in front of had a mannequin dressed in a white Edwardian dress. A pair of white boots with a dozen buttons sat at the base of the mannequin, along with a beaded purse and a silver flask. “Ohhhh…” I moaned, and pushed through the front door without saying a coherent word. I could hear him chuckling, but then I was inside and everything else faded from my awareness.

  It was a cozy shop with deep red carpets and a small selection of fine clothing. My fingers danced lightly over the dresses and velvet coats hung so carefully on their padded hangers. “They should never be worn,” I said quietly, hearing Ian come up behind me. “They should be lying flat, in acid-free paper, away from the light. I shouldn’t even be touching them with my bare hands.” I pulled my paws back to my chest, tucking them there to resist the temptation to touch, touch, touch.

  Most of the gowns were silk evening gowns from the first half of the twentieth
century; not so very old or so very valuable, but someday they would be. They were waiting to become treasured history, but would never get the chance if a modern body squeezed itself inside, splitting seams and sweating on fragile fabric.

  “May I help you?” a young woman asked. “Are you looking for a dress for a special occasion?”

  I shook my head mutely and turned away from the temptation. I wanted to squeeze myself inside one of those beautiful dreams from another era. When I turned I saw the glass display counter of jewelry and small decorative objects. On a middle shelf, calling to me like a pirate’s treasure, lay a three-strand garnet necklace with a large garnet-studded pendant. “Ohhh…” I moaned again, and went to it, pressing my fingertips to the glass and staring at the necklace as if I had PMS and it was a five pound chocolate bar.

  “Can you take it out?” Ian asked the shop clerk.

  “Sure,” she said, and although I didn’t take my eyes off the necklace to look and confirm, I could hear in her voice the simper directed at Ian.

  A rattle of a keychain and a sliding glass door later, and she was lifting the necklace off the shelf and laying it down on a piece of velvet on top of the display counter. I touched it, then started to pick it up, checking the clerk’s expression for permission first. She looked away from Ian long enough to nod.

  It was heavy, the garnets clicking against one another like rosary beads. When I turned the pendant over I saw a panel of glass attached to the back. “It’s a locket,” I said. “She would have kept a lock of hair in it.”

  “Whose hair?” Ian asked.

  “Someone she loved. Maybe someone who had died.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Of course!”

  He looked at it doubtfully. “It’s a bit gaudy, don’t you think?”

  “I love it. Look at the color in these garnets.” I held up a strand so that he could see the light through them. “Can’t you imagine a nineteenth-century woman wearing this over a bodice with a neckline that went almost all the way up to her ears? Or maybe a younger woman wearing it on her bare skin, her ball gown low-cut and this pendant shielding the bit of cleavage that showed?” I found the small price tag tied to the clasp and turned it over.

  Fourteen hundred dollars!

  I grimaced and put the necklace carefully back onto the velvet.

  Ian took out his wallet.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “I’m buying it for you. A thank-you for my tour of the city.”

  “Ian! No!” I stepped closer to him and said between gritted teeth, “It’s fourteen hundred dollars.”

  His eyebrows went up. “For that?”

  “Yes, for that.”

  “I thought it would be more.”

  I gaped at him, not sure if he was joking or being serious. “Even if it were only a tenth as much, I couldn’t let you buy it for me,” I said uncertainly.

  “Propriety? Not accepting jewelry from a man not your fiancé?”

  “I’m not that old-fashioned. No, I mean because this meager tour is the least that I can do for you, since it’s my fault you’re stuck in town to begin with.”

  “Then perhaps I could buy it for you simply for the pleasure it would bring you,” he said lightly, his tone only half serious. “It’s good to have things we enjoy.”

  I hesitated, still not sure that he was serious. He couldn’t be serious, not when the necklace cost fourteen hundred dollars! “I don’t need to own it to enjoy it,” I said carefully. “Having seen it and held it has given me as much pleasure as I can get from a piece of jewelry.”

  He laughed. “I don’t know of many women who share your philosophy.”

  I shrugged, relaxing now that I saw his wallet hand lowering, the threat of an emerging credit card apparently gone. “I know the necklace exists, and now it exists in my imagination, as well as in reality. Maybe I’ll use a copy of it in one of my costume designs. That’s more than enough for me. I don’t need to own it. I don’t even want to own it,” I added, and knew as the words left my mouth that I’d gone too far. I might be content to have seen and held the necklace, but part of me did want it. I only told myself I didn’t because I was used to denying my desires for almost everything: fatty foods, expensive furnishings and clothes, sex…. “It’s easier not to want it,” I said softly.

  I looked back at the garnet necklace, its deep red hue and heavy strands calling to the ravenously greedy pirate deep inside me. I wanted my own treasure chest overflowing with jewels that I could sift through at my leisure, admiring and gloating and decking myself in strands upon strands of pearls and shining stones, a gem-encrusted tiara on my head and heavy rings on my fingers.

  “What would I ever do with such a necklace, anyway?” I asked, my eyes still fixed on the beautiful thing. “It would sit in my jewelry box.” I smiled wryly, meeting his gaze. “No, even if it were affordable, it’s better that someone else should have it. Someone who would wear it.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want it?”

  “It’s fourteen hundred dollars. I don’t deserve a necklace worth fourteen hundred dollars.”

  He looked about to say something, but then he shrugged and put the wallet back in his pocket.

  We left the shop and headed down to the waterfront to find a place to eat where we could watch the boats and ferries. I chatted about the city as we walked, but in the back of my mind I wondered: had he already guessed how much the necklace would cost before he offered to buy it for me? I remembered Lauren’s warning: that he would try to get into my panties.

  Had Ian set his seductive sights on me?

  No. He’d already proven not. If he’d wanted me, we would be at my house right now, in my bed.

  Ian was just being nice by offering to buy the necklace, and couldn’t have suspected how much the necklace cost. How could an employee of a fake-luxury-goods company afford to buy such a thing, anyway? He couldn’t, and was probably relieved that I’d saved him the embarrassment of admitting it. If he had that type of money to throw away, he never would have slept on our futon that first night, nor agreed to stay in Lauren’s room for two nights instead of getting a room at the Four Seasons. For fourteen hundred dollars, he probably could have upgraded to business class and gotten a flight home!

  The cabernet reds of the necklace shone in my mind. Yes, memory was enough, especially when I could remember that once upon a time a handsome Scottish man had wished to buy me such a beautiful thing.

  Chapter Five

  Lunch was a couple buckets of steamer clams in a restaurant on a pier, washed down with a local microbrew. I quizzed Ian about growing up in Scotland and was surprised by how much our childhoods had in common. His family had been lower middleclass like my own, and he, too, had spent a goodly amount of time outdoors. His expression was bright and excited as he recounted the fun he and his friends had had improvising fishing poles and trying to catch trout, or digging up pieces of glass and metal and pretending to themselves that the bits of trash were artifacts of incalculable value. I told him about playing hide-‘n’-seek in the woods, and in summertime riding an inner tube down a river.

  “If I ever have kids, I hope I can give them a childhood like mine,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t raise them in the city?”

  I shook my head. “Not if I had the choice. Those are some of my best memories, running around in the field and woods. When they got older I might move back to the city, but for kids… it’s hard to beat the fun of being a wild savage.” I toyed with an empty clamshell. “What about you? What do you want for your children?”

  He took a sip of his beer. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Do you want kids?”

  “Someday. But there are a lot of steps between where I am now and being a father.”

  “You have to find a wife,” I said.

  “I’m not going to get married just to have children.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  He cut me off. �
��No, I know you weren’t, but it’s something a guy starts to feel from women when they reach a certain age.”

  I raised my brows. “Care to explain?”

  “You feel them looking at you as a potential father to their future children.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Of course they do!”

  He shook his head. “No, I mean they look at you as meeting their checklist of minimum requirements: has a job, no chemical addictions, looks all right, seems like a decent fellow, we get on well. He’s not what I dreamt of, but he’s good enough. Let’s get married!”

  I felt a grimace of a smile pulling at the corner of my mouth, knowing that I and several of my girlfriends had spent evenings hashing out just such trains of thought. “I think everyone wants more than that. No one wants to settle for ‘good enough.’ It just becomes tempting when even ‘good enough’ seems so hard to find.”

  His dark blue eyes locked with mine, his expression intense. “I want to know that a woman wants me, Ian McLaughlin. Not just that I’m the right age and have the right income, and treat my mother well. I want to feel that a woman’s world would not be complete without me; that I gave her something that no one else in the world could. That she found something in me that made her feel that she had come home after a long journey through a cold and lonely winter, and that she could never find exactly that same feeling with anyone else.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer; there was something too raw and honest and powerful in what he’d said, and it was something I’d never even considered before. I hadn’t known that a man could need to be needed in that way.

  For so many years I’d heard it said that when a man was finally ready to marry, he married whomever he was with at the time. I’d thought that men were easier to please than women were, when it came to choosing a mate. I’d thought, somehow, that they didn’t really care how well a woman knew them.