Under His Spell (Holiday Hearts #4)

by Kristin Hardy

  Elsie came up behind them, flushing. “Don’t you listen to what this child says.”

  J.J. grinned. “Well, we’re hoping to keep your hair brown, Elsie. We’ll get you your center, I think.”

  “Are you going to get it done by the costume parade?” Kisha demanded.

  Lainie put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s only two weeks away, hon. I don’t think even J.J. can build things that fast.”

  “J.J. can do anything,” Kisha said.

  “Maybe not that,” Lainie replied. “We’re having the costume parade at the high school gym.”

  Kisha wrinkled her nose. “It smells like dirty socks.”

  Lainie laughed. “You’re right, it does. We’ll have to try to do something about that.”

  “What’s the costume parade?” J.J. asked. “Do you march?”

  “It’s a costume contest,” Lainie told him. “We used to hold it in the center before it burned down.”

  “Are you going to be at the costume parade, J.J.?” Latrice asked softly.

  “Yeah, you could judge,” Kisha said. “You’ll pick all the best costumes.”

  “We shouldn’t ask Mr. Cooper to do something like that, Kisha.” Lainie studied the girl’s shining eyes uneasily. “He’ll be over in Europe.”

  “Where Europe?” Tyjah asked.

  “A long way away,” Latrice told him with a superior tone. “Too far to come back from.”

  “I think Mr. Cooper could make it back for Halloween. In fact, I’m sure of it,” J.J. said easily.

  Madsen gave him a sharp look.

  “We’ll find judges,” Lainie hastened to say. “You need to focus on your racing.”

  “It’s no problem,” J.J. assured her. “We can make it another fund-raiser for the center. I can sign autographs. Let me talk to George about flyers.”

  Her first thought was that it was impossible. But he’d pulled off the benefit, she reminded herself, and she’d thought that was impossible, too.

  “I’m going to have the best costume ever, wait and see,” Kisha said.

  “What are you going to be?”

  “It’s a secret,” she told him, grinning. “You’ll see at Halloween.”

  Lainie cleared her throat. “Isn’t that going to be a problem with your schedule?”

  J.J. shrugged. “Relax. After Sölden, we get three weeks off before things start up for real.”

  “Doug’s probably going to want you to stick in Innsbruck,” Madsen murmured.

  “I can deal with Doug,” J.J. told him and kissed Lainie. “Don’t worry. I’ll ski Sölden, come home for your festival and costume parade, and then head out. It’ll be cool.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first practice run was always the most important part of race preparation. Sure, J.J. knew the mountain, he’d been skiing it for most of the decade and a half he’d been on the circuit. Year to year, though, subtle changes took place. The first practice run was where he figured them out. The first practice run was where he found his line.

  When he got the nod, he pushed out of the starting gate at a measured pace. This one wasn’t about time, it was about reconnaissance, looking for any new idiosyncrasies that he needed to take into account. There would be time for break-neck speed later; now he needed to relearn the course.

  If downhill was all about speed, and slalom was about weaving through the pattern of gates, then giant slalom was a hybrid of the two—part speed, part technical skill. The giant slalom morphed the frenetic rhythm of traditional slalom into a more measured oscillation—if anything that happened at sixty-plus miles an hour could be called measured. It started out like a downhill, then whipped between a series of fifty or so gates separated by a hundred or more feet.

  In any kind of slalom, the skier was at war with the course designer. The fastest way down the mountain was a straight line. Slalom gates forced the skier off that straight line. The challenge became getting down as quickly as possible while weaving back and forth; the straighter the line, the shorter the time.

  That made giant slalom and its steeper sibling the super-G, in particular, a delicate balancing act. Skis went fastest when they were floating flat on the snow, minimizing friction. Straightening the course required digging in the edges of the skis to carve a tight line around the gates, though. But not too tight—unlike slalom, where the gates consisted of single poles that a skier could ski practically on top of and knock out of the way with his shins, giant slalom used double-poled gates. With two poles jammed close together in the snow and bound by a wide swatch of plastic, a giant slalom gate could rip you right off your feet if you got too cute. Mildly embarrassing, potentially hazardous and guaranteed to tick off the coaching staff.

  Racing giant slalom became a process of finding the float, finding the edge, finding the float, finding the opposite edge, getting close to the gate but not too close, pitching your body for the turns and staying in your tuck the rest of the time.

  And doing all of it faster than the competition.

  All in all, a satisfying challenge, and one J.J. excelled at. Sölden had been good to him over the years. He’d taken second in the season opener the year before. This time around, though, second wasn’t going to be good enough. This time around he had something to prove.

  This year, he was going to win it.

  “Weren’t you just in here?” George stared at Lainie over the counter of Cool Beans.

  “An hour and a half ago.”

  “And that’s not enough for you?”

  “The coffeemaker at work is broken. Come on, George, baby, I need my fix,” she begged. “I’m hurting bad.”

  “Hmmph. ‘Fix’ is right. You had an extra large this morning with a shot of espresso. That should have lasted you all day.”

  “It’s a nutritional thing. I have a caffeine deficiency.”

  “A caffeine deficiency?”

  She gave him a bland look. “Caffeine’s an essential nutrient.”

  “Do tell.”

  “At least it is for me. I’m ordering stock for the store. Come on, George, you don’t want me to order sixty cases of witch museum tilt pens just because I’m half asleep, do you?”

  “Tilt pens?”

  “You know, the ones you tip up and down that show the witch being dunked in the well.”

  He eyed her. “Sixty cases?”

  “It’ll be on your conscience.”

  He shook his head and turned to the coffee machine just as bell at the front door jingled.

  “There you are.”

  Lainie turned to see Caro, who was practically vibrating with suppressed excitement.

  “Hey, Caro, what’s up?”

  “I got it!”

  “Oh my God, the job? You got an offer? When?”

  “Yesterday, when I was out. We spent the whole day negotiating price and they just faxed the official offer.” She danced a little jig. “I’m going to Manhattan!”

  Lainie threw her arms around her. “Oh, Caro, that’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.”

  “I can’t believe it. It’s like it just dropped into my lap.”

  “It didn’t drop into your lap. You worked for it and made it happen.”

  Caro drew back and studied her. “Speaking of making it—”

  The front door jingled and they both turned to see a group of their colleagues coming in.

  “Look, I’ll tell you all about it later. How about dinner?”

  “You know it. My treat.”

  Caro shook her head. “No way. This treat’s mine.”

  “Number nineteen, Hermann Leipzig, Austria.”

  There was a cheer from the crowd, and flashbulbs popped. The bib selection party at a World Cup race was a major event. It was like a whole different world from the U.S.

  In Europe, especially in Austria, World Cup skiing was a mania. Being a racer was the equivalent of being an NBA star in the United States. The fans were everywhere, the media was relentless. In the U.S., J.J. could walk
through airports or down the street without being noticed too much. In Austria or Switzerland, every few feet, it seemed, someone asked for an autograph.

  It was almost enough to go to a guy’s head, and maybe it had for him early on. Of course, all he’d needed to do for a dose of reality was fly back home. Lainie, for one, always made sure she punctured any lingering bubbles of self-importance he’d had.

  Lainie. It seemed so incongruous to think that his tart-tongued sparring partner was now the warm, silky woman in his bed. Gabe’s cousin, the one he couldn’t charm, the one who challenged him head to head. Well, she still challenged him, but now in a different way.

  And he was damned if he knew what to do about it.

  He missed her, suddenly, with an almost physical ache.

  The skiing felt right to him, never better. He loved it, loved flying down the mountain, beating the hell out of his muscles with run after run. It was the nights that were the hardest. It was in the evenings, when the women crowded around, that the life in Salem that had started making sense to him seemed so strange and faraway. That was when he wasn’t exactly sure how he fit in his own skin.

  But he couldn’t worry about that now. He was here and had a race to win. A whole series of races.

  “Number twenty, J. J. Cooper, U.S.”

  The perfect spot. The course would be swept clean of loose snow by the early skiers but not too choppy. He resisted the urge to pump his fist. Instead he walked out on the stage amid cheers. The bib girl, a ravishing blonde with knife-edged cheekbones, took her time sliding it over his head.

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks, I need it.”

  “I do not think so. Perhaps I will be here to help you celebrate,” she said and gave him a heavy-lidded smile of promise.

  Flashbulbs snapped. J.J. gave her a brief, noncommittal nod and turned to walk off the dais. Even a half year before, he would have taken her up on her invitation in a heartbeat.

  He liked to think he was finally getting smarter. He needed to focus on his job, not on accidental encounters.

  And not on what he’d left back home.

  In the front row, a fresh-faced beauty who couldn’t have been more than sixteen flashed him a smile along with her cleavage. J.J. blinked in disbelief.

  On her forehead, in marker, was written “I love you, J.J.”

  Definitely a different world.

  Lainie gave a dubious glance at the five-inch balloon of the wineglass. “You ever notice how the larger the wine-glasses get, the smaller the amount of wine they put in them? What’s up with that? Do they think we won’t notice?”

  “Maybe they figure you’ll be too intimidated to say anything.”

  Lainie snorted. “As if.” She raised her glass. “To the Museum of Antiquities and Caro Lewis, the best boss in the world.”

  Caro made a mock frown. “I’d rather be known as the best friend in the world.”

  “That, too.” Lainie tapped her glass against Caro’s. “To Caro Lewis, best in show.”

  “Now there we go.” Caro sipped and then raised her glass again. “To Lainie Trask, great friend, great assistant curator.” She tapped her glass against Lainie’s. “And currently a woman with a decision to make about her life.”

  Lainie swallowed her mouthful of wine and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about J.J. tonight, okay? Off-limits.”

  “Who’s talking about J.J.?” Interest sparked in Caro’s eyes.

  Lainie flushed. “It’s nothing.”

  “It doesn’t sound like nothing if you’re connecting J.J. with decisions about your life. Did something happen?”

  “No,” she mumbled. “He’s just gone back to Europe to start racing.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah, ah.”

  “What does he say about it?”

  “That he’s only going to be gone for a week, that he’ll be back and stay until mid-November.”

  “And then he’s gone for good.”

  “Yeah. For good.” Lainie lapsed into silence, staring moodily at her wine.

  “You weren’t expecting anything else, right?” Caro asked carefully. “Wasn’t that what you told me?”

  “Sure. It’s just been fun while it’s lasted.”

  “Well, does it have to end just because he leaves? Can’t you keep going?”

  “I suppose. He says he wants to, but things will be different once he gets over there. I can’t see how it won’t. I mean, he’s the big celebrity, everybody wants a piece of him. Maybe he’s not even the same person as he is here. And we’d never see each other.”

  “You could go there,” Caro pointed out. “Just think, you might wind up on the cover of a European tabloid. J. J. Cooper’s latest squeeze.”

  Lainie snorted. “My life’s ambition. Besides, it costs a lot of money to get over there.”

  “And I suppose you wouldn’t want Mr. Megabucks to pick it up.”

  “Would you?” She raked her hair back with both hands and stared at Caro. “He asked me to quit my job, travel with him for the season.”

  Caro’s eyes went round. “Seriously? Wow. You’d see some great places. You’d love Europe.”

  “Come on.” Her voice was impatient. “Are you going to tell me even for a minute that you’d quit your job and let some guy keep you? Even if I were married to the guy, I couldn’t do that. And we’re not married. I don’t know what we are,” she muttered.

  “It would be a risk.”

  “There are risks and then there’s just foolhardy. There’s no way a relationship could possibly work under that kind of pressure. That’s not fair to either of us.”

  “You’re probably right,” Caro admitted. “It’s not possible, but it’s still a fun thought.”

  “I don’t think I can handle any more fun right now,” Lainie said.

  Caro twirled her wineglass thoughtfully. “He might have really changed. People do, you know.”

  “It’s true, they do. And I hope he’s one of them, but I just don’t know.” She sighed.

  “So where are things now?”

  “Day by day.” She took a breath. “I haven’t told him yet but if I can scrape together the money, I think I might go over for one of his races, see what it’s like. See what he’s like when he’s not here.” Saying the words made it all more real. She felt as if she were balanced on the edge of a cliff, preparing to leap out into the void with only a fragile pair of wings to sustain her. If it worked, it would be exhilarating beyond her wildest dreams.

  If it didn’t…

  Lainie gave her head a shake. “Enough talk about J.J. Tell me about your hot new job. When do you go?”

  “A month, probably. Maybe longer,” Caro said. “I need to give the folks here enough time to find a replacement. And I need to hire an assistant at the new job. I don’t suppose you’d be interested, would you?”

  “What?” Lainie asked faintly.

  “They’re letting me bring on an assistant curator.” Caro’s eyes brightened in excitement. “I told them about you. I have to do due diligence and interview several candidates, but they’ve given me the authority to hire you if you want to come on board.”

  “Me?” Lainie squeaked. “To Manhattan?” Living in a city. The city. A chance to live the glamour life she’d always dreamed of. “You know my degree’s in fine arts, right? I’m not trained in antiquities,” she felt duty-bound to point out.

  “That’s all right. We’d be working under my friend Julia, the head curator. Our job would be logistics, coordinating exhibits, that sort of thing. You’re perfect for it. We work so well together, I can’t imagine working with someone else.”

  Manhattan, Lainie thought as it sank in. To live at the hub of the universe. She wouldn’t be traveling Europe like J.J., but she’d be doing something, finally.

  “Now, you don’t have to decide right away,” Caro cautioned. “Think it over for a week. Decide if it’s right. If it’s not and you want to stay here, I’ll recommend that the b
oard consider you for my position.” Her sunburst smile broke out. “But I’m hoping you’ll jump ship with me.”

  From small town to big life. From a limited job to one that could really take her somewhere. A chance to live her dreams.

  With or without J.J.

  J.J. stood and watched the World Cup official inspect his skis, checking the length, the materials. Next to him, Martin, the rep from his ski sponsor, hovered protectively. Ski reps were the racing equivalent of golf caddies—indispensable to the success of a skier. They persuaded their companies to develop the custom skis that a racer needed, and J.J. was more demanding than most. If there was a reason outside of luck and bloody-minded determination that J.J. was on top, it was Martin.

  “Not so rough,” Martin muttered in his Danish-accented English, watching the two strips of laminate as though they were his children. Martin guarded J.J.’s skis jealously, turning them over to the technicians to wax and maintain, shepherding them through the race process, handing them off to J.J. at each race proudly and almost reluctantly.

  And sometimes dolefully collecting them splintered and delaminated at the end.

  The official gave a decisive nod. “Ja,” he said shortly. “Is good.”

  Like an overprotective mother, Martin leaned in to gather the skis to him. “So. I will meet you at the start house,” he said briskly as he zipped them back into their carrier.

  “Oh, I can get them,” J.J. said for the sport of it, reaching for the handles.

  Martin snatched them away. “Hands off, barbarian. You would bang them around. Worry about skiing and—how you say? Leave the rough stuff to me?”

  J.J. grinned. “And leave the rough stuff to you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lainie couldn’t believe she was spending a perfectly beautiful Saturday morning watching television. Actually, she wasn’t so much watching television as presiding over a meeting of the Salem chapter of the J. J. Cooper Fan Club. Elsie and her family, George and his wife and daughters, the collection of people sprawled around her living room, nibbling on chips and waiting for the show.