The unforeseen bonus was giving Kirsten a hard time first.
So far, it was working out surprisingly well. He assembled toys, hefted the big stuff, drove the truck, hammered together extra shelving. He was needed , and he was busy, even busier than he had been at Mr. Theodore’s, and it was a balm for his soul.
And he had the daily challenge of trying not to look at Kirsten’s lips, and took some satisfaction from the fact she seemed to be trying just as hard not to look at his. It also gave him grave satisfaction that he could coax that blush out of her at least once a day and on good days, more.
She was not only not wearing lipstick in her campaign to erase that first night from his mind—or her own—she was wearing ugly sweat clothes, T-shirts from the thrift bin, too large jeans. The nail polish had disappeared from her fingernails, never to return.
The silent message, I don’t care what you think of me.
She was a girl who couldn’t lie, though. Her eyes said she cared, even though he’d warned her, fair and square, caring about him would be a risk.
Plus, her affinity for baggy wear had the unfortunate effect of making her look waiflike and adorable, extra small, the kind of woman an extra-large guy felt an instinctive, almost primal need to protect, to care for.
Today, she was wearing what he and his brother would have laughingly called mom-jeans and a bright red T-shirt that said in large letters stretched across her bosom, I Love Santa Claus. The outfit, on the ugly scale, rated a full ten.
Still, he was tempted to read the slogan very, very slowly, until she was nearly scarlet, and then lift his eyes to hers and say, “Do you want to come sit on my knee, little girl?” in his most wicked voice. He had to be careful, though. Kirsten had a way of surprising him, and she might do it, just as she had unexpectedly kissed him the other night.
And if he found the most adorable Kirsten Morrison on his lap, then what? He was pretty sure it wouldn’t be, Tell Santa what you want for Christmas.
Even having thoughts like these—playful, teasing, slightly dangerous—was such a reprieve from the thoughts he had been thinking since a dark spring day all those months ago, that he felt grateful.
“Hey, what do you want for Christmas?” he said. That would be a nice, impersonal way to express gratitude for all the things he was getting here. Some clothes that fit her might make a good start. Was that impersonal enough?
“Getting all the packages wrapped by Christmas Eve delivery would be good enough for me.”
A puppy, he thought. That would knock down her defenses. He’d love to see her melting and cooing over a little golden ball of fur. He bet she’d like a cocker spaniel. He reminded himself that he had helped her put her defenses up. Why would he want to knock them down? He was the one who had warned her he was not available.
Besides, a puppy was a wholesome kind of gift from a guy who thought wholesome kinds of thoughts. And Michael had been plotting for most of the morning how to catch a glimpse of a little something more than Kirsten wanted to show him. He thought there were probably nuns who showed more flesh than she did!
Of course, if he found a reason to make her have to reach the top shelf of the storage area—diabolical, he told himself. Unworthy of an emissary of Santa Claus.
“Mrs. Henderson said you can’t have any of her special chocolate-dipped reindeer cookies unless you come wrap.”
So, she wanted to play dirty?
“Okay, okay.” He pretended to give in, knowing he could eat a whole lot of cookies before his wrapping skills were evaluated, deemed hopeless, and he was demoted back to wooden horse assembly.
“Uh, could you grab that game? Top shelf.” He pretended to be engrossed with fastening the horse’s surprisingly beady glass eye. “I think I saw a request for it on the board.”
They posted requests as they came in on a board, tried to match them with incoming supplies. It was not the most efficient method, and if he was here long enough, he’d probably come up with something that actually worked.
How long did he plan to be here? His own answer surprised him. He had become a man who didn’t make plans, who just got through each day as best he could. But somehow he knew he’d committed until Christmas. Committed.
He was distracted by the extreme discomfort of that thought when he noticed his ploy was working. Michael watched with evil delight as Kirsten spotted the game he claimed to want. Even when she pulled out the footstool, she had to stretch.
He was right. Bare skin. A taut tummy. A beautiful belly button. She could wear all the stupid clothes she wanted. He had an instinct for what was under there.
Diabolical, but you had to be careful working in a place like this not to be completely contaminated by the do-gooder stuff. A puppy, for God’s sake! He was a man who bought women wine and sexy lingerie, gifts designed, really, with his own pleasure outmost in mind. He didn’t want to become a saint, not that there was much chance of that.
She was still almost too short to get the game, she reached way up, stood on her tiptoes, managed to touch the game and lost her balance.
He was there in a flash, put his hands around her waist, swung her down onto the floor. He didn’t let go right away, and for a moment she didn’t move.
Here was the problem: he thought he was playing with her, but he had awakened that hunger within himself—to touch, to feel softness, to connect. His hands nearly spanned her waist. She smelled, ever so subtly, of gardenias.
“All hands to gift wrap!” The public address system was old, and sound crackled, burped and exploded out of it. He and Kirsten snapped apart as though they were teenagers caught in a cop’s spotlight in the back of a car.
Not that she had probably ever been in the backseat of a car, something he needed to remember when he was aching to touch her skin again!
He followed her to gift wrap, two long tables set up with bows and tape and tags and wrapping paper. The regulars were all there, his wonderful substitute moms. He glanced at the platter of cookies. It would take him about fifteen minutes to polish those off and then—
The music started. “No!” he protested. “I can’t handle it. I’m begging. Really.”
So, he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the odd evil moment. The old gals were all snickering happily at his complaining.
They liked the traditional Christmas tunes, whereas he preferred something a little more modern.
“What do you want to listen to?” Kirsten asked. Sheesh. She was still blushing!
“Something contemporary. Some rock music perhaps.”
She actually produced a tape. All the women were smiling benevolently at his expression. His requests for rock and roll had been falling on seemingly deaf ears since he’d arrived.
Since he’d arrived. Almost a week had gone by already. It was the first time since the accident that time seemed to be moving with any speed at all.
All these women mothering the hell out of him. It was as if he had arrived at an oasis after traveling across the burning sand. They were water to his thirst.
Michael Brewster wasn’t a man given to any kind of fancy. He did not believe in anything flaky. Reality was what you could touch and taste, smell and feel. When people tried to comfort him with platitudes about angels watching over him, he felt angry rather than comforted.
And yet there was something here he could not explain, a feeling of his mother’s presence. Probably only because these women were so much like her: they frowned when he swore, and forgave instantly when he muttered his apologies. They baked him cookies and casseroles, he’d had offers to mend his jeans, and he didn’t know how he was going refuse all those Christmas dinner invitations without hurting someone’s feelings. Mrs. Jacobs had offered to come to clean his house!
“How do you know my house needs to be cleaned?” he’d asked her.
“Oh, I just know,” she’d said, with a smile so like his mother’s had been when she’d seen his first very messy apartment.
So even though he was pra
gmatic to a fault, Michael sometimes wondered if his mother someway, somehow, using angel tricks, had led him to this place where so many women were so eager to mother him.
Now this.
A classic song by one of his favorite artists filled the room, making Michael aware he had been holding his breath and crossing his fingers that what they had chosen wouldn’t be something awful. He let it out in relief, and felt suddenly warm.
Really warm.
Was he flushing?
Good God, a week ago he could count on himself not to feel cold—or warm. And not to blush, either. He should just turn and walk out of here. No, run. Run from what was happening to him, the slow, aching return of feeling, of a desire to hope and believe that life might be good again.
But if he ran they would be so dismayed—so worried about what they had done wrong—and they all looked so pleased with their little conspiracy to surprise him with his favorite music.
“Now that’s music I can gift wrap to,” he said, not letting on that ice inside him was melting faster than ice cream under a hair dryer. He put his hands over his head and did a little thing with his hips that usually could get him a girl at closing time.
Mrs. Henderson gasped then threw her adhesive tape at him. Mrs. Jacobs chortled. All three hundred pounds of Lulu quivered. And Kirsten was looking down at the package in front of her, gift wrapping with manic fervor.
“Want to dance, Kirsten?” He was teasing her, and he wasn’t. He wanted to touch her again.
“No!” She did not look up.
“I will!” Lulu said. And so he danced with Lulu and then Mrs. Henderson and then Mrs. Jacobs, to the nice mix of not-Christmas music they had put together for him.
No, not they. Not one of these women would have chosen anything more recent than Frank Sinatra. So, this was a gift from Kirsten, who was sternly ignoring him, and muttering about the urgency of the gift wrapping task at hand.
“Kirstie,” he said, using, for the first time, the shortened form of her name others used all the time, “Come on.”
“No.”
But the grannies were having none of it, and Lulu used her considerable bulk to coerce Kirsten away from the table.
“You dance with him!” she ordered.
Kirsten stood in front of him, defiant. She folded her arms over her Santa T-shirt and tapped her foot. “If we could just get on with the gift wrapping—”
She was soundly booed by her volunteers. The music changed. A broken, mournful voice filled the room, crackled over the terrible speaker system, singing about a beautiful woman.
“May I have this dance?” he asked, his voice low, suddenly aware how much he wanted her to say yes, how he wanted to feel her skin beneath his hands again.
“No.”
More boos.
“Come on, Kirsten,” he teased her, “loosen up.”
“I don’t want to loosen up,” she hissed, for his ears only. “I can just imagine what happens to women who loosen up around you.”
“Can you?” he said. “Dirty mind.”
“Oh!”
“All the other girls danced with me,” he pointed out to her.
“That’s the whole problem. For a guy who is unavailable, you’re a little too sure of your attractions. Why, there’s a name for guys like you!”
“And what is it?”
“You know darn well what it is.”
“I don’t,” he said stubbornly.
“You’re a…a tease.” She was keeping her voice down—way down—but if any of those gals caught a glimpse of her face they would assume she was saying much naughtier things than she was.
Though for a girl like her to call a guy a tease was probably plenty naughty.
“They have a name for girls like you, too.”
She glared at him.
“Pure as the driven snow,” he said, but it didn’t come off his lips sounding anything like an insult.
“By your standard!”
It had been so long since he had felt like this: light, energized. Dare he say happy?
“Hey, I’m just a brokenhearted guy, looking for a moment’s haven,” he said. He had meant it to come out sounding the way he thought he felt: happy. But it didn’t. Not at all. It sounded like it came from a place within him that had not seen light for a long, long time.
She faltered. He had just played the broken heart card to manipulate her to dance with him. It seemed a shabby thing to do, until the moment his hand touched hers.
Something that was ravaged within him stilled. A place of darkness was pierced by a shaft of light. He had known it would feel like this from the moment he had lifted her down from that stepstool, he had known even then, he had to feel this way again.
That was the possible problem with working for the Secret Santa Society. Miracles happened here. A man’s shabbiest moments could bring unexpected gifts.
Somewhere, from a long time ago, dance class in PE, he remembered how it was supposed to be done. As much as he wanted to pull her in tight to him, and hang on to the way she was making him feel as if he would never let go, he couldn’t. You couldn’t just slam a girl like Kirsten up against your chest and hold her so close that there was nothing between you, not even air.
No, he took one of her hands, put his other hand lightly on her waist, missing the sensation of her bare skin under his hand, but trying to be satisfied. He kept enough distance between them for Lulu to slide into if she wanted to.
To his amazement rather than appreciating his effort at chivalry, Kirsten looked annoyed. “This is how you would dance with your grandmother.”
If Michael had hoped dancing with someone as pure as the driven snow would be like dancing with his grandmother, formal and stiff, a duty, a moment that could erase the hunger from him, he’d been mistaken.
Kirsten could be counted on to surprise. He had expected she would be stiff as a board to dance with, uptight. Only she wasn’t. She moved with ease, an unexpected sensuality that was easing the hunger in him at the same time it was making it worse.
“You don’t know how to dance!” she accused after a few steps.
“I’m trying to remember. Grade eight dance class.”
“You’re telling me you haven’t danced since the eighth grade?”
“Not like this.”
“How do you usually dance?”
He thought that might be an invitation. He thought of her arms draped around his neck and her lithe body pressed into his every place two bodies could touch. He thought of his lips on her ears and her throat. Desperately he tried to ignore his own thoughts, and her invitation, and recount his eighth grade dance adventures instead.
“I had to dance with Millie Milesworth. She was smarter than me, and held me in complete contempt.”
“Would that be because you tormented her?”
“Why are you taking her side? You don’t even know her.”
“I’m not taking her side. I just know she was only pretending not to like you so you wouldn’t hurt her too badly.”
Ah. Would that be the same as wearing baggy clothes so that a man would think you didn’t care what he thought? Women were so damnably complicated.
“How would you know something like that about someone you’d never met?” he asked.
“Hmph. I was probably her. And you were probably James Moriarty.”
“Why do I have the sinking feeling he was a jerk?”
“Ouch.”
Her foot felt small and fragile underneath his. “Sorry. Was he a jerk?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Was he mean to you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll track him down and look after him for you.” He was surprised at how much the thought pleased him.
“Thanks, but I’m mature enough not to let college slights still bother me.”
The change in her body language as soon as she had mentioned James Whoever told him that was a complete lie, though he refrained from calling her on it.
> “Plus, that’s not exactly in keeping with the spirit of the season.”
The standard line around here: it addressed wayward swear words, yelling at the truck driver who was late and other forms of manly behavior. Sometimes he longed for a good barroom brawl.
“Why? What do you think I’d do if I met old James in a dark alley?”
“Oh, something male and brutish.”
“In defense of your honor! You should be pleased.” He was getting the hang of this dancing thing. Relaxing. He liked the way her hand felt in his hand, how the other one rested on his shoulder. He remembered how his mother and father used to look dancing, as if they heard the very same music at the very same time, felt the very same things.
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