Finally he stepped back. The corsage was crooked, but be damned if he was going to try to fix it. At the moment, he didn’t even want to go to the party. He wanted to persuade her to go back in the apartment, turn the lights down low, put on some slow soft music, drink some wine and let what happened happen.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve never had a corsage before.”
“What? You must have had one for the prom.”
“No. I didn’t go.”
And suddenly, he didn’t want a night in the apartment with her. Well, he did, but he wanted something more. He wanted her to have all the things she hadn’t had before. It felt as if it was his personal mission tonight to make up for every fickle, shallow, superficial guy who had ever overlooked a girl like her, who had ever hurt a girl like her.
He extended his arm to her, walked her out to the car, opened the door for her, helped her get all that skirt into a very small space.
The Christmas party was surprisingly fun. There was a great dinner. Games. The hilarious election of Lulu as this year’s Santa Claus.
And then there was dancing. Everyone wanted to dance with Kirsten, but Michael finally put his foot down and had her to himself.
“Your dancing has improved,” she told him when he pulled her in close. It hadn’t really. He just was dancing the way he liked to dance, holding her in close to him, so he could feel the beat of her heart through the decided flimsy fabric of that dress.
They slow danced under the mistletoe. Had she guided him over here, little minx?
But he’d been fighting temptation for as long as a man could be expected to fight it. Besides, Lulu had told him she had never lent Kirsten a book, so he had to surmise she liked the kind of thing that had been depicted on that cover—or was at least curious about it.
He took her lips, and explored them. He didn’t know if the music stopped or if they had stopped, but she twined her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
And she kissed back like a lady who knew exactly what a red dress did to a man.
“You’re scaring the hell out of this poor carpenter and fisherman,” he said against her ear.
“Why?”
“You look exactly like a woman who is waiting for a knight in shining armor. A princess waiting for a prince.”
“And there’s something wrong with that?”
“I’m just an ordinary guy, Kirstie,” he said quietly. “I’m nobody’s fantasy.”
He didn’t want to scare her off but he wanted it to always be about the truth, and straight from the heart.
“I hate this suit. The tie is choking me.”
She found the tie, undid it briskly and dropped it on the floor.
He smiled, shook his head, continued: “I can be counted on to walk across a freshly swept floor with mud on my boots, I swear too much, I’m insensitive as hell. I own two pairs of jeans, one for work and one for dress-up and a leather jacket I never intend to part with. I’m not much of a dancer and have been known to drop a girl during that all important dip.
“On the other hand,” he said, interpreting her speechlessness as an invitation to go on, “when I am thoughtful, I really mean it. I can cook mean buffalo wings. I know how to do my own laundry and I don’t expect anyone else to do it for me.”
She nodded sagely. “Why are you telling me this?”
He looked into the clear of her eyes, at the tiny smile on her lips, and thought it’s time . Time to declare himself. Time to see if she felt anything the same way.
And if she did? Could he trust himself when he took her home in that red dress?
“It’s time,” crackled over the loudspeaker.
Startled, he thought someone was reading his mind, but then he saw Mr. Temple, resplendent in an electric-blue tuxedo that must have dated to the disco days had taken the stage.
“Kirsten, can you come on up here?”
Kirsten gave Michael a regretful look, wrinkled her nose, kissed his hand and then let it go.
She joined Mr. Temple on the stage, and acted surprised and tearful when she was presented with A Little Puppy Love .
Mr. Temple gave a speech. “I personally want to thank you for being an inspiration to all of us, Kirsten. To me it is amazing how you turned your personal tragedy into such a remarkable service to this city. I thank you, and I know I speak for all of us, for turning an event that could have made many of us feel hate, into an opportunity to love.”
Amidst the wild cheering, Michael felt something in him go very still. What tragedy? He knew Kirsten held back from him, but he had thought it was her natural reserve. Why had she allowed him to tell her everything and not once offered anything back? What he felt was deeper than frustration, closer to betrayal.
Tonight, he had been about to offer her his biggest secret. Suddenly he felt glad he had not. He had been about to trust her with everything, and he was not sure she had ever trusted him at all.
Kirsten kept casting glances at Michael as he drove them home. He looked absolutely astonishing in his tux, even better now that the tie was off and he opened the buttons at the throat.
But for the last part of the evening he had gone very quiet. Was it that kiss that had shaken him?
It certainly had her! Shaken her and filled her with the most delicious sense of anticipation. The dress had been worth every cent! No man had ever looked at her the way Michael had looked at her tonight, and the feelings in her were intoxicating.
But as she glanced at his face, now at a stopped light, she wondered if she had missed something.
Michael didn’t look as if he was anticipating anything. He looked remote, and faintly grim.
“Is everything all right?” she asked him.
And when his only answer was a shrug, she knew it wasn’t. He parked in front of her apartment, helped her from the car, lifted her new collectible from the trunk. The look on his face grew even grimmer.
She put her key in the door, went in, he followed her and set Puppy Love on the coffee table.
Once, she would not have been able to keep herself away from her new figurine, but her interest in it was stopped cold by the look on his face when he turned and looked at her. He folded his arms across his chest, almost as if he was trying to protect his heart from her.
“What’s wrong?”
“What tragedy?” he asked quietly.
“They shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
“No, maybe not. Maybe you should have. You’ve sucked my entire life story out of me, and not trusted me with one thing about yourself. I thought we were friends.”
Sucked? Plus, I thought we were friends.
She thought of the last few weeks, and the word friend did not seem strong enough to describe what was going on between them. She felt disappointed by it. She’d laughed with him. Plotted with him how to make dreams come true. Danced with him. Kissed him. Heard his secrets. Friends? And yet she knew he was right. She had held back from him, afraid to take those final steps of trust that loving a man like him would demand from her.
“You know my every damn secret,” he said, his voice a growl, “I gave you my soul. And I don’t know the first thing about you.”
“I keep trying to tell you I’m boring!” she defended herself desperately, but she knew there was no defense. He had been fearless. She had been fearful. Knowing she was in the wrong should have humbled her, but it made her feel prickly, and on edge, trapped in a corner.
“You won’t even tell me that you want that stupid figurine for Christmas. Knight in Shining Armor.”
He wanted her to risk? She risked. “Because you’d think it was stupid. Don’t think I didn’t see the look on your face when you carried in Puppy Love . And what’s the point of telling anyone you want something you can’t have? Knight in Shining Armor likely sold out within hours of being offered. And not for a price anyone I know could pay. How do you know that, anyway? That I wanted it?”
“You practically wore the print off that page in yo
ur catalog. You know the one? You keep it hidden in your top drawer of your desk.”
“You were spying on me!”
“Maybe you have to spy on people who don’t trust you enough to tell you anything. Not one little thing. Everything as hidden as that damned catalog.” He didn’t look even a little bit contrite. He glared at her, then kicked off his shoes without invitation. She thought maybe he was going to go flop down on her couch—which suddenly seemed small and foolishly feminine—and they were going to talk this out.
Instead he marched right to her display cabinet. He opened the door.
“Don’t touch that,” she said when he picked up First Little Kiss .
“You scared I’ll break it, Kirstie?” he asked.
She had the strangest feeling he wasn’t talking about her figurine at all, but about her heart. “Yes,” she whispered, “I’m afraid you’ll break it.”
He flipped it over and inspected the bottom. “Hand-painted in India,” he said cynically. “Probably by some poor little kid in rags, chained to a table.”
“Stop it!” she said, feeling the blood drain from her face. “You’ll wreck it!”
“You know what? That’s what reality does. It wrecks fantasy. But you know what else? Sometimes reality is better.”
“No, it’s not!” Her voice sounded shrieky. “On Christmas Day, four years ago,” she said, “my nephew was hit by a car. He was six at the time. He’s in a wheelchair now. He was hit by an eleven-year-old boy who stole a car because he was filled with helpless rage because, not only didn’t Santa come to his house, his little sister was crying. They didn’t even have milk!
“You want to know everything about me? That’s why I started all this. That’s why I became the Secret Santa Society. Because I don’t ever want any kid in Treemont to ever do what he did again! So, see? That’s what I want. For no kid ever to wake up without presents again. That’s the reality I want.”
He knew it wasn’t the total truth; she could tell he knew by the look in his eyes, deep and piercing.
“Tell me the rest,” he said. He put down the figurine and came back to her. She had the feeling he wanted to shake her but restrained himself by folding his arms over a chest that struck her as being enormously masculine. “That’s not the reality you want. Tell me the rest.”
Right from the beginning she had known this: that he was the most dangerous man because he would not ever settle for what a person wanted to give—he wanted everything or nothing at all.
She took a deep breath. “Okay. What I really want is for my life to be what it was before, and it can’t be, okay? It can’t be!”
“What changed?” he said. Oh! She’d told him enough. She didn’t want to tell him any more.
But that was the problem: a man like this was never going to accept just what you wanted to give him. He was never going to accept anything less than all of you, even if some of that was not what you wanted anyone to see. Even if some of that was fear-filled and afraid and hateful.
“My sister and my nephew moved to Arizona,” she said stiffly. “It’s easier to get a wheelchair around there with no snow to contend with six months of the year.”
He looked at her closely. She was not sure she had ever felt someone so close to reading her soul.
“They’re not even coming back for Christmas this year!”
He had lost so much, and she was whining about her life? She felt ashamed.
“Anyway.” She shrugged, “Life goes on—”
“No!” he snapped. “There’s more. What changed?”
She refused to cry. She refused to remember the days and years before that accident, moments that had played out so much like Harriet and Smedley. Moments that shone with love and laughter.
“My parents got divorced as soon as I finished high school.” She felt ashamed for digging up this old history, but here was the absolute truth, maybe more truth than she had ever admitted, even to herself. “And then in college I started dating a guy who every girl in the school had a secret crush on. He sweet talked me, and made my head swim, and I was not sensible the way I usually am. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat. I just thought of him.”
“Ah, James.”
It hurt that he remembered. It hurt because it meant he listened to her, and cared about her and hadn’t believed her for a minute when she’d told him she’d gotten over all this long ago.
“It was a ridiculously short romance. Six weeks.” Long enough for a girl as sensitive and as hopelessly romantic as she had been to be hurt irrevocably. “I was so infatuated, I would have done just about anything for him. Almost anything. He wanted me to cheat on his math exam so he could stay on the football team.”
“Well, you’re lucky that’s all he wanted,” Michael said without an ounce of sympathy.
“And into all that, my sister Becky started dating a really great guy named Kent Baker. And it made me believe good things could happen all over again. They got married in a fairy-tale ceremony. They e-mailed me pictures from their honeymoon. I remember how joy-filled they were that a baby was on the way. I remember them buying their first house. I actually started to think, well, maybe good things can happen after all.”
She jerked herself away from the warmth of those memories, looked Michael in the eye.
“My sister and her husband split up after Grant’s accident,” she finally said, trying not to cry. “He had an affair. When she needed him most, the bastard had an affair. Okay?”
He mulled it over, and apparently decided it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t enough. He wasn’t stopping until he had stripped her to her soul. “No. What changed in you? ”
She stared at him. Then she sighed, and let out her deepest truth and her deepest secret. “Once I believed in love. Now I don’t. That’s what changed. In me.”
And then she knew the truth of why she had held back from him. Because to be with a man like this she would have to let go of her fears, revise her belief system, change. Change a way of being in the world that was safe for her, risk-free.
Finally he looked satisfied that she had given him the full truth.
“A month ago,” he said quietly, “Mr. Theodore gave me an impossible assignment. He told me to find someone in more pain than I was in, and help them.
“I didn’t believe anyone could be in more pain than me. But now I see that’s not true. You see, Kirsten, I want what I had before. I want a family, and a home and everything that means. It doesn’t mean a stupid fantasy like Harriet and Meddlesome over there.
“It means burnt toast, and fighting over what channel to watch. It means deciding together what to name the baby, and what color to paint the bedroom, then painting it again when you hate it. It means working together, and falling apart, and then working to come together again. It means two people dancing when no one else is around to watch. It means planting trees, and building swing sets, and kissing bruises and going on vacation in a too-small van with a dog who stinks and a tent that leaks. It’s about knowing, no matter what happens, you’re never ever alone.
“I lost them. I lost my whole family. But I never lost my belief in love. That’s the gift they’ve left with me. That’s what I’ve come to know. I believe that love is the best damn thing—the only thing—worth having in this world.”
Slowly he looked at her and shook his head. “And you,” he said softly, “you think it’s the worst.”
“You said,” she accused him through tears, “that you weren’t available.”
“Then I stopped running and found out that I need the very thing you are running away from.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Why do you think, Kirsten?”
She wanted him to spell it out. She wanted him to say that he loved her. But how could he take such a risk, when she had risked nothing for him? Not her heart’s secrets.
“And just for the record,” he said, “I don’t condone what your brother-in-law did, but I understand it.”
“Yo
u do?” She was glad he said that. Why, she’d been on the brink of loving him! But to understand that . She felt fury and indignation sputter to life within her. They felt better, more powerful, than softness and vulnerability. It felt as if he was giving her the excuse she needed to retreat to her safe world.
“Men aren’t like Mr. Meddlesome over there,” Michael said. “When they feel helpless, sad, destroyed, they’ll do anything—absolutely anything—to alter how they are feeling. And they won’t always behave well.”
Cara Colter Page 13
