by Lisa Plumley
It was a good thing, too. Tommy and Susan Hamilton couldn’t have afforded to bribe anyone. These days, they were doing very well, partly thanks to Jason’s help. He liked giving it.
Danielle’s mulish expression told him she wasn’t convinced. “Crystal is piling up a pretty big fan club by doing exactly that,” she informed him as she pulled out a canister of delicious-smelling coffee. “I think she’s doing it on purpose.”
“Of course she’s doing it on purpose.” He couldn’t see any other scenario. Especially given who they were talking about.
But Danielle was kind enough to give her self-involved, PDA-loving nemesis the benefit of the doubt. “I dunno. Maybe. Sometimes I think so.” She sighed. “I’m doing my best to get along with Crystal, for the kids’ sake, at least, and we’ve never actually acknowledged the Christmas wars—”
“And, I’m guessing, the birthday wars, the vacation wars—”
“—but they’re happening anyway.” Danielle glanced over her shoulder at him just as his comment registered, inadvertently confirming his guess. “I don’t exactly have a bottomless bank account, either. I can’t compete with all these gifts.”
“You don’t have to compete.” Jason came closer, wanting to ease her worries. He stopped a few inches from Danielle, watching her assemble coffee fixings. “That’s why Crystal is so worried. You’ve already won. You’ll win every time.”
She scoffed. “I don’t feel as if I’ve won.”
He came even closer. Danielle’s back was to him now, but as she put down the coffeemaker’s carafe, Jason noticed the tension in her shoulders. He caught the faint fragrance of the peppermint body wash she showered with, too. Mmm. Christmassy.
With incentives like this, he could learn to love the holidays again. He already felt more like himself these days, and he’d hadn’t yet spent a week on the Moosby’s sales floor.
His return to his old form was all thanks to Danielle. In between appearances and advertising photo shoots, she’d pushed him to work. He’d acquiesced. Now that all was said and done, he was grateful to her for reminding him of the truth. He felt at home at Moosby’s. He’d let himself get sidetracked by corporate bullshit . . . just the way he was currently getting carried away with liking her, despite all the reasons he shouldn’t.
But no one was there to see them. And this was borderline pretending anyway. It was safe. In fact, it was essential.
Deliberately, Jason put his hand on her robe-covered shoulder. It would be easy to slip away those polka dots, bare her skin, lower his mouth, run his lips over her soft shoulder . . .
Instead, Jason gave her a reassuring squeeze. Making her feel better meant more to him than anything else. When all else failed, he knew, it was a good idea to listen. That meant . . .
“You don’t feel as if you’ve won? How do you feel?”
“Well . . .” Her shoulders expanded as she breathed in. Her long hair threatened to tickle his nose. “I feel . . .”
Breath held, Jason waited. But he felt all too aware of how close they were. Without really meaning to, he’d situated them both against the counter near the coffeemaker, with no escape available—and no distraction from his desire for her.
He was moving on to another Moosby’s tomorrow, Jason reminded himself. He didn’t have to be 100 percent diligent.
“. . . like I want something special for Christmas this year,” Danielle went on. Her voice sounded breathy, her tone tight. Was she nervous about something? “Something really special.”
Jason wanted something special, too. He wanted her.
Somehow, he mustered enough chivalry not to act on that wanting. Instead, he contented himself with gently stroking his thumb over Danielle’s neck. Even that much contact made his heart pound. Her skin felt so soft, her body so warm.
“I want you,” Danielle told him. “For Christmas.”
Shocked, he stopped moving. He’d thought he was the only one who felt that way. When he’d helped Danielle untangle her Christmas lights, when they’d accidentally wound up nose-to-nose, he’d been the one who’d almost kissed her. He’d felt sure that Danielle knew it, too. But she hadn’t acted. Even with their uncanny compatibility factored into the equation, Danielle had behaved with complete propriety. Whereas he, unbeknownst to her, had gone on to enjoy his favorite daily treat: the sexy view he had of Danielle as she bent over with her delectable derrière in the air while making up the sofa bed for him.
He’d never met anyone more generous. More fascinating. More willing to repeatedly extort a man for gas money.
“I want you,” she repeated, turning around. Her gaze met his, searching and certain. Her attention dropped to his mouth. Lingered. “If that means I won’t get promoted, I guess I can—”
It didn’t, of course. All the same . . .
“You don’t really want to get promoted.” Even as that unlikely insight struck him, it felt inarguably right. “I don’t think you want to leave Kismet at all.” As Danielle’s eyes widened in imminent protest, he added, “I think you’re just sick of watching Mr. and Mrs. Rub It In Your Face have all the fun.”
“Mark and Crystal?” Danielle laughed, momentarily relaxing against him. “Sure, they’re annoying. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to get promoted. I’m really good at my job.”
“I know you are. Maybe that means you should keep your job.” Was he crazy? She wanted him . . . and he was debating career strategies with her. “Not get a new one. I’ve seen you with your customers, Danielle. You love them. They love you. You wouldn’t be happy somewhere else—especially not at Moosby’s HQ.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
He thought about it. “It’s worse. It’s soul crushing.”
Jason only wished he had an alternative to it. He didn’t.
“You’re just trying to make me feel better in case I don’t get promoted. Because you won’t apologize and make the board—”
“I won’t apologize for wanting to kiss you, either.”
Danielle blinked. “Kiss me?” She gave a vague frown. “But you let go of my hand when we came in the kitchen, so—”
“No, you let go of my hand.”
“I thought you were only pretending out there.” She aimed her chin illustratively toward the living room. Her gaze returned to his, tremulous and hopeful. “If you weren’t—”
“I wasn’t.”
“I wasn’t either.”
Jason waited for her telltale sign: a nose crinkle.
It never came. She was telling the truth.
A moment ticked past, full of mutual confusion.
The reality of the situation struck them simultaneously.
“You want me,” Danielle breathed.
“You want me,” Jason echoed, light-headed and triumphant.
A heartbeat later, they lunged at one another. Their bodies met in a squashed union of arms and legs and torsos, hot and eager and long overdue, and it was all Jason could do not to moan aloud and alert everyone in the next room to what was happening. He was kissing Danielle. Incredibly, she was kissing him back. With fervor and enthusiasm and mind-bending skill.
He didn’t care that she might still be playacting to make her ex jealous. He didn’t care that he was technically her boss and she was officially off-limits. All that mattered were her, him . . . and the inconceivable pleasure that coursed through him as their lips met for the first time. Instantly, he needed more.
Kissing Danielle, Jason realized, was like eating gelato with one of those preposterously small spoons they favored in chichi Italian places. He couldn’t possibly get enough. Not with the meager tools at his disposal. Because he was only a man—a flawed, unremarkable man with a disreputable past and a hole in his heart where his love of Christmas used to be. But with Danielle in his arms—with her in his heart—everything started to fill in. Like the toothpick-and-napkin race car he’d given her, he started to feel a lot more cherished than he had a right to.
He couldn’t bel
ieve the way she’d looked at that damn thing when he’d given it to her, Jason remembered crazily as he delved his hands in her hair and kissed her again. Danielle had reacted as if he’d offered her something shiny and expensive from Tiffany, not a dumb handmade toy that would fall apart in days.
Time was, his handmade creations had lasted longer, he knew. But at least his knack for ingenuity had endured. Driven by poverty and love, a much younger Jason had turned empty boxes and piles of gravel into thrilling playgrounds for himself and his brother and sisters. He’d turned abandoned lumber and pilfered wheels into makeshift skateboards. He’d morphed cast-off shoes and threadbare pillowcases into lovable, lumpy dolls with hairdos made of orange carpet remnants—dolls his sisters had loved. Wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids like them couldn’t be picky, of course. It was an admittedly weird talent he had, making things the way he’d done in those days. But without Jason’s knack for improvisation—without the occasional five-fingered discount he’d used to get supplies for those improvised toys—the Hamilton kids would have gone without more often than not. Even at Christmas. Thanks to Jason and his not-so-secret talent for making something from nothing, they hadn’t had to.
Those were the kinds of sappy, sentimental details Jason didn’t want winding up in an unauthorized biography of himself. Those details made him seem destined to have become the man he was, with a retailing empire and an audacious net worth and honest-to-god squealing fans. But while living it—while struggling and scraping by the way he’d had to for years—nothing had felt destined. His net worth had been nonexistent. No one had been his fan. It felt dishonest now to give people the idea that his good fortune could ever be duplicated.
Jason didn’t have a 1-2-3 manual for success. He couldn’t. The funny thing about details like his toy-making past was that they were self-selecting. He’d gotten into a lot of fights, too; no one would have said he was destined to be a championship boxer. He’d done a lot of skipping school; it hadn’t turned out to be his destiny to be a truant officer. By the same logic that people applied to his toy-store success, he should have had any number of diverse careers, all of them predestined and perfect.
It wasn’t fair to suggest to people that success worked that way. Not when the only things that mattered were work, luck . . . and picking up the pieces to try again after failing.
So his race car wasn’t perfect. But it was emblematic of him. His days of Dumpster diving for supplies and hand-making toys were behind him now, but Jason still liked the idea of something he’d made staying close to Danielle. Even after he’d left Kismet, his race car would be right there on her bureau.
The idea of his leaving made Jason grip her even tighter. He had less than twenty-four hours to get enough of Danielle’s mouth, her hands, her expressive eyes and her evocative movements and her amazing way of pressing against him, undulating and moaning and burying her hands in his hair.
It was, he realized with a thrill, as if she had been wrapped up too tightly for weeks . . . and he was the lucky man who would get to uncover her on Christmas morning.
Uncovering Danielle would be . . . remarkable, Jason knew. For days, he’d followed her with his eyes, with his imagination . . . with everything except his hands. Now they could get in on the act too. The sky was the limit. Giddily proving it, Jason slid his fingers lower. He encountered Danielle’s slender neck, her delicate collarbones, her soft, warm skin . . . her cumbersome robe.
That had to go. Deliberately, Jason clenched its lapels in both hands, preparing to pull it away. With her robe gone, Danielle would be that much closer to naked. Except doing that might mean not kissing her. Even for an instant, that seemed too high a price to pay. So he only gave a low, impatient moan of his own and then kissed her more deeply, pressing them both against the counter and the cabinets. Something fell. It didn’t matter. Because Danielle was kissing him, and she wanted him.
He wanted her. He knew he could have her. Soon. Soon . . .
A sudden boisterous scuffle at the doorway broke the mood.
Jason glanced up just as Aiden skipped into the kitchen.
“Hey, look! I found your shirt!” The boy whirled it overhead like a cowboy’s lasso. “It was in my room along with a whole bag of stuff. Your stuff, I think.” His cherubic face took on a canny look. “You’d better not be sleeping in my bed. Because it’s mine. It’s not yours. You can’t have it.”
Zach came in just as Aiden said so, further obliterating the moment of privacy Jason and Danielle had been enjoying.
“He’s not sleeping in your bed, dummy,” Zach informed Aiden. “He’s sleeping in Mom’s bed. Just like Dad used to do.”
“Don’t call your brother names.” Flushed and mussed, Danielle gave Jason the merest push away from her. She straightened her robe, then broke his heart by belting it.
All that lusciousness, locked away from him. Too bad.
“Adults,” Zach went on, undeterred, “don’t like sleeping by themselves. For them, every night is a sleepover.”
His worldly wise tone brooked no argument. Jason wasn’t interested in offering one. If there was a chance this ruse could land him in Danielle’s bed, he was all for it.
So far, he’d enjoyed pretending to be Danielle’s new man—close encounters, kid attacks, kooky exes, and mayhem included. He’d always liked kids. Although Danielle’s brood was a little hostile toward him right now, Jason knew that was temporary.
He really was great with kids. He always had been.
His mother always said that was because he was a kid at heart. Jason knew there was more to it than that. He liked kids for themselves, as people, of course. But he also liked the idea of settling down, making coffee on a Saturday morning with his sleep-tousled paramour, feeling a part of a close-knit brood like the one he’d grown up in. It wasn’t macho to admit it. But it was true. And that was another thing that didn’t need to be published about him in the pages of a damn tell-all biography.
He hadn’t glimpsed Chip’s spy for a few days. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t out there, monitoring Jason’s every move, from his time on the Moosby’s sales floor to his daily visits to the bakery next door, which specialized in whoopie pies. He’d never experienced those cakey sandwich cookies before coming to Kismet. Now, Jason was pretty sure he was addicted to them.
“You’re sleeping together?” Karlie came in next, obviously having overheard. “Mom! You told us you’d always love Dad!”
“I will always love your dad.” Looking trapped, Danielle cast a flustered glance at Jason. Determinedly, she regrouped. “But just the way Dad has moved on to be with Crystal, someday I might want to move on to be with someone else, too.”
All three children scoffed. Well, except Aiden. He was busy slinging Jason’s T-shirt over his shoulders. He tied it like a superhero cape, then gave a self-satisfied twirl. “Cool!”
Karlie gave her mother a no-nonsense look. “Dad’s fling with Crystal is only temporary, Mom. We all know that.”
“Yeah,” Zach agreed. “He’s just sowing his wild oats.”
“Wild oats?” Danielle frowned. “Where did you—”
“Grandma Benoit,” her son clarified. “She said that Dad was just sowing his wild oats. She said he’d come crawling back.”
“Crawling back? To me?” Danielle seemed surprised at that. Also, definitely amused. “Maybe that was true at one point,” she told her children in a careful tone, “but now your dad and Crystal are married. They’re going to stay together.”
Her children shrugged. “Nah. I doubt it,” Zach said.
“With you as the alternative?” Karlie asked. “No way.”
At their insistence, Danielle seemed flabbergasted. She gazed at them all in turn. “How long have you felt this way?”
“Since . . . forever!” Aiden gave another superhero twirl.
Danielle bit her lip. “We’re going to have to talk about this, you guys. Because the truth is, your dad and I are split. We’re not going to get back to
gether.” Her tone was gentle. “We’ve moved on with our lives. Dad with Crystal, and me—”
“You haven’t moved on,” Zach disagreed.
“At least you hadn’t,” Karlie clarified with an evaluative glance at Jason. “Until he showed up to ransack our tree.”
“Is it time to set up the fishbowl yet?” Aiden asked.
Jason realized, in that moment, that he was going to have to step in. Because Danielle obviously needed help. He could tell by her bewilderment. She probably believed she had moved on. But if the hungry way she’d kissed him was any indication, she hadn’t yet moved on with anyone who was worth her while.
He had to help Danielle. For real this time. He had to show her that life without her ex-husband could be wonderful and fun and well worth experiencing. Not as a ruse to fool her blockheaded ex and his juvenile bride, either. Jason had to make sure that Zach, Karlie, and Aiden knew the truth: their mother wasn’t going to reunite with their father. For one thing, Danielle was too good for that chump. For another . . . well, it was obvious that Mark really did plan to stay with Crystal.
They deserved one another.
He and Danielle had to go further, Jason realized. For her kids’ sakes. For hers. And for his, too.
Because, after all, he was trying to be good, right?
What would be a better good deed than helping Danielle? She deserved it. After all, she was the only person who’d asked him for an explanation about the Bethany debacle. She was the only one who’d had enough faith in his integrity not to freak out—not to overreact the way the media and his board of directors had.
A good way to thank Danielle, Jason knew, would be by spending time with her and her kids. By making sure that Aiden, Zach, and Karlie saw their mom actively moving on. With him. The new Mr. Nice Guy of Christmasville, USA. Starting now.
Being seen with her and her three adorable moppets would only augment his new board-mandated, family-friendly image. Even Danielle would have agreed with that. It was a win both ways.
