Quino laughed. “So did I.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“She’s going back to New York to her career,” he said. “And my life is here.”
“No, it isn’t,” Desi said. “It’s wherever she is.”
“But now that you’re home, that changes everything,” he said. “I can’t leave you here by yourself.”
“You won’t be, because I’m heading back to Kenya right after the New Year. Charles has offered me a job, a permanent position at the institute, and I’m going to say yes.”
“But you’ve only been there a few weeks—how can he offer you a permanent job?”
“One of the staff has left and everyone likes me and I’m a quick learner,” she said. “I’ll be on probation for a few months, but if we’re both agreed at the end of it, then I’ll get to stay.”
Quino wanted to shout No! He didn’t. Instead, he forced himself to breathe and then he said, “So, you’re leaving Shadow Pine for good?”
“No, this will always be my home, and I’ll come back—a lot,” she said. “But there’s a world of creatures that need saving. I’m going to start with elephants and see where I go from there. I’d like to help the orangutan next. Did you know the massive expansion of palm oil plantations in Borneo and Sumatra is decimating their habitat? And palm oil is in everything! People need to read the labels.”
“Borneo and Sumatra?” he asked faintly.
“I have to help,” Desi said with a shrug. “I know it’s what I was born to do. I know it’s why I survived that car crash, to make a difference, to help.”
Quino felt his throat get tight. Now that Desi had spread her wings, there was no way he could stop her from flying. He swallowed the lump in his throat that was half pride in his baby sister and half mourning the girl he had raised to womanhood.
“I meant what I said before. I could not be more proud of you,” he said.
She grinned at him and hugged him hard. “Hey, want to watch some home movies?”
“Sure.”
She had the old family movies already loaded up on the big-screen television. “I was boring Charles with these earlier while we waited for you.”
She pressed play and they both reclined on the couch with their feet on the coffee table. It was bittersweet to see his parents on the screen. This house, which looked exactly the same, was full of love and laughs frame by frame. The ache in his chest was like a bruise when he watched his dad kiss him mom under the mistletoe as ten-year-old him slapped a hand over his face in embarrassment. The films rolled through the years right to Desi’s quinceañera, her fifteenth birthday. She was dancing in her beautiful gown with their dad, and she was laughing with her eyes bright and sparkling and the happiness bubbling up out of her like a fountain of joy.
Quino stilled. That was the last time she had looked like that until . . .
“Desi, can you show me the footage of you with the baby elephant?”
“That’s a lot of footage,” she said. “Can you be more specific?”
“The one where he was trying to climb into your lap,” he said. “I think you called him Maktao.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. She bounced up from the couch and crossed to the TV. Her phone was plugged into the television and she closed the app that held all of their family home movies and opened her videos. When she pressed play, there she was.
Quino studied her expression as Maktao, the scamp, tried to nudge his way into her lap and then stole her hat. There it was. What Savy had seen but he hadn’t because he’d been too paralyzed by change and fear. The expression on Desi’s face, the pure joy and the sparkle, was one she hadn’t worn since their parents had died.
Desi had left Shadow Pine but somewhere out there she had found herself again. And with that realization, Quino felt himself let go. Oh, he’d always be her big brother and she’d always have a home with him, for sure, but she didn’t need him anymore, and he didn’t need to maintain the past anymore. She was free and so was he.
She glanced at him and asked, “Why did you want to see this again?”
“Because it’s you, doing what you love, living your best life,” he said. “Mom and Dad would be so proud.”
Desi pressed her lips together and he noticed there were tears in her eyes. He held open his arms and gave her a hug. “And I’m proud of you, too.”
At that she did cry, and she hugged him tight. “Thank you. That means everything to me.” She released him and leaned back, wiping the tears off her face. “Now, what are we going to do to fix the mess you’ve made of things with Savy? Because now that I’m following my dream, you need to go follow yours.”
* * *
* * *
THE plan started with Quino in a suit and was accompanied by flowers, a box of chocolates, and a carefully rehearsed speech on Quino’s part where he groveled. He was completely fine with that if it would win Red over. When he arrived at the Happily Ever After Bookstore the next morning, he was as ready as he’d ever be.
Breakfast had been spent with Desi and Charles coaching him. Quino wasn’t sure how he felt about Charles, especially when he caught him looking at Desi with a softness of expression that was not employer to employee. For her part Desi seemed completely unaware, so Quino resolved to talk to her about it at some point over her holiday. His priority right now had to be getting Savannah to accept his apology and listen to what he had to say.
His hands were slick with sweat when he approached the front door. Jeri was seated at the counter when he entered and she looked him over from head to toe.
“Joaquin Solis,” she cried. “Are you wearing a suit two days in a row? Who died?”
“My relationship,” he said. “I’m trying to bring it back.”
“Oh.” Jeri’s eyes went wide as if she knew how unlikely this was going to be. He chose to remain undaunted.
Knowing Savannah was likely in the office, he made his way there. The door was ajar so he pushed it open with his heart pounding in his chest. No one was inside except for a forlorn-looking Maisy.
“Hey, Maisy, is Savy around?”
She glanced up from her desk and her shoulders slumped. “No, I’m sorry, but you’ve missed her.”
“When will she be back?” He felt the prickles of alarm at the back of his neck. She couldn’t have left already, could she?
“Oh, Quino, she’s not coming back,” Maisy said. She looked at him as if she hated being the one to tell him the bad news.
“What?” he asked.
“She left for New York early this morning,” she said.
“But we saved the bookstore,” he said. “Didn’t she want to stay to celebrate through the holidays?”
“She couldn’t,” Maisy said. “The offer was too good and they needed her right away. Wait . . . what do you mean, you saved the bookstore?”
Quino sighed. He dropped the flowers and the box of candy on Savannah’s old desk. It was then that he noticed her ever-present laptop was gone. He sank into her desk chair and leaned back in the seat, studying the ceiling.
He glanced at Maisy. “I’m sorry, but we knew.”
“Knew what?” she asked.
“The day after Thanksgiving when we were decorating the bookstore, I overheard you on the phone. I didn’t mean to, but I heard you say, ‘We’ll lose everything if we don’t have the money by the end of the year’ and I knew the bookstore was in trouble.”
Maisy frowned at him. Quino felt horrible. She must feel so embarrassed to have her financial difficulties out in the open like this.
“Then I told Savannah and she overheard you in a similar conversation, so the two of us started coming up with ways to drive business to the bookstore, including having Destiny sign here.”
“Oh, my God.” Maisy put her hands over her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he
said. “We never told anyone. It was just us. I didn’t even mention it to Ryder.”
“Well, it would have been news to him,” Maisy said.
“I figured, that’s why I didn’t say anything,” he said.
“No, not because it was true,” she said. Her smile when she looked at him was lopsided as if she found him to be a charming doofus. “The conversations that you two overheard were me haggling with the venue for our wedding.”
“What?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “We’d lose everything, meaning our reservation, if I didn’t put down a deposit by the end of the year, but I wasn’t completely sold on the location, so I was trying to haggle them down in price.”
“Oh,” Quino said. “So, the bookstore?”
“Completely solvent,” she said. “And after Destiny, we’re beyond imagination into the black for a business less than a year old.”
“I am an idiot.”
“In the best possible way.” She smiled at him. “So, what are you going to do about Savy?”
He looked down at her empty desk and blew out a breath. Then he met Maisy’s gaze and asked, “What would the hero of Destiny’s novel The Keeper do?”
Maisy put her hand over her heart as if it was beating too fast. Ever so softly, she said, “He’d go after her.”
Quino nodded. “That seems reasonable.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
SHE’D been back in the city that never sleeps for three days and it felt exactly as she remembered. The pulse of the city punched her in the chest like a zap with defibrillator pads the second she climbed out of Penn Station, off the train from her late-night flight into Newark, and the restless energy had carried her through an interview and two meetings and a substantial job offer from her former employer that she accepted.
It had been a whirlwind and she’d thought she’d be here for a couple of days before she went back to Fairdale to give her friends a proper good-bye and spend Christmas packing, but there was a hot debut author to promote and the department was in chaos. So here she was. She didn’t think about Quino, or rather she tried not to. He was there, though, constantly in the back of her mind.
She missed him more than she could have imagined, and that was saying something given that she had already known she was in love with him and fully expected that leaving him was going to be brutal. It was worse. She wandered by the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center and longed for him to be there with her to skate. She passed shop windows, much like Perryman’s, and wanted to have him chase her around the women’s underwear department again. She saw Christmas window displays all over Midtown and all she could think was that Quino would have loved it.
The real kicker was when she woke up in her temporary lodgings at the Waldorf Astoria—her employer was putting her up until she found a place—and she stepped out onto her small patio and surveyed the city. The loneliness echoed low and deep. It should have felt normal, like coming home, but now that she’d known a life that wasn’t lonely, the sad emotion cut her with its rusty jagged blade and left her to bleed.
She missed him, the bergamot and cedar scent of him, the feel of his arms around her, the smile that curved his lips when he glanced her way, the wicked thoughts in his black eyes when they were alone. How had she fallen so hard so fast for a man who could never fit into her life? It was a cosmic joke. A one-two punch of “screw you” from the fates. Here’s the perfect man but you can’t have him.
She’d picked up her phone a million times to call him, but what could she say? He was angry with her about Desi but she didn’t think she’d been wrong to help. Her life was here and his was there. There was no way they were ever going to meet in the middle. What even was the middle now? Someplace in Virginia? They were seven hundred miles apart! The thought tanked her spirits even lower.
Tomorrow was Christmas Eve and she’d never felt less like celebrating, not even when she’d been forced to spend holidays with her parents. This year, she would be in her hotel, working. It seemed rather pathetic, but she reminded herself, this was what she’d wanted. Her reputation, her career, all of it, back—and she’d gotten it. She should have been all fist pumps, high kicks, and look out worlds, but instead, she was dragging around her stupid heartache like a cinder block and she didn’t know how to let it go. She didn’t know how to let him go.
As she walked the four blocks to work, she passed a Santa standing on the corner and dug a few bills out of her purse to shove in his metal bucket. He thanked her and she nodded. He wasn’t as good a Santa as Quino. He didn’t bring the over-the-top joy to the task that Quino had brought. The ache in her chest made her catch her breath but she soldiered on, pushing through the doors to her building to face another day in the job she had been so sure she couldn’t live without.
* * *
* * *
IT was midafternoon. Savannah was overcaffeinated and hungry, never a good mix, and the update meeting that was mandatory for senior staff felt as if it were dragging on for eternity. Why couldn’t they keep it short and sweet? It should be limited to everyone’s best thing, worst thing, and next thing. Carl Heyer from accounting was the human equivalent of an algebra problem. He made no sense and had an inability to get to the freaking point.
She wanted to bang her head on the tabletop. She had a to-do list a mile long and it was not getting any shorter with her trapped in here. She glanced across the table at Archer and he pretended to shoot himself. She glanced away, turning her snort into a cough. She was happy to see Archer again. He and his partner had invited her over on Christmas, so there was that to look forward to.
Carl took a deep breath and she realized Carl was winding up, not down. She closed her eyes briefly and was transported back to Fairdale, to meetings of the Royal Order of George where Maisy, Perry, Jeri, and she talked about good deeds and gorged on donuts. There were carrot sticks and celery at this meeting. The inhumanity!
She pondered how the Royal Order was doing. She wondered if they’d replace her. She thought about playing yarn-ball fetch with George in the office and she was surprised by how much she missed the persistent little critter. She felt her throat get tight. Carl droned on.
When she thought she couldn’t take it for one more nanosecond, the receptionist, Amy, from the main lobby, poked her head into the meeting.
“Excuse me, sorry to interrupt,” she said. Carl shot her a dark look and she ignored him. “There’s someone here to see you, Savannah, and . . . well, I couldn’t say no to him.”
Savannah frowned. Then her eyes went wide. Standing in the hallway behind Amy was Quino. In his cowboy hat, boots, and shearling jacket he looked as out of place as Disney’s Tinker Bell in a slasher movie.
“Quino,” she whispered his name in surprise.
“You left that?” Archer hissed from across the table. She had told him very briefly about the breakup.
“Excuse me,” she said to the room. She rose from her seat, left her things on the table, and hurried to the door. He was here! Here! Her heart was beating triple time, her ears were ringing, she wanted to run to him, but she forced herself to walk, mostly.
“Thank you, Amy,” she said as she brushed past her through the door. When she stepped into the hallway, Quino removed his hat and ran a hand through his thick dark hair. Savy heard Amy heave a sigh behind her. She knew exactly how the other woman felt.
“Hey, Red,” he said. His North Carolina drawl drizzled over her like the sweetest honey. It made her dizzy.
She clutched his elbow and dragged him toward her office. She could feel the office eyes upon them as she led him down the corridor and around the corner, past three offices, until they got to hers, which was bare except for her laptop and a landline. Her current decor could best be described as barren.
She pulled him into the room and shut the door behind them. Quino tossed his hat onto her desk and grinned at her
in that way he had that made her knees weak. She leaned against her desk and crossed her arms over her chest. She would not jump on him no matter how much she wanted to.
“Nice office,” he said. The tenth-story windows gave a lovely view of the surrounding skyscrapers, the building across the way, and the view of the street below.
“Thanks.”
He glanced up. “No mistletoe.”
“No.”
“Pity.”
“What brings you to New York, Quino?” she asked. She was pleased her voice was steady, if a little breathless, because her nerves were stretched to the breaking point.
“I came to apologize,” he said. “You were right about Desi. She is doing amazing things in Africa and I should have thanked you for helping her instead of blaming you for her being gone.”
Savy felt her insides sigh. A man who could own his bullshit. They were as rare as a yeti sighting, weren’t they? Still, she kept her arms crossed.
“What brought you to this conclusion?”
“Desi,” he said. “She came home for Christmas.”
Savy dropped her arms. She knew how much having his sister there meant to him. “I’m really happy for you, Quino. So, she finished the internship that quickly?”
“No,” he said. “She’s going back after the holidays. They’ve offered her a permanent position and she’s accepted.”
“But . . . wow . . . that’s incredible,” she said. “Good for her.”
He nodded.
“But if she’s in Fairdale, what are you doing here?” she asked. “You could have just texted an apology. I would have accepted.”
He started to walk toward her. His look was predatory and dead sexy. Savy felt a thrill flutter through her. “Desi told me that she was following her dream and that I should follow mine.” He stopped right in front of her. He cupped her face with both hands as tenderly as if she were a buttercup. “You’re my dream, Red.”
The Christmas Keeper Page 30
