Page 3 of A Daddy for Christmas 2: Kitt

I smiled at him, and the cowboy said, “Get your own, mister.”

I turned my back to Kitt and gave the cowboy a look that quickly changed his mind about arguing, and he took off back to the bar.

“He left,” Kitt said. “Why did he do that?”

“No idea,” I said. “Why don’t you just dance with me? I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay,” he said, and I took him in my arms and began to whirl him around so fast he had to throw his arms around my neck to hold on. He gazed up at me with those big, dark-fringed eyes and his lush mouth fell open in surprise.

Somebody started playing “Little Bitty” by Alan Jackson on the juke box, and I pulled him into a fast two-step. He couldn’t keep up, so I lifted him off his feet and swept him around the floor. I may have made him a little dizzy, accidentally-on-purpose as I twirled him around so that he’d cling to me even harder. Finally, the music stopped, and he stayed in my arms, still holding on tightly and blowing his sweet breath in my face.He gasped out the words, “Dizzy,” and I pushed his head down on my shoulder and held him close.

I walked him back over to the bar and sat him down on a stool next to mine so he could rest a few minutes before I took him up to my room. I thought he was about ready to retire for the night, whether he knew it or not.

He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and inclined his head slightly to the side to light it up, twisting his head to avoid getting smoke in his eyes. Damn it, even that move was sexy as fuck, like every other move I’d seen him make. But I got the feeling he wasn’t even aware of how good he looked.

One of the ones leaning over the bar at the far end was a salesman—at least he looked like one. Big and beefy, with a red face, he wore a rumpled suit and was going on and on, telling the bartender stories with a Christmas theme. The one he was currently in the middle of was about how much he used to love Christmas as a kid and how much better everything used to be back then. He was pretty obviously drunk and getting louder. Most of the other customers were trying to ignore him, except for one. I saw that Kitt had begun to pay close attention and had his head slightly tilted toward the guy, his eyes narrowed and his lip curling as he listened. I wondered what was going on in that pretty little head of his.

“Christmas morning used to be the best at my house,” the salesman was saying. “My brother and I would get up before everyone else and run downstairs to see if Santa Claus had come. To see what he’d brought us.” He chuckled. “We were too damn old for it by then, but we were afraid that if we told our mom that we knew there was no such thing as Santa Claus, we might stop getting presents. So, we’d run to the tree and make a lot of noise until we woke her and our Dad up and they’d come down, all ready to raise hell with us, but then they’d realize what day it was and plop down on the couch to watch us. Mom would gooff to the kitchen to get Dad his coffee and make us her special Christmas pancakes. Dad would watch us open our presents and after breakfast, he’d be on the floor beside us, putting our toys together and saying that Santa must have forgot to do it the night before.”

“Oh yeah?” the bartender replied. “What kind of toys?”

“Trains and little toy cars that fit onto a track—you know the kind. Just cheap stuff that mostly tore up after a day or two—we were a little rough on them, but that was part of the fun. Christmas was the best back then, man. Not all commercial and expensive like it is today.”

The bartender, who must have been bored—though probably not as much as I was—kept talking to him. Maybe he knew the guy or else he was angling for a good tip.

“What about your pancake breakfast? What was so special about that?”

The guy laughed. “Not a damn thing. My mom was a terrible cook, but she’d stick some frozen pancakes in the toaster and then use whipped cream to make faces on them after she took them out of the toaster to make us laugh. I still remember how bad those damn things tasted. But man, I’d love to go back to that time again, just for that one morning alone.”

Kitt shook his head. I focused on Kitt as he signaled the bartender for another one of the fancy cocktails he’d been drinking. He’d had enough, but I let him do it, hoping he’d just pass out and not cause me any trouble about going along with me to my room. Whatever he’d ordered had another little umbrella in it and fruit hanging off the side. The bartender turned to look over at him and nod. That drew the salesman’s attention too.

“What do you think, boy?” the salesman asked. “Don’t you agree that Christmas is too commercialized and not what it used to be?”

Kitt turned his head a little and stared coldly at him. “Are you addressing me?” he asked in a prim, patrician little voice that was only a little slurred, but more than a little incredulous. He sounded like the queen might have sounded if someone had asked her for a light for their cigarette.

“Well, yeah. I asked if you agreed with me.”

“About what?”

“That Christmas when we were little kids was the best! Much better than today. It hasn’t been that long for you, but don’t you agree, buddy?”

Kitt smirked and tilted his glass at him. “Whatever you say...buddy.” He took a long swig of his drink.

“You don’t sound too sure,” the salesman said, his tone getting more than a little belligerent. He probably objected to that smart-ass smirk on Kitt’s face, and hell, you couldn’t blame him.

“You got a different idea?” The man yelled at him, and he must have been drunker than I’d first thought, because he’d puffed up belligerently. It looked like he was trying to start a fight over nothing much at all. And Kitt was just the kind of boy who’d give him one. I tensed, getting ready to stop this if it went much further.

I had no idea why Kitt was getting so mad about the guy’s stupid, but innocuous question. I knew that his parents had divorced when he was really young, and that he and his father had a contentious relationship. Maybe that was it. But he was about to start a fight over nothing much at all and I wasn’t in the mood tonight. As Toby Keith used to say in his song, “there was a time, back in my prime, when I could really lay it down…” But like Toby says, I ain’t as good as I once was.

“Oh, are you still talking to me?” Kitt asked the salesman, looking over at him with an incredulous look on his face.

“Yeah, damn it, I asked you a fucking question, you little asshole.”

“The thing is,” Kitt said, taking a drag off his cigarette and blowing a long plume of smoke up in the air, “I’m tired of hearing you running your big mouth. I just came in this place to have a drink. Not to listen to you. Can you lower your damn voice or at least talk about something else that doesn’t have a question for me in it? Or better yet, why don’t you just do us all a favor and shut the fuck up?”

The man lurched to his feet and began coming around the end of the bar, his face hot and bothered. I stood up, all six-feet, four inches of me, ready to head this thing off.

“The fuck did you say to me?” the drunk guy yelled.

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