Page 125 of The Holiday Gift

He looked down blankly at the present. “Not really,” he admitted.

She frowned, so close to him he could see the shimmery gold flecks in her eyes. “What part didn’t you get? I thought that was a great demonstration.”

He sighed. “It probably was. I only heard about half of it. I was too busy remembering how your mouth tastes like strawberries.”

She stared at him for a long charged moment and then she quickly moved to the chair across the table from him.

“Please stop,” she said, her voice low and her color high.

“I’d like to. Believe me.”

“I’m serious. I can’t handle this back-and-forth thing. It’s not fair. You flirt with me one minute and then push me away the next. Please. Make up your mind, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I don’t either,” he admitted. He was an ass. She was absolutely right. “I think that’s the problem. I keep telling myself I can’t handle anything but friendship right now. Then you show up and you smell delicious and you’re so sweet to bring dinner for us. To top it all off, you’re so damned beautiful, all I can think about is kissing you again, holding you in my arms.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide. He saw awareness there and something else, something fragile.

He wanted her fiercely. Because she trembled whenever he touched her, he suspected she shared his hunger. He could kiss her—and possibly do more—now, but at what cost?

She was a vulnerable woman. He was no armchair psychologist, but he guessed she was hiding herself away here on this ranch because she saw only weakness and fear in herself. She saw the sixteen-year-old girl who had cowered from her parents’ killers. She didn’t see herself as the strong, powerful, desirable woman he did.

He could hurt her—and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

“Sorry. Forget I said that. We’d better get these presents wrapped so you can go home and get some sleep.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide and impossibly green. Finally she nodded. “Yes. I would hate to be down here wrapping gifts if one of the children woke up and came down for a drink of water or something.”

She turned her attention to the task at hand. He fumbled through wrapping a book for Ava and did an okay job but nothing as polished as Caidy’s presents. After a few more awkward moments with only the sound of rustling paper and ripping tape, he decided he needed something as a buffer between them.

He rose from the table and headed for Mrs. Michaels’s radio/CD player in the corner. When he turned it on, jazzy Christmas music filled the empty spaces. She didn’t like holiday songs, he remembered, but she didn’t seem to object so he left the station tuned there.

The pile dwindled between them, and at some point she started talking to him again, asking little questions about the gifts he and Mrs. Michaels had purchased, about the children’s interests, about their early Christmases.

When he left to look for one more roll of paper in Mrs. Michaels’s room, he returned to find her humming softly under her breath to “Angels We Have Heard on High,” her voice soft and melodious.

He stood just on the other side of the doorway, wondering what it might take for her to sing again. She stopped abruptly when she sensed his presence and returned to taping up a box containing yet another outfit for Ava’s American Girl doll.

“You found more paper. Oh, good. That should help us finish up.”

He sat back down and started wrapping a DVD for Jack.

“Tell me about Christmas when you were a kid,” she said after a moment.

That question came out of left field and he fumbled for an answer. “Fine. Nothing memorable.”

“Everybody has some fond memory of Christmas. Making Christmas cookies, delivering gifts to neighbors. What were your traditions?”

He tried to think back and couldn’t come up with much. “We usually had a nice tree. My grandmother’s decorator would spend the whole day on it. It was really beautiful.” He didn’t add that he and Susie weren’t allowed to go near it because of the thousands of dollars in glass ornaments adorning the branches.

“Your grandmother?”

Had he said that? “Yeah. My grandparents raised my sister and me from the time I was about eight until I left for college.”

“Why?”

He could feel her gaze on him as he tried to come up with the words to answer her. He wanted to ignore it but couldn’t figure out a way to do that politely. And suddenly, for a reason he couldn’t have explained, he wanted to tell her, just like in his office earlier in the week when he had told her about Brooke.

“My childhood wasn’t very happy, I guess, but I feel stupid complaining about it. I don’t know who my father is. My mother was a drug addict who dumped my half sister and me on her parents and disappeared without a word. She died of an overdose about three months later.”

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