Cara Colter Read online

  His voice cracked, and was finally, blessedly silent.

  She was silent for so long, and yet her silence was not uncomfortable. It was not her lips he was noticing now, it was her eyes. There was something in the dove-gray of those eyes that a man could hold on to, if he let himself.

  Finally, when she spoke, she did not speak the words he dreaded. She did not say she was sorry, she did not ask what had happened.

  She said, with unbelievable strength given her slight stature. “I know how you’ll get through it.”

  Dumb to believe her. What did she know about his kind of grief? But somehow he did believe her, believed the quiet strength and calm in those eyes.

  She wiped at her lips with her sleeve, as if she was trying to erase the fact she had ever wanted him to look at them. It was an admission.

  The funny thing was it didn’t change the pull of her. Lipstick free, her lips were as compelling as they had been before. Maybe more so.

  All he could see in her face was a lovely tenderness, compassion. He had hurt a woman who ran something called The Secret Santa Society. He was pretty sure he was going to hell for that.

  And suddenly, he was aware he did have one small thing he could give her after all, that was not pure pain, one small thing to make amends for how he had just behaved toward her.

  He could let her know she was a beautiful, attractive girl. That her lips had called him. Words would be useless, now. He had abused his right to use words to tell her anything that he expected to be believed.

  He leaned toward her.

  Predictably she took a step back. And then unpredictably, she took a step forward, reached up on her tiptoes and kissed him.

  The kiss was a mere brush of his lips, butterfly wings against the petals of a flower. It was every bit as sweet as he had thought it would be.

  And so much more that he was shocked. Her lips, smooth, silky, soft, had touched his for less than a full second, and yet he felt rocked, as if an earth tremor had moved through his world. He felt the walls he had built around himself so diligently, brick after careful brick, shift slightly, dangerously.

  “Maybe,” she said softly, her voice a balm and a caress, “you have more to give than you think. And that’s how you’ll get through it.”

  He wanted to insist he didn’t, but something about that kiss had stolen his breath.

  The purity of it, how it gave instead of took.

  “What would you call those fifty coats if not giving?” she asked when he remained silent.

  He shrugged it off, uncomfortable, took a step back from her, found his voice. “Oh. That. That kind of giving is easy.”

  “If it was that easy there would be no such thing as children who needed coats.” She suddenly looked awkward. She looked at her watch. She blushed again, that incredible Rudolph’s nose blush that could be a beacon on a cold, foggy night to a man who was lost.

  To a man who had lost his soul at sea.

  “I have to go now,” she said abruptly, all business, afraid of this moment and the startling sense of intimacy they were sharing, just as he was. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave, too. I don’t have an extra key with me.”

  “I wouldn’t let you walk out to your car alone, anyway.”

  She looked like she was going to protest, thought better of it. Oh, yeah, she was into letting him give now, even to her.

  She turned back, scooped up the remaining pizza, packaged it neatly into a fridge that was tucked into a back corner.

  A moment later, they opened the door, into the freezing night.

  “Don’t you have a warmer jacket?” she scolded.

  Oh, sure now that he’d confided in her, she was going to treat him like an orphan. Worry about him. Be his mother, which was the last thing he wanted from her. He remembered she had worried about him before he’d confided in her.

  “I don’t get cold,” he told her.

  She shot him a puzzled look, but he was done with confessions for tonight. As she was locking the door, Michael noticed a large figure moving away from them down the street, shoulders hunched against a bitter wind.

  “I think I saw that guy hanging out around your door before.”

  She turned. “Oh, him. He’s always around. He’s just a kid. I’m not sure who he is, but I think he thinks he protects me.”

  Michael looked at the young man moving away from them, and doubted the explanation for his presence was anything quite so altruistic, but it was a further insight into her that that was what she believed.

  Innocent. She was innocent. Her lips had told him that, but even if they hadn’t, her eyes had already said it.

  But they had said something equally as dangerous: she was innocent. But that didn’t mean she wanted to be.

  They arrived at a car covered in snow. A small car, exactly what he would have expected her to drive. Practical, economical, nothing flashy.

  Then again, who needed a flashy car when you had a secret weapon like her lips? She got in and started it, he wiped the snow off with his hands and the sleeve of his jacket, until she got back out and passed him a brush.

  “Can I expect you back tomorrow to finish the trikes?”

  He hesitated.

  “It would be a big help.”

  But everything was so much more complicated now that he’d tasted her. He could just tell if he didn’t come back she would make it about her instead of about him. That voice that kept talking, even when he told it to shut up, answered. “Yeah, sure, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  As Kirsten Morrison drove away, even though her car heater was not keeping up with the cold, she felt the distinct warmness of a woman who was playing with fire. Had she known exactly what she was playing with from the moment she had dabbed on that lipstick, removed the cardigan, applied the nail polish?

  How humiliating to be seen through so quickly! A reminder of how dangerous his particular fire was—he understood women and how they thought, he had understood her motives even before she had completely sorted through them herself.

  And to add a layer of complexity to everything, his terrible pain, his horrific loss. His whole family. Her heart felt as if it was breaking for him. Now, coupled with this unfathomable attraction, she felt a duty to help Michael Brewster make it through this Christmas season.

  But how was she going to be in the same room with him now without thinking of that kiss? Without being swamped by fairy-tale dreams that went beyond kisses? That went to a future. A small house in a good neighborhood, nights of cuddling by the fire, babies…

  “Stop it!”

  That’s what she got for kissing a stranger! Her motives had been stellar—to erase the sudden starkness that had appeared in his eyes. Or maybe they hadn’t, because she had wanted to taste him, as if his lips would hold some truth she could cling to.

  Her most treasured Little piece was First Little Kiss . It was the most valuable of her collection, because it was the oldest she owned, closest to the beginning of Lou’s brilliant career. It showed Harriet and Smedley, leaning adorably close to each other, Harriet’s lipstick marks on Smedley’s cheek, eyes wide at what they had just done, tiny smiles of recognition on their faces, Smedley so obviously smitten, his eyes on Harriet’s lips as if they were irresistible to him.

  But kissing Michael had not been like that. The truth it had shown her was not about who Michael was, but about who she was, what secrets lurked in her. Something primal was in her, some longing and urgency that could totally capsize her controlled world.

  Even more astounding, he had looked just as helpless, as if she wielded some power over him.

  The Little piece somehow missed that. The power . The sizzle of playing with forces of nature that would not be controlled. First Little Kiss made it seem as if a little kiss was enough. It gave no indication that a kiss was a beginning, that it awoke deep longings, that it led somewhere else. She shivered just thinking about it.

  Michael Brewster had warned her he was a man with nothing to g
ive, and she knew when someone told you something like that it was a very wise thing to believe them.

  But all her life she had been wise and practical—with the exception of the thousands of dollars she had spent on her Little collection—and suddenly she did not want to be wise and practical anymore. She wanted to be the kind of girl whose lips a man found irresistible.

  More, she longed to be the one who healed what was broken in his soul.

  She hit an icy spot on the road, and her car slid on the new snow, resisting her efforts to control it. She careened across the road, bumped up the curb and stopped only inches from a telephone pole. The items on her backseat fell on the floor. Thankfully, because of the lateness of the hour, there had been no oncoming traffic.

  Her heart racing, she realized she had just been taught a lesson. She was on a slippery slope with Michael Brewster. She could lose control just that easily, and she could end up hurtling toward certain disaster with no ability to stop.

  She shivered then scolded herself for being overly dramatic.

  And for being way too afraid of getting hurt. It was unrealistic to expect to get through life with no bumps and bruises.

  She thought of James, and the six weeks of heady wooing when she thought she had been in love. He’d known all the lines. Slathered her with affection and gifts and attention. And then, oh-so-casually, mentioned he was in danger of getting kicked off the football team without a better grade in math, and he’d figured out a way she could help him on the final. And it wasn’t extra studying, either! She had cried herself to sleep for weeks. If a superficial, full-of-himself, manipulative guy like James could cause the kind of hurt he had caused her, what could Michael Brewster, a wounded grizzly bear, do?

  “Put together a whole lot of tricycles,” she told herself firmly. “Nothing more. He’ll be bored inside of a week and he’ll move on to the kind of things a man like that moves on to.”

  Underwear models came to mind. Safaris. Helicopters. High adventure of some sort. No, he was not the kind of guy whose interest would be held by tricycles for long, or by book-club kind of girls for that matter.

  Meanwhile, her conscience would be clear. She would not wear lipstick. She would have done her part—everything in her power—to help him heal.

  She snorted to herself. Had she really said to him, with such certainty, she knew how to get him through it? She had not even gotten through her own personal tragedies! How could she even think she knew anything about his?

  No, in a week he’d be ready to go, and she’d be quite ready to say goodbye. A man like that would be just like too much egg nog—the first few sips were as heady as wine, and then it seemed too sweet, and then it was just sickening, and by the last few drops you wondered how come you ever thought you liked it in the first place.

  She turned to make sure that her newly acquired catalog had survived the slide off the backseat. But after shuffling through all the scattered papers, she realized she had forgotten it in her office. She frowned at that. Twenty-four hours ago she wouldn’t have been parted from that brand-new catalog by a crowbar.

  Had it been because he insisted on walking her to her car? Did she have an unconscious desire not to let Michael see her interest in the figurines? She hated that, that already she was trying to hide who she really was.

  Or becoming something else, a little voice suggested.

  He’d go. Of that she was certain. Michael would go and she would return to her fascination with the lovely, fantastic, safe world Lou Little had created.

  But over the next few days, Michael did not get sick of putting together toys, nor was anybody treating him as if he was too much egg nog. No one even seemed curious about his availability, why a strong, healthy man had so much time to devote to them.

  The volunteers just loved him unconditionally. Maybe they sensed the sadness in him, and knew to push him for details about himself would be to drive him away.

  Kirsten was not even aware something had gotten stale at the Secret Santa Society until he came in like a breath of fresh air.

  No wonder he knew what her lipstick had meant! Every woman who came through the doors, from age nineteen to ninety, flirted with him. Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Jacobs were trying to outdo each other in the cookie department. Each day he was presented with shortbread cookies tenderly shaped into snowmen and Santas for him. Lulu Bishop, not to be left out of the action, had presented him with a Christmas cake so rum laden that Kirsten could smell it from her office. He’d been invited to all three houses for Christmas dinner.

  Kirsten found it annoying. She was single. She was on her own. Not one offering of cookies or Christmas dinner for her. Of course, she had not confided in anyone that Becky and her nephew Grant, who had relocated to Arizona, had said they would not be able to afford the trip to Treemont this year.

  And Kirsten had only been to see them once in Arizona, and had hated it there. She had thought she would find them unsettled and longing for home, instead she had to face how completely they seemed to be going on with their new lives, leaving all that was old behind them.

  And Kirsten also found it annoying that she’d been so wrong about Michael Brewster. Even when he ran out of tricycles to assemble, he never seemed bored. He seemed content unpacking boxes, driving the cranky old truck to pick up donations, sorting through secondhand toys to see if they were salvageable, programming the odd computers that came in.

  In a very short time, Kirsten didn’t know how the Secret Santa Society had ever survived without him. How long it would be until she felt she could not survive without him, either?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Thirty-three days until Christmas…

  “MICHAEL , can you help with gift wrapping? I have to get some stuff into storage, we’re running out of room in here.”

  He glanced up from assembling a wooden rocking horse. Kirsten had her long hair up in a clip, making a statement, just as she made one every day since he had started showing up here: girl not trying to attract a man.

  Of course, the clumsy efforts she made were backfiring, the hair being up being a perfect example. Her bone structure was exquisite, delicate and feminine. Plus, there was nothing like a woman putting her hair up to make a man long to pull it down, to feel the silk of it run through his fingers. Okay, and maybe to wipe that look off her face, the one that said, I

  did not kiss you. Or if I did kiss you it will be a cold day in

  July before it happens again.

  “Gift-wrapping?” He snorted. “That doesn’t sound very masculine.”

  “Well, if your masculinity is so easily threatened, I’ll ask someone more secure.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, and smiled, challenging her to find someone else.

  She glared at him. “You wouldn’t believe the bottleneck that develops if we don’t get toys wrapped and labeled. It is the job you don’t want to leave until the ninth hour.”

  “I think that’s eleventh hour.” He had a gift for flustering her. He enjoyed it. She was just beginning to blush. With a small effort on his part, he bet he could get the full wattage.

  “Look at these hands,” he said to her. He moved closer to her and held them out for inspection. She looked, she blushed, her wonderful one-of-a-kind Rudolph blush that she seemed to save just for him.

  Now, why did he have the feeling she wasn’t imagining his hands gift wrapping? He pushed her a little. “I’m just not sure,” he said smoothly, “that gift wrapping is the best use for these hands, Kirsten.”

  Her blush deepened, she sputtered, something about a fish!

  “It’s a rocking horse,” he said, turning to see what part of the assembly he had screwed up enough for it to look like a fish. It looked like a horse to him. “And assembling rocking horses is,” he injected his voice with as much innocence as he could muster, “the best use of these hands. My skills just wouldn’t be fairly utilized in the gift wrapping department.”

  On the other hand, he had made a little deal with
himself: he’d just take it one day at a time. After that first night of putting together tricycles, after kissing Kirsten, he’d gone home and thought I can’t go back there. She was complicated…his feelings for her could become very complicated.

  But here was the thing: he’d felt no desire to turn on his TV set, he’d felt no desire to have a beer. He was aware of feeling better—he couldn’t say he felt good, but marginally better, as if he’d seen a promise of the sun through stormblackened skies.

  He’d asked for a life rope. He had asked in a moment of desperate honesty, how will I survive? He could not walk away from this thing that might be his answer.

  He’d decided he would show up at the Secret Santa Society, even on those days when he didn’t want to get out of bed, and do whatever was put in front of him. If it was gift wrapping, okay, he’d gift wrap.