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  Prom photo of Harry and some tall bombshell whose pinkie—and svelte figure—he’d been wrapped around until graduation last June. Then, oh…

  Prom photo of Bailey and Finn. She tried forcing her gaze away—God, what had she been thinking when she bought that silver dress?—but then it snagged on Finn. Finn, two years older, eons more fascinating than any boy she’d ever known.

  She’d chosen silver to match the thick steel hoops he wore in his ears. Of course the color washed out her blond looks, but who wouldn’t look washed out compared to Finn, with his bad-boy bleached-on-black hair and his brooding brown eyes? He’d worn motorcycle boots with his dark-as-night tuxedo, and by the time they’d arrived at the dance, he’d already yanked free from his neck the bow tie his grandmother had been so careful to tie for him.

  He’d never been careful with anything but Bailey.

  It had only made him more dangerous, more imperative to run away from. She’d done it ten years ago.

  Move feet, move. She could do it again now.

  Forcing him out of her mind, she climbed the last of the steps. “Mom?”

  A scuffle down the hall sent her toward Harry’s room. In the doorway, she halted, relieved to finally find her quarry sitting on Harry’s bed, her back half turned. Surely with a little forthright conversation she could convince her mother to swallow her pride or her heartbreak or whatever was keeping her out of the store. Bailey could jump back in her car and drive away from Christmas and from Coronado. Maybe tonight!

  “Mom, I’ve been calling you.”

  Tracy Willis swiveled to face her. “Oh, I didn’t hear you, honey.”

  Bailey swallowed. The last time she’d seen her mother had been at Harry’s high school graduation. But the older woman looked as if years had passed instead of months. Her face and neck were thin, her blunt-cut hair straggled toward her shoulders. It looked gray instead of its usual blond. She wore a pair of muddy green sweat pants and shearling slippers. A football jersey.

  Another unwelcome memory bubbled up from the La Brea tar at the back of Bailey’s mind. Her mother, lying in an empty bathtub in Bailey’s father’s flannel robe, sobbing, unaware that her kindergarten daughter was peering through the cracked door. Her kindergarten daughter who was wondering why her daddy had left and made her mother so miserable. It could have been yesterday, an hour ago, ten minutes before. There’d been a bumpy mosquito bite on Bailey’s calf and she’d stood there, silent, scratching it until it bled like red tears into her thin white sock.

  A shudder jolted her back to the present, and she shoved the recollection down and cleared her throat. Old memories, just another reason to get away from here ASAP. Trying to sound normal, she asked, “Is that the top half of Harry’s high school uniform you’re wearing?”

  Her mother absently plucked at the slippery fabric, the hem nearly reaching her knees. “It’s comfortable.”

  “So’s a shower curtain, Mom, but it’s not a good look. What are you doing in here?”

  “I…” Her mother shrugged, then made a vague gesture behind her. “Just, just…”

  Bailey stepped inside the room to peer around her mother’s newly skinny body. “You’re eating in here?” A small saucepan, more than half full of mac and cheese, was on the bedspread behind her mother, a fork jammed in the middle. “You’re eating out of the pan?”

  Okay, Bailey ate out of pans often enough. Weren’t Lean Cuisine microwave trays pans, after all? But her mother didn’t eat out of them. And her mother didn’t let people eat in bedrooms.

  Bailey snatched up the food and tried catching her mother’s eye. “Mom, we need to talk.”

  “Are you hungry?” Tracy asked, her own gaze wandering off. “It’s not from a box. It’s my recipe.”

  Her stomach growling, Bailey forked up a mouthful. “We need to talk about the store, about Dan, about what’s going on.” She retreated toward the room’s windows and the desk that sat beneath them. Leaning her butt against the edge, she swallowed, then pierced some more pieces of macaroni. “Mom—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Dan.” Tracy still didn’t meet her eyes.

  This wasn’t good. Her mother didn’t sound reasonable and willing to step back up to her responsibilities. “Mom—”

  “And now you’re here to take care of the store.”

  “Yes, but Mom—” Someone had upped the volume on his speakers, and “Joy to the World” blared its way into the room through the half-open window. Grimacing at the oh-so-inappropriate background music, Bailey clunked the pan onto Harry’s desk. Then she twisted to shove shut the wooden sash.

  The houses were so close together, she was peering right into Mrs. Jacobson’s rear garden. There was a man there, a wide-shouldered man. She couldn’t see his face, his back was turned to her, and he was carrying a Christmas tree through the kitchen door.

  Her heart thumped. Her stomach clenched.

  He could be anyone, her common sense told her. A handyman. Another neighbor. A generic good Samaritan spreading holiday cheer.

  But that wasn’t what her intuition said. Her intuition was cringing away from the glass and the soul-freezing knowledge of who was really moving through Mrs. Jacobson’s back door.

  She should ignore her silly intuition. She should turn off those goofy internal warning bells and get back to real business. She should face her mother and insist they talk.

  But her mouth was suddenly so dry, she couldn’t find her own voice.

  December 25 wasn’t going to arrive soon enough, that was certain. Because Bailey had a very bad, very unignorable feeling that Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past had both come home to Coronado for an untimely visit.

  * * *

  Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

  Facts & Fun Calendar

  December 2

  The word Yule comes from the Scandinavian word Jol which means festival. Though the festival often lasted twelve days, it was then not associated with the twelve days of Christmas.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  With the door shut behind that mysterious figure next door, Bailey had managed to put him from her mind to concentrate on talking with her mother about her recent separation and The Perfect Christmas. The effort hadn’t gotten her anywhere, however. So she’d followed Tracy to an early bedtime and woke up early as well, to now find dark-rimmed eyes staring into hers.

  Bailey jumped, pressing back against the pan-cake-flat pillow of her childhood, then relaxed again as she realized she was gazing at one of her old band posters and into Kurt Cobain’s compelling—likely drug-addled—gaze. Even still, she felt a tug of attraction.

  Once you jonesed for a bad boy, you always jonesed for bad boys.

  But she wasn’t going to think about bad boys, or mysterious strangers, or even the possibility that the mysterious stranger next door was Finn.

  Even if it was Finn—itwasn’tFinn itwasn’tFinn itwasn’tFinn—this unlucky intersection of their lives didn’t make it necessary for her to see or talk to him. Not that she couldn’t! But surely it was natural to feel discomfort around an old—first—flame, wasn’t it?

  Especially as they hadn’t parted on ideal terms. As a matter of fact, they were un-ideal enough to make her even more certain she should continue avoiding Finn just as she’d done for the past ten years.

  With a last glance at that gorgeous, doomed Kurt, Bailey climbed out of bed and headed straight for the attached bathroom. The sooner she stopped thinking about old times and old flames, the sooner she could get on with her day. The sooner she got on with her day, the sooner she could tackle the chaos at the store and the renewed disorder in her mother’s emotional life.

  The sooner she could escape from all of it.

  Despite her time in the shower, the whirr of the blow dryer, and then the rattle she made in the kitchen getting coffee and toast, neither mother nor even sound emerged from the master bedroom. Once dressed, complete with Christmas apron and striped stocking cap
, Bailey let herself out the front door, resigned to the next resort of spending yet another day in sole charge of the store.

  Her feet stuttered to a halt. The next resort would have to wait until she first made contact with the nitwit who’d left a refrigerator-sized wooden carton on the street, directly behind her Passat.

  The folded invoice inside the plastic sleeve stapled to the pine slats confirmed her unluck was holding…the address was that of Mrs. Jacobson. If Bailey was going to do all that getting on and tackling she had planned, she first would have to knock on the one door she particularly didn’t want to open.

  Her feet dragged as she headed down the sidewalk and up the front walk of the other house. She might have excused herself that it was too early in the morning to disturb any occupants, but the unmistakable mingled scent of coffee and bacon had made its way to the front porch. Someone was up and cooking breakfast at the Jacobsons’.

  Taking a breath, Bailey rapped on the wood. It didn’t take long to hear the approach of footsteps on the other side. The door swung open.

  Itwon’tbeFinn itwon’tbeFinn itwon’tbeFinn.

  It…wasn’t?

  The T-shirt was the same, the broken-down blue jeans, the battered motorcycle boots. But this wasn’t a teenage juvenile delinquent. This looked more like an adult delinquent, someone who spent time on a chain gang, or bounced other bad guys out of rowdy bars, or ran security for Hell’s Angels events.

  He was certainly no boy and no angel himself, not with those wide, I-work-out shoulders, mussed black hair—sans the bleach overlay—and dark stubble. This man didn’t wear her first lover’s steel earrings, but instead a black eye patch covered one of his brown eyes.

  Finn’s eyes.

  She took a step back.

  A smile flitted over his face. Finn’s smile. The uncovered eye didn’t betray a flicker of emotion or familiarity, though. “Is it Girl Scout cookie season too?”

  He didn’t recognize her! The man who had been Finn, the pirate that was this Finn, didn’t realize she was the grown-up girl next door. To him, apparently, ten years was distant history.

  Okay.

  That was good, easier, fine. She could at least pretend the same. It wouldn’t be hard anyway, since he seemed so different than she expected.

  Who was she kidding? Second only to prison convict, she’d have bet the farm that Finn would turn pirate.

  She gestured behind her. “There’s a package on the street with this address,” she said, in the tones of a polite stranger. “It’s blocking my car.”

  His eyebrows shot up and he moved out the door and past her, leaving his scent in the air. The Finn she remembered had smelled like Irish Spring. This Finn smelled shower-fresh too, but with a subtler scent that tickled her nose. Following him out to the street, she rubbed it. As her hand came down, her fingers brushed the nametag pinned to her apron.

  BAILEY

  (Yes, like George!)

  Damn Finn. He knew exactly who she was. Even if she didn’t look exactly as she had at eighteen, he wouldn’t have forgotten her name.

  She snatched the dopey hat off her head and combed her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. He wasn’t looking at her, though. Instead he strode straight to the carton, ripped the invoice from its plastic, and unfolded the thin sheet.

  He cursed like a pirate too.

  Then he glanced over at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this out of your way.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this out of your way, Bailey. The name’s Bailey Sullivan.”

  His gaze flicked to her nametag, back to her eyes. “I can read.”

  But he couldn’t remember?

  She remembered everything.

  The sullen expression on his thirteen-year-old face the first summer he’d been packed off to his grandmother’s. The outrage that had replaced it when Bailey had accepted her best friend’s dare and squirted him, long and cold, with the garden hose.

  The summer she was fourteen and she cajoled him to the beach with her every afternoon. His kiss one July day—her first. She hadn’t known to open her mouth for his tongue, and her skin had heated like sunburn when he whispered the instruction. Then his tongue had touched the tip of hers and he’d tasted like pretzels and Pepsi and salt water. Going dizzy, she’d clutched his bare shoulder, her fingertips grazing across gritty golden sand sprinkled on his damp tanned flesh.

  Two years after that, the darkness of her backyard and the ghostly glow of the soccerball-sized hydrangeas. The fresh scent of night-blooming jasmine. The flinch of her stomach as his bony boy fingers touched her belly skin on their first, bold approach to her breast. The instant pebbling of her nipple beneath her neon bikini top and her naïve, desperate hope he wouldn’t notice.

  He had.

  “Something wrong?” he asked now.

  He’d always paid such close attention.

  She tossed her hair back and crossed her arms. “Nothing access to my car won’t fix right up.”

  “Give me a sec.”

  She let herself watch him stride off, his long legs so familiar, the wide plane of his back and his heavy-muscled shoulders so not. What had he done to earn that beefcake physique? What had he done with his life? What had happened to his eye?

  Did he ever hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and in his memory smell the fruity coconut-oil scent of suntan lotion? Would he then recall the way he rubbed it on her shoulders and then the small of her back, his fingertips sliding under her bikini bottoms to tease the round globes of her butt and then trace the half-hidden bumps of her tailbone?

  He’d been such a bad boy.

  Her bad boy.

  But the bad boy had grown into a one-eyed stranger who was already back with a hammer and who didn’t appear interested in talk.

  Or interested in her.

  So she clapped her mouth shut too and watched him break open the big crate.

  Then felt her jaw drop as out of frothy curls of shredded paper he drew a shrink-wrapped gingerbread cookie. A life-sized, frosted-in-colorful-detail sheep. Followed by a calf, a chicken, two lambs. Then it was figures. A man, a woman, an angel, a baby in a cradle. Baby Jesus.

  A whole, to-human-scale Nativity scene of gingerbread.

  Bailey had to blink a few times to believe her eyes. “Someone has a Neiman Marcus catalog and a triple-platinum AmEx card,” she said.

  He said nothing. In silence he stacked the cookies on the lawn, shoved the packing material into a garbage bag, then finally broke down the wood carton, piling the pieces far enough away to create getaway space for her.

  Getaway. Great. Perfect. All that she would have asked Santa for if she’d ever had the chance to believe in him.

  But the craziness of the family business during December had prompted her parents to forgo the usual fantasy for their child. With Santa visits part of The Perfect Christmas’s holiday schedule, instead it had made sense for them to explain that the man in the red suit who spent afternoons in their store was an out-of-work navy vet and that the character who supposedly left gifts on Christmas mornings for good little girls and boys was none other than their mommies and daddies.

  But shhh! she had to keep the secret for everyone else.

  So she was good at keeping quiet and she continued the practice as she ducked into her car, turned the key, then slipped it into reverse.

  Not putting voice to her questions for Finn didn’t make them disappear, though. Just as wishing her memories of him to a cobwebbed shelf in the back corner of her brain didn’t immediately send them there either.

  But the fact that he didn’t appear the least bit affected by her presence—or their past—should make the banishments not far off. Just, say, five minutes away.

  Before that could happen, though, a knock on her driver’s door window made her jump. The one-eyed pirate who was moments from being out of her mind forever was giving her another expressionless look from his one dark eye.

  Bailey unrolled the windo
w, trying to appear as if she’d already forgotten who he was and what they’d once meant to each other.

  It certainly appeared as if he had.

  “Yes?” she asked. “Did you want something?”

  “Just checking.”

  She frowned at him. “Checking for what?”

  “That you’re still into skipping good-byes.” And then he turned, leaving without another word.

  She put the pedal to the metal and got out of there as quick as she could too.

  Her palm smacked the steering wheel as she drove off. He had to do it, didn’t he? Just when she was sure she could parlay his disinterest into her own, he had to make that little crack.

  God, she hoped it was a wear-her-heels-down day at the store. Not just because they needed the business, but because without that, she was lost. Without a steady stream of spending customers, it was a damn certainty she wasn’t going to be able to think of anything or anyone but Finn.

  Finn Jacobson stalked back into his grandmother’s kitchen, pissed off at himself for making that last remark—almost as pissed off as he was at Bailey. The fact that he was feeling anything toward her at all made his back teeth grind and the bones around his missing eye ache like a bitch.

  On his way to the refrigerator, he kicked the leg of a wooden chair, shoving it toward the farmhouse table. Then he jerked open the door to reach for a beer and had to swallow his curse as Gram nearly caught him at it when she came through the other door.

  “Finn?” Her frail—too frail—hands stroked the velour of her holiday-red sweatsuit. Her lipstick matched, and with her white hair and white running shoes she looked like a sporty Mrs. Claus. Sporty, but not yet one hundred percent recuperated from the pneumonia that had hit her hard last month. She was on the road to recovery, though.