“Her job.” Bailey heard the sharp edge in her voice. “You said she did her job.”
“Yeah.” The stick was burning now like a tongue of flame. “But the problem is, see, I don’t know that her actions were dictated by the mission. There were other ways for it to play out that day which didn’t involve her standing up for that bullet. I wonder…was she thinking of me? Was she trying to impress me? Save me? I don’t know. But I should have seen, I should have sensed in those days and weeks before, that she wasn’t operating in pure agent mode. I should have worried about how far she would go for love.”
The smoke was stinging Bailey’s eyes. Blinking them away, she had to clear her throat too. “How could you look into someone else’s heart?”
“Easy.” His laugh sounded short and rough, and then he took a long draw from the flask. “I only had to look as far as my own. I was the same for you, Bailey, once upon a time. I would have done anything for you-hell, I did. I cleaned up my act, went to college, joined the Secret Service as my way of impressing you. A bullet? I would have taken that too.”
“I…I don’t know what to say.” She didn’t want to think about all she’d lost by running away.
“Good-bye will work.” He was staring down at the booze again. “Oh, that’s right, you tend to duck those.”
It stung, but this time she wasn’t leaving, even though the smoke was making her chest feel tight now too. “That’s not fair. I came here tonight, didn’t I? I came to talk to you about how you feel. I came here to…to be your friend.”
There was a charged moment of silence. Then he shot to his feet. Bailey twitched at his sudden movement, staring at him and how the light of the flames on his jeans and black sweatshirt made it appear as if he’d caught fire himself.
“My friend?” he repeated, his tone incredulous as he stared at her through the leaping blaze. “You call yourself my friend? You want to know how I feel?”
“Well, I…yeah.”
He threw back his head and laughed, a dark sound that made her think of pirates again. Or devils. “Be careful what you wish for, baby.”
Though it was clear that the alcohol, or his emotions, probably both, had caught up with him, Bailey needed to see this through. “I can take it.”
“Then how about this.” He snagged another piece of thick wood and threw it into the blaze. More sparks exploded, flying upward. “I feel torn to pieces over Ayesha. I feel pissed off that I lost my eye and my ability to do the job I love.”
More fuel was dumped on the fire, and pieces of ash swirled around him. “I hate that I couldn’t stop a disease that was leaching the life from Gram.”
Turning, he dropped his flask to the sand, then bent at the waist to pull something from the hodgepodge of wood beside him. When he straightened again, she could see it was a full-sized Christmas tree-but an old one, its needles dried to a rusty brown. “I’m damn depressed that it’s the holidays and I can’t think of a single thing worth celebrating.” With one strong movement, he lifted the tree over the concrete ring and jammed its trunk into the sand and into the center of the leaping fire.
As the needles burst into flame, crackling and popping, their corner of the beach turned bright as day. The heat forced Bailey to scoot back.
But not far enough to miss Finn’s next words, harsher and more biting than all the others. “And at the top of my list, I feel like letting you know you’re not my friend. Friends are people I trust. And you just don’t qualify.”
She was on her feet, backing away from the burn, but he still seared her.
“You, Bailey, you are nothing to me.”
Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas
Facts & Fun Calendar
December 23
Guidelines from a department store Santa Claus training school include admonishing Santa not to leave his chair even if a child has an “accident” and to always keep gloves and beard scrupulously clean. They further advise that it never looks quite right for Santa to flirt with the elves.
Chapter 23
Finn saw in another dawn. Three days ago it had been in Bailey’s bed, yesterday on the beach, today he sat on the wicker chair in the corner of Gram’s small porch. With his boots propped on the railing, he sipped another of the endless cups of coffee he’d been mainlining since dumping the last of his flask into the sand after running Bailey off.
Bingeing on booze no longer appealed-and he hoped was no longer necessary.
He took another swallow from his mug and paged through Desirée’s-aka the Mad Gift Giver’s-latest present. The poor little rich girl continued to come up with outrageous ways to assuage her guilt in the whole assassination debacle and to thank him for saving her father’s life-even though that father had little use and even less time for her.
Sort of like someone else he knew.
But he pushed that thought from his mind and turned another page, his gaze widening at the latest position detailed in the Kama Sutra pop-up book that had been left on the doorstep. A note in Desirée’s own handwriting guaranteed it was a one-of-a-kind faithful rendering of the ancient text on sexual behavior. “May it inspire you to great lengths for love,” she’d written in that perfect, boarding school handwriting of hers. He wasn’t sure she even realized the double-entendre.
And love wasn’t something he wanted to be thinking about either.
Despite himself, he glanced over at the house next door. Bailey’s Passat was still on the street. He couldn’t wait until she left town.
Then he could hunker down to make it through Christmas. Gram had specifically prohibited a funeral or memorial service, so his parents had encouraged him to head out to the Midwest to be with the rest of the family, including his new nephew, but he’d taken a pass. He didn’t plan on wallowing his way through the holiday so much as it didn’t feel right to leave Gram’s home empty right now.
Gram. Somehow, her memory didn’t hurt. That last morning, his sixth sense had failed him again. He’d had no clue that she’d pass on peacefully in her sleep, but he could accept that now. They’d had plenty of time to talk about her wishes and her attitude toward the end of life. More important, he could hear her telling him as clearly as if she were sitting beside him right now, over seventeen years she’d shared with him how to live it.
A car clattered its way around the turn at the end of the block. Finn placed his feet on the ground and craned his neck to see what was happening as the junker came to a stop behind Bailey’s car.
The passenger door popped open, and a young man unfolded from the seat. Then he ducked back in to pull out a backpack, two roly-poly duffels, and a shopping bag of wrapped gifts that he propped against the pole of the ribbon-bedecked mailbox. One more reach inside, and he drew out an extra-long sleeping bag that appeared to be stuffed from mummy toes to cinched neck with-Finn squinted as items spilled from a rip in the side-clothes. Having once been a college student himself, Finn hazarded a guess they were dirty clothes.
The boy grinned at the driver and waved a good-bye. Harry, Finn thought, home at last.
It was like that Christmas coffee commercial, when Peter arrives in the early a.m. to surprise sister and sleeping parents. But this prodigal son didn’t make it so far as the kitchen. Instead, suddenly the Christmas lights blazed on next door, and Tracy, Dan, and Bailey poured out of the front door and onto their porch.
Finn drew deeper into his corner so they wouldn’t see him, but he watched the reunion. Dan grabbed his son first, clapping him on the back, the sound loud enough to wake the neighborhood. Tracy got him next. Harry swung his mother up, and she hugged him close with one arm around his shoulders. Her other arm curled out to her husband, inviting him into the embrace. What followed was a Willis family huddle.