Once Upon a Christmas Eve Read online

  Max walked up behind her, looked over the top of her head.

  “The middle one needs to go left.”

  She could almost feel his heat radiating into her back. Too conscious of him, definitely not needing the way his nearness toyed with her nerves, she moved back to the window.

  She edged the little tree to one side, adjusted the one next to it.

  “Better,” he concluded.

  “Thanks,” she murmured.

  “What else do you need to do out here?” he asked. “Unless you need your notes, we can talk while we do it.”

  She had far more color than when he’d last seen her. Her cheeks were pinked by the cold breeze, her unadorned mouth was the color of a blush. Her eyes looked tired to him, though. Bothered by the latter, not questioning why, Max focused on the caution lifting from those dark depths. Even as it relieved him to see her smile forming, he reminded himself he was there to close a deal. He might as well get it done as quickly as possible.

  “Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “You wouldn’t be. I’m here, anyway.”

  The delicate wing of one eyebrow arched. “Is that the two-birds-with-one-stone approach to negotiating?”

  “Whatever works,” he replied, his shrug tight.

  His offer was a two-edged sword. Helping her outside while they discussed the issues they needed to address seemed infinitely preferable to being with her in the confines of her empty bistro. On the other hand, the last thing he wanted was to get involved in a decorating thing. The entire holiday season was something he didn’t so much ignore as he did endure. He didn’t have the luxury of ignoring it. There were too many parties to attend and too many clients to remember with gifts and cards and whatever else Margie reminded him needed to be done to pretend the season didn’t exist. So he simply tolerated it instead, and used it as a marketing tool.

  “If you’re willing,” Tommi conceded, “that would be great. I usually put lights around the windows. The little white ones like those,” she said, motioning to the pre-wrapped lights on the fake firs. “But I’d been thinking about just going with ‘simple’ this year.” The savings to her personal energy aside, she’d thought it would be pretty enough with the lights on the little trees reflecting on the windows at night.

  But pretty enough wasn’t as pretty as it could be.

  She didn’t care at all for the idea of doing less than her best.

  “If you were a customer here,” she prefaced, “which would you rather see? Understated decorations, or more festive ones?”

  “I’m not the right person to ask.”

  Tommi opened her mouth, closed it again. Considering his list of opinions about the rest of her operation, she had trouble believing that he’d go mute on something so visible. “But you eat out,” she reminded him as they started around the corner. “Do you think people feel something is missing if decorations are subtle?”

  “It depends on how they feel about this time of year. Some people probably want all the…trappings,” he called them. “Some people don’t.”

  The breeze blew a loose strand of hair across her cheek. Tipping her head so the wind could blow it back, she glanced over to see that he still had his hands jammed into his pockets. His left hand jingled his keys. Despite his conversational tone, there seemed to be a hint of defensiveness in his voice. That same subtle guard etched his profile as she stopped short of the bistro’s front door.

  He was one of those people who wished Christmas would disappear. She felt that as surely as she did her own disconnect from the season now. She just had no idea how long his aversion had existed.

  “I wasn’t thinking of how difficult this time of year can be for some people.” She’d been so caught up in her scramble to regain her sense of security that she’d considered little beyond what was required of her. “I know what you mean, though. I had a hard time with holidays for a long time, too.

  “I was ten when my dad died,” she said, since he already knew she’d grown up without him. “Before that, I remember Christmas being this wonderful sense of anticipation with parties and lights…” And feeling utterly safe in that little world, she thought. “For a long time after, Mom went through the motions for us, but it was never the same.

  “It took a long time to really look forward to the holidays,” she admitted, picking up a wreath from atop the plastic tub of lights. “But seeing everyone else happy made me happy, too. So, the spirit did come back. Just in a different way.”

  Lifting the wreath to the chalkboard mounted between the front door and the window, she hung it on the little hook above it. The words on the board, Welcome to The Corner Bistro, weren’t actually written on it in chalk. She’d just had them painted to look that way.

  With the greeting now encircled in noble fir and pine, she turned to meet the quiet curiosity in his otherwise guarded features.

  “I’m sorry about whatever it was that took the joy out of the season for you, Max. If whatever it is was recent, or if this time of year is still difficult, please don’t think you need to help with any of this. I’ll quit now and we can go inside.”

  He’d stopped toying with his keys, but the guard in his expression remained as he considered her. “It stopped being difficult a long time ago. I just look at it all now as a way to maintain client contacts.” He nodded toward the box beside her. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  She’d all but asked him to open up to her. At least a little. She truly didn’t want to overstep herself, and she certainly didn’t want to make a potentially recent hurt worse. She just needed badly to know more about him.

  Even without the need to know who she might be going into business with, she would have wanted to know what memory of his home had brought the quick distance about him the other day, and why he’d been so adamant about a man’s obligation to support his child when he’d just as clearly not liked the idea of having children himself. She wanted to know, too, why she sensed such restlessness in him. And what made him so inherently kind, yet so closed and inaccessible.

  She wanted to know if he ever felt the need to let someone in.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said, but gave her nothing else.

  The breeze picked up the scent of fresh pine from the wreath, scattered curled leaves down the wet sidewalk. With the tails of the red ribbon on the ring of greenery fluttering behind Tommi, Max watched the sympathy in her expression give way to apology for having bumped into something obviously uncomfortable for him. There was something more there, too. He just wouldn’t let himself wonder what it was as she murmured, “Thank you,” and turned away.

  Her perception had caught him completely off guard. So had her concern for him. Not sure what to make of either, or how to take away the quick unease he’d caused her to feel, he settled for dismissing the concern as inconsequential and tried to ignore the rest.

  “If you don’t mind, you can help me put lights around the windows.”

  Thinking she looked more tired, and more wary, than she probably realized, he looked up. The top of the window was only nine feet or so from the sidewalk. Not far, but too far to stretch. “I don’t mind. You shouldn’t be on a ladder, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  Max’s expression remained utterly unreadable to Tommi. So did his glance as it slid to where her jacket covered her stomach.

  “You just shouldn’t.” A frown finally surfaced. “How do you hang those things?”

  “On the clips. They’re inside the frame. But wait a minute,” she said, catching his arm as he started past her.

  Conscious of how the muscle in his jaw jerked when he met her eyes, she pulled away her hand. She didn’t step back, though, not even from his odd displeasure. Though the street was all but deserted, she didn’t want her voice to carry on the chill breeze.

  “I’m only pregnant,” she murmured, afraid her condition was influencing him after all. “It’s not like a disease or a disability, Max. I can d
o everything I usually do. I told you the other day that I’ll keep up all the things I’ve always done here. I meant that.”

  “I wasn’t insinuating that you couldn’t keep up.”

  The woman was determined to a fault. Stubborn, too. But what he saw in her gentle features looked too vulnerable for him to believe it was just her independence driving her.

  “I was only thinking that you look pretty tired, and that you might not want to fall.” He hated that she kept stressing so much. It couldn’t possibly be good for her. “The ladder is wet and your soles are leather. Mine aren’t.”

  Her glance fell to their feet. Her boots were suede with a stylish little heel. His heftier ones were made for hiking. He was just being logical, she realized. And thoughtful. The way he had been at the hotel. And the other day when he’d stayed close so he could catch her again if she fell.

  He was looking out for her.

  That realization touched her in ways she knew she shouldn’t let matter, but mattered far too much, anyway.

  “Just for the record,” he added, “I have no doubt that you’ll continue pushing to do everything you do. Stop worrying. Okay?”

  His phrasing lent an odd edge to his assurance. But that assurance was all she cared about just then.

  “Does that mean you’ll drop the on-site manager clause?” she asked.

  The edge faded.

  “We’ll drop it,” he agreed. “We’ll go with a modified silent partnership.”

  “Modified?”

  “Come on. Hand me some lights before it starts raining again,” he said. “We’ll talk while we get them up.

  “By modifying,” he explained, climbing the ladder as she unwound the string of clear lights, “I mean the company will take our agreed-on forty percent interest in your business in return for paying for the expansion. For the first year, we’ll also pay all salaries, including the new chef’s.” He took the string she handed him, turned to the window. “You’ll retain full creative and managerial control and send us monthly reports, but we’ll set caps on salaries and insurance.”

  Her sixty percent left her with controlling interest. That part was huge. It was the part she couldn’t control that bothered her. “I’m still not comfortable with cutting pay and benefits.”

  Arms stretched above him, he slipped the string into the clips under the high window frame. “I know you’re not. And I know it’s hard for you not to be generous,” he admitted, his tone utterly patient. “But that generosity is what prevented you from qualifying for a loan and having to go with a partnership instead.”

  “I wasn’t being generous.” The realization that he was looking out for her lingered. So did the undeniable draw of that knowledge. Yet, the hard-core businessman in him clearly didn’t allow him to see what seemed so apparent to her. “I was just being fair.”

  “You can’t afford to be that ‘fair,’” he pointed out, then asked for another string of lights.

  Since she couldn’t effectively argue his logic, she didn’t try. She just handed him what he’d asked for, then took over clipping the string down the side of the frame and along the bottom of the window behind the trees when he got to where she could reach it herself.

  “Does the franchise clause have to stay?” Surely that could go, she thought. The only bistro she wanted was the one she had now.

  “You want that clause,” he assured her. “Franchising can make you a wealthy woman.”

  “I don’t need to be wealthy,” she insisted, wondering if it was his expression or her nerves that seemed a little tight when she reached the side of the window and he took over. “I just need to earn enough for me and my baby to be comfortable.”

  “You’ll be more comfortable with a bigger nest egg. And, probably,” he muttered, his back to her, “a bigger nest.”

  She already had plans to move to the two-bedroom apartment down the hall. When she told him that, his response was to meet her eyes, shake his head at what he apparently considered her lack of grander foresight, snap in the last light and say, “What’s next?”

  She told him they needed to do the window on the side.

  “Then, what about the lease on the space next door?” she asked, moving on to the expansion as they carried box and ladder around the corner. “Do you deal with that or do I?”

  “Our office will take care of it.”

  He set the ladder in place, climbed up. With him near the top rung, her eyes were even with his boots as she held up lights. “And the contractor?”

  “Scott will handle that,” he said over the tick of tiny bulbs bumping glass. “You’ll just need to oversee the design.”

  Scott. She kept forgetting about him. She hadn’t forgotten the information he’d imparted about his partner, though, spare as it had been.

  “He called yesterday.” Just after she’d removed his roses from the bar because they’d started to fade. “He wanted to make sure all my questions were being answered, and to tell me to call him if there was anything I didn’t understand.”

  What he’d actually said was that he wanted to make sure his partner was treating her right, and that she shouldn’t let Max’s workaholic tendencies intimidate her. According to him, Max often forgot that the rest of the world didn’t live, eat and breathe expansions and acquisitions. He’d assured her he’d be back toward the end of the week. Then, the two of them could start working together.

  She wasn’t especially looking forward to that. Probably, she thought, because the man still sounded interested in pursuing her along with her business. Yet, he was part of the company to which a huge part of herself would soon belong. It only made sense to know more about him.

  Since she’d mentioned Scott, Max hadn’t said a thing as he continued tackling her chore for her.

  “Does he have family here?”

  He gave the string a tug. “A stepmother.”

  The loose end of the string had caught on one of the little fir trees. She unsnagged it. “Did he lose his father, too?”

  The lights seemed to tick against the glass more sharply.

  “Years ago.”

  “Are they close?”

  “Who?”

  “Your partner and his stepmother.”

  “Not especially,” he muttered, sounding as if he might be understating considerably.

  “Does he have other family?”

  Looking up, she saw the underside of his strong jaw tighten.

  “If you have questions about Scott, you’ll have to ask him.”

  “Then, what about you? Do you have family here?”

  From his hesitation, it seemed he didn’t like that question, either.

  “No, I don’t,” he said and clipped in two more lights.

  “They must be in Los Angeles, then.”

  He aimed a frown at her upturned face. “Why do you think that?”

  “Your website said you earned your MBA at UCLA. I thought maybe you grew up there.”

  “I grew up in a lot of places.”

  “So you have family in different cities?”

  He’d reached the end of the string. Or, maybe, it was his rope. With his frown deepening the creases in his forehead, he climbed down the ladder and took the bundle of lights she held. Once that was strung they’d be finished.

  The almost comfortable ease they’d managed as they’d worked on the front window had vanished like smoke in the wind.

  “Are you using the back door or the front?” he asked, totally ignoring her question.

  “Back.”

  “I’ll put these up. You take the box inside and I’ll bring the ladder. It’s starting to rain.”

  It seemed to Tommi that there was nothing quite so deafening as the sound of a slammed door. Especially when standing right in front of it.

  It was barely raining at all. Just a few little drops that hardly qualified as a sprinkle, much less anything requiring escape.

  Escape from her was clearly what he wanted as he turned away. From her questions
, anyway.

  He just as clearly expected her to take the hint.

  The man had no idea how tenacious she could be when she really wanted something.

  “You did the high parts,” she reminded him, taking the lights back to finish them up herself. “I can do the rest. And, by the way, I’ve answered every question you’ve asked me.” Clips snapped as she secured green wire. “You know everything about me from my checking account balance to something my family doesn’t even know.”

  “I need to know who we’re doing business with,” he defended.

  “So do I,” she defended, right back. “I need to know who I’m doing business with, too.”

  She glanced around to see a muscle in his jaw jerk. She had a point and he knew it. He didn’t like that she had one, either. She just couldn’t begin to imagine why that was.

  Looking caught, not liking it, he finally conceded.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “About your family,” she said, trying not to sound exasperated. “About where you’re from.” About your personal life, or if you even have one, she thought. “Something that tells me who you are besides a fabulously successful investor who tracks down properties for big corporations.”

  Max wasn’t sure if the twitch at the corner of his mouth was a smile or a grimace. He liked the compliment. He liked the way her frustration with him animated her expression. What he didn’t care for at all was how she kept walking all over the graveyard of a past he’d laid to rest long ago.

  “It’s actually the other way around. The investment part is a sideline.”

  It seemed to be all she could do not to roll her eyes. Exasperation fairly leaked from her fine pores.

  “As for the rest of it,” he conceded, keeping it simple, “my mother is dead, I never knew my father and I have no idea what family is supposed to be.” The whole concept had eluded him. He knew nothing of how that dynamic worked. “If it’s blood relatives you’re talking about, I imagine I have them somewhere, but I don’t know who they are. As for anyone else who might have once qualified, I had a wife who left after six months about twenty years ago. I grew up in Nevada and Southern California. Scott has always lived in Washington,” he added, since she was, rightfully, entitled to background on both of them, “but like I said before, you’ll have to ask him about the rest of it.”