That Holiday Feeling: Silver BellsThe Perfect HolidayUnder the Christmas Tree Page 9

  He stuck the key in the lock, turned it and pushed open the heavy door, noting as he did that it was in serious need of paint. It had once been bright red, as had all the shutters on the house. Now it was faded to a shade only slightly deeper than pink. Maybe he’d take care of that while he was here. It would be a fitting homage to Mae to see the doors and shutters restored to their scarlet holiday brilliance.

  He was about to close the door when a girl—just about the size of the snow angel outside, he noted—skidded to a stop in front of him on one of the scooters his company made. It had been the hottest gift of the holiday season two years ago. It was not meant to be used indoors, though he could understand the temptation given the wide expanse of hardwood floors. And it wasn’t as if those floors were in particularly great shape. They could do with sanding and a fresh coat of wax. Something else he could do while he was here…in Mae’s memory.

  First, though, he had to figure out who was this imp of a child regarding him with blatant curiosity, her golden hair scooped through the opening of a baseball cap, her T-shirt half in and half out of her jeans.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded in the no-nonsense tone he used on executives who’d failed to deliver on their division’s projections.

  The kid didn’t even flinch. “I’m Hannah and I live here. Who are you? And how come you have a key to my house?”

  Trace’s head began to throb. What the devil was Mae up to? “Are your parents here?”

  “Just my mom. My dad divorced us. He lives in Florida. My mom’s baking Christmas cookies.” She cast an appealing smile at him. “Don’t they smell great?”

  Trace automatically sniffed the air. They did smell fantastic, just the way Mae’s always had. He’d eaten fancier food than what was served at Holiday Retreat, but he’d never had any that tasted better or was prepared with more love. He wondered if Hannah’s mom shared Mae’s talents in the kitchen, then sighed. That was hardly the point.

  “Want me to get my mom?” Hannah inquired.

  “I’ll find her,” Trace said, heading determinedly toward the kitchen. He’d taken only a step before he turned back. “By the way, that scooter is not an indoor toy.”

  The kid’s smile never faltered. “Maybe not, but it works great in here.” And off she went, completely unimpressed by his admonishment.

  Trace sighed and went in search of her mother.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected, but it certainly wasn’t the frail wisp of a woman who was bent over in an incredibly provocative pose, her head stuck halfway into the huge, professional-quality stainless-steel oven that had been Mae’s pride and joy.

  This room was where Mae had splurged, spending her money to design a kitchen that was both welcoming and efficient. Everything in it, from the refrigerator to the granite countertops, was top-of-the-line. When she had shown it to Trace a few years ago, she’d been as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. She told him it was how she’d spent her first dividends from her stock in Franklin Toys.

  And now there was an interloper in here, he thought, feeling oddly possessive on Mae’s behalf. Unless this woman could prove her right to be on the premises, Trace would have her packed up and out of here before nightfall, even if he had to call on local law enforcement to toss her out on her attractive backside.

  Despite his impatience to accomplish that task, and rather than risk scaring her half to death while she was that close to incinerating herself, he waited, barely resisting the desire to haul her out of there immediately and demand an explanation for her presence.

  Of course, he was also having some difficulty resisting the urge to smooth his hand over that narrow curve of her denim-clad bottom. That, he concluded, was a very dangerous temptation. He admonished himself to forget it the same way he’d scolded Hannah only moments earlier. He hoped he paid more attention to the warning than she had, since there was likely a lot more at stake than scarred floorboards.

  The woman finally retreated, holding a tray almost as big as she was. As she turned to set it on the granite countertop, she spotted him and let go of the tray with a yelp of surprise. Trace caught it in midair, then let out a curse of his own as the hot metal seared his fingers. He dropped the tray with a clatter. Cookies went flying. And the woman regarded him as if he were a living, breathing embodiment of Scrooge and he’d deliberately set out to ruin her Christmas.

  “Look what you’ve done,” she said, scowling at him as she bent to pick up the broken remains of sugar cookies decorated with pretty red and green designs. She waved a hatless Santa with half a beard under Trace’s nose. “Just look at this.”

  She didn’t seem one bit concerned with the fact that he’d burned himself trying to save her blasted cookies. He stepped past her and stuck his hands under cold running water. That finally got her attention.

  “Oh, fudge, you burned yourself, didn’t you?” she said. “What was I thinking? I’m sorry. Here, let me see.”

  She nudged up against him and grabbed his hand. Her touch was anything but soothing. In fact, now Trace was suddenly burning on the inside, too.

  “Sit,” she ordered before he could unscramble his thoughts. “There’s a first-aid kit around here somewhere.”

  “Cabinet next to the stove,” Trace told her, blowing on his fingers.

  She stopped and stared. “How do you know that?”

  “Mae was always getting distracted and having little accidents in the kitchen. She said it paid to keep the bandages close at hand.”

  Rather than fetching the first-aid supplies, the woman sank down onto a chair, her eyes promptly filling with unshed tears. “She did say that, didn’t she?” she whispered. “I must have heard her say it a hundred times. And even before she remodeled in here, she kept aloe and antiseptic spray and bandages right by the stove.”

  Trace was startled by the depth of emotion in this stranger’s voice. Her love for Mae was written all over her face. That much raw pain was more than he knew how to deal with; his own emotions were shaky enough. He stepped carefully around her and got his own ointment and bandages, using the time to collect himself and try to fill with renewed resolve the tiny chink she’d created in his desire to be rid of her.

  When he was finished repairing the damage to his hand, he finally risked another look at her. The color had returned to her cheeks, but there was no mistaking the signs of a woman on the edge. He’d seen that same stressed expression often enough on his mother’s face, the same tightness around the mouth, the wariness in her eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked at last.

  She nodded, still blinking back tears. “Sometimes it just catches me off guard, the fact that she’s gone. I hadn’t seen her in several years, but I always had such wonderful memories of being here, especially around the holidays.”

  That must have been a long time ago, Trace thought with a surprising surge of anger on Mae’s behalf. He’d been here with Mae every year since that trip when they’d first met. He’d never been entirely sure how she’d cajoled him into coming, but year after year he’d found himself driving north from New York City, looking forward to spending time with the closest thing he had to family now that his folks were both dead.

  Oddly, on none of those trips had he ever caught a glimpse of the man in Mae’s life. Only at the end had she explained why, that Nate had his own family responsibilities, duties that he had never once shirked through all the years they had loved each other. It had been an unconventional love—an impossible love—she had explained to Trace. The man’s wife had suffered a nervous breakdown years before, when his children were little more than toddlers. Nate could never bring himself to divorce her during all the long, lonely years when he’d struggled as a single dad, watching his wife’s mind deteriorate degree by degree. He had been the rock that held his family together…and the other half of Mae’s soul. If she regretted anything about their long, secret affair, she never once complained of it to Trace. And it had certainly never soured her
on the possibilities of romance.

  It was little wonder, though, that Mae had sought out Trace’s company around the holidays, he had realized as she told him the story. The loneliness at a season meant for sharing with family and friends must have been unbearable. Trace wondered if this woman even knew about that part of Mae’s life.

  “If you hadn’t been here for years, why are you here now?” Trace asked, unable to hide the note of bitterness in his voice. “Did you come to pick over her belongings?”

  She seemed startled by the hostility in the question—or maybe by the fact that he thought he had the right to ask it. “I’m here because my aunt left Holiday Retreat to me,” she said eventually. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m Savannah Holiday. Mae was my grandfather’s sister. And you are? How did you get in here, anyway?” She sighed. “Hannah, I suppose. I’ve told her and told her about not opening the door to strangers.”

  It didn’t seem to occur to Savannah Holiday that it had taken her a long time to get around to asking about his identity. In New York, the police would probably have been called the second he appeared in the kitchen doorway and the answers to all those questions could have been sorted out later.

  “I’m Trace Franklin,” he said. “A friend of Mae’s.” He retrieved the key from his pocket and plunked it on the table where it glinted in the sunlight. “And I got in with this, though I did see your daughter as I came in.”

  She stared at the key. “Where did you get that?”

  “From your aunt.”

  “Why would she give you a key to Holiday Retreat?”

  “Because she’d invited me here for the holidays.” He was only now beginning to grasp just how diabolical that invitation had been. His finding the alluring Savannah Holiday and her daughter underfoot was clearly no accident, but Mae’s last-ditch effort at matchmaking. He wondered if Savannah Holiday had figured out what her aunt was up to.

  He regarded his unexpected housemate with a wry expression. “Merry Christmas!”

  Three

  Compared to the man sitting across from her with his cool, flinty gaze and designer wardrobe, Savannah felt like a dowdy waif. She was pretty sure there was flour in her hair and, more than likely, red and green sprinkles on her nose. When it came to baking, she did it with more enthusiasm than tidiness or expertise. The results were equally unpredictable, though she’d been particularly proud of the batch of golden cookies that were currently lying in crumbles around her feet.

  She regarded this interloper with caution, in part at least because his presence rattled her. She’d felt a little flicker of awareness the instant he’d entered the kitchen. At first she’d attributed it to surprise, but then she’d realized it was a whole lot more like the sensation she’d experienced the first time she’d met Rob. It was the caught-off-guard, heart-stopping reaction of a woman to a virile, attractive male…or a doe when confronted by a rifle-toting hunter. She was stunned to discover that she was even remotely susceptible to a man after the bitterness of her divorce, especially to a man wearing the clothes of a business executive to a country inn. It was something her uptight ex-husband would have done.

  Because her reaction made her uneasy, she focused on the one topic guaranteed to take her mind off it. “You said Mae invited you here. You do know that my aunt died, right?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  His expression was almost as bleak as the one Savannah saw in the mirror every morning. “But you came anyway,” she said, impressed despite the instinct that told her this man was anything but sentimental.

  “It’s what she wanted,” he said simply. “I promised I would.”

  “And you always keep your promises?”

  “I try,” he said. “I don’t make that many, and the ones I do make mean something.”

  “What about your family? Won’t they miss you over the holidays?”

  “In recent years Mae was the closest thing I had to family. What about your family?”

  “Hannah’s here. For all intents and purposes, she’s all I have. My husband and I divorced a year ago.” She hesitated, then added, “My parents and I aren’t on speaking terms at the moment.”

  “I see.”

  She was grateful that he didn’t bombard her with a lot of questions about that. “How did you know Mae? Forgive me, but you don’t look as if you spend a lot of time in the country.”

  He laughed at that, and it transformed his face. The tight lines around his mouth eased. His dark eyes sparkled. “What gave me away?”

  “The clothes, for starters. I’m amazed you stayed upright walking from the car to the house in those shoes. I don’t think snow is kind to Italian leather. And I can’t imagine that you’d be able to spend more than a few minutes outdoors before freezing in that shirt. Men around here tend toward flannel.”

  “But I think the real secret is what they wear under it,” he said, barely containing what promised to be a wicked grin.

  Savannah’s thoughts automatically veered off in a very dangerous direction. She had the oddest desire to strip off his clothes to see if there were practical long johns underneath. She’d never thought that sort of men’s underwear to be particularly sexy, but she imagined Trace Franklin could do amazing things for the look.

  “You’re blushing,” he said, regarding her with amusement.

  “Well, of course I am! I hardly know you, and here we are discussing underwear.”

  “It can be a fascinating topic, especially if we move from cotton to satin and lace.”

  She frowned at him. “You’re deliberately trying to rattle me, aren’t you?”

  “Why would I do that?” he asked, trying for a serious expression. The twinkle in his gray eyes betrayed him.

  “I can’t imagine, especially when all I was trying to find out was what drew a city man like you to spend time in a country retreat.” She studied him thoughtfully, then said, “There must have been a woman involved.”

  “Bingo. The woman who brought me here years ago was envisioning a quiet, romantic getaway with long hikes through the woods.” He shrugged and gave her a beguilingly sheepish look. “Instead I spent the weekend holed up in Mae’s study with my computer and fax machine taking care of a business crisis.”

  Savannah immediately felt a surprising empathy for the woman. “Now, that I can imagine. Your friend must have been disappointed.”

  “Dreadfully.”

  “What sort of business?”

  “I own a company in New York,” he said in such a dismissive way that it sparked her curiosity.

  “Franklin,” Savannah recalled thoughtfully. “Not Franklin Toys, by any chance?”

  He seemed startled that she’d grasped it so quickly. “That’s the one. How on earth did you figure that out?”

  “There were some articles about that company on Mae’s desk. Obviously she kept up with it.”

  “I imagine so,” he said, his expression noncommittal.

  “Because she knew you from your visits here?” Savannah persisted, sensing there was more.

  He shrugged. “That was the start of her interest, I suppose.”

  She frowned at his evasiveness. “What aren’t you saying?”

  “What makes you think I’m leaving something out?”

  “Instinct.”

  “Okay, then, here’s the whole story in a nutshell. I suppose I owe you that, since I’ve shown up on your doorstep out of the blue,” he said. “Your aunt was the one who encouraged me to start the company. I’d been with another toy manufacturer for a few years. I’d learned all I could, and I had a lot of ideas for ways to do it better. Mae was an early investor in Franklin Toys. Over the years she and I made a lot of money together, but I owe every bit of that success to her initial encouragement.”

  “I see,” Savannah said slowly. “So that first trip here wasn’t a waste of your time after all. Did your relationship with the woman last?”

  “Only for as long as it took me to get her back to her a
partment in New York that Sunday night,” he said with no hint of regret. “My friendship with Mae lasted much longer.”

  “Then you came back here often?” she asked, feeling a vague sense of regret and guilt that he’d spent these last years with her aunt, when she should have been the one spending time here.

  “As frequently as I could,” he said. “Your aunt was a remarkable woman. I enjoyed my visits with her.”

  “Even if she did live essentially in the middle of nowhere,” Savannah said, needing to remind herself that this man bore way too many resemblances to her ex-husband.

  “Funny thing about that,” he said, picking up one of the few sugar cookies they’d managed to salvage and breaking off a bite. “I got used to the peace and quiet. And the phone lines, fax and Internet connections work just fine.”

  “So even though you’re here for the holidays, I suppose you brought all of your equipment along,” she guessed.

  “Of course.”

  Savannah shook her head. “I hope you watch your cholesterol. Anybody who’s as much of a workaholic as you appear to be is clearly a heart attack waiting to happen.”

  “I’ll try not to have one while I’m here,” he promised solemnly.

  “Thank you for that. I’m afraid I don’t have the kind of insurance it would take to cover your medical expenses if you collapse and fall down the stairs.”

  He grinned. “I do.”

  “Well, then, I suppose you can stay,” she said grudgingly, thinking of the extra work involved in having a guest in a house that was all but falling down around them.

  He regarded her with a wry expression. “I had no intention of doing anything else.”

  “You’ll have to pitch in and help,” she said, deliberately ignoring his remark. “I’m afraid the inn isn’t officially ready for guests again.”

  “I’m not a guest—not the way you mean, anyway. And I came expecting to take care of myself. The attorney said the refrigerator would be stocked, and I brought along plenty of food from the city.”