For This Christmas Only Read online

  But she pointed at him. “I wasn’t trying to score a point. I’m proving to you that you are wrong. What about family? What about your dad? My brother idolizes our dad.”

  Displeasure touched his face. “We’re talking more than necessary to keep up appearances.”

  “No, we’re not. This is what a real girlfriend would do, you know.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Seriously, it is. You’re not supposed to toss your date onto haystacks without warning. You are supposed to talk to her over drinks, even nonalcoholic drinks. You truly have never had a girlfriend, have you?”

  He gave her the unnecessary question look again—with a good dose of that alpha arrogance.

  Right. There was no way this man was an untouched virgin.

  “Fine,” she said. “Then what kind of weird girlfriends have you had? What do you even do on a date, if you don’t talk?”

  He gave her a look: Really? Then he sat back and let his gaze roam over her hair. Without the ski cap, her hair had to be messy, even a little wild. He took his time, studying her hair from the crown of her head to where she’d tucked it behind her ear, tilting his head as if he were deciding whether or not he was satisfied yet with how wild it looked.

  Yet. If not, he’d undoubtedly take her for another tumble to get her looking thoroughly debauched. He’d probably start by whispering a sexy something into her bared ear.

  Mallory felt naked without her hat. If this was how he looked at a woman’s hair on a public park bench, how would he look at a woman in his bedroom, when she was all his and completely exposed to his gaze?

  Eli’s gaze glanced over her heated cheeks, before he raised an eyebrow. Any more questions?

  “In the park?” she asked, incredulous.

  Silence.

  “On a bench?”

  He gave her the hint of a purse of his lips, the faintest imitation of Zoolander, spoofing a supermodel.

  Mallory burst into laughter. “How many of your dates end by being jailed for public indecency?”

  He couldn’t sustain the smolder. She caught the twinkle in his eye just before he looked down at his cup, but his shoulders gave him away.

  “Eli, is that an actual chuckle? Are you laughing? You are.” She poked him in the chest. “You are trying so hard not to smile.”

  He caught her finger mid-jab and pressed her gloved hand to his chest. She tried to pull her hand back, but he held tight.

  She reversed course and pressed her hand into his chest. “Is that a heart I feel beating? You do have a heart, Tin Man. You’ve just gotten rusty when it comes to smiling. You need an oilcan, that’s all.”

  “You do have a brain, Scarecrow. You just need the diploma, that’s all.”

  Oof. Mallory had walked herself right into that one. In the movie, the Scarecrow hadn’t really needed a diploma, but it had been part of his happily-ever-after.

  She didn’t let her confident façade slip. “They just hand them to you in Oz, apparently, as long as you can prove you murdered a wicked witch.”

  “You’ll earn yours.”

  He spoke like her success was a foregone conclusion. He really would be a great narrator for her book. She supposed a business planning guide would be an odd choice for a bedtime story, but if he were reading it, she’d go to sleep feeling hopeful that she had what it took to change her world for the better, drifting into a night of happy dreams as she snuggled against his chest, listening to that deep voice...

  He let go of her hand and slouched a little, stretching his legs out in front of him, crossing his ankles in those classic boots. “If this date requires more talking, then go ahead. Tell me about your childhood hero, instead of demanding to know about my nonexistent one.”

  “My childhood hero? Singular? I had many.”

  He nodded toward the last remaining children and the firefighter. “Tell me about one you met.”

  “The first one I remember was when I was six. I met Cinderella at Disney World, and I’m telling you, I thought I’d explode from the excitement. She asked me what my name was, and then she acted delighted to hear it, like it was the most special name in the world.”

  Eli smiled fully.

  Finally.

  With Christmas lights and music all around her, and with a handsome leading man beside her, the evening was taking on a magical glow. It felt like a real date, even though she knew it was not. She hadn’t forgotten for a moment, but he’d placed her hand on his chest as if he didn’t mind at all if she touched him, and now he was relaxed and smiling because he was enjoying their conversation.

  This was such a luscious little evening of make-believe. He would smile at her like this when she tossed that bedtime book aside and spread her hand on his chest—on his bare chest.

  “You remind me of my little sister,” he said.

  Ugh. No. Stop.

  “I think she was in kindergarten when she met Cinderella. She went crazy, too.” He shook his head at Mallory like she was in kindergarten herself. “What is it with you girls and a sparkly blue gown?”

  “A gown?”

  “That’s what girls love about Cinderella. A big, sparkling, blue gown.” The authority in his voice edged closer to derision. “It’s probably behind the wedding gown mania later in your lives.”

  His smile was for himself. He was so satisfied with his dissection of a children’s hero—worse, a girl’s hero. It reminded Mallory too much of her brother’s visits during his college breaks, as her one semester off had dragged into two. He’d take control of the TV as if only he knew how to operate it. Then he would dismiss her movie suggestions as silly girl-stuff. Her father would agree, although he’d enjoyed all the movies Mallory had watched with him to keep him company while he was a housebound invalid.

  She didn’t want Eli to be like that. “We weren’t excited about a blue gown. It was about the hero who was wearing the blue gown. She was—”

  “Heroine.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Hero can be gender neutral, and that was the most trivial big-brother thing to interrupt me with. I’m not your little sister. I’m your fake girlfriend.” You’re my birthday fantasy. Don’t ruin it.

  “All true.” He polished off his cup of hot chocolate.

  Mallory might have chosen to spend her birthday with a hot guy, but she wasn’t going to be patronized as if she were a child, not even by the hot guy. “The reason girls love Cinderella isn’t because she wore a pretty dress. Girls aren’t that shallow. Cinderella’s moment of victory isn’t her arrival at the ball in a glass carriage. It’s at the end of the story, when she doesn’t have a magical disguise. That’s when she wins. It’s about being seen, being valued even when you’re dressed in rags, not only when you’re in a sparkly blue gown.”

  “That’s what you’re thinking in kindergarten?”

  “Well, no. I don’t mean that kindergartners analyze a hero’s journey, but that’s when those ideas are being formed. Subconsciously, girls are excited to meet Cinderella in her sparkly blue gown, because they recognize that it’s a symbol that Cinderella is a winner.”

  “You said she wore rags when she won. They sell more dolls in sparkly blue gowns because that’s what little girls like, and it doesn’t matter whether or not the doll accomplished anything in the blue gown.”

  “It’s not about dolls.” Her frustration was real, but she faked being cool. “How about this? Soldiers earn medals when they are filthy dirty on a battlefield, but we dress them up in sharp uniforms and pin the medals on them later, while they’re looking their best. Cinderella won when she wore rags, but we like to see her looking her best, now that her battle is won.”

  Eli leaned in closer, a smile still flirting with the corners of his mouth as if he found the whole awful conversation entertaining. “A handsome prince noticed her while she wore a blue gown, then
a second time while she wore rags. Is that a battle victory? It’s not much.”

  “You’re right.” Mallory didn’t have to fake her sarcasm. “Thank you for proving that having a handsome man notice you isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Touché, once more.”

  His approval wasn’t thrilling now.

  “You think I’m handsome, at least,” Eli said. “I also fulfilled the requirement to notice you while you were not wearing a sparkly gown.”

  “I’m not wearing rags.” She said it as if it hadn’t taken forever to get the mothball smell out of her grandmother’s peacoat. It was humiliating to be only a mitten away from scrounging through a lost-and-found box. Mallory could feel a knot of old and new sadness clogging her throat. This whole evening had been terribly emotional, all quicksand and broken plans. “The only reason you noticed me was because I decided you would. I gave you no choice.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.” He raised his cup in a toast. “I would have missed out on some excellent hot chocolate.”

  With that meaningless bit of polite charm, he ended the subject. He’d torn apart her childhood hero for sport. End of discussion. Move on.

  I’m not done. Mallory crumpled her empty cup and threw it at the nearest trash can. It hit the side of the metal barrel and fell to the plank flooring. “Cinderella doesn’t care that the prince is rich. The important thing is that he loves her. She’ll have an ally from now on. A champion.”

  Eli looked bemused. “An affluent champion. One who can buy her sparkly blue gowns and put her up in a castle.”

  “Should she aspire to keep her rags and remain in her family’s attic? Do you know anyone whose life goal is to be poor?”

  “Yes.” He held up his empty cup. “The nuns that made this hot chocolate. Who knew women living in poverty would make something this rich?”

  “You’re being insufferable.” She crossed her arms, rounding her shoulders so that she wouldn’t be leaning against his arm on the back of the bench any longer. “You wouldn’t know a hero if one sat right next to you. Cinderella, for your information, was a hard worker even when life wasn’t fair to her, even when her own family wasn’t fair to her. Her prince and her castle and even that sparkly gown were what she deserved. She worked hard, and she got what she deserved after all her hard work.”

  “Hard work? It was servitude. She was treated like a servant by her own family, performing every chore they didn’t want to do themselves.”

  “I...”

  Servitude to her own family...

  Eli uncrossed his ankles and pushed himself out of his slouch, a leisurely lion toying with a mouse. “Worse than a servant. She wasn’t paid for all that hard work you admire. She got some food and a bed in a room where her family didn’t want to sleep.”

  “I...”

  Spare bedrooms and food...her own family...

  “She was being used,” he said, “and she was allowing herself to be used.”

  “Allowing it? Where was she supposed to go? A homeless shelter?”

  Cinderella hadn’t had any options. Mallory understood that. For years, she hadn’t been financially free to return to school. Her father had needed to pay for his medical bills instead. Her own savings had slowly dwindled down to nothing. It hadn’t seemed right to add something like a bottle of nail polish to Aunt Effie’s grocery cart, or even necessities like maxi pads or toothbrushes. Mallory would do Aunt Effie’s shopping for her, then purchase her own things separately.

  Mallory had been frugal, but her savings couldn’t last forever, and she couldn’t get a paying job to fill her account back up. Her family wouldn’t allow it. They’d needed her with them full-time. Who else would help an invalid get to the bathroom and back, day and night?

  Mallory had believed it would be impossible to go back to college without her family’s financial help, because they’d said so. Missed semester after missed semester, medical bills and home repairs, new televisions and used cars had taken priority over her.

  Worst of all, she’d been lied to by her own father. He’d told her he wasn’t getting disability payments from the government any longer, until the month that a paper check had arrived in the mail rather than being electronically deposited. Her father had claimed that he hadn’t realized he was still getting monthly payments. If the checks kept coming, he’d be able to send her back to school next year, he’d said, so she should be happy. But her father wasn’t a very good liar. She’d only felt betrayed.

  She would have still been waiting on her fifty-ninth birthday if she hadn’t made her own plan. E.L. Taylor had been right. Never believe those who say it can’t be done. There is always a way to get it done. They haven’t tried hard enough to find it. You will.

  “Cinderella is a terrible heroine for young girls.” Eli crumpled up his cup and pitched it toward the trash can with just the right arc, just the right amount of force to land it in the barrel. “That story teaches girls to keep hoping all the garbage they’re putting up with will magically disappear one day, so they continually put up with garbage. I don’t want my sister to believe that the possibility of a wealthy prince in the future is worth putting up with any kind of abuse in the present.”

  Any kind of abuse...by her own family...

  “Prince Charming could be poor, and he’d still be her choice. It’s about finding someone who doesn’t treat you like a servant. It’s choosing your own friends, and making your own family, if you need to. It’s having enough respect for yourself to be with people you can trust, instead of people who’ll lie to you to keep you where they want you.”

  None of which she’d done for herself.

  Eli’s laugh was more like a scoff. “Self-sacrifice and servitude won’t help you find any of that, either.”

  “Stop it.” Mallory pushed herself off the bench and took a step away, desperate to put some space between herself and his terrible, horrible opinions. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t understand anything.”

  “Mallory?” He stood, too, and had the audacity to look baffled. “We were talking about fairy tales. I was telling you that my little sister—”

  “We were not talking about fairy tales.” She stalked over to the trash can, scooped her cup off the ground and threw it into the barrel. “We were talking about heroes. My heroes.”

  “Childhood heroes. You must have outgrown Cinderella.”

  Eli had gentled his voice. He slowly put his hands into his pockets, as if she were a spooked horse, and he didn’t want to make any sudden moves to upset her.

  Too late.

  Eli had been the mirror. Everything Mallory had thought reflected well on Cinderella looked tragic when she saw it on herself. Mallory had been a woman used, letting herself be used, until she’d stumbled from a fairy-tale story to a business manual that had forced her to stop waiting for that magical moment when she’d be sent to the ball—back to Masterson. If she hadn’t been given that book as a birthday gift, whose house would she be sleeping in tonight, after she’d cooked and cleaned and administered the medicines, then cleaned up the food one more time when her great-aunt or grandfather was too sick to keep it down?

  She thought she might be sick herself. What if she hadn’t read that book? What if?

  “I’ve got to go.” She whirled around and clomped down the shallow wooden stairs as fast as she could, heading for the darkness, because she was about to bawl and she needed to do it in private. No one could see the worst version of herself. Her book said so, and her book had saved her.

  There was no darkness in this part of the park. Everything was bonfires and Christmas lights. Mallory started to jog down the row of booths, weaving around the people in line at each one, desperate to reach the darkness beyond the stage.

  “Mallory!”

  She didn’t want to talk to him. She was sorry she’d ever t
alked to him. She was—damn, damn, damn.

  She was wearing his super-expensive gloves.

  She stopped in her tracks and fumbled with the gloves, her vision blurring, her chest heaving as she fought to keep the sobs at bay—not here, not now—until strong hands, larger than her own, cupped hers together firmly but gently.

  His voice was just as firm and gentle. “Please, don’t leave yet.”

  Mallory lost her battle.

  She started to cry.

  Chapter Six

  Never apologize for being right.

  —How to Taylor Your Business Plan

  by E.L. Taylor

  God, he was an ass.

  Eli had known it for some time, but this was terrible, even for him. He’d made this genuinely interesting, expressive, attractive woman cry.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, a stupid command.

  “I’m n-not.” Tears ran down her face and she was doing something anxious with her hands.

  He tried to hold them still. “I didn’t realize your feelings were being hurt.”

  “This isn’t about my feelings. This is about you, and your lack of feelings.”

  He had nothing to do with this drama over a fairy tale, but Mallory’s face scrunched up as anger warred with sadness. If being angry with him stopped her tears, she was welcome to chew him out. Tears made him uncomfortable. Anger was easy to take.

  Best to let Mallory get it over with. He tossed her some easy bait. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She didn’t yell at him to let off some steam. Instead, her tone turned icy. “You’re so proud of not having a hero, of not ever having had a hero. You think that makes you superior to all the little girls who have hopes and dreams. I’m here to tell you, Eli, that it makes you worse.” She threw her hands apart, knocking his away. “It makes you a man who has no one to aspire to be like, no dream to reach for. You’re a man without any inspiration to keep growing.”

  He dropped his hands to his sides. A man without any inspiration. The world hadn’t noticed any change in him, none at all. How had she?