Mistletoe Man

“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said, her throat thick and aching with emotions she had no right to express. No right, really, even to feel. “Of course you’re right. I’ll stay.”

Roc brought them lunch in the office area, and while they ate the surprisingly delicious fare—a light, creamy soup and a platter full of fresh fruits and hunks of cheese—Daniel finished studying the documents pertaining to Hamilton Homes.

Lindsay and Roc chatted quietly while Daniel read. Within a very few minutes, Lindsay found herself growing accustomed to Roc’s odd looks and earthy language. She even forgot about his hook, until, with a twinkling wink, he speared the last chunk of cheddar cheese with it and plopped it into his mouth. Lindsay blinked, and then, as if he’d done something quite clever, both of them laughed out loud.

Daniel looked up, frowning, his concentration broken, but Roc just laughed harder. “Go back to your homework, Danny Boy. Can’t you tell the lady and I are busy?”

And with no more than a wry twist of his mouth, Daniel did just that. Lindsay tried to relax. Roc was so natural, so uninhibited, treating Lindsay, whom he had known for approximately an hour, exactly the same way he treated Daniel—it really was impossible not to like him.

Daniel was another matter. Lindsay kept sneaking glances at him, wondering what he thought of the financial details he was learning about Hamilton Homes. It wasn’t all good news, not by any means. She tried to read the set of his mouth, the angle of his body, but it was hopeless. She didn’t know him well enough. She found herself distracted by the play of winter’s odd bluehued sunlight against the black of his hair.

“You wouldn’t know it now,” Roc said, breaking into her abstraction with a plaintive voice, “but twenty years ago I was a great deal more handsome than our Danny Boy. I was a big man, a man’s man, not puny like this fellow here.”

“I’m six-two, you old liar,” Daniel said without taking his eyes from the documents.

Roc chortled. “Puny, like I said.” He stretched out, black jeans covering limbs as long and thick as tree trunks. “Me, I’m not an inch under six-five, and if I’d met you twenty years ago I’d have swept you off your feet, Miss Lindsay.”

Daniel made one last note on the papers, and, sighing, he let the pen drop to the desk. “Don’t you have some caretaking to do, Roc? Big man’s man like you? Wood to chop? Roofs to shingle? Dishes to wash?”

“Nothing wrong with a man washing dishes,” Roc said defensively, lumbering to his feet. “Still, I’d better go,” he whispered to Lindsay as he gathered the empty bowls and munched the last of the grapes. “Danny here can’t stand the competition.”

When he was gone, Lindsay took a deep breath and, folding her hands in her lap, faced Daniel with the stoic air of a witness taking the stand. For Robert’s sake, she had to pull this off. Dear, gentle, improvident Robert, lying in a hospital room right now, impotently worrying, wondering how her interview was progressing.

She waited for the first question, the first scathing comment about what a financial mess Hamilton Homes was in. But the thick silence lengthened uncomfortably. Daniel merely sat with his elbows on his desk, looking contemplatively at her over his steepled fingers, until she felt such tension in her chest that she thought she might scream.

“I know the figures look bad,” she said, unable to bear the loaded silence another minute. “Robert’s been having some problems lately.”

“Evidently,” he murmured, his lips against his fingertips.

“Well, don’t you have any questions?” She had come armed with facts and proposals, with explanations for Robert’s errors and suggestions for how to redeem them. She’d certainly never pictured the interview going like this, with Daniel McKinley sitting there, bored or sleepy or just plain indifferent, his blue eyes half closed, his syllables short and ironic. “Don’t you want to know exactly how this happened, what went wrong?”

He smiled behind his fingers, but Lindsay wasn’t sure it was a pleasant smile. “I know what happened.” When she raised her brows skeptically, his smile broadened and he leaned back in his chair. “Actually, I knew before I even opened these documents—what I’ve read here has merely confirmed what I already suspected.”

“Oh, really?” His tone, so full of a natural, unassumed arrogance, annoyed her. She tightened her hands in her lap. “Why don’t you tell me, then?”

“All right.” He laced his fingers behind his head, a posture that made his shoulders seem even more impossibly broad. “I’d say it boils down to the three main problems. First, Robert Hamilton hired too many people, paid them too much, with luxurious benefits, and he could never bring himself to trim away any of the dead wood or lay off unnecessary positions, even during the recession. Your payroll is hopelessly bloated for a company in these financial straits.”

Her cheeks stung. She had been telling Robert things just like that for years. “Well, being too generous is hardly a sin, is it?”

He ignored her comment, putting one ankle over his knee to get more comfortable. She noticed that his legs were almost as long as Roc’s, though they were lean and muscular beneath the fine wool of his trousers, and didn’t resemble tree trunks by any stretch of the imagination.

“Second—he’s been building houses in all the wrong places, trying to provide single family homes in areas where the income ratios make apartment living far more logical. Then, in order to sell the places, he’s had to make extremely questionable loans. Now there’s a huge percentage of defaults which he’s refusing to call in. Instead of turning over these houses, trying to salvage his investment, he’s carrying these people for months at a time.”

She bit her lip. It was true. But it was part of Robert’s incredible goodness that he couldn’t bring himself to turn a desperate family out onto the streets. Though she had been warning him for months that he couldn’t be the Great Provider for long if he let his own company go under, now that Daniel McKinley was criticizing him in that dry, disinterested voice, she suddenly felt absurdly defensive.

“He realizes he’s been far too lenient, Mr. McKinley,” she said, ready with her prepared speech, though suddenly she felt little hope that she could make this ruthless businessman appreciate how Robert Hamilton’s idealism worked. “But, you see, he built his development in response to what he saw as a dire need for adequate housing among these plant workers. It was a tremendous success at first. Frankly, if there hadn’t been layoffs, the idea might well have worked.”

She took a deep breath. “I wish you could see the subdivision now, Mr. McKinley. These people aren’t deadbeats. They’ve planted trees and gardens. They’ve started their children in schools. Believe me, they will pay as soon as they can, and you know that this economic downturn won’t last forever. Robert was willing to dig into his own pockets, hoping against hope that he could find a way to let these people keep their homes until the economy improved.”

“Yes, Robert is a prince among men, I’m sure,” Daniel interjected dryly. “But now what? Now we come to the third and perhaps most troubling problem in this misguided troika—he’s taken out high-interest loans to cover his debts, and he’s secured those new loans with the few good properties he still owns. If he defaults, he’ll lose every profitable asset Hamilton Homes possesses, and the company will consist of a couple of hundred families who are busily planting marigolds in yards they can’t pay for.”

He leaned forward and tapped the thick pile of documents. “And then, Miss Blaisdell, Robert Hamilton won’t be able to sell this company for enough cash to buy a pair of gardeming gloves.”

Lindsay opened her lips to contradict him, but somehow no words would come. Again an uncomfortable silence blanketed the room. While she searched for the perfect answer, she touched her hair, tucking it behind her ear, wishing she had brushed it after that harrowing helicopter ride. She must look completely mussed and flustered. Which, of course, she was. Where had all her carefully crafted speeches disappeared to? Daniel hadn’t said anything that Lindsay herself hadn’t told Robert a thousand times. Why did hearing it from this man give the criticism so much authority, so much power to crush Robert’s good intentions to dust?

“There is one thing I do want to ask you, though,” Daniel said suddenly, and though his eyes were still narrowed, they no longer looked bored. They looked focused, probing.

“What is it?” She lifted her chin, ready.

“Why are you here?” He raised a hand to hold off her murmur of surprise. “I mean really why are you here? You must have known that the odds of persuading me to buy this business were about a million to one. And I suspect that you would rather jump naked into a river of hungry crocodiles than come begging for special favors from me.”

For a minute she stared at him, irritated by his confident assurance that she hated being here, that she was still afraid of him. He raised one brow and waited.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she finally said with all the equanimity she could muster. She had known he’d find a way to bring up the past, and she was ready for it. “But crocodiles, however hungry, rarely have enough liquid capital to pull off a deal like this.”

“I see.” He almost smiled. He leaned back again slowly. “Right. But you’re very young, attractive, capable. Why not go get yourself another job and leave Robert Hamilton to suffer the fate of all misguided martyrs?”

What a question! She stiffened, her short-lived poise evaporating. “Hamilton Homes is special to me, Mr. McKinley. Robert Hamilton is special to me. He’s been my employer for three years. He hired me when I was unexpectedly…out of work.”

She paused a moment to let the significance of that comment sink in, and then she went on. “He hired me without any references, and he allowed me the flexibility I needed to keep my family together. I owe him a lot for all that. And I intend to help him in any way I can.”

“So that’s all there is behind this impassioned defense? Gratitude?” He tilted his head speculatively. “I wonder. Could he, perhaps, be more than your employer?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Are you lovers?” He said the word so offhandedly she could hardly believe she had heard him correctly.

“Lovers?” A fire rose in her cheeks. “Of course not!”

She was outraged by the question, and yet her blush was all the more intense because, in a way, Daniel had stumbled closer to the truth than he imagined. Strange as it sounded, she had accepted this desperate mission in part because Robert Hamilton was not her lover. He desperately wanted that title…and more. It was his dream, he had hinted, to be her husband someday. It was because that dream would never come true that she felt obligated to make it up to him somehow.

“No,” she repeated more quietly, trying to quell the stupid blush. “We’re not lovers.” Not that it was any of Daniel McKinley’s business.

Daniel’s mouth twisted in an ironic smile. “You know, I’m almost tempted to believe you. You’re much too young to have a lover if the mere word makes you blush.”

“Tempted to believe me?” She rose to her feet, finally too furious to play this stupid game of insinuation and veiled hostility. “My private life has no bearing on these negotiations, Mr. McKinley, but, just for the record, if I’m blushing it’s anger you see on my cheeks, not embarrassed innocence. I’m not accustomed to having my word doubted, and frankly I don’t appreciate your condescending attitude toward Robert, who has been a very good friend to me, and to a lot of people.”

His lips thinned. “Perhaps if he had spent less time on friendship and more time on his business—”

But that was too much. She broke in heedlessly, her voice cold and contemptuous, finding with fatal certainty the phrase she’d uttered three years ago.

“Not every employer is a money-mad workaholic with no time for personal relationships, Mr. McKinley.”

The instant the words were out, she knew she had crossed some invisible line. She saw him draw his head back slightly, a fighter reacting to a surprise jab. So he remembered, too, she thought—remembered the exact words she had used that day, though he obviously hadn’t expected her to use them again.

Deep beneath her anger, she felt a dull pang of regret for having wrenched open their mutual wound. “More importantly, though,” she said, talking fast, as if hurrying to bury the insult, “you should learn that not every employee is a rat ready to leap overboard at the first sign of trouble.”

The air in the room had gone cold, as surely as if someone had opened a window to the storm outdoors. Daniel was still, frozen except for a subtle whitening around his lips. Her throat felt very dry again, and her heart was suddenly like a stone in her chest. She had, she knew, just put paid to all of Robert’s hopes.

“Perhaps not,” Daniel said quietly, lethally. “But I’m quite sure that, if you think back on my experience as your employer, Miss Blaisdell, you’ll understand why I might have…shall we say.. .underestimated your passion for loyalty?”

It was an emotional bull’s-eye and she felt the shaft of his insult pierce straight through her. Somehow managing not to wince, she bent over his desk and, with fingers that were visibly shaking, began to gather up Robert’s papers.

“Yes, of course, I understand perfectly,” she said, glad that the trembling in her fingers had not penetrated her voice. “If you’ll just please send for another helicopter…I’m sure there must be one somewhere for hire…Robert will pay the fare, whatever it is…and I’ll not bother you any further—”

“Damn it.” Damel put out his hand, staying hers by encircling her wrist with his thumb and fingers. “Lindsay—”

But he never got to finish his sentence. Suddenly Roc was there beside them again, the black of his clothes and the gleam of his hook as startling as ever.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” Roc said, clearing his throat loudly, “but I just wanted to report that I’m off to make up the bed in the guest room.”

Daniel’s hand tightened on her wrist. Both of them stared, uncomprehending, at the big man. Lindsay saw that his huge arms were full of pale green linens and creamy white blankets.

“The guest room?” The words were Daniel’s, but they were echoing hollowly in Lindsay’s mind, too. “The guest room? Why?”

“Look out the window, Danny Boy. While you’ve had your nose stuck in those papers, that storm’s been huffing and puffing and trying to blow your house down.”

Like a dazed child, Lindsay turned toward the picture window. Even the trees seemed to have disappeared behind a curtain of white. Not just snow. A blizzard. Oh, my God, she thought. A blizzard.

Daniel hadn’t bothered to look. His gaze was steady on Roc, though his hand still manacled Lindsay’s wrist. “No flying?”

“Not unless you want your helicopter to end up a Christmas ornament on the nearest Douglas fir.”

“How long?” Daniel’s words were tight, economical, grim.

“They’re saying twenty-four hours,” Roc reported, rolling his eyes skeptically. “But what do those windbags ever know about it? Could be an hour or a month.”

Daniel turned slowly toward Lindsay, his gaze dropping to their locked hands. He stared in silence a moment, and then a mirthless smile twisted his full lips.

“Well, how about that?” he said, but he didn’t seem to be talking to her. He shook her wrist slightly, and the movement made the papers slide helplessly out of her numb grasp. As the white sheets spilled over the desk, onto the floor, he looked up. Finally their eyes met.

“Perhaps we’d better progress to first names, Miss Blaisdell. It looks as if we’re going to be roommates.”

CHAPTER TWO

DANIEL paced in front of the picture window, trying not to listen as Lindsay talked to Christy on the telephone. The younger girl was obviously all broken up to hear that Lindsay wasn’t coming home. From what he could hear of the one-way conversation, Daniel deduced that she dreaded the thought of spending the night with her grandparents and was putting up quite a fuss.

“Christy, honey, I’m sorry, but you’re just too young to stay alone all night,” Lindsay was saying again. She’d been like a record stuck on that sentence for the past five minutes. Daniel marveled at her patience even while he longed to snatch the telephone out of her hand and tell that spoiled kid to shut up, for God’s sake. There were worse things than an impromptu sleep-over at grandma’s house.

But then he hadn’t ever been very good with kids. Even his own.

Especially his own.

So he refrained from suggesting that a firmer hand might cut down some of the wrangling. Who was he to criticize? And besides, Lindsay looked so wrung out from the battle of wills already. Make that battles, plural-the one with her sister and the one with him. She looked whipped. She clearly wasn’t a born scrapper, was she?

In fact, now that he’d had time to observe her more closely, he began to feel slightly ashamed of the tone he’d taken with her over the Hamilton Homes deal. Was he just so accustomed to playing hardball professionally that he didn’t know when to ease up?

Or was it worse than that? Was it perhaps petty and vindictive…and personal? Was it maybe that he hadn’t been able to resist retaliating for what she had said about him all those years ago?

Looking at her now, with the haze of swirling snow behind her, he could almost see it all happening again.

“McKinley’s wife is missing? Well, I’m not surprised—she probably ran away from him,” Lindsay had blurted angrily to one of the other stenographers that day, clearly unaware that Daniel was standing in the doorway behind her. “Who wouldn’t? Daniel McKinley thinks he’s wonderful, but he’s just a money-mad workaholic.”

In all fairness, Lindsay couldn’t have known the truth. Daniel wouldn’t discover the truth himself for two whole nightmarish days. The roaring void of grief and pain that had opened at his feet had not yet sucked him down into its final black hopelessness. But, maddened by his fear, he had been looking for someone to lash out at, and Lindsay was elected.

“You, there.” His voice had sounded vicious, weird and steely, a half-human, robot voice. “What is your name?”

Everyone in the room had gasped, he remembered. At first Lindsay didn’t answer. Her small, oval face had blanched to a sickening, bloodless white, and her eyes had registered mute horror. “Lindsay Blaisdell,” she had whispered finally.

“Well, you have five minutes to clean out your desk, Miss Blaisdell,” he had ordered in that same alien voice. She was afraid of that voice, he could see that. He was a little afraid of it himself. “You’re fired.”

He passed his hand over his eyes, as if to wipe away the vision. He didn’t want to relive that day. Not now, not ever again. Recalling himself with an effort to the present, he swiveled and paced to the window on the other side of the fire. A safe distance—from there the crackle of the logs muffled Lindsay’s words into unintelligible coos and murmurs. He dropped onto the sofa and watched her.

Lindsay Blaisdell. It was ironic, wasn’t it? Of all the people with whom he could have been snowbound…

He still hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of seeing her climb out of that helicopter. At first he’d thought she hadn’t changed a bit. With her long, dark, braided hair wet and tousled from the snow, her cheeks a bright, wind-stung pink, she had looked very much like the naive woman-child she’d been back then.

But fifteen minutes in her company had changed that impression for good. He took a sip of the coffee Roc had left on the end table and tried to analyze where exactly the change had come from.

It wasn’t her face. She still had the face of a teenage Madonna, her dark blue eyes set wide apart and tranquil, her mouth full, upturned, serene, her expression one of unassailable innocence.

No, the difference was in her body, he decided. Seen like this, with her back to him, the honeyed firelight trickling along her hip and thigh, which were outlined by her skirt as she leaned against the desk, she looked sexy as hell. Her hips, in particular, were a work of art. Erotic art, straight out of a bad boy’s dreams. And a grown man’s palms would cup perfectly around them, just where the swell began to flare out from her narrow waist.

Which brought him to Robert Hamilton. Or did it? Daniel gripped his coffee mug tightly, letting the heat burn into his palm. Though her shocked denial had rung true, still…something, somebody had to account for the way that body moved. Its sensuality was definitely awakened.

“Christy, honey, I’d better go now. This is long distance, and I’m using Mr. McKinley’s telephone.”

Lindsay looked at him over her shoulder, her face sheepishly apologetic, and instantly his emotional kaleidoscope refocused, innocence again dominating the picture. With her lower lip between her teeth and her brows knitted in the middle, she looked like a child herself, a nervous kid who was worried that she might have irritated the grown-ups.

He waved her concern away with an upturned hand, suddenly annoyed with himself. He took another swig of coffee, burning his throat with an ill-advised gulp. Oh, hell, what did it matter anyway? Maybe she was as pure as those snowflakes out there. Or maybe she and Hamilton were sleeping together twice a day, as regular as flossing. He, for one, didn’t give a damn.

“I’m sorry that took so long,” she said suddenly, and he looked up to see that she had cradled the receiver. Sighing, she rubbed the back of her neck with one hand. “I think this must be the onset of adolescence. She argues with me about absolutely everything.”

“Yes, I hear the teenage years can be fairly hairraising,” he said politely. “I assume Christy doesn’t consider going to her grandparents’ house exactly a trip to Disneyland.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lindsay said, still kneading her neck. “Come to think of it, the old place does bear a slight resemblance to the Haunted Mansion.” She walked over to stand near him by the fire, her upraised hand resting behind her head, her loosened braid spilling in thick, dark waves over her arm. “But you’re right, of course. Christy doesn’t feel comfortable with her grandmother. Even before our parents died, we were never—” she seemed to be looking for the right word “—very close.”

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky, and the storm will pass through quickly,” he said. He hoped it would, and not just for her sake. For three years now he had spent the winters up here alone. The snowbound days were the best. Cut off from work, friends, television, telephone and sometimes even Roc, he could sink numbly into the brooding silence. It felt right, this frozen prison. It was the only time he didn’t have to pretend to anyone, and he wouldn’t welcome having Lindsay Blaisdell as a cellmate. “You may be able to get home before she’s out of school tomorrow.”

“Oh, good heavens, yes! I have to get home by tomorrow,” she exclaimed, wide-eyed, as if she hadn’t considered the possibility that this could go on longer than twenty-four hours. “It’s only four days till Christmas!” She added the last as if that fact alone decided the matter.

He hesitated, hardly able to credit the ingenuous faith he heard in her voice. Apparently she still believed that Fate intervened to protect the dreams of the innocent. Usually such naiveté made him impatient—he had made a religion of facing difficult truths, and he insisted that those around him do the same.

Natural disasters didn’t pause for Christmas dinner. The storm front might stall right over them, trapping them here for days, only to be followed by treacherous winds, buried roads, ice storms, downed trees and power lines, a hundred dangers that would make escape impossible. She might be smarter to plan on celebrating New Year’s Eve with her little Christy.