A Very Daring Christmas (The Tavonesi Series Book 8) (19 page)

“Yes, great. Thanks.”

He levered away from her back, but even inches away she felt the energy of him, like a magnet drawing her life force toward his.

The saw skidded out of the track of the cut they’d made.

“You have to concentrate on these last strokes.”

He clearly had no idea of the effect he had on her.

Fine. Great.

Better that way.

She concentrated on drawing the saw blade through the cut in the branch. When the last stroke freed it, she lost her balance, and still gripping the branch, she tumbled back into Jake’s arms.

Jake caught Cameron as they both rolled to the ground below the Douglas fir. He held the branch in one hand and had his other arm wrapped around her waist.

She tried to stand, but the branch had her pinned in place. He dragged the branch to the ground beside them and with his hands firmly grasping just above her hips, he helped her to slither to the needle-strewn ground beside him.

“You chose a good branch,” he said, unsuccessfully ignoring his desire to kiss her. But if he wasn’t going to act on it, he’d better move his hands off her and quick. She was trouble in its every form, and he was determined to remember that fact. He loosened his fingers from her waist and swore he heard a chorus of boos from the region of his groin as he put distance between their bodies.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked.

“Other than the saw smacking me in the jaw? Nope.”

He was a liar. By having sex with him and then leveraging the intimacy to get him to do her bidding, she’d hurt him in ways that counted, sliced far deeper than any tabloid article could cut. But no way would he let her know that.

She twisted toward him and tapped his jaw. “You’ll have a bruise. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll ice it.” The scent of apples and some sort of flower wafted through the astringent scent of the fir.
Cameron’s scent
. If he sat there one more minute and if his body had its way, he’d have her clothes off and kiss every inch of her. He pressed up from the ground. “One down.”

“Oh, no, I’m all right.”

“I meant the branch.”

She surveyed the branch beside her. “Right. How many do you think they’ll need?”

“Knowing Sabrina and Alex’s mom? And estimating the size of Trovare? Several forests’ worth.”

She laughed. He had to stop making her laugh. Like a laser beam, her laughter cut through his rational defenses and laid him bare.

“No, really. How many?” She rose to her feet. “We have an assignment, after all.”

The assignment had nothing to do with cutting branches to make garlands. Jake knew Alex well enough to know his teammate
would
in fact stoop so low to set him up. He needed to have a word with him. And soon.

A whistle from the direction of the wagon had both of them turning toward it. The neighing of the horses punctuated the whoops of children’s laughter.

Jake lifted the branch. “Better head back. I’ll come out with Alex and a truck and get more branches later. One job we do have to do right now is pick a tree. How good are your diplomacy skills?”

Her eyes clouded, and the smile drifted out of her face. “Judging by my lack of success in Dominia, just about zero.”

“Then we’ll have to wing it.” Jake was in no mood to revisit anything about his trip to Dominia. “When I was a kid, we’d go out into the snow every Christmas and find a tree,” he said, changing the subject. “We didn’t have the luxury of having a ready-made tree farm like the Tavonesis have here. It was often a slog through half a mile of wet snow. My mom, my sister, my brother and I made the ornaments.”

He was blathering. It was a helluva lot smarter than kissing her.

“Peter always made baseballs. It didn’t matter what the material of the year was—wood, papier-mâché, cookie dough or felt—he always made a slew of baseballs.”

“You have a brother?”

“Had. He died in a boating accident. Four years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jake shouldered the branch they’d cut. “Hey, you couldn’t have known.”

He was aware of Cameron watching his face. The branch was heavy, but he shouldered it and started back down the path toward the wagon.

“By the time I was seven,” he said, his tone falsely breezy, “we had half a tree of baseballs, most of them losing their stuffing. But Peter would howl if every single one didn’t make it onto the tree.”

“Did Peter play baseball?”

“Oh, yeah. He was drafted straight out of college by the Rangers. He would’ve been better than me in another year or two. He had the touch.”

“Alex said you do too.”

She’d been discussing him with Alex? The admission shouldn’t have made him smile. But his thoughts of Peter tugged the smile off his face fast.

Part of him had died with Peter, the part of him that trusted the justice in the world. Peter never took risks.
Except
on the ball field. And those were calculated, brilliant moves, nothing rash about them. Jake was the one who’d jumped out of airplanes, raced dirt bikes in places no sane person would’ve attempted, drove fast cars and tempted fate in more ways than he should ever have gotten away with.

“Peter was a natural,” Jake said into the uncomfortable silence. “He had a bigger heart than me—for the game, for life—bigger than anyone’s.” The scene on the dock that hot summer afternoon flashed in his mind. One impulsive decision followed by shuffled plans, and the next thing he knew, he no longer had a living brother. “It should’ve been me going down on that boat.”

Cameron stopped walking, and he nearly smacked into her with the branch.

She lifted a searing gaze to him. “How can you say that?”

He’d never voiced the thought before. Aware that she expected an answer, he shrugged and picked up his pace. He’d never talked to anyone about what had happened the day Peter died.

What the hell was it about Cameron that made him scale the walls that had served him for so long? Boundaries were important. Boundaries made sense. They let in what worked and kept out what didn’t. But around her those walls were neither thick nor high. Or maybe they simply weren’t strong enough to withstand her.

He dropped the branch to the ground next to the wagon. He was spared from further questions by Sophie’s exuberant hug.

“Tyler and I picked the
same
tree.”

“I saw it first,” Tyler protested.

“It’s cosmet,” Sophie said with a gloating smile.

“Kismet,” Jake corrected, glad he didn’t believe in such forces. But when Cameron said that if two of them had chosen the same tree, it had to be the hands-down winner, he agreed.

Until the kids led them to the tree.

The Douglas fir was over twenty feet tall and nearly nine feet wide at the base.

Alex whistled.

“Kismet, huh? Looks like we’ll have to bring in the vineyard truck.” He looked at Cameron and then Jake and smiled. “Nice work, guys.”

Jake had the sneaking feeling Alex wasn’t talking about the freaking Christmas tree. It dawned on him that Alex really had invited him up to Trovare to set him up.

When they returned to Trovare, he and Cameron worked side by side at the table Sabrina had prepared in the castle’s inner courtyard. Jake sheared the smaller branches off the larger bough they’d collected and twisted them together into a line with wire. Cameron hummed a soft tune as she fashioned red bows out of a huge spool of velvet ribbon.

She stopped humming. “If Peter made baseballs, what sort of ornaments did you make?”

Her question surprised him. “Bears.” He couldn’t help but grin at the rising memory. “Very badly made bears. Most of them ended up looking like doughnuts with noses. My mom still has every one. She drags them out every Christmas. Except this year.”

“Why not this year?”

“I sent my parents to Rome for the holidays. Mom always wanted to spend a Christmas there. And since Peter’s death, holidays have been painful. This year I was able to make at least one of her dreams come true.”

Cameron stopped tying the bow she held in her hand and lifted her gaze to his. “What other dreams does she have?”

“The usual—grandkids and all that. I’m leaving that one to my sister. Not for me.”

Cameron chewed at her bottom lip as the smile faded from her eyes. “My mother’s Christmas dreams have always been about fame. The rare times she was around, she used to spend the entire holiday on the phone trying to get film deals. Our phone had a very, very long cord—no cellphones then. There were days when I wanted to cut that cord.” She went back to tying on the last red bow. “I admire how you’re never on the phone.”

“I left mine in the city.” He didn’t add that he hadn’t done it on purpose. “It’s been great to be out of touch.” That much was true.

“I may try that. I get tired of being tethered to the busy, crazy world.”

The quiet, almost imperceptible sigh she gave whooshed into him like a birdsong on a breeze. This was the woman the public didn’t see. If they did, they’d never leave her alone. There was a magic to her that he couldn’t put his finger on. She was a crazy combination of opposites, and the tension between them had the draw of the strongest magnet. And the tug of that force? It dragged him toward territory he wasn’t so sure he wanted to enter.

“You must love what you do. I mean, to put up with all the downsides.”

She pulled a length of the red velvet off the spool of ribbon. “I love the work. I love the stories. I love the family feeling and the teamwork of a film crew. When we wrap a film and everyone goes back to their lives, I miss the camaraderie most of all.” With a few deft twists, she formed a perfect bow. “What about you? What is it that drew you to baseball?”

Getting out of a poor mountain town
, he wanted to say, but didn’t. That was only one reason he’d chased his dream. “The first time I had a bat in my hand, it felt so right, so exciting—I didn’t even have words for the feelings that took over. Looking back, I’d say it felt like I’d come home—home to a place I hadn’t even known I’d wanted to go to.”

“I know that feeling. I felt it the first time I stepped onto a film set.”

The sun made her eyes sparkle as she lifted her gaze to his. The woman had the power to mesmerize him, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t even aware of it.

“Besides, baseball’s the only game where if you fail less than two-thirds of the time, you’re still considered a star.”

She laughed. He’d meant to amuse her, but all of a sudden, talking about life dreams felt too intimate. She stirred him in ways he hadn’t thought anyone could. More disturbing was the way she touched places deep in him where he hadn’t yet had a chance to set up boundaries. It was as if she touched his soul without even trying. Shaken by the realization—disturbed that a woman could move him so deeply and so easily—he lifted the garland from the table. “Let’s take this in.” Grasping one end, he began to roll the garland in a loop, focusing on his hands, the action, anything but his unsettling thoughts.

“Don’t—you’ll crush my bows. You take one end, and I’ll take the other.”

With the garland dangling between them, they hauled the decoration into the Great Hall. All fifteen feet of it.

Sophie ran to them and shouldered the sagging middle. They laid the garland along the huge wooden table in the middle of the Great Hall.

“You really know how to make bows, Cameron,” Sophie said in a tone bordering on adulation. “Will you show me? I want to put bows on all the mistletoe bundles.”

Hell, Cameron even mesmerized kids.

“She’ll have to show you later, half-pint,” Parker said as he entered the hall with a fifteen-foot orchard ladder. Sabrina and Alex trailed in behind him. “I need all persons over five feet tall to help Alex and me get the tree in here and mounted in the stand.”

Sophie stuck out her bottom lip. “I’m
not
a half-pint.” She brandished a bundle of mistletoe and, with a gleam in her eye, climbed up the first four steps of the ladder.

Jake’s heart leaped into his throat as she leaned precariously toward Cameron.

“You have to kiss him.”

“Sophie likes getting adults to do her bidding,” Sabrina said. “We should never have told her about mistletoe.”

The ladder wobbled, and Cameron put a hand out to steady it. “Come down, Sophie. The ladder’s not steady.”

“Not until you kiss
him
.” Sophie pointed to Jake and dangled the mistletoe closer to Cameron’s head.

“Kiss, kiss, kiss.” Parker clapped and started an obnoxious chant. Alex and Sabrina joined in. Sophie chanted, gloated and waved the mistletoe.

Knowing he shouldn’t but seeing no better alternative, Jake walked over to Cameron.

“Some holiday traditions we could do without,” she said as she leaned over and touched her lips lightly to his.

His entire body roused at the contact. Reciting his batting stats for the past season as she pulled away didn’t shut down the spark she’d fired. Or help him to shove down the memories of making love with her.

Making love
? Since when did he think of sex as making love? He stepped back.

“Oh, give him a real movie star kiss,” Parker needled. “Oscar material.”