'Tis the Season (24 page)

Or else maybe this kiss would be as intimate as they'd ever get. She would come to her senses and resume her position as his children's baby-sitter and his friend. And maybe that would be for the best.

Maybe he should do exactly what he'd told her to do. Just let it be.

E
VERYONE AROUND
the conference table seemed distracted. Stuart was popping mints into his mouth, one after another, and jiggling his foot. Heather kept rattling papers and fussing with her perfect blond hair. Jennifer had the appearance of someone who'd been abducted by aliens and deposited back on earth with a mutated personality—glassy eyes, moony smile, none of her familiar abrasiveness.

Evan didn't want to be there any more than the rest of them. He'd finished his shopping except for one last gift, which was sitting in a showcase at Arlington Jewelers on Dudley, waiting for him to decide whether he was brave enough to give it to Filomena. He'd phoned and found out the store would be open until midnight tonight, and was assured that no one had bought the one-of-a-kind piece yet. As soon as he and his senior staff finished this meeting, he could head over to the jewelry store, study the thing a bit more and hope that, if he made up his mind to buy it, Filomena would like it—or at least wouldn't think he was nuts for giving it to her.

“Okay, guys,” he said, flipping a page in his binder. They all flipped pages in their binders, as well, as synchronized as the Rockettes. “Here are the numbers for the New London store. They're underperforming com
pared with the other stores. What's the problem there? Can we figure it out?”

“Military salaries,” Stuart suggested.

“Hmm?”

“Well, New London is a navy town, isn't it?”

“Coast guard,” Heather corrected him.

“Coast guard, Navy—either way it's boats, right? Anyway, there's all this talk about how the military doesn't pay its people enough. So maybe they can't afford to splurge on racquetball equipment or in-line skates at holiday time.”

Evan glanced at Jennifer. Ordinarily, she would have jumped all over Stuart, spewing statistics to counter his assumption. But she only nodded and grinned. “I wouldn't want to have to support myself on a military salary,” she said.

Of course she wouldn't. Coast-guard employees risked their lives on every mission, but they never got to ride around in limos. “Jennifer, give me an analysis,” he said sharply, hoping to snap her out of her reverie. “It's Christmas Eve and we all want to get out of here.”

“'Twas the night before Christmas,'” she quoted dreamily.

“So help us figure out what's going on in the New London store. I don't buy Stuart's explanation.”

“I don't really buy it, either,” Stuart interjected. “I just thought I had to say something so we could go home.”

“Every outlet except for New London is breaking the bank this year,” Evan reminded his staff. “We're way above projections. This year's bonuses are big—” Heather perked up when he said that “—but New London is dragging its butt. Jennifer, you were down at that
store last week with Tank. Was the place comatose? Any traffic at all?”

“It wasn't as crowded as Hartford or Bridgeport,” she said. “But I didn't notice any significant problems.”

“Was the staff cheerful? The displays neat? It's a great store with great inventory, but things aren't moving there.”

“It's not as if they're losing money,” Jennifer pointed out. “They're just not as profitable as the other stores.”

Evan rolled his eyes. He knew that. They all knew that. The issue was
why
that store wasn't as profitable.

“We'll have to talk to Peter about it,” Stuart suggested. Peter Blanchette was the manager of the New London store.

“I think you need to put a woman in charge of that store,” Heather announced.

“Don't give me an equal-rights lecture,” Evan warned her. “We've got women managing Seekonk, Bridgeport and Providence. And I've got women at the top, right in this room—”

“—who'd love to get out of here and finish their Christmas shopping,” Jennifer finished.

Evan was tempted to remind her of how many times she'd held him prisoner in this room. The Pep Insoles presentation came to mind. Had
he
sulked about being stuck in the conference room?

Well, yes. But he was allowed to sulk. He was the boss.

“All right,” he relented, because he wanted this meeting to be over as badly as the rest of them. New London's numbers were troubling, but every other outlet was performing phenomenally. Champion Sports was going to have a superlative year. And now it was time for them
to all go home and have a superlative holiday. “We'll figure out New London later. Let's get out of here.”

Stuart cheered. Jennifer flung her arms around Evan's neck and thanked him for the leather portfolio he'd given her that morning. He'd given one to Heather, too, and she'd thanked him much less effusively. Heather was extremely particular about whom she hugged. He shook hands with Stuart, who'd received a more masculine-style leather portfolio. The rest of the staff had received boxes of Swiss chocolates, Champion pens—and bonus checks that had put everyone in a remarkably festive mood.

He glanced at his watch. Three-thirty. After leaving the conference room, he marched up and down the hall, bellowing, “Go home, everyone! Have a good holiday!” Then he ducked into his own office, dropped off his binders of sales figures, locked up his desk and donned his wool coat.

A light snow was sifting through gray clouds when he exited the building. Arlington's downtown looked almost absurdly Christmasy as the soft powder turned rooftops white and dusted the sidewalks. The store decorations, the wreaths and lights, the extra energy with which everyone moved lent the world a special aura. People ought to have been frantic—and maybe they were, hurrying to buy one last present, one final treat—but everyone Evan saw seemed to be smiling. They all had crystals of snow glistening on their hats or in their hair, which made them look magical.

Did he look magical, too? Was he grinning like that silver-haired woman with the bulging tote bag, like that skinny young man with the waist-long ponytail and the bounce in his gait?

Probably. He was pleased that Champion had per
formed so well this season, that he had nearly all his shopping done, that he would get to spend all day tomorrow with his children.

And Filomena.

He turned the corner onto Dudley and wove among the crowds until he reached the jewelry store. The windows had fake snow painted onto them, and multicarat diamonds glittered in velvet perches behind every pane of glass. He wasn't looking for a diamond, though. Not for Fil. Not for a woman who was going to be gone once the old year rolled into the new.

He pushed the door open—and simultaneously pushed all thoughts of Filomena's departure out of his mind. He and she would be together tomorrow. They'd share the holiday. She had promised to help him cook a ham, which, as best he could figure, was already cooked but still needed something other than broiling done to it. She and the kids had constructed the gingerbread house and baked butter cookies shaped like snowmen over the weekend. The entire house smelled like an evergreen forest, thanks to the tree.

Tomorrow would be wonderful, and he wasn't going to think beyond that.

As the door swung shut behind him, he dusted the snow from his shoulders and headed over to the glass showcase. There it was. Utterly impractical, grossly overpriced—and perfect for Filomena. He beckoned a clerk with a wave and pointed to it. “I want this,” he said. “Gift-wrapped, please.”

“For someone special?” the clerk guessed, unlocking the showcase.

“Yeah,” Evan murmured, promising himself that giv
ing it to the most magnificent woman he knew wouldn't be a huge mistake. “Someone special.”

 

F
ILOMENA LEANED BACK
into the embracing cushions of the sofa. The floor of Evan's living room was a mess of wrapping-paper scraps and scattered ribbons. A few piles of gifts—articles of clothing, pairs of ice skates and the books she'd given the children—lay amid the debris, not neglected so much as reserved for a later time, when the initial flood of Christmas adrenaline dried up. She could hear the kids shrieking in the den, and the electric hum of the race-car set Evan had given them. Without a doubt, race cars were cooler than books.

She didn't mind that the kids had tossed aside the books she'd given them. Eventually, they would get tired, and then they'd want to sit quietly and read. In the meantime, Gracie was carrying her Piglet doll everywhere with her.

The living room was surprisingly cozy and not too formal. The two chairs facing the couch looked a bit rigid, but the couch, a gentle blue brocade, was plush and comfortable, and Filomena felt almost decadent lounging on it by herself, the skirt of her velvet jumper tucked around her legs, the sleeves of her burgundy turtleneck pushed up and her hair falling loose down her back. Across the room stood the tree, its branches still wide and fresh, its silver garlands and ornaments glinting in the lamplight.

She couldn't exactly say this was the best Christmas she'd ever had. She recalled a Christmas when she was eight and she received a stained-glass ornament to hang in her window. It was a crescent moon, her first moon, and she'd brought it back to her prep school and fastened
it to her window with a clear plastic suction cup. The light would spill through its pale-blue glass and cast mysterious shadows on the opposite wall. Not an expensive gift, but she'd adored it. That Christmas had been marvelous. So had the Christmas her family had celebrated in Hawaii when she was sixteen. She and her parents had hiked to the center of a dormant volcano and eaten a picnic lunch on the grass growing inside the crater. What an amazing way to spend Christmas!

But this year's Christmas definitely merited placement in the top three or four Christmases of Filomena's life. From the moment she'd arrived at the Myers house at noon, she'd felt a part of this home, this family. The kids had given her a detailed tour of every single gift they'd received: “Grandma and Grandpa sent this,” they'd said, showing her some complicated Lego sets, “and our aunt and uncle sent these”—some Disney videos. They'd let her take a turn racing a car around the track Evan had set up in the den. Her car had skidded off the track three times, but Billy had assured her that was supposed to happen, sort of, and it was awesome when the cars fishtailed and stuff.

And Evan. Evan in a soft flannel shirt and even softer-looking jeans, demonstrating surprising culinary flair by marinating the ham in orange juice and brown sugar and cooking it in the microwave—a recipe he told Filomena he'd gotten via a panic-stricken phone call to his mother last night. Evan smiling, beaming at the children, relating funny stories about his colleagues, filling Filomena's glass with wine and whispering, “I have something for you, but we'll do that later.” His words kept echoing inside her, even as she watched part of a video with the kids, let them demonstrate their new computer games to
her, helped Evan to prepare a salad and oversaw the children's efforts at setting the table.
I have something for you
, he'd said, and for some reason, she couldn't exactly think of it as the sort of something that would come in a gift-wrapped box. He had something and they would do it later.

If only his eyes didn't glow so seductively when he gazed at her; if only his smile didn't make her breath catch. If only he didn't touch her so casually, arching an arm around her to reach into the silverware drawer, brushing a strand of her hair back from her face, resting his hands on her shoulders as he stood behind her at the computer terminal, giving her pointers on how to play the game Billy had loaded onto the machine.

If only he hadn't returned her kiss the way he had the night he'd invited her to spend Christmas with him, maybe she wouldn't keep thinking about what they were going to do later.

Exchange presents—that was what they were going to do. And she was pretty sure later had arrived. She'd set her gift for him under the tree, next to a box wrapped in shiny silver foil and adorned with a white-and-silver bow. Obviously it wasn't a gift for the children, or that beautiful wrapping paper would have been torn to shreds hours ago and the contents of the box exposed, scrutinized, played with or ignored, depending on whether the gift was a toy or a book.

Was that box something for her? She didn't want to guess what was inside it, because she didn't want to be disappointed. Yet she couldn't imagine being disappointed by anything Evan gave her.

She heard his voice drift in from the den, quietly reminding the kids not to play rough with the race cars.
Then his footsteps in the hall, past the stairway and through the arched doorway into the living room, a balloon-shaped glass of brandy in each hand. “Hi,” he said. His smile melted something inside her.

“Hi.”

He set the two glasses on the table in front of the sofa, then crossed to the tree and pulled the two remaining packages out from under the low boughs. He eyed her gift to him curiously, pretending to weigh it in his hand, scowling and shaking it. “Don't!” she warned him when the click of marbles inside the package deepened his frown.

“Is it fragile?”

“Not really, but if you shake it like maracas, it could break.”

“It doesn't sound like maracas,” he said, placing both packages on the table. “I'm bummed out. I was really hoping for maracas this year.” He sent her a wicked grin.