Cole For Christmas

Had he guessed that she was thinking about kissing him? More to the point, why had she been thinking about kissing him? He was hardly her type.

“Oh, no. Not the Christmas carols.” Her father let out a melodramatic groan, then whispered to Cole out of the side of his mouth, “My dear wife plays the world’s worst piano. And my mother-in-law has a singing voice that could sour wine.”

Uncle Peter shuddered. “Never heard anything worse than the two of them together.”

“Quick, Cole. Say you’d rather we didn’t do the Christmas carols,” her father urged. “You’re a guest. They might listen to you.”

Cole laughed, such a joyous, infectious sound that it seemed to run through Anna’s veins along with her blood.

“Not on your life. I might not be much of a singer but I like to sing,” Cole said before he walked toward the gleaming mahogany piano at the corner of the room.

Five minutes later, while her mother pounded enthusiastically on the piano keys, Cole led their group in a truly tuneless rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

The tassel from the Santa hat he’d plucked from Grandpa’s head swung as he swayed to the music, such as it was. A few bars into the song, her mother stopped in midstanza.

“Those are the wrong lyrics,” she said crossly and tapped the music on her stand. “Can’t you read? I’m playing ‘All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth.”’

A great belly laugh escaped from Grandpa Ziemanski and suddenly Anna couldn’t stop herself.

She looked from her indignant mother to her roaring grandfather to a puzzled Cole and burst into laughter. His lips twitched and, after the barest pause, he joined in.

The result was contagious. One by one, everybody in the room began to laugh until there was no sound save the combined chortling of ten people.

Anna’s eyes watered and her sides ached. She leaned her head weakly against Cole’s chest, thankful when his arms came around her shoulders to support her.

She felt the rumbling inside his chest through her ear and unthinkingly put a hand on his shirt to feel the vibrations.

She could feel the heat coming off his body through his clothes. Experimentally, she moved her hand over the crisp material of his dress shirt. He felt warm and solid, hard muscle covered by smooth flesh. Flesh that no longer vibrated with laughter.

She raised her head to look at him. Her eyes lingered on his mouth, which was no longer laughing, then lifted to his eyes. Even through his glasses, she could see the heat in them.

He was looking at her as though all he wanted for Christmas was her.

Sexual awareness shimmied through her, the same way it had in the office when he’d flirted with her. She’d ignored it then, but she couldn’t any longer. Not when it was as plain as the Santa hat that covered his lush, dark hair.

Wrenching her gaze from his, she stepped back. He let her go but not so far that she wasn’t still in the loose circle of his arms.

“Don’t go, sugarplum,” he whispered. “You felt good exactly where you were.”

She started to pull back despite his words, but her body tingled everywhere it came in contact with his. She hesitated at the same time that her mother crushed the piano keys and the family belted out the lyrics of “Jingle Bells.”

She knew she was right about the identity of the song because she glimpsed the music on the piano stand. Cole grinned at her, then sang along in his truly awful baritone.

By the time they were well into another carol, Cole’s arms circled her from behind. Before they’d finished for the night, her back was against his chest with his chin resting on the top of her head.

Somehow, she never did muster the will to move.

“I HAD A GREAT TIME,” Cole said as Anna’s family gathered around him in the foyer. “I can’t thank you enough for having me.”

Anna’s mother handed him the black wool overcoat she took out of the coat closet.

“We’re the ones who should thank you for impressing Anna enough that she wanted us to meet you,” she said.

Anna didn’t rise to that particular bait, possibly because she was occupied with helping him put on his coat. She applied pressure at the small of his back, the better to shove him out the door.

He stubbornly held his ground. He’d bonded with her family over dinner, caroling and midnight services. He’d be damned if he cut his goodbyes short.

“Me, impress Anna?” he asked rhetorically. He ignored the warning look Anna shot him. “You got that wrong. Anna’s the impressive one.”

“What a nice thing to say,” Grandma Ziemanski offered. “Anna, you better keep this one. When you’re as old and set in your ways as you are, there aren’t many good ones left.”

“Thank you for that thought, Grandma,” Anna said wryly. She tapped the face of her watch. “It’s late. Cole needs to leave so we can all get to sleep. If we don’t, we’ll be too tired to enjoy Christmas day.”

She pushed at his back but not hard enough to budge him. He didn’t spend hours at the gym for nothing.

“Say good-night, Cole,” Anna said.

“Good night, everyone,” he said, mostly because he couldn’t prolong his leave-taking indefinitely. “And Merry Christmas.”

“Speaking of Christmas, Cole, what are you doing tomorrow?” Miranda asked. “Peter and I are having everybody over to our house. You’re more than welcome to join us.”

“Yes,” her husband immediately added. “We’d be happy to have you. You and I never did get a chance to talk about the stock market.”

Cole’s lifting spirits had nothing to do with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. He realized he was reluctant to leave because spending the rest of the holiday alone had lost its appeal.

“He can’t come,” Anna interjected, shooting him a dagger of a look. “He’s busy.”

“What could he be busy doing that can’t wait until after Christmas?” Rosemary asked incredulously.

Cole kept his mouth shut, especially because Anna’s mother had directed the question at her daughter. He crossed his arms over his chest and watched Anna sweat.

“He’s busy…working,” she said, wiping her brow. Her big, doe eyes flew to him for help, but her mouth flattened when she realized he didn’t intend to provide any. “He needs to finish up what he was working on tonight. He can’t have any distractions.”

Cole sent her a sharp look before it dawned on him that she couldn’t possibly know he’d waited until the office was deserted so he could go over the company’s marketing plan.

Anna wasn’t the retiring type. If she’d guessed what he was doing, she would have said something.

“But it’s Christmas,” Grandma Ziemanski protested. “Nobody works on Christmas.”

“And you’re his boss, Anna,” Rosemary said. “I know I raised you to be career-minded, but you can’t mean to make your boyfriend work on Christmas Day.”

“He’s not my—” Anna began.

“Of course Cole’s not working Christmas Day,” her father said. “He’s coming to Miranda and Peter’s house.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to come,” Anna said in what was obviously one last-ditch attempt to exclude him from her family’s plans.

“Nonsense,” Grandpa Ziemanski roared. “The boy wants to spend Christmas with us. Don’t you, Cole?”

Cole gazed from the expectant faces of Anna’s family members to Anna, who was imperceptibly shaking her head back and forth.

If he did her bidding and said no, he’d risk offending the people who had gone out of their way to make him feel welcome tonight.

Not to mention relegating himself to a lonely Christmas in his new apartment with nothing to keep him company except his miniature Christmas tree, the printouts of Skillington’s financial records his father had given him and the memory of the way Anna had felt in his arms.

He gave Anna what he hoped she could tell was an apologetic look before smiling at the people gathered around her.

“Thanks for thinking of me,” he said. “I’d love to spend Christmas Day with you.”

3

“THIS IS A DISASTER,” Anna said after she chased Cole into the cold, calm night. She shivered. She’d been in such a rush to right things that putting on a coat hadn’t occurred to her. “What are we going to do now?”

Cole stuck his hands in his pockets, looking maddeningly untroubled by their problem, not to mention impossibly handsome. She bit the inside of her lip. When had she started thinking of him in those terms?

“I thought we’d enjoy each other’s company tomorrow,” he said.

Anna threw up her hands. “I’d say we did a little too much enjoying tonight. Otherwise we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

“I thought tonight went well,” he said over his shoulder as he descended the three porch steps to the sidewalk.

The better to make a quick getaway to his car, she thought.

“Tonight did not go well,” she refuted emphatically as she chased after him. His legs were so much longer than her own long legs that she had to practically run to keep up with him. “You heard my family. They think we’re involved.”

He was halfway to the car before he abruptly turned to face her. When he spoke, she could see his breath. “So what? We know we’re not so I don’t see that it’s a problem.”

She knew her mouth had dropped open by the cold air that swooshed inside. “How can you say that? Didn’t you listen to them tonight? They’re probably inside right now talking about what they’ll get us for wedding presents.”

He laughed and skimmed his fingertips down her cheek. She wasn’t sure if her shiver was from his touch or her negligence in putting on a coat to walk him to the car.

“You’re exaggerating,” he said.

Clouds obscured the moon but the Christmas lights scattered over the property made it possible to read his expression. The harsh lines of his face had softened, and his eyes roamed over her with appreciation. This time her shiver was definitely not from the cold.

“You’re doing it again,” she accused.

“Doing what?”

She put her hands on her hips. At least she thought they were her hips. She was so frozen she could barely tell where one body part ended and another began. “Touching me. And looking at me like you want to kiss me. No wonder my family thinks we’ve got something going.”

He focused on her lips while his tongue flicked out and licked his bottom one. “I can’t help the way I look at you,” he said in a hypnotically soft voice.

Her heartbeat sped up but she wasn’t about to let him know that. She narrowed her eyes, which had begun to water from the cold. She only hoped her tears didn’t ice over. She tried to make her voice harsh. “Sure you can. You don’t look at me that way at work.”

His eyes roamed over her in the way she was talking about, the way that made her insides melt like chocolate in the sun. “You’re different around your family than you are at work,” he said. “Softer, more feminine. When I look at you right now, it’s easy to forget we work together.”

“Then you need to get a better memory, buster, because work is the reason we can’t get involved,” she said.

She might have sounded more convincing, she thought, if her teeth weren’t chattering.

“I agree,” he said.

“You do?”

“I do,” Cole said so reassuringly that she didn’t protest when he took her lightly by the forearms. His hands moved up and down her arms, creating a wonderful friction and chasing away some of the chill. “If you and I get involved, I’d find it too hard to concentrate at work.”

“Me, too,” she admitted.

At that moment, it was difficult to concentrate on much more than the feel of his hands on her. They were such large, wonderful, magic hands. How would they feel, she wondered, on someplace more intimate than her arms? Heavenly, she answered herself.

She cleared her suddenly clogged throat. “Can I ask you something?”

“Um, hmm,” he said absently as he continued the delightful massage.

“If we’re not getting involved, why are you trying to turn me on?”

“I’m not trying to turn you on.” His voice was husky and spiced with deep-toned laughter. “I’m trying to warm you up. It can’t be more than thirty degrees out here.”

“Oh,” Anna said weakly.

“Is it working?”

That depended on whether he was talking about warming her up or turning her on. Hot little pockets of sensation were erupting in places deep inside her but the outer layer of her skin still felt as though she’d been hanging like a slab of beef inside an industrial-sized refrigerator.

“Not entirely,” she said.

He let her go, making her fear she’d given the wrong answer. She fisted her hands so she wouldn’t reach for him and watched in confusion as he unbuttoned his overcoat. Before she could ask if he was crazy, he drew it open.

“Come here before you freeze to death,” he invited.

Said the spider to the fly, she thought. But the promise of warmth plus the chance to be close to him was more temptation than Anna could withstand.

“Oh, all right,” she muttered before letting him en-fold her in the flaps of his overcoat. Their bodies touched from chest to thigh. Delicious warmth spread through her, and she was honest enough to admit it was only partly due to the coat.

She wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her cheek to the cool cotton of his shirt and heard his heart rate speed up. Hers was already galloping.

“Nobody better be looking out the window,” she murmured without lifting her head. “Otherwise we’ll never be able to convince them you’re not my boyfriend.”

“Does it matter that much what they think?” he asked. His breath was warm against her temple.

“It’s not so much what they think as what they’ll do,” she said. “They’re crafty. They like you. They’ll throw us together whenever they can.”

“Is that why you never brought Larry Lipinski home?”

“I never brought Larry home because he was a chronic liar,” she said. “I couldn’t trust him.”

He was silent for a moment. “Then why did you date him?”

“It’s not like I knew he had a Pinocchio complex ahead of time,” she said. “But we’re getting off the subject. We were talking about why you can’t spend tomorrow with us.”

She felt his body stiffen. “I already said I would.”

“I have an idea about that.” She spoke into his chest, finding it easier to deliver her news when she wasn’t looking into his devastatingly attractive face. “When I go back inside, I’ll tell them you remembered accepting another invitation.”

“But I didn’t.”

“They won’t know that. It’s the perfect plan.”

“You say that like it’s already been decided.”

Realizing she couldn’t drive home her point while talking to his chest, she lifted her head. His sensuously curved lips had thinned and his eyes had hardened into chips of blue ice, not the mark of a happy man.

“It has been decided,” she said firmly.

“No,” he said, shaking his dark head emphatically. His jaw firmed. “You decided. I didn’t. This isn’t like at work where your word goes, Anna. Your family invited me. I have some say in whether I show up.”

She felt her eyes widen. “You can’t mean you actually want to spend Christmas with my family?”

“I like your family,” he said. She got ready to argue that he’d never have met her family if it hadn’t been for her but he wasn’t through talking. “And it would sure beat staying home alone.”

The argument died on her lips. Alone, he’d said. “You mean you really don’t have plans?”

“I told you. I’m new in town. I don’t know many people.”

“Nobody invited you over?”

“A couple friends in San Diego, but I decided to stay here. I didn’t think it would bother me to spend Christmas alone,” he said, then gazed at her so intently she was surprised his glasses didn’t fog up. “Until your family invited me to spend it with all of you.”

She sighed. “You don’t play fair, Cole Mansfield.”

A corner of his mouth kicked up. “Does that mean you’re as much of a sucker for a guy alone on Christmas Day as you are for one going solo on Christmas Eve?”

“Not quite, but close.” Now that they were no longer at odds, she was intensely aware of her body humming in sensual awareness against his. That called to mind, once again, their problem. “Tell you what, you can come tomorrow on one condition.”

A fat snowflake drifted down from the sky and hit her nose, distracting her from what she’d been about to say. It was followed by another and then another. She raised her eyes and saw hundreds of white flakes leisurely falling to earth against the gray blanket of night.

“It’s snowing,” she said, grinning up at him in delight.

Almost instantaneously, she heard voices in the distance break into “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” Making sure to stay in the warm circle of Cole’s arms, she turned to watch a party breaking up across the street. The departing guests were singing. Most of them had their arms flung around each other.

She giggled. “It looks like the Gumberts can’t restrain themselves.”

“Neither can I. Not any longer,” Cole said in a strangled voice. His arms tightened at her back and she felt the tension in him give way as he gathered her close.

Even before she turned all the way back around, she knew he meant to kiss her. He was so tall that avoiding his mouth would have been a simple matter of bowing her head. Instead, with her blood thrumming and her senses singing, she lifted her head and met him halfway.

In Anna’s experience, first kisses were usually clumsy, with neither party sure exactly how to please the other. But Cole’s mouth molded to hers as though it had been designed to fit there, like the interlocking piece of a puzzle.

His lips, warm and tasting vaguely of the fine red wine he’d drunk at dinner, moved gently, persuasively against her mouth. The lower part of his face was vaguely scratchy against her smooth skin, underscoring his potent masculinity.

Intoxicating sensations poured through her, surprising in their intensity. She could feel his erection against the lower part of her stomach, and a swirling, liquid heat settled deep inside her.

She moved her hands from his waist, up the hard contours of his chest and circled them around his neck. If she didn’t anchor herself, she was afraid she’d get drunk on his kiss and sink bonelessly to the sidewalk.

His tongue slipped inside her mouth, feeling like heated velvet. She moaned, and a heady sensation shot straight to her head.

She was getting drunk on his kiss.

She angled her mouth to give him greater access, wanting to get closer to him. She almost cried out in dazed protest when he lifted his head, but then the cool feel of the snow falling on her face penetrated her haze.

The snow reminded her of where she was. She blinked once so that his face came into stark focus. She needed to remind herself of who she was with: Cole Mansfield, the man angling for her job. Lines of strain rimmed his mouth and his glasses were fogged.

“If we don’t stop now,” he said in a low growl, “I’m afraid your neighbors across the street will get more of a show than they bargained for.”

Although an unwise part of her wanted to cling to him, she resolutely loosened her arms from around his neck. She stepped back from the protection of his overcoat and the chill of the night immediately enveloped her.

“So I’ll see you tomorrow then,” she said, trying to resurrect the businesslike tone she used at the office and failing miserably.

One of his large hands came out to brush the hair back from her face, an intimacy she shouldn’t have allowed him. But then hair touching paled in comparison with lip locking. He gave her a sexy, lopsided smile.

“You never did tell me that condition,” he said.

She drew a blank until it occurred to her that she had been about to place a provision on him spending Christmas day with her family.

“Of course, the condition,” she repeated, stalling while she searched her muddled brain for it. Finally, it came to her. “Tomorrow, you need to make it clear to my family that we’re not involved.”

His dark eyebrows arched. “In that case, I’ll need one to last me.”

Before she could guess his intention, he cradled her head between his large hands and brought his mouth down on hers. Their initial kiss had exceeded every expectation she’d ever had about first kisses, but this kiss surpassed it.

This time, there was nothing tentative about the way they came together. Their mouths opened, their tongues tangled in an erotic dance and her insides quaked so hard the rumbling might have registered on the Richter scale.

He held her head steady but it wasn’t necessary, not when she couldn’t gather the will to move away. Knowing that she shouldn’t be kissing him didn’t seem to matter, not when the heat was back, making a mockery of the winter night.

She met his passion, ravishing his mouth the same as he did hers. Her mind seemed to switch off so only sensation remained. Again he was the one who drew back, but she couldn’t have said for certain how much time had passed: seconds, minutes, hours.

His glasses had fogged again, making it impossible to see his eyes. She had the sensation that he was gazing deeply into hers, looking for some acknowledgment of what they’d just shared that she knew instinctively she shouldn’t let him see.

“Good night, sugarplum,” he said.

Then he grinned, kissed her on the nose and disappeared down the sidewalk as she stood gazing after him. He whistled a holiday tune that was so off key she couldn’t recognize it. She had no trouble identifying the one running through her head, though.