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“Him,” her mother said, indicating Cole with the sweep of her hand. “But Anna, you should have told us you were dating someone at work.”
“Oh, no.” Anna waved her right hand back and forth for emphasis. “We’re not dating. I’m Cole’s boss.” She nudged the solid thickness of Cole’s arm with an elbow. “Tell them you work for me, Cole.”
“That’s true,” he said, and Anna could breathe again. “Anna’s my boss.”
“Well, well, well. Who would have thought Anna would get involved in an office romance.” Aunt Miranda, her father’s svelte, self-assured sister, came forward on three-inch heels. Her frosted blond hair, combined with winter-white slacks and matching sweater, projected a cool, sophisticated image and made her appear younger than her forty years. “Not that we’re not thrilled to finally meet one of her men.”
“Anna has a man?” Grandma Ziemanski, who wasn’t any taller than Anna’s mother and had recently dyed her hair jet black, crossed the room to stand between the other two women and peered up at Cole. “He’s kind of big but he’s cute. Good going, Anna.”
“He’s not my man, Grandma,” Anna denied sharply.
“If he wasn’t your man, you wouldn’t have brought him home to meet us,” Grandma Ziemanski said brightly, then turned and issued a general invitation. “Hey, everybody, come meet Anna’s man.”
One by one, like the guests in a receiving line at a wedding, the rest of her family came forward. Her grandfather, uncle and brother-in-law shook Cole’s hand, her sister Julie gave him a friendly elbow squeeze and her father slapped him on the back.
If Cole had been her boyfriend, Anna could have tolerated the welcome. Except Cole wasn’t her boyfriend. He was the employee with designs on her job.
“Excuse me,” Anna said yet again. “Isn’t anybody paying attention? Cole and I are not dating.”
Her father, who was standing closest to them, winked at Cole. He was slender as a reed, with thinning blond hair and an open manner that endeared him to his patients. “That’s what she said about Larry Lipinski, and she dated him for six months.”
Anna turned to her father in surprise. “You knew I dated Larry?”
“Who’s Larry Lipinski?” Cole asked.
Somebody—Anna wasn’t sure who, considering most everybody was still congregated at the head of the room—jarred her, causing her to bump into Cole. His arm came around her shoulders, creating such a rush of heat to shoot through her that she was startled into staying where she was.
“Nobody you need worry about, considering that hold you have on my daughter.” Her father gave Cole another wink, making Anna wish the pair of them would rise up the chimney, like St. Nick. “She never brought Larry home to meet us.”
Considering Larry had lied to her about everything from where he’d gone to college to how many miles he’d logged on his daily run, that wasn’t surprising. But she didn’t have time to get into that now.
“But—” Anna began again.
“Let me take your coats,” her mother said, practically peeling Anna out of hers. Anna felt a little less warm, but not much. Cole shrugged out of his overcoat, revealing his tree-dotted tie. He squeezed it, and a riff from “O, Christmas Tree” sang out.
Grandpa Ziemanski, connoisseur of all things corny, rumbled with laughter. His most prominent feature was his shaven head, but Anna noticed he was the only man in the room that Cole didn’t dwarf. Grandpa, however, lacked Cole’s muscular build. But not many men who didn’t make their living playing professional football were as muscle bound as Cole.
“I like him, Anna,” her grandfather said heartily.
“But he’s not—”
Grandpa didn’t let her finish. “What’s that in your hand?” He reached out and took the Bobblehead Santa doll from her, pressing the button at its back.
“Hee, hee, hee,” said the Santa doll, his head bobbing crazily. Grandpa mashed the button again, and the doll said, “And I bet you were expecting me to say ho, ho, ho.”
Grandpa erupted into more joyous laughter, which was so infectious that Anna couldn’t help but chime in. She glanced at Cole to share the moment. Cheerful, masculine rumbles seemed to come from the very center of his being and his blue eyes crinkled behind his professor glasses.
“You’ve got a great family, Anna,” he told her. He reached out and hugged her to him with one long arm, tucking her head under his chin. In light of the laughter and the fact that it was, after all, Christmas Eve, the gesture seemed perfectly natural.
Until her mother called from the entrance to the dining room in her resounding voice.
“Come help Julie and me get out the food, Anna. There’ll be enough time for snuggling with your man later.”
“We’re not snuggling,” she denied, shooting out of Cole’s embrace so quickly that she stumbled and he had to steady her. She sent him a pleading look and ordered in a low, resolute voice. “Tell them we weren’t snuggling.”
“I think that was snuggling,” Cole said just as quietly.
“Yep,” said Grandpa. “That was snuggling, all right.”
“Told you,” Cole said, his eyes grazing over her as though she were the sexiest woman this side of the North Pole. The room was suddenly so hot Anna felt as though she were standing inches from the fireplace when, in fact, it was fifteen feet away.
“You’re not helping,” she snapped at Cole.
This was much worse than she’d anticipated. She’d considered the possibility her family might jump to the conclusion that she and Cole were involved, but she hadn’t foreseen him acting like he was her boyfriend.
As Anna went to help her mother and sister, she wondered how she could convince her family that nothing was going on between her and Cole.
Especially because she was no longer sure that was true.
2
HIS STOMACH FULL after a traditional meatless dinner of Polish food with strange names like pierogi and kluski, Cole sat in the glow of a giant Christmas tree watching Anna ignore him.
She stood near a flaming fireplace animatedly talking to her much-rounder, chestnut-haired sister and her boyish brother-in-law, who had apple cheeks and fine, straight hair worn in a bowl cut. She didn’t seem to notice that the newlyweds were more engrossed in each other than the conversation.
His eyes drank in the curve of her figure in the red sweater dress she wore, the fall of her curly brown hair, the lovely line of her profile.
She laid a long-fingered, well-shaped hand on her sister’s arm, and he couldn’t stop from wondering how that hand would feel running over his skin.
Erotic, he thought. Especially if they were both naked.
As though sensing his stare, she looked directly at him. Still imagining her lush body bare, he smiled long and slow.
She didn’t return the smile, which was undoubtedly a good thing. If she didn’t encourage him, he wouldn’t do something stupid: Like make a play for her.
Still, he wanted to believe she kept looking his way because she couldn’t help herself. Instead, he had to face the possibility it had something to do with the miniature women perched on either side of him.
“So how long ago did you meet my daughter?” Rosemary Wesley, Anna’s mother, sat on the sofa so that her velour-clad body angled toward his. His ears rang. For someone so tiny, she had a monstrous voice box.
“I love how-we-met stories,” chimed in Grandma Ziemanski, patting her incongruous black hair into place. He’d already gathered from her own not-nearly-dulcet tones that she was Rosemary’s mother. “They’re so romantic.”
“No romantic story here,” Cole said. “I met Anna about a month ago when she interviewed me for the job at Skillington Ski.”
He left out the part about the owner of the business being his father, but then he always did. What other choice did he have when Arthur Skillington had asked him to keep their connection on the QT?
“Did she stammer when she asked you questions?” Grandma Ziemanski asked. “That’s a dead giveaway that she’s nervous.”
“Anna would never stammer. That was Julie and she doesn’t do it anymore.” Rosemary patted Cole on the hand. “So did you know right away you wanted to ask her out?”
Cole thought back to the icy looks that had put his initial attraction to Anna in deep freeze. She’d grilled him relentlessly about why he was pursuing an assistant position when he was qualified to be a marketing director.
He’d claimed to be aiming for her job because he couldn’t very well tell her the truth.
The part about him needing work while he was getting to know his father would have been fine. The part about him being a mole trying to figure out why profits were lagging wouldn’t have gone over as well.
Cole wanted to reveal his connection to Skillington Ski up front, but Arthur Skillington had talked him out of it. Arthur claimed Cole would be more likely to get to the heart of the problem if the other employees, whose jobs were at risk, weren’t on guard around him.
Mostly because he wanted to please a father he’d never known but already loved, Cole had gone along with the plan.
He hadn’t let dating Anna enter his mind, primarily because the wrong word from him could get her fired.
“Well, no, I can’t say I thought about asking her out right off the bat,” he said. “At first, she struck me as…cool.”
Grandma Ziemanski’s wrinkled hand flew to her chest. “You think Anna’s cruel?”
“Not cruel, Mom. Cool. And he doesn’t mean now. He meant then.” Rosemary leaned across him to get the point across to her mother. “Tell us what you think of Anna now, Cole.”
His gaze once again honed in on Anna. Although up to this point her marketing efforts hadn’t been enough to pull Skillington Ski out of its slump, at work she struck him as intelligent and competent.
But her mother was interested in his personal assessment. As he tried to form one, firelight danced over her. It infused her golden skin with warmth and made it seem as though her brown hair was spun through with red and gold highlights.
Grandpa Ziemanski snatched the Santa hat from her mop of brown curls and covered his own bald head. When Anna threw back her head and laughed, her face seemed to glow.
“I think she’s the most captivating woman I’ve ever seen,” Cole said under his breath.
“Captivating?” Rosemary nodded. “That’s a good word. Much less trite than beautiful.”
“You don’t think Anna’s beautiful?” Grandma Ziemanski asked.
Cole jerked his gaze from Anna to her grandmother. “Yes,” he refuted quickly. “Yes, of course I think she’s beautiful.”
“And captivating,” Rosemary added, sounding smug. She squeezed his arm. “I knew you felt that way about my daughter the minute I saw you.”
“How did you know, Rosie?” Grandma Ziemanski asked.
“The face,” Rosemary said. “There’s always something glowy around the eyes.”
Anna picked that moment to slant him another one of those disapproving looks. A shard of guilt speared through Cole.
She’d spent a good portion of the last few hours trying to make her family understand they weren’t dating, and here he was looking at her with “glowy” eyes and expounding on their non-existent romance.
It was a terrible way to repay her for the kindness of asking him to dinner with her warm, wonderful family.
“So when did you change your mind about Anna being cruel and decide you wanted to ask her out?” Grandma Ziemanski asked.
“He didn’t say cruel, Mom,” Rosemary cut in with an audible tsk. “He said cool.”
“Alright already. Then let me put it another way.” Grandma Ziemanski peered at him. “When did the cools turn into the hots?”
Cole was about to point out that he didn’t have the hots for his boss when he realized he needed to face facts.
A few hours ago, on the sidewalk in front of the house, a definite thaw had begun when he noticed she was nervous about introducing him to her family.
The notion of Anna being apprehensive about anything had thrown him, and he’d glimpsed a different, softer woman in those moments under the starlight.
After watching her talk and laugh with her family over dinner, he’d concluded that woman and not the cool, detached one who came to the office every day was the true Anna.
He tapped his chin with a knuckle while he thought about how to phrase his answer so that it was both truthful and non-inflammatory.
Yes, he was attracted to Anna. But, no, he couldn’t become involved with her.
“Anna asked you out first, didn’t she?” Rosemary asked when the moments lengthened without a response. “That’s what you don’t want to say?”
“No,” Cole said quickly, then thought of the invitation to dinner. “I mean yes, but—”
“That Anna has always been too straightforward for her own good,” Rosemary said. “Did you know she told Brad Perriman right there in the living room in front of all of us that she didn’t want to date him? Not that he accepted that. But in this case, I suppose we should be thankful.”
“Look, I should confess something here,” Cole began before the women could jump to any more conclusions.
“I already know,” Rosemary said. “Don’t you think I noticed the way she’s been glaring at you?”
“What do you know?” Grandma Ziemanski asked her daughter.
“That Anna made Cole here promise to tell us he was only a friend.”
“That’s true,” Cole said. “But—”
Rosemary patted him on the hand.
“Don’t worry about it,” she interrupted. “We knew Anna wasn’t telling the truth about you not being her boyfriend as soon as we saw you.”
WHAT WAS COLE telling her mother and grandmother?
Anna tried to convey with a long, penetrating look that he needed to be careful of what he said.
The main reason she didn’t bring home men was that the Ziemanski women seemed to think she needed a husband. Anna wasn’t against marriage but she’d yet to have a truly successful relationship.
Before unleashing her family on a man, she needed to be sure she not only loved him but trusted him. The way she’d never trust a man who panted after her job.
She’d had Cole in her sights long enough to notice that teeth were flashing on either side of him. Didn’t he realize things weren’t going well if her mother and grandmother were smiling?
She’d have to head over there and set things straight but not until Julie and Drew, her sister’s husband of three months, understood the situation. She turned back to them.
“So now you see why I couldn’t leave Cole all alone in the office on Christmas Eve, right?” she asked.
Julie giggled, prompting Anna to notice that Drew was nuzzling a spot below her sister’s ear. She frowned.
“Are you two even listening to me?”
