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She hoped she hadn’t missed anything. He’d told her it would all make sense in time so, ever the bright, obedient girl, she had tried to make mental notes as they drove along.
“Yeah?” He seemed engrossed in reading the street signs.
If he didn’t know where they were going then why had he brought her along? And why had she come? She squeezed her eyes shut to put her thoughts back on track.
She crossed her arms and tipped up her chin. “So far you haven’t really shown me anything that supports your claim of needing me to help you play the jolly fat guy.”
“Hey.” He tapped the brake lightly and stole a sly, amused glimpse her way at last. “Is that any way to talk to Santa?”
“You are not Santa.”
“Maybe not,” he conceded, with an expression that was neither jeering nor jovial but somewhere in between. Then he made a sharp turn, and used the momentum of their shifting center of gravity to lean over and whisper, just beside her ear, “But I’m on his team.”
“Oh, right.” She shivered at his nearness. “Team Santa. I suppose you have the T-shirt and matching ball cap?”
“No can do. Team Santa is strictly a hush-hush kind of deal.” He sat upright behind the wheel again and fixed his eyes straight ahead. “Not that I would look devastatingly cute in said hat and shirt.”
He would. He’d be downright adorable, with his suntanned skin and deep set eyes that twinkled when he knew he had the best of a person in a given situation—and Burke always had the best of everyone in any situation. He knew it and so did she.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him now. So strong, so confident, so manly but with just a hint of boyish excitement over this odd adventure he insisted on dragging her into. This was the Burke she had known last summer. The one she had wanted so much to give her heart to, right up until his last quick, cutting phone call when he’d ended their professional and, by extension, personal relationship based on the results of the family meeting. Correction: the Carolina Crumble Pattie board of directors meeting, a board made up of the members of the Burdett family. This Burke and the man who had torn her dreams to shreds with a soft-spoken and deceptively simple, “nothing personal, just business,” seemed to be two entirely different people.
A man like that…he was not to be trusted.
That reminder made it easier for her to sit back and create a little verbal distance. “I suppose next you will try to tell me that you’re an elf?”
“Why do you think I let my hair get this shaggy?” He tapped the side of his head. “To hide my pointed little ears.”
“Really?” She did not look his way. “I thought you let your hair grow out for the same reason I keep mine short.”
“Because it makes you look like a little girl all dressed up in grown-up clothes?”
“No.” She crinkled up her nose at his way-off-base guess. “Because…um, does it?”
She put her hand to the back of her head. If anyone else on earth had said that she’d have given them what for, but coming from Burke, it had a sweetness that took her by surprise. She had always suspected that he could see the young Dora, the frightened, lonely and longing-to-belong child who lurked just beneath her polished surface. The notion warmed her heart. And chilled her to the core.
“That’s not…that is…the point is, we both keep our hair the length we do for the same reason.”
“I hope not. My hair is long but I hope not long enough to make me look like a little girl!”
“I like your hair.” It wasn’t all that long, really, just grown out enough to add to the overall appeal of this man who was rough-hewn, unfettered by convention and free from any kind of vanity or fussiness.
“Do you?” he asked softly.
“Yeah,” she said, more softly. Almost childlike, almost flirty. The CD had stopped playing a few minutes earlier and she didn’t have to compete with sleigh bells and steel guitars to be heard.
He looked into her eyes for only a moment before he squared his broad shoulders and stuck out his chest. “Then I guess I’ll cancel my regular appointment with the barber.”
“You don’t keep any regular appointments with a barber, Burke. Just like I never miss mine.” She sat in the truck with posture so perfect that only the small of her back made contact with the upholstery. “I wear my hair short for the same reason you don’t bother to keep yours trimmed. I’m too busy with my work to bother with upkeep and style.”
He did not dispute that, just turned the wheel and took them down a quiet residential street in a part of town Dora had never seen before.
They fell silent.
The air went still around them.
Dora should have let it go. Let him make the next move, the next comment. He had brought her here to prove something, after all. She didn’t need to ramble on, cajoling and teasing and then retreating, hoping he would follow. That phase between them had passed. Now it really was just business.
Nothing personal. Just business.
No, not even business.
Once he had shown her the last of these places—he seemed to think they would add up to something that would somehow affect her—and shared this story of his, she’d probably never see him again. If she were smart she’d just keep her mouth zipped and wait it out until he dropped her off back at her office building.
“So if your hair hides your ears then I guess you wear that cowboy hat of yours all the time to hide your pointed little head?” So much for keeping her mouth shut.
“Elves don’t have pointed heads.” He frowned. Actually frowned as if he had to think that over and make the point quite clear.
She gulped in a breath so she could launch into an explanation that she had meant it as a joke.
He beat her to it by adding, with a wink, “It’s just our pointy little hats make it look that way.”
She laughed at the very idea of Burke in a pointed hat. “Someone sure is aiming to get on the naughty list.”
“Aww, you haven’t been that bad. Lots of people make cracks about elves and helpers and Santa’s weight issues.”
“I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about you, for fibbing about wearing a pointed hat.”
“I’m not fibbing.” He looked quite serious, but couldn’t hold it and broke into a big grin. “And I have the photo to prove it.”
“Then prove it.”
“Uh, I, uh, I don’t have the photo with me.”
She shook her head. “For a second there, you almost had me believing you.”
He went quiet then. Not silent, not still, but quiet with all the power, control and even reverence that implied. She could hear the tires on the road, the squeak of the seat cushions, the beating of their two battered hearts.
Her skin tingled. Her throat went dry.
For only a moment it was like that, then Burke turned to her, his intense, serious eyes framed by playful laugh lines as he whispered, “Believe me, Dora.”
Oh, how she wanted to—to believe him about the hat, his being Santa and, most of all, that he needed her in a way that he needed no one else in the world.
But life had taught her that those kinds of beliefs only led to disappointment. So she kept it light, played along. “You in an elf hat?”
His eyes twinkled. “With red and green stripes, a plump pom-pom and a brass jingle bell on the end.”
“What are you going to tell me next?”
“That this is what I wanted you to see.” He pulled into a parking lot, slid the truck into a space and cut the engine. “This is why I need you.”
“To go to a pediatrician? What? You need me to hold your hand while the doctor holds your tongue down with a Popsicle stick and makes you say ‘ahh’?” What was he trying to pull?
“No. Not to go to the doctor, to see what she’s doing.”
“What? Seeing patients?”
“On the Friday after Thanksgiving.” He nodded, his gaze scanning the lot.
Dora took a moment to follow his line of vision. It did not take long for her to come to a conclusion. “This is some kind of clinic?”
“Every Friday, even holidays—except Christmas and when the Fourth of July falls on Friday.” He watched as a little boy scurried ahead of a young woman carrying a baby and then held the door to the office open. “A clinic for people who have jobs but no insurance. Just the doc’s way of giving back because once upon a time somebody did something nice for her.”
“And what does that have to do with Santa Claus coming to Mt. Knott, South Carolina?”
He hesitated a moment, gripping then repositioning his large, lean hands on the steering wheel. He started to speak, held back, then took a deep breath. Finally, he worked his broad shoulders around so that they pressed against the window and his upper body faced her. His brow furrowed. His eyes fixed on her then shifted toward the children. He kept his voice low as if he thought one of them might hear. “Do you know the story of the first Santa, the real Saint Nicholas?”
She kept her backbone pressed to the seat and her cool gaze on the man. “I think the real question here is, do you know how to answer a question directly when it’s put to you?”
“Humor me,” he said with grim sobriety just before he broke into a crooked grin.
It was the grin that got her. She sighed. “The real Saint Nicholas? Hmm. Turkish? Skinny fellow, too, not the bowlful of jelly Clement Moore described. Or the ho-ho-hokey, soda pop–swilling, round-cheeked invention of American advertising.”
“Right. The Bishop of Turkey. He surreptitiously gave bags of gold to girls who otherwise would not have had a dowry so they wouldn’t be pressed into servitude or prostitution.”
Now she moved around in the seat, impressed. Suspicious but definitely impressed. “You said that like a kid reading off a plaque in a museum.”
“Close. Only the museum is my mom’s office in the attic of our family home, and the plaque is a caption under an old print from a book she has framed there.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’d like…”…to see it someday. The rest of the sentence went unfinished. She had no business inviting herself, not only into the home where Burke had grown up, but into his late mother’s office. “I’d like to know how that relates to this pediatrician’s office in Atlanta?”
“Easy. The original saint gave money to girls in order to give them the power to make better lives for themselves, and by extension better lives for their families and their communities.”
“And this doctor is doing the same?”
“Because?”
“Because she…” Dora looked at the office once again. On the sign with the doctor’s name was the symbol of a gold coin with a wreath encircling a Christmas stocking. “Because once upon a time that doctor got a visit from Saint Nick?”
“Who is?”
“You.”
“My mom.” His gaze dropped for a moment and the grief seemed so real and still so fresh in him that Dora did not know how to respond. She didn’t have the chance, as he quickly recovered and met her gaze with his sad and solemn eyes. “From the time she decided to stay in Mt. Knott and raise a family instead of traveling the world, my mother gave out grants and scholarships to deserving girls and young women who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to make better lives for themselves.”
“Wow. She paid for their college?”
“She helped. And not just college. Private high schools. Vocational training. Trips. Conferences. Art supplies.”
“Art…oh, art supplies. So the artist, the jeweler, the accountant were all…”
“Just the artist and accountant. The jeweler is where she has the gold medallions engraved that she gave the recipients to let them know they were chosen.”
“She didn’t present them in some kind of ceremony?”
“She kept it quiet. The jeweler sent them from here so no one would ever know who they came from.”
“People suspected the Burdetts, though. They’d have to.”
“If they did, no one ever said.”
Dora studied the coin with new eyes and understanding. “There’s writing around the edge.”
“‘We give to others because God first gave Christ to us,’” he said, without even looking at the sign or the coin he had just quoted.
“And no one knows about your mother’s good works? Really?”
“Only the accountant who manages the financial side of things, me and now you.”
“Not even your brothers? Or your dad?”
“It’s a secret Mom entrusted with me alone on her deathbed.”
“Oh, Burke.” She reached out to touch his face, to lend support and comfort.
“But me alone? I don’t think I’m up for the job.”
Job. Only business. She curled her fingers closed and put her fist to her chest.
“That’s why I need your help. I need someone who isn’t from Mt. Knott to help me pull this off. Because as a Burdett I can’t do anything in Mt. Knott in secret.”
“Including taking me out there to manage this for you,” she reminded him, switching swiftly into organizational problem-solving mode. “How would you ever explain that?”
“Oh. Yeah.” He scowled. “Unless…”
“Yes?” She needed him to come up with this solution, not because she didn’t have one to offer, but because it was his project. She had no intention of investing in it emotionally or even mentally unless he could find a way to win her over to it. Which meant she wasn’t getting involved.
“Well, you were out there all last summer and no one questioned that.”
“I was in negotiations to buy into your business then.” She folded her arms and clamped them down tight. “I don’t suppose you want to revisit that?”
“There’s a lot about last summer I’d like to revisit.”
And a lot of memories she wanted to send packing. She shut her eyes. “Burke, I…”
