Blame It On Christmas

Four

J.B. cursed beneath his breath, stunned at his run of bad luck. Then again, maybe he should admit the truth. No matter his physical frustration, he had escaped certain catastrophe. He’d spent years avoiding Mazie Tarleton, and yet he’d come perilously close to doing the very thing he knew he couldn’t do.

His beautiful enemy was barely decent when a loud scraping ensued, and the heavy door began to swing inward. At the last second, J.B. shoved her torn underwear into his pocket and slipped his shirt on again.

The lights from outside the vault were so bright they both blinked. Their rescuer crossed his arms over his chest. Jonathan Tarleton. Mazie’s brother. With a smug smile on his face. “Well, look at you two.”

J.B. took a step forward, shielding Mazie in case she had anything else she needed to tuck away. “What are you doing here?”

Jonathan moved back, allowing them to exit. “I though maybe I could convince Mazie to give you a fair hearing. When I arrived, I saw both of your cars, but neither of you. So I put my CSI skills to work and found footprints leading to the vault. Fortunately for you, this hardwood floor is dusty as hell.”

For J.B., the rush of cool air was blissful. He inhaled deeply, feeling the last tentacles of his brief ordeal slip away.

Truth be told, Mazie had rescued him quite effectively. Her methods were almost beguiling enough to make him drag her back into the vault and shut the door again.

Almost, but not quite.

“Thanks for rescuing us,” he said. “If you hadn’t come by, we might have spent an uncomfortable few hours locked up in there.”

“The mechanism was jammed on the outside. I had to hit it with my shoe to knock it loose.”

Mazie hadn’t said a word up until now, though she had hugged her brother briefly. She edged toward the front of the building. “It was my fault. I didn’t mean to close the door.” She grimaced. “Not to be rude, but I’m in dire need of the ladies’ room. I’ll see you later, Jonathan.” She gave J.B. an oddly guarded look for someone who had only recently been wrapped around him like a feather boa. “Thanks for the tour.”

And then she was gone.

He stared out the window, wondering if the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach was sexual disappointment or something far more alarming.

Had he actually connected with his prickly nemesis? Surely not. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. The only reason he was spending time with her at all was to seal a deal. He dared not let himself get sidetracked by an almost irresistible attraction.

That kind of thing made a man stupid. He should know.

Jonathan cuffed his shoulder. “Well,” he said. “Did you convince her? What did she say?”

J.B. ran his hands through his hair. “She didn’t say anything. We’d barely started looking the place over when we got stuck. I have no idea if she liked it or not.”

“Of course she liked it,” Jonathan said. “Mazie is a sucker for historic buildings. This one has tons of original features, but unlike the dump she’s in now, your building is rock-solid.”

“Yeah.” J.B. nodded absently, reliving every incredible moment of his incarceration. Now that it was over, the whole thing seemed like a dream. Did Mazie Tarleton really let him touch her and nearly make love to her?

“Hey, J.B.” Jonathan eyed him strangely.

“What?”

“You have lipstick on your chin.”

J.B. froze inwardly. This was a minefield. Mazie wasn’t a child anymore, but Jonathan was very protective. That was part of the reason J.B. had kept a healthy distance from her over the years. “Do I?” he said.

Jonathan’s expression segued into a frown. “What the hell went on in that vault?”

“None of your damn business. Your sister is an adult. Besides, nothing happened. I got claustrophobic, and Mazie tried to distract me with a little kiss.”

“Claustrophobic?” Jonathan’s distrust vanished. “Oh, man, J.B., I’m sorry. You must have freaked. That was nice of her, especially considering she doesn’t like you all that much.”

She seemed to like me just fine a few minutes ago when she had her tongue down my throat.

J.B. swallowed the sarcastic words and managed a noncommittal nod. “Not my finest hour. It’s humiliating as hell to have something that happened almost twenty-five years ago still yank my chain. For a minute in there, I thought I was going to lose it.”

“You should be glad it was Mazie with you and not someone else. At least she won’t ever tease you about it. That girl has a tender heart.”

“She’s a lot like Hartley in that way. The two of them were always bringing home strays. Have you heard from him at all? I still can’t believe he simply vanished.”

“No. But it’s only a matter of time. Hartley was born and bred here. The Lowcountry is in his blood.”

“You don’t sound happy about that.”

“He abandoned the family business...left me to deal with Dad. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for my brother right now.”

“He’s your twin. Twins are close.”

“We were at one time. Not anymore.”

“You say that, Jonathan, but I know you. And I know Hartley. The two of you were practically inseparable when we were growing up. You can’t pretend that tie isn’t there. It always will be.”

“Not if I don’t want it...not if I don’t want him.”

J.B. let the subject drop, but only because he saw beneath Jonathan’s angry response to the deep hurt that still festered.

He rotated his shoulders and took one last look around the room. “I think this will work for Mazie. I didn’t get a firm yes from her, but I’ll follow up.”

“And I’ll continue to put in a good word for you.”

They exited the building. J.B. locked up. “You on for basketball next weekend?”

“Yeah. Seven o’clock?”

J.B. nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

When Jonathan climbed in his car and drove away, J.B. should have followed suit, but he felt oddly out of sorts. Perhaps because he wanted to get this project settled. He needed Mazie’s property.

Who was he kidding? Every bit of his current angst was because of a frustrating, completely off-limits woman who had bedeviled him for years. He wanted her. End of story.

He took out his phone and pulled up her contact info. A short text in this situation would be perfectly acceptable.

Hope you liked the property. Let me know what you think.

But he couldn’t do it. Mazie had muddied the waters. Or maybe they both had. He was accustomed to closing deals. In business. For pleasure. Never both at the same time.

This was exactly why he was screwed. He had resisted temptation all this time, and then in one short afternoon he’d undone all his good intentions.

Thinking about Mazie was a mistake. Half an hour ago, he had been primed to make love to her. His body had been denied satisfaction, and now he was itchy, restless.

One thing he knew for sure.

Kissing Mazie Tarleton was an experience he planned to repeat. Some way. Somehow. Maybe she didn’t know it, but J.B.’s intentions were crystal clear.

Now that he had touched her, tasted her, there was no going back...

Mazie wanted to go straight home and take a long cold shower, but it was too early in the day to be done with work, and besides, Gina was expecting her to return.

There was no choice but to brazen it out.

Which was not easy when a girl was commando under her skirt.

Fortunately, the shop was swamped with customers. Mazie barely did more than wave at Gina and say hello to her other employees before she was pulled into the fray. Thank goodness for tour ships that dispatched groups of passengers ashore, eager to tick off items on their Christmas lists.

At last, the furor subsided. Mazie sent two of her employees on lunch break. She glanced at her watch. It was almost one.

Mazie had advertised heavily during the last year in several of the cruise lines’ brochures. Her print ads were paying off, despite the digital age. Today, she’d had several customers come in clutching their maps of the historic district. All That Glitters was clearly marked, along with the small rectangle showcasing a beautiful necklace and the store’s phone number with other contact info.

She glanced in one of the larger cases. “We’re going to need more sweetgrass basket charms in gold.”

Gina nodded. “Yep. One lady bought six of them for her granddaughters. I’ll call Eve this afternoon and place an order.”

They were eating pizza standing up, a common occurrence. Gina swallowed a bite and grinned. “Don’t keep me in suspense. How did it go with Mr. Gorgeous? Did you like the building?”

“Honestly, I did. The place J.B. wants us to have was originally a nineteenth-century bank. He was showing me the vault when we had a little accident and got locked inside.”

Gina’s eyes rounded. “You got locked in a bank vault with J.B. Vaughan? God, that’s so romantic.”

“Um, no. Not romantic at all.” You couldn’t call what happened with J.B. romance. Sexual frenzy, maybe.

“So it was too scary to be romantic?”

The other woman’s crestfallen expression might have been funny if Mazie hadn’t been walking on eggshells. She wasn’t going to betray J.B.’s secret weakness. Instead, she skirted the truth. “Not so much scary as tense. We were awfully glad to get out of there when Jonathan showed up.”

“So are you going to take it? The building, I mean? Will it work for our purposes?”

“It’s perfect. Doesn’t mean I’m ready to give J.B. what he wants. Surely there’s another way.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re contrary?”

“You,” Mazie said, finishing her meal. “Every other day.” She wiped her hands on a napkin. “My...conversation with J.B. got derailed when my brother showed up. I’m sure I’ll hear from him soon. J.B., that is.”

“And what will you say when he asks you again?”

Mazie flashed to a mental image of the real estate developer’s chest. His tousled hair. His eyes, heavy-lidded with desire. Her throat tightened. Her thighs pressed together. “I don’t really know.”

Unfortunately, the afternoon crowd picked up, and Mazie never found a moment to scoot home and restock her wardrobe. By the time the shop closed at five, she was more than ready to call it quits.

The Tarleton family had lived for decades on the tip of a small barrier island just north of the city. They owned fifteen acres, more than enough to create a compound that included the main house and several smaller buildings scattered around.

An imposing, gated iron fence protected the enclave on land. Water access was impossible due to a high brick wall Mazie’s grandfather had erected at the top of the sand. The beach itself was public property, but he had made sure no one could wander onto Tarleton property, either out of curiosity or with dangerous motives. Hurricanes and erosion made the wall outrageously expensive to maintain, but the current Tarleton patriarch was by nature paranoid and suspicious, so security was a constant concern.

At times, Mazie felt unbearably strangled by her familial obligations. Perhaps that was why being around J.B. felt both dangerous and exhilarating all at the same instant.

She punched her security code into the keypad and waited for the heavy gate to slide open. She and Jonathan both wanted to move out, but they were trapped by the weight of love and responsibility for their father. She suspected her brother kept an apartment in the city so he could have a private life, but she didn’t pry. Someday she might find a place of her own, as well.

She had let the long-ago debacle with J.B. cast too long a shadow over her romantic life. Heartbreak had made her overly cautious.

It was time to find some closure with J.B., one way or another. Time to move on.

The house where she had grown up was a colossal structure of sandstone and timber, on stilts, of course. Supposedly, it had been built to withstand a Category Four hurricane. Though the family home had suffered damage over the years, the original structure was still mostly intact.

An imposing front staircase swept upward to double mahogany doors inlaid with stained glass. The images of starfish and dolphins and sea turtles had fascinated her as a child. When she grew tall enough, she liked to stand on the porch and trace them with her fingertips.

The sea creatures were free in a way that Mazie couldn’t imagine. All her life she had been hemmed in by her mother’s illness and later, her father’s paranoia. Jonathan and Hartley—when they had been in a mood to tolerate her—had been her companions, her best friends.

And J.B., too.

The Vaughan family was one of only a handful in Charleston as wealthy as the Tarletons, so Gerald Tarleton had condoned, even promoted his children’s friendship with J.B. But Mazie was younger, and Hartley was a loner, so it was always Jonathan and J.B. who were the closest.

Mazie had adored J.B. as a child, then had a crush on him as a teenager, and finally, hated him for years. No matter how she examined her past, it was impossible to excise J.B. from the memories.

Mazie found her father in the large family room with the double plate-glass windows. The ocean was benign today, shimmering shades of blue and turquoise stretching all the way to the horizon.

“Hi, Daddy.” She kissed the top of his curly, white-haired head. Her father was reading the Wall Street Journal, or pretending to. More often than not, she discovered him napping. Gerald Tarleton had been an imposing figure at one time. Tall and barrel-chested, he could bluster and intimidate with the best of them.

As he aged, he had lost much of his fire.

He reached up and patted her hand. “There you are, pumpkin. Will you tell cook I want dinner at six thirty instead of seven?”

“Of course. Did you have a good day?”

“Stupid doctor says I can’t smoke cigars anymore. Where’s the fun in that?”

The family physician made twice yearly visits to the Tarleton compound. Mazie wasn’t sorry to have missed this one. “He’s trying to keep you alive.”

“Or take away my reasons for living,” he groused comically.

Her father had married later in life, a man in his midforties taking a much younger bride. The story wasn’t so unusual. But in Gerald’s case, it had ended tragically. His bride and her parents had hidden from him the extent of her mental struggles, leaving Gerald to eventually raise his young family on his own.

Mazie and her brothers had each paid an invisible price that followed them into adulthood.

She ignored his mood. “I’ll speak to cook, and then I’m going to change clothes. I’ll be back down in half an hour or so.”

“And Jonathan?”

“He’s home tonight, I think.”

After a quick word with the woman who ran the kitchen like a drill sergeant, but with sublime culinary skills, Mazie ran upstairs and at last made it to the privacy of her bedroom. She stripped off her clothes, trying not to think about J.B.’s hands on her body.

His touch had opened her eyes to several disturbing truths, not the least of which was that she had carried a tendresse for him, an affection, that had never been stamped out.

She had spent a semester in France her senior year, only a few months after he had rejected her. The entire time she was abroad, she had imagined herself wandering the streets of Paris with J.B.

What a foolish, schoolgirl dream.

Yet now, when she stared in the mirror and saw her naked body, it was impossible to separate her former daydreams from the inescapable reality. She had allowed J.B. Vaughan to caress her breasts, to touch her intimately.

Had Jonathan not intruded to rescue them, would she have regrets?

Confusion curled her stomach. She wasn’t the kind of person who jumped into bed with a man. Especially not J.B.

Something had happened in the vault.

Yet however she replayed the sequence of events, J.B. didn’t come out the villain. Mazie had been the one to accidentally close the door and lock them in. Mazie had been the one to kiss J.B. Mazie had been the one who decided that a nod to her past infatuation would serve to distract J.B. from his claustrophobia.

Was it any wonder he had taken her invitation and run with it?

She stayed in the shower a long time, scrubbing and scrubbing again, trying to erase every vestige of his touch from her skin. She still wanted to hate him. He was still off-limits. And damn it, she still wanted to see him squirm.

Today had weakened her position in their face-off.

J.B. was a highly sexual man. When a woman gave him every indication she wanted sex, it was no wonder he had obliged.

Mazie had to live with the knowledge that she had done something extremely foolhardy. Self-destructive even.

Circumstances had saved her from the ultimate humiliation.

She didn’t have to face J.B. as an ex-lover. Thank God for that.

But the unseen damage was worse, perhaps.

Now she knew what it felt like to be in his arms, to hear him whisper her name in a ragged groan that sent shivers of raw pleasure down her spine. Tonight when she climbed into bed, she would remember his hands on her breasts, her bare body, her sex.

How could she think about anything else?

Five

Even now, her hands trembled as she dried herself with a huge fluffy towel that smelled of sunshine and ocean breezes. The housekeeper liked pinning the laundry on an old-fashioned clothesline when weather permitted.