You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(136)

“You were sort of busy.”

“No way. Not too busy for this.”

“Yeah.” She smiled at him. Replete and happy. “Doing this with other girls.”

That blush again. Really. It was too much on him. “Well, you were busy saving the world.”

“Some of us just have higher callings, I guess,” she said with a grin. Slowly, they disengaged from each other. They both shuddered and twitched, rocked by the end of the unexpected storm.

“Thank you,” he breathed, kissing her hands. Her cheeks.

“Back at you. I honestly never thought—” She stopped, and he looked down at her.

“Really?” he asked. “You never thought about us?”

“No. I thought about us a lot. For at least a year straight, that was about all I thought about. But I never really thought it would happen. There’s just always been so much between us. You know?”

“Yeah. What happened to Trevor?”

“Trevor was hardly between us.”

“He was the night I invited you to my Christmas party.”

She blinked. “You mean…you wanted…?”

“Of course I wanted,” he said. “There’s no way I thought you were actually bringing your boyfriend.”

“But you acted—”

“Like a total gentleman, because I am. And a nice guy, too.”

“And modest.”

“And a sex god, don’t forget that.”

Their laughter faded and in the silence guilt was like a rat in her stomach.

“Actually, I was talking about our parents.” The room was getting colder, the truth harder to avoid. “And our friendship and the fact that… we were so different.”

“Meaning you were a genius would-be lawyer and I was a simple cowboy?”

“No!” she snapped, furious that he would accuse her of thinking like that.

He grinned. “Just checking.” The silence between them was not as warm as it had been. The past had been let in and the edges of this room, of their night, were growing cold.

“You heading out to see your dad?” he asked, watching her through the flop of his hair as he zipped up his pants.

“Not…yet.” She’d need a few days after Dean to put together her defenses. Rebuild her walls. Around her father she’d need to be unbreakable. Because there was nothing that could break her like her father’s drunk indifference. Being the daughter he never saw had ground her down into a fine powder. And she’d spent all these years away from him trying to figure out who she was. “Have you seen him?” she asked, pretending like she didn’t care, or that it wasn’t important.

But because this man knew her better than anyone else in her life, he wasn’t buying it.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even brought it up,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “Let’s go get some breakfast. Or I could run down to Deckers and grab some—”

“Stop.” This was the moment.

“Okay.”

Trina held him hard for one more second. Memorizing every bit of him. The smell, the feel. The way his breath touched the top of her head and tickled.

“Trina? You all right?”

“Fine. I just…I need to tell you something.” She pushed away from him, and then took a few more steps, hoping she’d find a bit more courage with some distance.

“I should…I should tell you something, too.”

That made her look up, stunned. Anger, because she was her father’s daughter, primed. That was always her first reaction to surprises. And she worked hard on that every damn day of her life. “What?”

“You first.”

She imagined him married, but he wouldn’t be married and spend the night with her. He wasn’t that guy. And, other than that, she wasn’t sure if anything he said would be as bad as hers.

“I’m working for your dad.”

He recoiled, nearly laughing. “What?” he asked.

“It’s not a joke. Or anything. Your father, or rather I guess the company, has hired me as part of the legal team as they fight the pipeline.”

“You’re here because you’re working for my dad?”

“I wouldn’t do it if it was just your dad, but we need to fight this pipeline and he’s throwing big money behind it.”

“You’re crazy if you think he’s going to fight that. It’s a trick somehow.”

“I know you have no reason to believe your father wants to do something noble.”

“I can’t believe you’ve been sucked in by his lies!”

“It’s not. It’s real. It’s a real job, an important job, and I couldn’t—”

“Turn it down. You said.”

She nodded and braced herself for an explosion. Because Dean did not talk about his father without, at some point, exploding.

“You know why he’s hired you, don’t you?” he snapped.

“Because I’m very good at my job, Dean.”

“Yeah, and there aren’t seven thousand other lawyers who could do the same damn thing, but no, he hired you. The daughter of the man who owns part of that land. The man he hates.”