Читать книгу Cole For Christmas - Darlene Gardner - Страница 10

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?”

“Listening?” Julie looked at her blankly, then seemed to register what she’d asked. “Oh, yes, listening. Of course we were listening. Weren’t we, Drew?”

He peeled his lips off her sister’s neck and nodded sheepishly, like she’d caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. “Yes. Cole in the office. You asking him to dinner.”

“Only because I felt sorry for him,” Anna emphasized. “End of story.”

“Would you get me another glass of wine, sweetie?” Julie asked her husband, reaching up on tiptoes to give him a lingering kiss on the mouth.

When he was gone, she rolled her hazel eyes at Anna. “Would you give it up already, Anna? Don’t you think we can all tell something’s going on between you and Mr. Hunk?”

“My own sister,” Anna said through clenched teeth, “and you don’t believe me either.”

“That’s because you’ve cried wolf once too often.”

“If you remember, a wolf does show up in that fairy tale and eats the shepherd boy’s sheep,” Anna pointed out with heat.

“Wolves don’t look at women the way Cole has been looking at you,” Julie said, then bit her lip. “Hey, maybe they do.” Her face creased into a wide smile. “Lucky you.”

How dare he? Anna thought as she mentally reviewed the looks Cole had been giving her. Her sister was right. They did have a wolfish quality.

“Excuse me,” she said to Julie and headed straight for Cole.

He was watching her again. Watching her and—she could hardly believe his nerve—smiling.

But not an innocent smile. His teeth weren’t visible, his lips had a sensuous curve and his eyes roamed over her with barely concealed appreciation.

Anybody who intercepted that look would probably conclude that he could hardly wait to get her alone, she thought as she stomped toward him.

“Where you going in such a rush?” Her father stepped in front of her so she had to stop or careen into him. He was in a conversational group that included her Aunt Miranda and Uncle Peter. “I, for one, would like to hear more about Cole.”

“I’m all ears, too,” Aunt Miranda said. She slanted a cool look at her stockbroker husband. “I think we could all take a break from Peter speculating about which stores in the retail sector are providing the best investment opportunities.”

“It was more than mere speculation. It was expert analysis,” Peter said, stroking his neatly cropped beard and visibly bristling. “Wonder if Cole plays the market.”

Cole. If she heard that name one more time, Anna thought she might scream.

“I really wouldn’t know,” Anna said. “Like I’ve been telling you, I hardly know him at all.”

“Don’t you two talk to each other?” her aunt asked before taking a long sip from her glass of white wine.

“Hardly,” Anna said. “If you’d been listening to me, you’d know that—”

“I say we get Cole over here so we can all become better acquainted,” her father interrupted before beckoning to Cole. “Hey, Cole, the Ziemanski women have had you long enough. Come talk to us Wesleys.”

Anna watched as Cole slanted regretful looks at first her mother and then her grandmother, as though he’d actually enjoyed talking to them. He walked up to their group and took a position next to her instead of between her father and uncle, invading her personal space.

She’d never thought of herself as small but her head didn’t reach much higher than his extremely broad shoulders. No wonder she imagined she could feel his body heat through the thick jersey knit of her dress. With his height and muscular build, he had quite a lot of body. She inched away.

“It’s Tom, Peter and Miranda, right?” he said to her father, uncle and aunt. They nodded in unison, obviously pleased he remembered their names.

“Anna tells us you two haven’t been spending your time together talking,” her aunt said, arching a suggestive eyebrow at Cole. Cole, in turn, shot Anna a speculative look.

“I did not say that!” Anna refuted, feeling her face heat.

“It’s okay, Anna,” her aunt continued. “We’re all adults here.”

“Must you always say such outrageous things, Miranda?” her husband asked testily. “Anna is Tom’s daughter.”

Her aunt waved a dismissive hand. “Come now, Peter. I’m sure my brother realizes Anna’s not an innocent little girl. She is nearly thirty years old.”

“I’m twenty-seven,” Anna said. “And I didn’t—”

“So, Cole,” her father interrupted smoothly. “Seems to me I heard your family was from California.”

Cole nodded. “San Diego.”

“Is it a big family like ours?”

“I’m not as lucky as Anna,” Cole said, moving the hand on her back in a caressing motion. Anna would have shifted away if it hadn’t felt so good. “Growing up, it was just me and my parents. Their families were spread all over the country so we didn’t see them much.”

“Then you’re an only child?” her father asked.

“I’m my mother’s only child.” His hand was on her shoulder now, kneading gently. She nearly closed her eyes with pleasure as he rubbed away her tension. “My father has two stepdaughters from his second marriage but I didn’t meet them until recently.”

“Does your father live in San Diego, too?” Aunt Miranda asked.

He hesitated before answering. “No.”

It took Anna a few moments to figure out Cole didn’t intend to elaborate. In the month he’d worked at Skillington, Anna hadn’t asked him a single personal question. But now a dozen crowded her brain.

“Where does he live?” she pressed.

Again, he took his time answering. “Not far from here.”

Interesting, Anna thought. “Is that why you moved to the Pittsburgh area? To be closer to your father?”

“I moved here to take the job at Skillington Ski,” he said, which made her remember why she shouldn’t let him touch her with such familiarity: he was after her job.

“If your father’s in town, why did Anna say you didn’t have anywhere else to go tonight?” Uncle Peter asked, frowning.

“My father and his wife are vacationing,” Cole said. “My stepsisters live in Texas, and my mother and her husband are in the Bahamas on a cruise.”

“So that left you ripe for Anna’s picking,” Aunt Miranda observed, looking pointedly from one to the other.

“Miranda,” Peter said in a warning voice.

“Get with the times, Peter,” Aunt Miranda said. “Women pick up men all the time. It’s a perfectly acceptable dating practice.”

Anna ignored the delicious sensations Cole’s gentle massage was causing and figured she’d better distance herself from him, both physically and verbally.

“I didn’t pick him up,” Anna said, stepping away from him. “I asked him to dinner.”

“Am I glad she did.” Cole reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be.”

The tenderness in his touch was reflected on his face, which was quite a feat considering it was made up of hard angles and planes. Not that there wasn’t a certain softness around his mouth, which was really quite beautiful when you examined it closely.

The sheer loveliness of that mouth had the power to draw her in. Closer and closer. Until she wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

“What does everybody say to some Christmas carols? Rosemary? You up for some piano playing?” Her grandfather’s voice boomed the questions, causing Anna to jerk back.

Her eyes flew to Cole’s, which she couldn’t read because of the twinkling Christmas tree lights reflected in the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses.

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.”