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“We should get back,” he said.
“You never answered my question about your deal with Christmas,” she said, propping her hands on her hips. She wasn’t going to be dismissed like an employee. She may have signed on with MBH Industries, but she wasn’t under him.
A naughty vision flitted through her mind…this time with him above her, running his fingers across her not-so-tight abs. Okay, they were tighter than before thanks to Zumba, but still not as awesome as his probably were. She’d been imagining that rippling six-pack, and she knew they had to beah-mazing.
“Listen, no need to hash and rehash who we are. I’m a realist. A capitalist. And I don’t like Christmas. You’re a romantic, a Christmas nut, and I don’t really know…a socialist?”
“I’m not a socialist…or a nut.”
“Okay, but we’re different, from different worlds, so let’s respect that and we’ll get along fine.”
“Fine. I’ll respect your right to be grumpy and inflexible.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Are you trying to argue again?”
Was she? No. Though their earlier argument had ended nicely—a hot, steamy, forget-you’re-probably-standing-in-urine-and-other-icky-stuff kiss. So maybe there was something to be said for trading barbs with Brennan if it ended in bliss.
“No, and you’re right. We should respect our differences, but I asked why you don’t like the holiday not to reiterate what we already know. Are you avoiding the question because you don’t have a good answer?”
His eyes went blank—death-stare blank. “I have a good answer, but I fail to see why I’m required to share it with you.”
“Because I asked.”
“So…”
“So what? You didn’t get a pony or an expensive gaming system when you awoke one Christmas morning? Or maybe Santa didn’t eat your cookies because they weren’t homemade?”
The death stare remained.
“Or maybe your high-school girlfriend kissed someone else beneath the mistletoe. Or did you get pink bunny pj’s from your aunt Mabel. Or maybe—”
“My parents died in a plane wreck on the way to pick me up from boarding school for the holiday break. I spent Christmas Eve on the headmaster’s mother’s couch in Connecticut.”
She swallowed the rest of her comments. But it was hard to swallow the idea of parents dying around Christmas.
“Yeah, it’s awesome opening gifts your parents lovingly picked out while funeral arrangements are being made by a grandfather you barely know because he lived at his office for years. Makes for loads of Christmas cheer.”
“Oh, Brennan,” she breathed, wanting to stroke his arm, but knowing she had no right to offer such comfort. They weren’t even friends.
Still, her fingers sought his. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He looked away but didn’t pull his hand from hers. “How could you? You don’t know me at all.”
“No, but I shouldn’t have been so obtuse. Very thoughtless of me.”
He shook his head and allowed his fingers to curve around hers. “I’m certain those words are seldom used about you. It’s fine.”
The image of a dark-headed boy curled into a ball on an aged couch popped into her mind. It would be so easy to weep for that boy, to hold him while he cried against the brutality of the world.
But Brennan wasn’t a little boy. He was a man who should understand the holiday had little to do with mechanical failure or icy conditions or whatever had brought the plane holding his parents plummeting to earth. Yet, she knew the human mind was a complexity never to be explained. Fear and anger could twist unrelated facts into something seeming quite sensible. “How old were you?”
“Nine, almost ten. I had been at Billings Academy for only four months—sent because my parents were in the process of separating. My sister’s accidental drowning a year before put both of them in a tailspin of grief, anger, and finger-pointing. The weekend before they flew to pick me up, they’d reconciled. My father said he couldn’t spend Christmas hating my mother, blaming her for Brielle’s death. I had thought it meant the end of Billings, thought I could smile again.” Brennan’s eyes were focused on a distant spot, his voice different from his usual timbre.
“When Headmaster Jennings’s eyes met mine after I answered my dormitory door, I knew. Knew my visions of laughter under the Christmas tree wearing the matching pajamas my mother had ordered from L.L.Bean were shattered like…like—” he pushed a broken piece of glass with the toe of his loafer “—glass.”
Mary Paige squeezed his hand but offered no words. What could a person say to something so devastating? What right did she have to berate the man for disliking a holiday that reminded him of his shattered family?
His head jerked up, and he released her hand. “Hell, I don’t know why I dragged up that tale of woe. I don’t usually wallow in melancholia.”
