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The words of “Silent Night” washed over them. She looked at him, at those gray eyes no longer immeasurable, but clear with intent.
“Good, because I’m really trying to be a man worthy of you.”
“That’s ridiculous. I am exactly what you said last night. Just a girl. Not a do-gooder or Merry Sunshine or the Spirit of Christmas any more than you’re just a billionaire playboy who sneers at Santa Claus. We’re both people.”
A man with a box holding small white candles approached and offered them each one. At first she thought Brennan might wave him off, but he surprised her by taking the candle and saying, “Merry Christmas.”
The man responded in kind and moved on to a clump of older women holding oversize shopping bags.
“Wow,” Mary Paige breathed. “Youaretrying to be good.”
His response was to stand and offer a hand, which she accepted. He hauled her to her feet, winding an arm around her as if he’d done it many times before.
And at that moment, they didn’t need any more words.
Being in the moment and listening to the sacred strains offered by the choir was enough.
* * *
AFTERSPENDINGTHEAFTERNOON doing touristy stuff he’d never truly done before in all his time of living in New Orleans, Brennan could only desire two things—a good meal and Mary Paige in his arms.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to Commander’s?” he asked as Mary Paige poked through the offerings on one of the tables in the French Market. She held up a bracelet and the woman across the table immediately barked, “Twenty dollars.”
Mary Paige shook her head and set down the bracelet.
“Fifteen?” the woman asked, crossing her arms as if she were insulted to have to come down in price.
“I’ll give you ten,” Mary Paige said, looking the woman in the eye.
The vendor, who wore a full-length trench coat and had hair dyed the color of coal, sighed. “Deal.”
Money exchanged hands, and Mary Paige tucked the treasure in her bag. “This will be perfect for Lars’s wife, Pris.”
“Who’s Lars?”
“The man who helps my mom with the farm. He’s nearly seventy years old but doesn’t act it. He refuses to slow down, though Pris fusses constantly about old men acting like wet-eared pups.”
Lars and Pris. Tractors and goat cheese. Wheelchair-bound brothers and former groupie mothers. The life Mary Paige had led certainly didn’t sound as boring as she’d made it out.
“Reminds me of my grandfather chasing after Judy. Thinks he’s in his twenties the way he’s been acting.”
Mary Paige passed a booth filled with leather bags and coin purses and stopped at one selling cashmere wool scarves. “She seems to make him truly happy. I don’t know him well, but you can’t miss that gleam in his eye.”
Her hand stilled a moment as she lifted her gaze, focusing on something beyond the edge of the marketplace. For several seconds she was silent, and he wondered why the spark in Malcolm’s eye demanded contemplation.
“What?” he asked.
She blinked and jerked her gaze back to him, her brown eyes soft like chocolate chips in the cookies his mother used to make. “Nothing.”
“So, about dinner?”
Mary Paige tilted her head. “You know what sounds good?”
“What?”
“Takeout and a tour of your town house.”
And with that decree, Brennan knew the night would likely be better than the afternoon he’d spent with Mary Paige.
