Somebody's Santa. Annie Jones
a single one of my questions. Why should I let you show me this place?”
“Showing is simple.” He held out his hand again. “Answers are complicated.”
She ignored his gesture and raised one arched, dark eyebrow. “Then uncomplicate them.”
Uncomplicate a lifetime of mischief, hope, happiness, tough choices and intricate clandestine arrangements? Couldn’t be done.
Rattle. Squeak. Rattle.
Zach and his cleaning cart went wobbling by the open door.
Burke grinned. Maybe he couldn’t just hand her the whys and wherefores of his situation, but if Dora wanted answers he could at least give her one. “You asked me who comes all the way from South Carolina to Atlanta to ask someone what they want for Christmas. It’s not so hard to figure out, really, if you think about it.”
Zach’s raspy voice rang out in a Christmas carol about Santa Claus.
Dora frowned.
Burke jerked his head toward the open door. “Go ahead. Say it. You know you want to. Who makes a trip to ask someone what they want for Christmas?”
“S-Santa Claus?” she whispered, as Zach rounded the corner and his song faded.
Burke gave a small nod of his head, then looked up to catch her eye and winked. “That’s me. And if there is going to be Christmas in Mt. Knott this year, I am going to need your help.”
Chapter Four
“Okay, we’ve been driving for fifteen minutes.” Dora glanced out the window of his shiny silver truck. Her, tooling around Atlanta in a pick up with a South Carolina snack cake cowboy Santa-wannabe at the wheel—listening to country music’s finest, crooning Christmas carols on the radio. What happened to her policy of not trusting anyone, especially anyone named Burdett, again? What happened to her plan of ditching Christmas again this year by making herself scarce before sundown? What happened to this place that Burke had promised to show her, the one that would give her a reason to forgo the not trusting and the ditching and make her want to…
The lyrics to a song she’d heard moments before—“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”—popped into her head. Burke Burdett? Santa? Difficult to imagine. Kissing him? Hardly the kind of thing a serious businesswoman, an angry almost-girlfriend or a woman of good Christian character ought to be dwelling on! She stole a peek at his rugged profile and noted the way he seemed to fill up the cab of the truck and yet still leave a place for her to sit comfortably beside him.
“Burke?”
“Hmm?” He didn’t look at her and yet the casualness of his reply gave her a sense of familiarity no quick cast-off glance in a truck cab ever could.
She flexed her fingers on the padded car door handle and forced herself to study their surroundings as she counted off their recent itinerary. “I’ve seen the art gallery where some lady from Mt. Knott had her first show. The jeweler’s where your mother used to have special ornaments engraved. And the building of the accounting firm that employs the valedictorian of your graduating class.”
She hoped she hadn’t missed anything. He’d told her it would all make sense in time so, ever the bright, obedient girl, she had tried to make mental notes as they drove along.
“Yeah?” He seemed engrossed in reading the street signs.
If he didn’t know where they were going then why had he brought her along? And why had she come? She squeezed her eyes shut to put her thoughts back on track.
She crossed her arms and tipped up her chin. “So far you haven’t really shown me anything that supports your claim of needing me to help you play the jolly fat guy.”
“Hey.” He tapped the brake lightly and stole a sly, amused glimpse her way at last. “Is that any way to talk to Santa?”
“You are not Santa.”
“Maybe not,” he conceded, with an expression that was neither jeering nor jovial but somewhere in between. Then he made a sharp turn, and used the momentum of their shifting center of gravity to lean over and whisper, just beside her ear, “But I’m on his team.”
“Oh, right.” She shivered at his nearness. “Team Santa. I suppose you have the T-shirt and matching ball cap?”
“No can do. Team Santa is strictly a hush-hush kind of deal.” He sat upright behind the wheel again and fixed his eyes straight ahead. “Not that I would look devastatingly cute in said hat and shirt.”
He would. He’d be downright adorable, with his suntanned skin and deep set eyes that twinkled when he knew he had the best of a person in a given situation—and Burke always had the best of everyone in any situation. He knew it and so did she.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him now. So strong, so confident, so manly but with just a hint of boyish excitement over this odd adventure he insisted on dragging her into. This was the Burke she had known last summer. The one she had wanted so much to give her heart to, right up until his last quick, cutting phone call when he’d ended their professional and, by extension, personal relationship based on the results of the family meeting. Correction: the Carolina Crumble Pattie board of directors meeting, a board made up of the members of the Burdett family. This Burke and the man who had torn her dreams to shreds with a soft-spoken and deceptively simple, “nothing personal, just business,” seemed to be two entirely different people.
A man like that…he was not to be trusted.
That reminder made it easier for her to sit back and create a little verbal distance. “I suppose next you will try to tell me that you’re an elf?”
“Why do you think I let my hair get this shaggy?” He tapped the side of his head. “To hide my pointed little ears.”
“Really?” She did not look his way. “I thought you let your hair grow out for the same reason I keep mine short.”
“Because it makes you look like a little girl all dressed up in grown-up clothes?”
“No.” She crinkled up her nose at his way-off-base guess. “Because…um, does it?”
She put her hand to the back of her head. If anyone else on earth had said that she’d have given them what for, but coming from Burke, it had a sweetness that took her by surprise. She had always suspected that he could see the young Dora, the frightened, lonely and longing-to-belong child who lurked just beneath her polished surface. The notion warmed her heart. And chilled her to the core.
“That’s not…that is…the point is, we both keep our hair the length we do for the same reason.”
“I hope not. My hair is long but I hope not long enough to make me look like a little girl!”
“I like your hair.” It wasn’t all that long, really, just grown out enough to add to the overall appeal of this man who was rough-hewn, unfettered by convention and free from any kind of vanity or fussiness.
“Do you?” he asked softly.
“Yeah,” she said, more softly. Almost childlike, almost flirty. The CD had stopped playing a few minutes earlier and she didn’t have to compete with sleigh bells and steel guitars to be heard.
He looked into her eyes for only a moment before he squared his broad shoulders and stuck out his chest. “Then I guess I’ll cancel my regular appointment with the barber.”
“You don’t keep any regular appointments with a barber, Burke. Just like I never miss mine.” She sat in the truck with posture so perfect that only the small of her back made contact with the upholstery. “I wear my hair short for the same reason you don’t bother to keep yours trimmed. I’m too busy with my work to bother with upkeep and style.”
He did not dispute that, just turned the wheel and took them down a quiet residential street in a part of town Dora had never seen before.