Fruitcakes and Other Leftovers & Christmas, Texas Style Read online

  “Dam it.” She knelt and chased the powder puff just as the door creaked inward.

  “Winnie Becker?”

  “That’s me.” Her attention shifted to the pair of black dress shoes standing on her doorstep.

  Her fingers grasped the puff and she straightened, her gaze moving higher, over a pair of creased black slacks to long, tanned fingers tipped with short, clipped nails that clutched a battered briefcase. She had the quickest flash of Arthur who’d been joined via umbilical cord to his own briefcase.

  But, of course, this wasn’t Arthur.

  Was it?

  A black jacket covered a severe white dress shirt and framed a black tie knotted so tight she marveled at how the man could actually swallow. He was painfully clean-cut, his jaw freshly shaven, his dark brown hair slicked back.

  His eyes met hers and her brain short-circuited. Liquid gray. Intense. Penetrating…

  This guy was definitely not Arthur, even if he did shop at Nerds-R-Us.

  “…looking for Winnie Becker?”

  His deep, rumbling voice finally penetrated her shock and Winnie did the only thing she could, standing there in her ragged, anti-vixen bathrobe. She blushed and smiled, and promptly slammed the door in his face.

  This was not happening to her.

  Winnie slumped back against the door and tried to get a handle on the moment, but it was hard to think past her pounding heart, her fluttering stomach, her spinning head…

  Spinning? Oh, God, it was spinning.

  The eggnog. It was just eggnog, because no way was she having any sort of physical reaction to the exact type of man she’d sworn off of, even if he did have great eyes. Liquid-silver fringed with thick black lashes and…

  Geez, where was Big Jim when she needed him? Or the roof fairy? Yes, she would have killed for the roof fairy right now.

  The roof. That was it. Shermin had said the bank made house calls, and since she was late, maybe he’d taken matters into his own hands.

  Wood creaked, a fist pounded, and a deep voice vibrated from the other side.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Uh, fine. You just caught me, uh, at a bad time.”

  “I could come back—”

  “No!” She yanked open the door just enough to eyeball him. “I need you now.”

  He looked oddly disappointed. And panicked. And her heart paused.

  Wait a second. He wasn’t her type. He was her fairy and she wasn’t about to let him get away.

  “Just give me five minutes.” A quick glance at her reflection in the Home Sweet Home picture hanging just to the side of the doorway, and she added, “Better make that ten. Here.” She tossed him a magazine.

  “I’m not much of a reader.”

  She eyed Birdie perched on the overhanging gutter, his black eyes glittering as if sizing up his next target. “It’s not to keep you busy. It’s for cover.”

  WHAT THE HELL was he doing?

  The question echoed through Trace’s head as he sat on the porch, dodged the poster bird for Prune Power, and waited for a woman who wanted to drag him to the altar.

  I need you now.

  As much as the words panicked him, he felt this strange warmth in his gut.

  Understandable since he had on several layers of clothes, complete with the prerequisite undershirt Shermin had insisted no geek ever left home without. Texas wasn’t known for its harsh winters and it was damned warm. That, coupled with the fact he hadn’t so much as looked at a woman in six months, made for a dangerous situation.

  Which was why he should get gone before it was too late. Because he wanted to touch this woman, feel her lips beneath his own, and see if her skin felt as soft as it looked—

  “Dammit, bird!”

  “Birdie. His name’s Birdie.” Winnie walked out wearing black designer jeans and one of those fancy Tshirts with an Italian name that hugged her chest and made him swallow and forget all about the bird goop dripping off the shoulder of Shermin’s dad’s old jacket.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said when she spotted the mess. “Come on in and I’ll get something for that.”

  She led him inside, then disappeared for a few seconds before returning with a damp cloth.

  “I don’t think it’ll stain.” She wiped at the spot, coming so close he could smell the warm scent of her wild flame-colored hair. Strawberries and cream. Not a lick of hair spray. He took a deep breath and felt his groin tighten in response. “But I’ll be happy to pay for the dry cleaning.”

  “No need.”

  “I didn’t know birds could be so territorial. At least I got him out of the living room when they ousted the tree, but I suppose you know that.”

  “I do?”

  “Since you’re here about my roof.” Her gaze met his. “You are here about my roof, aren’t you? I mean, I had an appointment with Shermin this morning, but I sort of had a rough night and missed my meeting. I assume Shermin sent you because he said the bank made house calls. You are from the bank, aren’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Actually, he’d only meant to pose as a nerd, but an employed nerd was even better. “The bank. That’s me. Trace Honeycutt. Loan officer.”

  “Trace Honeycutt?” Her green eyes widened and her full lips formed a surprised O. “You’re Trace Honeycutt?” Her gaze swept him. “I mean, yes, yes, of course you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I know your grandfather. He’s at the same retirement ranch as my grandfather who’s living out his Bonanza fantasies.” She shook her head. “He didn’t say anything about you working for the bank.”

  “What, um, exactly did Ezra say?”

  “Just that you were staying out at the Broken Heart Ranch, recuperating after a recent divorce. Since Ezra’s a cowboy, I assumed—”

  “That the calf doesn’t stray far from the cow.” Trace shook his head. “I could never get quite as comfortable in a saddle as old Ezra.” Saddle bronc riding had been his grandpa’s speciality, while Trace stuck to bulls and bareback.

  “So banking’s your livelihood?”

  “You said it.” Which eased Trace’s conscience considerably, because while he might be forced to fool Winnie Becker, he didn’t like it. Trace wasn’t a man to lie, after all, no matter how good the cause. Nor did he fancy hurting a woman’s feelings. But if Winnie assumed, he wasn’t going to rush to correct her.

  “Well,” he tugged at his tie, “this has been nice, but I’ve got a busy schedule to keep. Meetings. Loan applications.”

  “Don’t you want to look at my roof before you go?”

  “Your roof?”

  “That’s why I’m trying to get the loan. I need a zillion other things done, as well, but most of them can wait until I find a job and build up more cash. The biggie is the roof.”

  Guilt speared him as he took his first good look around, in broad daylight, and realized the sad shape of Ezra’s house. He’d meant to get out and make repairs whenever he blew into town, but he’d always been too short on time, and over the past few months, between his training and helping Spunk with the horses, he hadn’t even given a thought to the falling-down two-story house where he’d spent part of his childhood.

  “Bea and I taped up a tarp, but it’s not going to hold past the first big rain,” Winnie went on, “which is why I need the loan and…” She eyed his briefcase. “Don’t you want to write this stuff down?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He sat down on her couch, pulled out a pad and pen and said, “Shoot.” At her questioning look, he added, “Er, I mean, name?”

  “Winnifred Becker. That’s W-I-N…”

  Trace spent the next fifteen minutes going through the motions with Winnie, asking everything he could think of from her social security number and birthdate, to her educational background, and trying not to stare at her lips as they moved around the answers.

  “Marital status?”

  “Single, and staying that way.”

  The answer snapped him out of his fascination with her mouth. “What did y
ou say?”

  “That I’m single.”

  “The other part.”

  “And staying that way.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.” Obviously the shock showed in his expression because her gaze narrowed.

  “What? A woman can’t be secure in her own femininity? She has to have a man to validate her?”

  “No, no. Of course she doesn’t. It’s just… It’s just a surprise that a pretty woman like you doesn’t have any marriage prospects.”

  “I had one,” she told him. “But it didn’t work out. Thankfully, because I’m much too young to settle down with just one man. I want to play the field. For once in my life, I want to play, period.” As if she’d just realized what she’d said, a flush crept into her cheeks. “I guess that sounds sort of bad, huh? But it shouldn’t. What’s good for the gander should be just as good for the goose. Do you know I’ve only kissed two men in my entire life? Arthur and Santa Claus.”

  “Come again?”

  Her cheeks flushed an even brighter shade of red. “Never mind. The point is, I’ve never had a chance to date, to go out with different guys, to really learn how to kiss. I owe it to myself. I’m thirty years old and I’m clueless when it comes to real kissing.”

  “Real?”

  “Lips, tongue, everything.”

  “I see.” Too well, he thought when an image of Winnie, hair sprawled against her pillowcase, lips parted, eyes dreamy and so hungry, flashed in his mind.

  “I’ve been Miss Boring my entire life. I deserve a little excitement, don’t you think?”

  “No argument here. What I, um, don’t understand is why you picked this town. Nostalgia’s more family-oriented. Not much when it comes to the singles’ scene.”

  “Actually, I thought it was going to be a little bigger. A little more lively. More exciting. Exciting is very important to a woman like me.”

  A single woman like her who didn’t have marriage on her mind.

  She smiled and heat bolted through him. He grew harder, stretching the crotch of his already too-snug slacks.

  At least he didn’t have to fret about falling into matrimony with her.

  Now falling into bed… There was his biggest worry.

  And getting bigger with every sweet smile she cast his way.

  WINNIE WATCHED Trace climb into a battered pickup and pull out of her driveway. A loan officer. She wasn’t really sure why it surprised her so much. She hardly knew Ezra, and what little he’d said about Trace certainly hadn’t indicated a rough-and-tough cowboy.

  Shy, timid, boring…

  He definitely fit the stuffy suit mold.

  All except for his gaze. So deep and penetrating and stirring… Not that she was stirred, mind you. She’d been that route before and no stuffy, boring, number-crunching type was going to push her buttons. Why, he was probably even more clueless when it came to kissing than she was. At least she had the Five B’s to Femininity.

  Winnie told herself that through a two-hour makeup job before another knock sounded on her door and killed any more thoughts on the subject.

  She found Big Jim, toolbox in hand, standing on her doorstep wearing a yellow rain slicker and eyeing Birdie.

  “Couldn’t have you risking your life in that rickety old outhouse all weekend,” he explained as he stepped inside, closed the door and shucked the rain slicker.

  “Afraid I’ll tell Shirley about the buffet last night?” she asked as she followed him back to her bathroom.

  “That about sums it up.” He went to work on her toilet.

  Blackmail was a beautiful thing.

  Winnie was busy scrubbing the wood floors when she heard the flush, the sound sweeter than the Hallelujah Chorus to a dying man.

  “That about does it,” Big Jim said, walking back into the living room with his toolbox. “You’re all set, and my work is finished. About the bill—”

  “Yes, I was thinking about that.”

  “I take cash, checks and credit, or we could take it out in trade.”

  And to actually think she’d forgotten that Big Jim was related to Little Jim.

  “I’ve got Mace in my pocket,” she warned him.

  “I was hoping for meat loaf. Or pot roast. Or maybe a thick chicken fried steak.”

  “Come again?”

  “Well, Harriet Blinn heard from Bea Winegarten who heard from Sarah Willis who heard from the clerk at the Piggly Wiggly who checked out Essie Calico who said that you’re the best danged cook in the county, and everybody knows Essie knows everything about everybody. Then you showed up with that box of goodies at the fire station last night.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “I know sweets ain’t exactly a five-course meal, but the way I figure, cookin’s cookin’ ” Spoken like a true man who’d never lifted a frying pan. “You just use different ingredients and turn on a burner instead of an oven. Simple.”

  “There’s really more to it…” Her words trailed off. What was she saying? The closest she usually came to a stove was when she passed by on the way to the microwave. She hadn’t even had the one in the kitchen hooked up yet. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Three dinners, leftovers included, and I’ll only charge you for the plumbing supplies, the duct tape, the iodine and the rabies shots.”

  “Supplies, duct tape, iodine, no shots and you do the dishes.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “Deal. But not a word of this to Big Shirley.”

  She smiled. “My lips are sealed.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Winnie had just unearthed her one and only cookbook, Hungry He-Man, just as someone knocked on the door. For a small town, things were pretty busy.

  “Relocation didn’t work,” Bea said when Winnie stepped out onto the porch. “So we move on to Plan B. I don’t give a money-back guarantee for nothing.” She held up a can of spray. “I sprayed your entire porch.” She indicated the area, and sure enough, Birdie was nowhere in sight. “Guaranteed to ward off insects and pesky birds, and even scare away unwanted suitors.”

  “It says that on the can?”

  “Actually, it’s from my own experience before I met my husband, Jack. One whiff of this, and half the pesky cowboys in this county took off running for the hills.”

  “Where can I buy some?” Lacey Mae called out as she climbed out of her pickup, a covered dish in hand. She held up the offering and smiled at Winnie. “Just thought I’d get over and say welcome. Hey, Bea.”

  “Hey, honey. How’s your daddy?”

  “Good.” She stepped onto the porch. “And I’m serious, I’d love a can of that stuff.”

  “I take it you’re not into cowboys,” Winnie took the dish from Lacey and motioned both women inside.

  A few seconds later, Bea sank down onto the sofa. “Lacey’s got a thing for stuffy suit types. In particular, Shermin Rayburn.”

  “I do not have a thing for Shermin. He’s just a friend.”

  “Who’d like to be more.”

  “Says you.” Lacey perched on a nearby chair. “Shermin’s never even asked me out.”

  “Because he’s afraid of Boris who’s had his eye on Lacey since they were knee-high and she can’t stand him.”

  “He’s okay. But he doesn’t like Chinese food, which I adore, and he smells like tobacco, which I hate, but—”

  “She tolerates him because her daddy likes him and Lacey’s a daddy’s girl.”

  Lacey shrugged. “My dad and I are close. My mom died when I was young and he raised me. I can’t very well tell him I don’t like the man of his dreams. Sounds silly, huh?”

  Unfortunately, it sounded all too familiar. Arthur had been little more than a good friend when her mother had come to town to visit during Winnie’s senior year in college. Gwen had taken one look at Arthur, who’d just landed a partnership with his firm, and pushed her daughter in his direction.

  Not that it had been all Gwen’s fault. The more her mother had talked up Arthur, the closer he’d s
eemed to Mr. Right. While he hadn’t been the handsome, rugged cowboy Winnie had always envisioned sweeping her off her feet, he had been nice. Reliable. Settled—and that itself had drawn her more than anything else.

  No more.

  She’d traded settled in Boston for bold, vivacious and exciting right here in Nostalgia.

  “So,” Winnie said, “what do you guys do on a Saturday night around here?”

  “Well, there’s bingo over at the fire station.”

  “Or the tadpole races out at Johnson Creek.”

  What had she gotten herself into?

  6

  “YOU LYING, CONNIVING, lying, lowdown, lying—”

  “I think we’ve already established the lying part.”

  “—manipulating, sneaky, lying—”

  “You don’t have to make a federal case, boy.”

  “You lied to me,” Trace told Ezra over the phone later that day.

  “Just a small one, boy.”

  “And you lied to her.”

  “Old Jasper did that. I’m not above sinning, but I’ve done plenty of my own without taking the rap for somebody else’s.”

  “I actually thought she was here to marry me.”

  “She is. She just doesn’t realize it. Yet.”

  “She’s not marrying me and I’m not marrying her.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not ever, Gramps.”

  “Just get to know her. You’ll change your mind.” It wasn’t the changing his mind that he was afraid of, it was the losing his mind. His willpower.

  He wasn’t falling into the lust trap again and losing his head over some woman. Losing everything. Never again.

  “She’s a nice girl. You’re a nice boy. Take her some candy. Sit on the front porch.”

  Trace glanced down at his stained suit. “That’s not an option.”

  “Sure it is. That front porch has a swing on it just perfect for two—”

  “The swing’s barely hanging on by a thread.”

  “There’s the picnic table out back.”

  “Electric storm last year. Tree fell.”

  “Build a fire in the fireplace.”