12 Christmas Romances To Melt Your Heart (41 page)

“Bookkeeping,” said Eve Marie. “Because math is a . . . a . . . oh, I remember! A universal language.” Tom smiled at her, forcing himself not to give her a round of applause since she’d worked so hard for the answer. “But she also reads a lot of books. Ellie’s, like,
always
reading books. Since as long as I’ve known her, and that’s forever because I’m three years younger. It’s, like, her favorite thing to do.”

“Too bad partying isn’t her favorite,” said Van under his breath.

“Nope. That’s
my
favorite,” said Eve Marie, arching her back provocatively as she slid her gaze to Van.

Van chuckled, nodding at her with appreciation before glancing at his friend. “So, Tom, what’s your all-time favorite nonfiction tome, huh?”

Tom glanced at the kitchen door, wishing Ellie would come out for a second. He’d like to look into her eyes again. He’d like to see her reaction as he answered
The Joy of Sex
or
A Moveable Feast
or . . .

He looked up at Eve Marie and grinned.

“Tell her if she wants to know my favorite nonfiction book, she has to be my date tonight.”

E
leanora didn’t know
what had prompted her to play the What’s Your Favorite Book? game with the man at Auntie Rose’s this morning, but as she and Evie walked to the Hotel Jerome at seven thirty, she had to admit that she was looking forward to this evening a lot more than the others set up by her cousin.

The Swiss Family Robinson
, while not Eleanora’s favorite book, was a good, honest choice, and she was curious about why he loved it. She also appreciated that he’d volleyed back, asking about her favorite poet, and she’d wondered all afternoon if he had a favorite too. Maybe tonight—instead of awkwardly sipping a club soda and leaving after an hour—she’d actually have a date worth talking to. Now wouldn’t
that
be a nice turn of events?

Evie pushed through the revolving door of the hotel and walked confidently to the bar. She was familiar with all the local hotel bars, a fact that made Eleanora grimace, but she couldn’t fault her cousin either. Eleanora had chosen an education as her way of bettering her life; Evie was on the fast track to love, albeit via lots and lots of quasi-anonymous sex.

“Evie,” she said, placing her hand on her cousin’s shoulder and making her turn around. “You don’t have to sleep with him.”

Evie shrugged her older cousin’s hand away. “Ellie, I’m not smart like you.”

Undeterred, Eleanora threaded her fingers through Evie’s thick, dark hair, gently tucking a strand behind her ear. “You’re sweet. And young. I worry about you.”

“You’re young, too,” Evie said, her tone holding a reminder. Whenever Eleanora hinted about Evie’s promiscuous ways, Evie countered that her cousin just didn’t know how to have fun. She tilted her head to the side, grinning at Eleanora, her face bright and fearless. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

Then she strode into the hotel bar, leaving Eleanora to stand in the doorway on her own for a moment. The two men who’d been sitting together at Auntie Rose’s several hours earlier were settled into a booth at the back, and rose as Evie approached.

The brunet, a man named Van, had already been claimed by Evie, so Eleanora looked more closely at her own date: he had a mop of sandy-blond hair and a neat mustache and wore a white button-down shirt with a tan corduroy blazer. He glanced over Evie’s head and caught sight of Eleanora, a pleased smile taking over the entire real estate of his face. It was a good smile—confident and kind, interested and warm, flirtatious without being grabby.
And beautiful
, she thought, unable to look away from him as she made her way closer.
So very, very beautiful.

“This is my cousin, Ellie,” said Evie, accepting a kiss on the cheek from Van, then shimmying into the maroon leather cocktail booth beside him.

“I’m Tom,” said the blond man, still holding Eleanora’s eyes. “Tom English.”

He didn’t lean forward to kiss her, which she appreciated. It saved her the trouble of jerking back and creating an awkward moment. Instead, he held out his hand, and she saw it was wrapped in a white bandage she hadn’t noticed earlier.

“You hurt yourself today, Tom,” she murmured, taking his hand and pumping it very gently.

“A minor ski accident. I sprained my wrist on Devil’s Dash.” He chuckled with a low burr of pleasure as his fingers tightened around hers. “I’ll be okay, Ellie, but thanks for worrying about me.”

“Eleanora,” she said. “My name isn’t really Ellie—that’s just what Evie calls me. My name is Eleanora Watters.”

He didn’t drop her hand. He didn’t test out her name. He just grinned at her and nodded. “Okay.”

“Ahem,” said Van, and Eleanora dropped Tom’s hand quickly, her face flushing as she looked down at Tom’s friend. He had his arm draped around Evie’s shoulders, his fingers dangling directly over her cousin’s breasts, which heaved under a light pink angora sweater that covered her uniform. “Are we having drinks or what?”

Tom gestured to the booth, and Eleanora slid in next to her cousin, unwrapping her scarf and unbuttoning her coat but keeping it on. Van ordered a bottle of Asti Spumante, then leaned close to Evie and said something that made her blush and giggle. Eleanora rolled her eyes and turned to look at Tom.

“So . . .”

“So . . .,” he said, tenting his hands on the table. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

“Yes.” Eleanora grinned at him, leaning one elbow on the table and shifting to face him. “I love her. She’s so honest.”

“And passionate,” he added, searching her eyes thoughtfully. “Though I confess I didn’t appreciate her as much as I should have when I studied her in college.”

“Were you an English major?”

“I was.”

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Princeton.”

Eleanora whistled low.

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Sure. You know Brooke Shields? From the movie
Endless Love
? She gave an interview on
The Tonight Show
and said she wants to go to Princeton someday.” She swallowed, feeling a little silly, but pressing on. “So I looked it up.”

“And . . .?” he prompted, grinning at her in a way that melted any self-consciousness.

“What’s not to love?”

“Your cousin said you go to college locally.”

“Mm-hm.” She nodded. “At Colorado Mountain College. It’s hardly Princeton.”

“It’s still college,” he said, sliding a glass of sparkling wine over to her. He held up his own glass, and Eleanora did the same. “To college. And to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

As they sipped the sweet white wine, Eleanora felt a strange fluttering in her tummy and tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to ignore it.

By and large, these dates were gruesome—some rich boy who wanted to get laid putting his arm around her and trying to pass off nonstop innuendo as conversation. She went for Evie’s sake, in an attempt to look after her younger cousin, so that Evie didn’t look all alone in the world.

But Tom English seemed different. He seemed, as Evie had indicated this morning, genuinely nice. He seemed interested in more than getting her upstairs; he was talking to her about books and college. And he was so handsome, she couldn’t stop staring at him.

“What are your plans for Christmas?” she asked. “Staying here in Vail?”

“No, I’ll be headed back to Philly for Christmas.”

“Just here for a few days of skiing, huh?”

Her cheeks flushed hot as she heard the noise of sloppy kisses directly behind her and she braced herself for what was coming. Any minute her cousin would abandon her, and no matter how nice he seemed, when Tom English realized that she wouldn’t be putting out like Evie, he’d make some excuse for why they should call it a night. And she’d be left to walk home alone,
again
, to her cold apartment, worried about her cousin and wishing that someone, somewhere, would see beyond the waitress uniform and want to get to know her.

“No, actually,” said Tom, glancing down at his wineglass, running his index finger lazily around the rim. “I was here for . . .”

“For what?”

“To get married, actually. I got stood up.”

He looked up at her then, his eyes clear and blue, unapologetic and unhurt, and that’s when she felt it in her gut: she didn’t care that he was older or that she was his social inferior in every possible way. She desperately hoped that right here, right now, Tom English would want to get to know her.

T
om wasn’t
sure what had prompted him to be so honest with her.

Maybe it was that she sat so straight, her eyes cautious, her coat still on, her blonde hair in a neat, simple ponytail, smelling faintly of maple syrup and pancakes whenever she moved her head. She was nothing like her cousin, who had one hand in Van’s lap and the other raking through his scalp as they kissed noisily across the booth. Eleanora seemed like a lady—smart and pretty. No, she wasn’t an East Coast debutante like Diantha or the other girls Tom had grown up with, but there was something honest and thoughtful about Eleanora Watters, and Tom hoped she wouldn’t run off the moment her cousin headed upstairs with Van. He—rather desperately—hoped she’d stay and talk to him.

Van cleared his throat loudly, his voice raspy when he spoke. “I, uh, I think I left something in my room.”

“I’ll help you find it,” said Eve Marie, jumping up to follow him.

In a flash, Van and Eve Marie were gone, leaving Tom and Eleanora with four mostly full glasses of sickeningly sweet wine and a painfully awkward silence. Would she suddenly run away without the buffer of her cousin sitting beside her? It was surprisingly and unexpectedly painful to think of losing his chance to get to know her better.

Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed her hand. “Stay and talk. That’s all. Don’t—don’t go yet.”

Her face—her very lovely face—turned to him, her pink rosebud lips tilting up in a sweet smile. She searched his face, gently pulling her hand away when she replied, “I’ll stay a little longer.”

It occurred to Tom that he should stop staring at her, but he couldn’t. It was the first time she’d smiled at him, and his heart thundered from the way it made him feel to see her face light up. She was young and bright and ridiculously beautiful, and he’d been captivated from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.

“
A Moveable Feast
,” he said softly, memorizing the unusual blue color of her eyes, a blue somewhere between cornflower and lavender. “By Ernest Hemingway. That’s my favorite nonfiction book. What’s yours?”

“
How to Win Friends & Influence People
,” she said. “By Dale Carnegie.”

“What?” A soft laugh escaped before he could stop it. “Really?”
She nodded, grinning at him. “Uh-huh. I’ve read it at least six times.”

“Amazing,” he murmured softly. “Why?”

“Besides the fact that it’s a good book?” she asked, with a hint of that sass he liked so much. “Well, I hope it’ll be helpful one day.”

“One day when?”

“When I start my own business,” she said quietly, reaching for her wineglass and taking a tiny sip.

“What kind of business?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I don’t—it’s a long way away. Really, it’s just a silly dream probably.”

He searched her eyes, wondering why it wasn’t more than a silly dream. She was going to college. She was obviously bright. His eyes slid to her threadbare, outdated coat and the cheap, plastic-looking pocketbook on the seat beside her. Money. She had none, or very little. And opening businesses took more than education and smarts. It took money.

She tilted her head to the side. “Why, um . . . I mean, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Nope. Go for it.”

“Were you kidding about getting married?”

“No.”

“Well, I mean . . . it’s just that you don’t seem very upset.”

“Well, it’s inconvenient,” he confessed. “But no, I’m not upset. I wasn’t in love with her.”

Eleanora sat back, her eyebrows furrowing, her smile fading. “What?”

“I didn’t . . . I mean, we weren’t in love with each other. That’s the truth.”

“Then why were you marrying her?”

“You can marry people for reasons other than love,” he said, feeling a little defensive.

“Like what?”

“Like . . . I’m about to lose my inheritance.” She stared at him, her face expressionless, her eyes rapt. “My grandfather, he’s, well, he’s a control freak, in addition to being crazy and old-fashioned. He has this theory that a good woman makes a man, well, a
good
man. So he promised to cut me off by my thirty-second birthday if I wasn’t married to a good woman. And I mean, I’ve dated a lot of girls, but I just haven’t met, you know,
the one
.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You believe in
the one
?”

“Everyone believes in the one, whether they admit it or not.”

“Go on.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. He might as well tell her everything. “Diantha is an old friend. She agreed to marry me before I turned thirty-two so that I could secure my inheritance. Our plan was to get a quiet divorce this summer.”

“Huh,” she said, taking another sip of wine. “When’s your birthday?”

“Tuesday.”

“Four-days-from-now Tuesday?”

“That’s the one.”

“You were born on Christmas Eve,” she said.

He nodded, pouring himself another glass of wine.

“What was her cut?” asked Eleanora.

It was the last thing he expected her to ask. “Wh-what?”

“I assume you were cutting her in? Since your—” She cleared her throat. “—your
marriage
was little more than a business transaction?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He chuckled softly, nodding at her with grudging admiration for her candor. “Yeah. I was cutting her in. I would get fourteen million. I promised her one. Not that it matters now because—”

“One million dollars.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t—”

“One million
dollars
,” she repeated.

He nodded. “Yep. But—”

“I’ll do it.”

Tom’s head jerked back as he stared at her in shock. “What? You’ll do what?”

“
I’ll
marry you for a million dollars.”

Laughter bubbled up inside him, and he let it rip for several seconds until he realized she wasn’t joking. She was staring at him unblinkingly, her hands folded on the table as if they were working out a business deal at a conference room table.

“You’re serious.”

“I don’t joke about money.”

He chuckled, this time nervously. When she didn’t join him, his grin faded. She was completely serious.

“I don’t think you understand. It was an arrangement, and yes, I was giving her a portion of my inheritance, but Diantha was actually planning to
marry
me. Our families have known one another for ages, and we’d been friends since grade school. Everyone believed that we’d started dating last summer and fallen in love. It took some planning, you know?”

She didn’t say a word, just stared back at him, her eyes owl-like in their intensity.

“I don’t even know you. My family doesn’t know you. We just met twenty minutes ago.” He tried to keep his voice gentle wondering why he cared so much about hurting her feelings. “I just don’t think it would work.”