The Naughty List Bundle with The Night Before Christmas & Yule Be Mine. Fern Michaels

cooling racks. She dropped the oven mitts and curled the fingers of one hand into a fist.

      The cakes were a rich golden yellow, and their warm, sweet scent made his empty stomach growl. But he was more concerned with the color of her hand.

      “Did you burn yourself?” He closed the distance between them. “Let me see, I can—”

      She shooed him back as she shifted to the other oven in the smooth, almost graceful manner of someone who had danced between them many, many times. She handled the mitts better and was more purposeful, sliding out one tray at a time and placing them on a different cooling rack.

      He didn’t push her about the burn, he just got out of her way. “Do you ever tire of the scent?” he asked. “It’s wonderful, and, along with your fresh roast, quite like paradise would smell, I imagine.”

      She didn’t respond. He noted she didn’t look at him, either. He should just let the moment go. Only he didn’t want to. Hence his lame attempt at conversation. He thought her lack of response was because she was busy unloading her ovens, arranging cooling racks, and rearranging the hot racks inside the ovens. But once those tasks were complete and the beeping timer had ceased, she made herself enormously busy arranging the hot pans just so on the cooling racks, then going over to the refrigerated units and burying her head inside one, then another, rooting around…but coming out empty-handed.

      “It’s the one memory of my grandmother’s place, of my childhood, that stays with me,” he persisted. “The scents, I mean.” Then he abruptly snapped his mouth shut. He didn’t like her withdrawing, had wanted to keep her in the moment with him, but he had no earthly idea what had made him blurt out that little tidbit. He didn’t mind sharing the personal stories of those he’d helped over the years. He considered those stories triumphs, business successes. He didn’t share stories about himself. And definitely not about his childhood. Other than surviving it, there was nothing worth mentioning.

      In fact, he should take the annoying intrusion of those blasted timers as the signal they surely were. A signal that it wasn’t the time, nor the place, and she was most definitely not the woman to be distracting himself with. He had a very specific job to do. One that, if done properly, would become the single most important thing he’d done to date. Definitely the most meaningful. That opportunity was everything he’d dreamed his future could be. He’d tackled bigger jobs, even more prestigious ones, at least as far as the initial stages of the Hamilton project went. But it was very different from all the others. Because it was personal. It was his.

      Where he could go with it, where he could take it, if he worked hard, and made the right decisions…went beyond his wildest dreams. And he’d allowed himself to dream pretty big. He’d had to. The last thing he needed at such a precipitous moment was a reminder of where he’d come from.

      And yet…he’d been the one to bring it up. Even more startling to him was that he hadn’t been lying. It was the best memory of an otherwise brutal childhood. The very best. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about it in a very long time. Because it was hard, if not impossible, to think about one part…and not all the rest. A long time ago, he’d needed to use those memories, every vile one of them, to motivate himself when things were hard, or when he thought his wits weren’t going to be enough to get him where he wanted to go.

      They had to be enough—the only other things he had were his fists. He knew, all too keenly, what it felt like to fight his battles with those. That sure as hell wasn’t going to be his future.

      “Look at me now, Da,” he murmured beneath his breath. “Look at me now.”

      “What kind of restaurant did she run?”

      He jerked his gaze up, and his mind away from that path. He shouldn’t be here. He looked at her then, trying, struggling, to regain the perspective that was as natural to him as breathing. The perspective that steered him single-mindedly toward his goals. Being with her…wanting her as he did, was not the way to get there.

      So, when he quite readily said, “Irish pub, actually,” he knew with absolute certainty that somewhere between sipping her coffee and kissing her lips, he’d lost his mind.

      “I know Sean’s place over in Willow Creek is absolutely wonderful. Warm atmosphere, good hearty food, great music on the weekends. I’ve always felt a warm welcome there. Was your grandmother Gallagher’s place like that? There’s more than one Gallagher place in Ireland, I know. Sean talks about his extended family all the time,” she added.

      She was nervous, he realized. It was the only explanation for her sudden chattiness. Welcome to the party, luv, he thought, making no move to leave, as he bloody well knew he should.

      “Aye, there are several. I grew up in West Cork.” He’d started to say his branch of the family was from there, but skipped it. He was still unresolved about the information that had been kept from him all his life. A life that could have been improved far, far sooner had he known the truth. “Our pub was down by the waterfront, so it brought in an interesting…clientele.”

      She opened the cooler doors again, and came out with a large container. “Here,” she said, handing it to him, then turning around to get another, and still another.

      He put the first carton on a rolling tray beside the worktable. Apparently…he was staying.

      “Sounds like an interesting childhood,” she said. “Did you spend a lot of time in the pub? Or were you too busy going to school or”—she paused for a moment as she reached over the worktable, trying to set it back to rights, then glanced at him as she finished—“playing sports?”

      He saw her gaze roam over his face. He knew exactly what she saw. And what she thought. Probably wasn’t far off in her assessment. Most people assumed he’d earned his scars and odd bumps the hard way, by putting his fists up first, and thinking later. In actuality, he’d earned them a far, far harder way, but he never corrected the assumption.

      “I worked in the pub my whole life, or as long as West Cork was my home, anyway. Everyone in the family did.”

      “Did you resent it?”

      He caught her gaze then, and realized she wasn’t asking idly, or making empty conversation. She was looking at him, and her expression was one of sincere curiosity.

      “Because I think I would have,” she went on, when he didn’t immediately reply. “At least a little.”

      “I loved being in the pub,” he said quite honestly. It was when he’d been the safest. For him that meant the happiest. “Not so much the bar itself, but the rest of it. Families came, no’ just the men to play darts or lift an ale. Everyone we knew was there at one point or another over the course of the week.”

      Memories tugged at him, and he was quite surprised to realize that not all of them made him flinch and want to look away. It had been a very long time since he’d pulled them out and looked them over. Up until a year ago, he’d avoided thinking about the past. He’d gone home then, leaving Dublin for Cork for a brief spell, when he’d found out about Lionel Hamilton. About being a Haversham by blood.

      And not a Gallagher.

      “That sounds kind of nice, actually,” she said.

      “What did your parents do?” he asked, partly because he was curious, and partly because he needed to think a bit more about his past before he shared it with her.

      “My father worked for Hamilton Industries as an account manager. My mother ran a daycare in our home. My grandmother—on my mom’s side—helped out with that. My folks both died when I was three, so I don’t have any real memories of them, other than the pictures and the endless stories my grandmother told me. She raised me after they were gone.”

      He set the last carton on the rolling tray, then walked over to her. “You’ve experienced a lot of loss in your life, Melody Duncastle.” He laid his palm on her shoulder, turning her toward him. She didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry for that.”

      “It