The Baby Made at Christmas. Lilian Darcy

years, not three days.”

      “So I’ve come to the right bar.”

      It was a statement, not a question, and she didn’t quite follow the logic. “Depends what bar you were looking for.”

      “I meant, if you’ve lived here seven years and you’ve chosen this bar, it can’t be a pure tourist trap.”

      “Oh, right, sorry, yeah. Waterstreet isn’t upmarket enough for a lot of visitors.”

      “I like it. Nice crowd.”

      But he wasn’t looking at the crowd. He was looking at her.

      Something kicked between them. Something Lee hadn’t felt in a long time but recognized anyhow. It shocked her that it was this fast and strong and instinctive, and her first reaction was to seek a way to pull back, mentally skidding on her heels in panic and getting nowhere, like a character in a cartoon.

      She asked carefully, “You’re new and no one is showing you around?” Because he was clearly here on his own.

      “I had a late finish today. Someone in the group had a fall and lost confidence at the top of the mountain, and it took me forty-five minutes to get her down. Someone else...Everard—”

      “He’s a nice guy,” she interjected. She worked with him on junior squad coaching.

      “He is. He took the rest of my class back down the mountain for me, but by the time I arrived, everyone but him had gone for the day. He’s married, wanted to get home. My nervous lady wanted to take me for a drink—we both needed it—but her choice of bar wasn’t mine. After she, uh, left, I came looking for somewhere I liked better.”

      “And you found it.”

      “And I found it.”

      The thing kicked again, and robbed Lee of speech. Imagination? She didn’t think so. He didn’t seem in a hurry to fill the sudden silence. Well, it was filled already, just not with words. He took a pull on his beer and looked at her over the top of the foam, his eyes very dark in contrast to the frothy white.

      Am I really going to do this?

      It was too fast. She never did anything like this. She hadn’t dated anyone in three years, and that had lasted only a couple of months. Before that... What, another two years? Was it really possible she’d had only two boyfriends in five years? Two pretty lame, tame boyfriends, and lame, tame relationships that hadn’t ever looked to be going anywhere, and hadn’t been all that successful even as short-term flings.

      This one, though...

      Really? You’re deciding this soon?

      For a start, she knew nothing about him.

      Or else she knew too much. She could list his likely qualities, just by knowing what he did for a living, and that he was new in town, and that he was on his own in a bar at seven in the evening on Christmas Eve. Was a fling with a bachelor ski instructor really what she wanted?

      Why not?

      “She, uh, left?” Lee mimicked part of his last statement.

      He shrugged and gave an apologetic kind of smile. “She was interested in a longer evening. I wasn’t.”

      “Are you usually?”

      He said very firmly, “She was nice. Pretty. But no, not with clients.”

      A handful of words, and they’d covered an awful lot of ground. Lee had learned that he could have slept with an attractive and willing woman tonight, and that he’d turned her down because on principle he didn’t get involved with clients.

      If he did make a habit of such a thing, she decided, he could probably have had a different bed partner every night. He was pretty good-looking. Yet it seemed he wasn’t just about getting women into bed, and was polite enough to go for a drink when a client needed or wanted it, despite his lack of secondary motivation. He’d apparently charmed the pants off this particular one, since she hadn’t been ready to let the evening go.

      “You?” he added. His voice had dropped in both pitch and volume, and it drew her in, tightened the circle of deepening intimacy around them.

      She shook her head. She didn’t date clients, either. That kind of thing could get so messy. And she’d never dated another instructor. That particular form of mess might be even worse.

      So why am I thinking about it? I don’t even know his name.

      “It’s Mac, by the way,” he said, having apparently read her mind. “Mac Wheeler.”

      “Lee Cherry.”

      “I’ve seen your name on the notice board in the ski school office. We must have been at the morning meetings together, the past couple of days, but I don’t remember seeing you.”

      “It’s a big ski school.”

      “I’m still finding my feet. New town. Back instructing. I haven’t done it for a while.”

      “Oh, you haven’t?”

      “I’d moved over into the administration side, at a resort that will remain nameless for the moment.”

      “Ah.”

      She wasn’t exactly asking for an explanation, but he gave her one anyhow. “Didn’t see eye to eye with the boss on a certain personal issue. Flung down the gauntlet at the wrong moment. Not that I regret it. It was the only choice.”

      “Flung down the gauntlet? This is the way you talk?” When you talk, which at first we weren’t, and which I have a feeling we might not be doing for all that much longer...

      “I’ve been reading a really long fantasy series. The vocabulary is starting to stick. I quit, if you prefer it simple, and there was nothing more for me in Sn— I’ll tell you where when we know each other better.”

      “Right, when,” she replied mildly, in a drawl, because she didn’t want his assumptions to get too out of hand.

      Even though his assumptions are correct...

      He gave a slow smile, and said in a tone of meek apology, “If?” There was nothing remotely meek or apologetic about him.

      They lasted three hours in the bar, which was pretty impressive, she considered. It was clear where this was going to end, but they weren’t in a hurry to get there. They shared another bowl of wings, with fries, and each had another beer before they both switched to soda. He called it pop, which told both of them that they weren’t from the same part of the country.

      He was from Idaho, it turned out. “Coeur d’Alene. My mom’s a teacher, my dad works for the city. I have a sister there, too, married with two kids.”

      Lee supplied her own basic biography. Mom, Dad and two sisters. Opposite side of the country, but strong similarities all the same. Both of them were mountain-born, growing up in resort towns where dramatic vistas of lakes and mountains were a major part of the attraction. Both of them had started skiing as kids and then turned to it as a career, although Mac had fairly quickly moved into the management side, and had a degree in the field.

      “Can I ask about your skin?” he said at one point. “Do you mind?”

      “Of course I don’t mind. It was a kitchen accident,” she answered. “Big splash of hot oil. Eleven years ago, nearly.”

      “Right.” He nodded. “I thought it looked like a burn. Must have hurt.”

      “They gave me nice drugs.”

      He laughed, and they were done talking about her scars, so check off another item on the biography list.

      But who was she kidding? Maybe they covered those kinds of things, but it was all the stuff going on underneath the conversation that really counted. The way his shoulder brushed against her when he reached for his drink, and the way she leaned into the contact instead of away from