Blame It On Christmas. Janice Maynard

rectangle showcasing a beautiful necklace and the store’s phone number with other contact info.

      She glanced in one of the larger cases. “We’re going to need more sweetgrass basket charms in gold.”

      Gina nodded. “Yep. One lady bought six of them for her granddaughters. I’ll call Eve this afternoon and place an order.”

      They were eating pizza standing up, a common occurrence. Gina swallowed a bite and grinned. “Don’t keep me in suspense. How did it go with Mr. Gorgeous? Did you like the building?”

      “Honestly, I did. The place J.B. wants us to have was originally a nineteenth-century bank. He was showing me the vault when we had a little accident and got locked inside.”

      Gina’s eyes rounded. “You got locked in a bank vault with J.B. Vaughan? God, that’s so romantic.”

      “Um, no. Not romantic at all.” You couldn’t call what happened with J.B. romance. Sexual frenzy, maybe.

      “So it was too scary to be romantic?”

      The other woman’s crestfallen expression might have been funny if Mazie hadn’t been walking on eggshells. She wasn’t going to betray J.B.’s secret weakness. Instead, she skirted the truth. “Not so much scary as tense. We were awfully glad to get out of there when Jonathan showed up.”

      “So are you going to take it? The building, I mean? Will it work for our purposes?”

      “It’s perfect. Doesn’t mean I’m ready to give J.B. what he wants. Surely there’s another way.”

      “Has anyone ever told you that you’re contrary?”

      “You,” Mazie said, finishing her meal. “Every other day.” She wiped her hands on a napkin. “My...conversation with J.B. got derailed when my brother showed up. I’m sure I’ll hear from him soon. J.B., that is.”

      “And what will you say when he asks you again?”

      Mazie flashed to a mental image of the real estate developer’s chest. His tousled hair. His eyes, heavy-lidded with desire. Her throat tightened. Her thighs pressed together. “I don’t really know.”

      Unfortunately, the afternoon crowd picked up, and Mazie never found a moment to scoot home and restock her wardrobe. By the time the shop closed at five, she was more than ready to call it quits.

      The Tarleton family had lived for decades on the tip of a small barrier island just north of the city. They owned fifteen acres, more than enough to create a compound that included the main house and several smaller buildings scattered around.

      An imposing, gated iron fence protected the enclave on land. Water access was impossible due to a high brick wall Mazie’s grandfather had erected at the top of the sand. The beach itself was public property, but he had made sure no one could wander onto Tarleton property, either out of curiosity or with dangerous motives. Hurricanes and erosion made the wall outrageously expensive to maintain, but the current Tarleton patriarch was by nature paranoid and suspicious, so security was a constant concern.

      At times, Mazie felt unbearably strangled by her familial obligations. Perhaps that was why being around J.B. felt both dangerous and exhilarating all at the same instant.

      She punched her security code into the keypad and waited for the heavy gate to slide open. She and Jonathan both wanted to move out, but they were trapped by the weight of love and responsibility for their father. She suspected her brother kept an apartment in the city so he could have a private life, but she didn’t pry. Someday she might find a place of her own, as well.

      She had let the long-ago debacle with J.B. cast too long a shadow over her romantic life. Heartbreak had made her overly cautious.

      It was time to find some closure with J.B., one way or another. Time to move on.

      The house where she had grown up was a colossal structure of sandstone and timber, on stilts, of course. Supposedly, it had been built to withstand a Category Four hurricane. Though the family home had suffered damage over the years, the original structure was still mostly intact.

      An imposing front staircase swept upward to double mahogany doors inlaid with stained glass. The images of starfish and dolphins and sea turtles had fascinated her as a child. When she grew tall enough, she liked to stand on the porch and trace them with her fingertips.

      The sea creatures were free in a way that Mazie couldn’t imagine. All her life she had been hemmed in by her mother’s illness and later, her father’s paranoia. Jonathan and Hartley—when they had been in a mood to tolerate her—had been her companions, her best friends.

      And J.B., too.

      The Vaughan family was one of only a handful in Charleston as wealthy as the Tarletons, so Gerald Tarleton had condoned, even promoted his children’s friendship with J.B. But Mazie was younger, and Hartley was a loner, so it was always Jonathan and J.B. who were the closest.

      Mazie had adored J.B. as a child, then had a crush on him as a teenager, and finally, hated him for years. No matter how she examined her past, it was impossible to excise J.B. from the memories.

      Mazie found her father in the large family room with the double plate-glass windows. The ocean was benign today, shimmering shades of blue and turquoise stretching all the way to the horizon.

      “Hi, Daddy.” She kissed the top of his curly, white-haired head. Her father was reading the Wall Street Journal, or pretending to. More often than not, she discovered him napping. Gerald Tarleton had been an imposing figure at one time. Tall and barrel-chested, he could bluster and intimidate with the best of them.

      As he aged, he had lost much of his fire.

      He reached up and patted her hand. “There you are, pumpkin. Will you tell cook I want dinner at six thirty instead of seven?”

      “Of course. Did you have a good day?”

      “Stupid doctor says I can’t smoke cigars anymore. Where’s the fun in that?”

      The family physician made twice yearly visits to the Tarleton compound. Mazie wasn’t sorry to have missed this one. “He’s trying to keep you alive.”

      “Or take away my reasons for living,” he groused comically.

      Her father had married later in life, a man in his midforties taking a much younger bride. The story wasn’t so unusual. But in Gerald’s case, it had ended tragically. His bride and her parents had hidden from him the extent of her mental struggles, leaving Gerald to eventually raise his young family on his own.

      Mazie and her brothers had each paid an invisible price that followed them into adulthood.

      She ignored his mood. “I’ll speak to cook, and then I’m going to change clothes. I’ll be back down in half an hour or so.”

      “And Jonathan?”

      “He’s home tonight, I think.”

      After a quick word with the woman who ran the kitchen like a drill sergeant, but with sublime culinary skills, Mazie ran upstairs and at last made it to the privacy of her bedroom. She stripped off her clothes, trying not to think about J.B.’s hands on her body.

      His touch had opened her eyes to several disturbing truths, not the least of which was that she had carried a tendresse for him, an affection, that had never been stamped out.

      She had spent a semester in France her senior year, only a few months after he had rejected her. The entire time she was abroad, she had imagined herself wandering the streets of Paris with J.B.

      What a foolish, schoolgirl dream.

      Yet now, when she stared in the mirror and saw her naked body, it was impossible to separate her former daydreams from the inescapable reality. She had allowed J.B. Vaughan to caress her breasts, to touch her intimately.

      Had Jonathan not intruded to rescue them, would she have regrets?

      Confusion