My words are vaguely complimentary and plausibly deniable if you’re not listening carefully, but Gerry’s brows lift like she clocked my subtext, as I hoped she would. But an additional conversation is is interrupted by a Bavarian flourish announcing the next verse of the “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
“What are we on?” Joanne glances at her husband with eagerness in her eyes.
“Seven swans,” Bethany says grimly.
Kent pushes his chair away from the table and tosses his napkin on his plate. “I can’t. See you back at the hotel.” He brushes a kiss over his wife’s cheek and speed-walks out of the room like a pack of swans are already nipping at his heels.
“He had a run-in with a shoebill stork during a trip to the zoo when he was ten,” Bethany tells us. “Hopefully some room service will lock that trauma right back down for him.”
I fiddle with the empty meatball skewer on my plate and focus on looking innocent. I couldn’t actually tell him, but Kent would’ve been fine with the next round of entertainment, which I arranged as a small gift to Elaine for putting up with Howard all these years.
Right on cue, there’s Darby ushering seven little-girl ballerinas into the ballroom. She flashes them a thumbs-up and disappears back into the hallway, leaving them in front of the crowd in their feathery leotards.
Elaine gasps when she sees the grinning redhead in the front row. “Howard!” she calls to her husband. “Look, it’s Bailey!”
The Randalls’ only grandchild was one of the dancers in the city ballet’s production of The Nutcracker last month, so Maxine suggested we recruit her and six of her friends to play the swans. Based on the appreciative coos that swirl across the room as the baby ballerinas step onto the dance floor set up in the center of the room, it’s the perfect calm before the storm to come. Max and his bandmates wrap up their verse, and Patty, the Oakwood employee running the AV booth, hits play on a selection from Swan Lake, prompting the seven swans to start twirling and jumping with more enthusiasm than skill.
“Howard!” Elaine calls again, but her husband doesn’t look up from his spot at the bar where he’s scrubbing at the meatball stain on his shirt. “It’s Bailey!”
Howard barely glances up. “So it is,” he says, and Elaine abandons her attempts to involve her husband and watches the performance with happy tears in her eyes.
Joanne tears up right along with her. “She’s just lovely, Elaine. A true star.”
Elaine rests her fingers on the string of pearls at her throat. “She’s just?—“
And then the screaming begins.
Fourteen
July, Last Year
CJ
* * *
“So it’s a Christmas curse?”
I take a long pull of my peppermint piña colada before answering the pretty man across from me. “Yes. It’s the reason you had to sweep me up in your big, strong arms and whisk me away to be bandaged up.”
I bat my lashes up at Omar, who winks and smooths his hair back from his forehead. “You gave me the biggest hero moment I’ve had since I got my certification.”
“Big, big hero,” I assure him. “And because of that, I’ll let you buy the next round.”
He laughs and heads to the bar. I watch him go and wish we’d had enough chemistry to get us through more than a couple of dates. At least he made the transition into the friend group, which tonight includes Em and Rachel for the Midnight Moose’s Christmas in July party.
Did I mean to blurt out my tortured holiday history with Wyatt? No, I did not. I’ve never told a soul about what started our war, but I groaned a little too loudly when he walked in just now with a pack of guys, and as a result, I’m stuck trying to explain myself with as few details as possible.
“So you angered some sort of Yuletide deity who keeps throwing you together once a year?” Rachel asks.
“That’s the working theory. I thought maybe July would throw it off our scent, but red and green decorations must be enough to trigger it.” I playfully glare down at the Christmas-colored Mardi Gras beads the bouncers are handing out at the door.
“I saw it in action a couple of years ago,” Em says. “She’s not kidding. It’s the weirdest kind of angry heat. I thought they were going to strangle each other, then make out in front of God, Santa, and everybody.”
I flick her arm. “It’s nothing like that!”
“It’s exactly like that,” she theatrically whispers.
“Oh, are we talking about the man who almost decked me for daring to touch his woman’s ankle?” Omar slides into our booth and hands out the next round.
