Free Christie Ridgway by Must Love Mistletoe

place for itself among the other emotions crowding her chest. Bailey, who’d gone from five to forty in the space of a season. Tracy knew why, of course. As a little girl she’d borne witness to the end of her parents’
    marriage. Neither Tracy nor her ex-husband had tried to protect her from the ugliness.
    Tracy had leaned on her little daughter—all big dry eyes and starched spine—then.
    As she was doing now.
    More guilt.
    But then it was swept away as over Jeff’s shoulder she glimpsed a familiar car cruising toward the house.
    Her heart jolted to her throat again and she grabbed Jeff ’s arm, dragged him inside, then slammed the door shut behind him.
    The sweat pants. The T-shirt. The pillow-head hair. She couldn’t let Dan see her like this.
    She couldn’t look at his face.
    “We’re not here, Jeff.”
    The heels of his sneakers thudded against the hardwood floor as he backed away. “Wh-what?”
    Tracy had said something similar before. We’re not here, Bailey. She’d hidden from her ex, holing the two of them up in the house, locking the doors and telling her daughter to be quiet, quiet and good so that Tracy could avoid facing the man who was making her so miserable. “Never give your heart away,”
    she’d whispered to her daughter then.
    Now she couldn’t regret the advice.
    “Mrs. Willis?” Jeff Gable’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Do you, uh, need some help?”
    Tracy sidestepped the young man to curl a finger around one of the window sheers and peek outside.
    The car was slowing, then it paused behind the one—presumably Jeff ’s—that was parked in the driveway.
    “Mrs. Willis?”
    The little-boy note in Jeff ’s voice got her attention. She glanced over at him, seeing the confusion on his face. Good God, what must he be thinking?
    “I…um, wanted you to come in so I could send some Christmas treats home for your family.” It was the first thing that popped into Tracy’s mind, in case he was worried she was a serial killer or a Mrs.
    Robinson in the making.
    And since she’d mentioned food, and he was a teenager, he grinned, relaxing. “That would be great.”
    Which meant she had to lead him toward the kitchen.
    There, she stood on the cool floor between the sink and the tiled island and tried to think what she could possibly put together in the way of “Christmas treats.” She found a paper plate first.
    Then it was three crumb-dusted old Oreos from the bottom of the cookie jar. A handful of withered baby carrots. For the reindeer, she told herself. Two lonely martini olives from the test tube–like jar in the back of the fridge.
    She found one foil-wrapped dinner mint mixed in with the pencils in the everything drawer. A lone freckled banana from the now-empty fruit bowl. Finally, a sprinkle of hardened raisins from the red box in the pantry.
    To hide the pitiful sight, she covered it all with the last crumpled inches of the foil tube, then taped an even more pitiful smooshed red bow—also liberated from the everything drawer—on top.
    The plate was just like her, she realized, blinking back a sudden sting of tears. Unkempt on the outside and a mix of old, lonely, and dried up on the inside.
    How had this happened? Harry had gone, and no wonder Dan found nothing else to keep him at home.
    She didn’t even have the will or the energy to loathe him anymore.
    “Here, Jeff.”
    He looked up from something he’d been fooling with on the counter. A little Christmas tree. Jeff had plugged it in and the tiny lights twinkled in the shadowed kitchen. Tracy vaguely remembered Bailey setting it down last night and even more vaguely remembered ordering two dozen for the store last spring.
    When she still had a son and husband at home. When she had a purpose. An identity.
    “This is nice,” Jeff said. “Maybe I’ll get my mom one for Christmas. Do you think she’d like it?”
    She shrugged. What did she know about the tastes of Jeff ’s mom who was happily married, her home now