Christie Ridgway - Must Love Mistletoe

The first book in the Must have Mistletoe series, 2006

Bailey Sullivans Vintage Christmas Facts & Fun Calendar

December 1

St. Nicholas took pity on a family of penniless girls and tossed bags of gold through their window for dowries. The bags landed in their stockings that had been hung by the fire to dry, initiating the worldwide custom of Santa leaving gifts in stockings or shoes.

Fingers hovering at the switches by the front door, Bailey Sullivan glanced over her shoulder at the interior of The Perfect Christmas and wondered what would happen if she set Santas beard on fire.

But the happy, arsonistic notion died a swift death. That wasnt the answer to her problems. Surely the manufacturers of the dozens-hundreds!-of Santas in her familys shop would have treated their respective fabric, resin, wood, or cotton-floss facial hair with flame retardant.

Damn it all.

And anyway, a visit from the Coronado, California, fire department would only make bigger the mess shed been forced back home to put to rights. With a resigned shrug, she doused the lights and cut off Marilyn mid-Santa Baby. For the first time in ten hours Baileys ears experienced a grateful reprieve from holiday assault. Until the rattle of the jingle bells as she exited the front door, that is. But that noise was mercifully brief, and after she locked the door behind her, she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the cold plate glass.

One day down, twenty-four to go.

She sucked in a deep breath of night air, cooled and salted by the Pacific Ocean just a block away, and let it clear out the lingering notes of cinnamon-and-clove potpourri that was The Perfect Christmass signature scent. Customers Internet-ordered the stuff from all over the world, claiming it captured their very best holiday memories.

As far as Bailey was concerned, captured was the operative world. From the day she could be trusted to unwrap merchandise to the day she could run the cash register with her eyes closed, shed been a prisoner in the two-story Victorian that housed the almost sixty-year-old family business. Shed managed to escape for the ten years between eighteen and twenty-eight, but now, just as surely as Hermies dental skills came in handy, just as inevitable as the foggy night that required Rudolphs very shiny nose, she was once again held hostage.

Until December 25. Then she was outta here and back to Los Angeles and her happy holidays-less life.

Giving an emphatic nod, she almost lost the green-and-white striped hat jammed over her blond hair. With a grimace, she yanked the thing off and stuffed it in the front pocket of her red cotton and fake-fur-trimmed apron. This morning shed driven straight from her condo in L.A. to the shop and found them hanging on their customary hook in the back office. Along with her customary nametag-her name between two peppermint sticks-that read:

BAILEY

(Yes, like George!)

Just about everyone except the Japanese tourists recognized the identity of the main character of the movie classic Its a Wonderful Life. Just about everyone loved the idea that shed been named after a famous Christmas character.

Just about everyone.

Gee, thanks, Mom.

Which made her think about the next item on her todays to-do list. Heading the eleven blocks to her childhood home and confronting her mother. Bailey rested her head another moment against the cold glass, then straightened. There was nothing to it but to do it. And there was no one else to do it but Bailey.

She turned, pointing herself in the direction of her car that earlier shed moved to the end of the block beneath one of the streetlights. Her gaze lifted to the holiday decorations suspended from the metal poles along the avenue. When she was a kid, theyd been tired-looking tinseled bells and dusty angels, but in the new millennium they were bright polyester flags depicting holiday icons like nutcrackers and snowmen. Over her silver Passat hung one stamped with a multicolored tree ornament, and beside her car was a little man in a uniform holding a ticket book.

A ticket book?

No! she called out, rushing down the walkway and along the sidewalk. She wasnt going to get a citation. She couldnt. Wasnt being back in the shop enough? Wasnt it already unfair that shed be spending the night in her old twin-sized canopy bed, sleeping with her Nirvana posters instead of on her Posturepedic mattress and with her framed Picasso prints? Her day wasnt supposed to get any worse. Hey!

The elderly man didnt look up.

Bailey was going to break his busy little pencil in half. Listen, she said, in her meanest I-manage-a-hundred-attorney-law-firm voice, the one even the toothiest of shark-lawyers feared, what do you think youre doing?

The man looked up. Eh? His fingers went to the hearing aid nestled in his right ear. Bailey? Bailey Sullivan?

Mr. Baer? He used to live down the street from her family home. She supposed he still did. What are you doing?

He gestured to the car parked on the other side of hers. The one with Retired Citizens Service Patrol emblazoned on its side. It was gleaming white, official enough to have a cherry-red light on top and a sturdy-looking something that might be a cattle prod attached to the front grille. Im on the job.

Oh, well. She tried smiling at him, hoping hed remember some good deed shed done for him as a kid. Maybe shed retrieved his morning newspaper from the bushes once upon a time. Me too. I put in a long day at the shop.

He leaned against the side of her car as a fond smile added new wrinkles to his liver-spotted cheeks.

Inside Bailey hope surged, until she realized he was gazing not at her, but over her shoulder, at the store that was the new albatross around her neck.

I bought my daughter her first Christmas ornament there, he said. She bought her daughter her first Christmas ornament there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bailey said. Its an institution. Albatross.

A landmark, the old man added, then bent his head back over his book of triplicate forms.

She wasnt going to take a ticket. What are you, uh, writing there, Mr. Baer? Because, you see, Im in a bit of a hurry. Moms home alone, probably keeping dinner warm for me, and-

Dans really moved out then? He stopped writing to squint at her over silver-rimmed bifocals. Heard hes in one of those ugly condos on the bay side.

Um, well Bailey wasnt sure if her mother and stepfathers recent separation was public knowledge, but heck, this was 7.4-square-mile Coronado. Secrets were impossible to keep, plus perhaps she could use the sympathy to wiggle out of whatever the Retired Citizen Patrolman had written on that little form. Theyve been living apart since September.

Mr. Baer nodded. Heard one wont step inside the shop if the other ones there.

Thats true too. Which had resulted in the frantic phone calls shed been fielding from the part-time assistant manager and the guy who did the books-both old family friends. With her mother and Dan refusing to share the same air space, no one was minding the store. During the season when they made seventy-five percent of their years profits, this meant the likely end to a Coronado institution. A landmark.