For This Christmas Only by Caro Carson

Author:Caro Carson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2020-09-07T13:36:25+00:00

* * *

The fire grew larger.

Eli kept walking closer, Mallory’s hand in his own once more.

The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach made him angry. The anger was why he’d come to the park tonight. He knew why the fire sickened him, of course. He’d escaped burning wreckage as water had filled the cockpit. The death he’d faced would have been gruesome, burning up, drowning, both.

His therapist had suggested giving exposure therapy a try if this avoidance of fires continued more than a few months. He’d have Eli begin by looking at fires that were smaller, contained, limiting the exposure to a few minutes. Then a few more, until the sight of flames would no longer cause a spike of anxiety.

Anxiety. He’d let the therapist name that one.

It didn’t matter what it was called, Eli was not going to spend months timidly facing little candle flames. The announcements for this Yule log lighting had been on every gas station pump when he’d filled his motorcycle after he’d driven to Masterson. He’d left his staff to deliver his Aston Martin and a more anonymous Ford pickup, but the motorcycle had been his excuse not to fly. This festival had been his excuse to face a bigger fire than he could have built himself. He’d come tonight to face it and be done with it, in one grand episode of exposure therapy.

But a woman in a pink coat and blue hat had stood next to him and started talking. She’d grabbed his arm, argued with him, and even lain on a hay bale to talk to some stars. She was so damned distracting while he was dwelling on demons. Then she’d slid down his body, and he had come alive.

So, he’d lied to keep her by his side tonight, just so she’d make him feel better. Just like her father had done. Just like her aunt and her brother and all the others who were not the key to her happiness. She thought Eli was different.

He wasn’t even Eli.

“What are you going to wish for?” She sounded upbeat as they got closer to the fire.

“I’m not going to make a wish.”

“You can’t go back to just brooding at the fire.”

Brooding was a good euphemism for coming to grips with a near-death experience. He liked it. It wasn’t exposure therapy. It was brooding.

“I’ll watch you make your wish,” he said.

I’m going to use you as a way to associate something pleasant with fire.

He was a real prince, all right.

“The table that’s selling the wishing papers is over there,” she said.

“Selling wishing papers?” It sounded absurd, and it gave him somewhere else to vent his turmoil. “Someone came up with a great marketing scheme to defraud the good citizens of Masterson out of a few pennies.”

“Ah, that’s the fake boyfriend I first came to know and love and knock upside the head with an oilcan.”

Eli chuckled. He actually chuckled as he got closer and closer to a fire. That was the kind of miracle Mallory was.

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