Nothing Personal by Rosalind James

across her eyes, over her cheeks. The dream was still there, vivid in her head along with the pain, and she switched on the lamp to chase it away, sat up and reached for her phone to check the time.
    Four o’clock . The witching hour, when the bad things came back to haunt you.
     
    “Tell my girlfriend that I missed her. Give her a big smooch for me.”
    “I will.” She smiled at Philip as she slammed the trunk of the car on her suitcase, then reached out for him, felt his arms wrapping around her, squeezing her tight, and had to blink back a couple tears at the comfort of it.
    And then Javier, giving her a hug of his own. “Merry Christmas. Drive safe. And oh.” He reached for the red bag he’d set on the sidewalk beside the car, handed it to her with a flourish. “Something to make Christmas Day a little more festive.”
    “Ooh, champagne,” she said with a quick peek. “ Cool. Thanks, guys. We’re going to be two loopy ladies after we toast with this.”
    “ Hmm.” Javier tapped a finger against his chin. “You could use it for that, or you could invite Mr. Alexander Alpha Kincaid over and get toasted with him.”
    “ Which would be . . . hmm. Yeah. A very bad idea.”
    “Really? Because, baby girl, excuse me for saying it, but you need to get laid. You’re getting dark circles under your eyes.”
    She had to laugh. “And sex helps with that? Really? I never heard that one.”
    “ Gets the blood flowing,” Javier assured her. “Sends oxygen to all those important places. Like your . . . brain.”
    “Oh, yeah. My brain. I’ll remember that. Gotta go. Merry Christmas, guys. Have a great one.”
    “Bye. ” Javier gave her one last kiss on the cheek. “But if you get that man under the mistletoe, take that chance. Oxygen. Blood flow. I’m just sayin’.”
     
    Philip and Javier were almost the only people who had touched her at all during the past two months, bar the occasional handshake, she realized as she drove off with one last wave out the car window. She hadn’t been able to get back to Chico since she’d started the job, even for Thanksgiving. Which would have been all right, because her grandmother always came to visit her for a few days in December. Ostensibly to walk around Union Square, look at the decorations in the store windows and the big tree, exclaim over the huge, decorated marble lobbies of the grand office buildings, and go for a ladies’ lunch on the top floor of Macy’s, have tea with little sandwiches and cakes. But actually because it was a time when it was better to be together.
    But this year, her grandmother hadn’t come.
    “The drive’s getting a little long for me,” Dixie had told her. “So you’ll have to go see all the lights for me, and tell me all about it.”
    “Are you not f eeling well? What does your doctor say?”
    “Oh, I’m fine,” Dixie insisted. “ Nothing to bother a doctor about. I’m not sick, just a little tired. Just getting old.”
    “You aren’t old, Grandma. You’re not even 75 yet.”
    Her grandmother laughed, the familiar smoky whisky sound. “Well, then, just say I’m old enough to deserve a rest, how’s that? I get to lie around on the couch all day and eat bonbons if I want, I’m such a lady of leisure. I’ll miss our treat, but that’ll make it even nicer to see you, and hear about all that important stuff you’ve been doing.”
    Desiree laughed herself at that. “If you want to hear about me yelling at t he phone guys to check the lines, I guess I could tell you about that. I don’t do the exciting parts, all the big meetings and the important people. That’s Alec’s job.”
     
    But she wasn’t thinking about Alec when she’d left the congestion that was I-5 on the day before Christmas Eve and was riding the back roads, quiet and empty, lonely or peaceful depending on your point of view, a series of right angles and straight lines arrowing across broad stretches of pancake-flat farmland, bringing her ever