Wish Upon a Christmas Star by Darlene Gardner Page A

“There. Now for the ice.”
    She went into the bathroom, where she’d left the ice bucket
she’d filled from the dispenser down the hall. Taking some cubes, she wrapped
them in a washcloth and seconds later was back at his side, handing him the cold
compress.
    “The ice will reduce the swelling, but you’ll still have a bit
of a shiner,” she said. “Keep the ice on for twenty minutes and off for twenty
and it won’t be too bad.”
    “That means you’re stuck with me for the next twenty minutes,”
he said.
    “Only because you insisted on coming here instead of going to
your own hotel.”
    “I didn’t want you walking back by yourself,” he said.
    She crossed her arms over her chest and considered him. “I used
to be a cop. I can take care of myself. If you’d remembered that in the bar, you
wouldn’t have a black eye.”
    “I did remember it,” he said. “It didn’t help.”
    “Do you get into a lot of fights?” She reached out, traced his
not-quite-straight nose with a finger and then pulled her arm back. He resisted
capturing her hand so they’d still have a physical connection. “It looks like
your nose was broken.”
    “Not in a fight, in a racquetball game. The other guy swung his
racket and my face was in the way.”
    “Ouch,” she said.
    “Yeah.” Logan rubbed his nose, remembering the blast of pain.
“My last fight was in high school.”
    “You mean the time you decked Bobby Jones in the school parking
lot?”
    “Yep,” he said. That had been over Maria, too, although he’d
never shared the particulars with her. She thought Bobby had started the fight
because he was jealous that Logan had beaten him out as starting shortstop on
the baseball team. In reality, Logan had hit Bobby for making a lewd comment
about Maria.
    She shook her head. “You’ll have to come up with a story for
when you get back to New York. Telling clients you were in a bar fight won’t go
over well.”
    “Don’t be so sure about that,” he said. “Don’t women like their
financial planners with a dash of danger?”
    “Ha!” she said, smiling. “That’s the last thing women look for
in their financial advisors.”
    “How about you?” He met and held her gaze. “What do you look
for in a man?”
    The mood in the room seemed to change, becoming more charged
and reminding him of the lateness of the hour. Once upon a time, she’d told him
he was everything she could ever want.
    She wet her lips, bringing his gaze to her mouth. “Somebody who
knows to duck when a punch is thrown,” she said, breaking the invisible thread
of tension between them.
    He laughed. “Smart aleck.”
    “Your turn,” she said. “What do you look for in a woman?”
    “Somebody like you.” He hadn’t thought before he spoke.
    “Yeah, right.”
    “It’s true,” he said. For years, his friends had been teasing
him that he dated only tall women who wore their dark hair long and straight.
“That’s probably why none of my relationships last.”
    “Because the women get on your nerves?” she quipped.
    “Because what I feel for them doesn’t compare to what I felt
for you,” he said.
    The words hung between them, and just like that the tension was
back in the room. She gazed at him, her blue eyes huge in her pale face, her
lips slightly parted.
    He stood up abruptly, cleared his throat and lowered the
washcloth from his eye. “It’s late. I should get going.”
    “It hasn’t been twenty minutes yet,” she protested.
    “I can’t last that long without doing something stupid,” he
said, moving past her to drop the ice in the sink. When he came out of the
bathroom, she was facing him.
    “What if I want you to do something stupid?” she whispered,
closing the distance between them until he could smell her light, flowery scent.
She anchored her hands on his chest, stood on her tiptoes and put her mouth on
his.
    He didn’t try to resist her. He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted
to. It had been almost a dozen