Holiday Magic (Second Chance) (3 page)

He nodded and opened the copy to show her the stipulation.

“Can you find another date for the dance?” She was subdued. “Georgia knows about it, since it is one of my all-inclusive events, but if she discovers that she has to be your official escort for the evening, she’ll kill me.”

Mark groaned inwardly as Eleni allowed a tear to roll unheeded down her cheek.

Damn her.
That woman can turn on the waterworks at will.
He shook his head, admiration and frustration in his eyes.
Is there ever anything she wants that she doesn’t get?

“
I’ll see what I can do.”

He had not dated since the fiasco with Georgia. There had been too much pain there. He would never get involved with a woman again.

Once Eleni left his office, Mark sank into his desk chair and stared at the photograph of Georgia on his desk. Beautiful, loving, funny Georgia, the woman who should have been his bride, and the only woman he would ever love. What would it be like to see her again, talk to her, and yet not be able to touch her?

Chapter Three

Georgia was so angry with Eleni she could spit nails. How could she have been so stupid as to sign that contract without reading the fine print?  She had warned her to do so, but it was so like her twin to ignore advice that would be commonsense to anyone else.

Discovering it was year-end time, and Mark would be underfoot every day was a low blow, but finding out that she had to be his escort at the Christmas Eve Snow Ball? Well, she was still reeling from that! 

Eleni tried her best to placate her, but she was way beyond calming now. She had not been this furious in years.

“Georgia, I told you that the ball was one of my all-inclusive gigs, so don’t get bent out of shape about it. Mark would have been there anyway. The organizing committee insisted on it. I told you before, he’s my partner, and the people who are covering the cost of our services want him there. They’re quite annoyed with me that I can’t attend, but they’ve agreed to let you stand in my stead. There is no way that Mark can give them the slip too. Look, you’ll probably be so busy hobnobbing with the elite, you’ll hardly spend any time with him. I’m sure some of your old friends will be there. It’ll be a great opportunity to reconnect now that you’ve decided to move back and join the living, and you can push your jewelry too. Who knows? If the Governor’s wife likes it, she might want some, and you could have a whole new client base in Washington.”

Georgia shook her head.

“Forget it! As Grandma used to say, ‘Whitewashing the pump won’t make the water clean.’ If you’d told me about all this, I would never have agreed to help you out. I’m sure that’s why you’re springing this crap on me now. You knew I wouldn’t come if you’d been honest about it. I find it hard to believe that you just conveniently forgot to mention this. Seriously, you expect me to be his date for the night? That night of all nights? I’m sorry, Eleni, but you are out of your cotton-picking mind!” Her voice had risen, attracting the attention of some of the diners, so she lowered it immediately.

Eleni’s lower lip trembled, and Georgia knew that the waterworks were next. It wasn’t fair. Her sister could read her like a book—a first grade primer, at that!

“Eleni Jean Baxter, don’t you dare cry!”
Maybe it’s good I’m angry
, she thought,
at least when I’m angry I’m not feeling sorry for myself!

“
Nobody gives you more trouble than you do yourself, honey. You just don’t think things through. You’ve created this mess, and you really didn’t think about the way it would affect others. You have to stop jumping in with both feet before you test the water. One of these days, you’re going to get hurt. This will be hard for Mark—well, maybe not hard, but uncomfortable at best.”

Eleni giggled. Georgia realized what she had said, and the double meaning easily attached to it.

“Seriously? You’ve got your mind in the gutter now? You know what I mean!”

Disgusted with herself, Georgia couldn’t stop the blush suffusing her cheeks as her imagination brought that image of him vividly to mind. Heat spread through her body. The one thing they had always had was chemistry, lots and lots of reactive chemistry.

“Mark and I haven’t even spoken since that morning. Seeing him again will be very difficult for me, and now you tell me that I’ll have to see him almost every day?”

She pushed her hair behind her ears and reached for her wine glass. Her hand trembled.

“It still hurts to remember what we had. I don’t know about him, but I wish it had never happened—that we had never met.” She took a sip of her wine, and Eleni had the common sense to stay quiet.

Eleni reached across the table and took her free hand, offering a familiar comfort. Although fraternal rather than identical twins, the girls had always been inseparable – that is until the Mark disaster, and she had missed her sister dreadfully. It was one of the reasons that she had decided to come back to Philly in the first place.

Eleni was tall, topping five foot ten, with their mother’s fair skin, blonde hair, and green eyes, while she, at five foot six, favored their father’s Mediterranean roots, and had  naturally curly, light brown hair, filled with golden highlights, and light blue eyes.

Georgia knew that Eleni wasn’t being cruel purposely. She had moved to New York specifically to get away from him, and all the painful memories Philadelphia held for her, especially at this time of year. Her decision to come home now had been based on Eleni’s need, but she would never have willingly put herself in this position.

“I really don’t think I can do it. I want to help you, but you’re asking too much,” she said, tears running down her cheeks unnoticed. Every time she thought of Mark, her heart broke all over again. She wanted to hate him, despise him for what he had done, but despite everything, she still cared deeply for him—she always would.

“
Georgia, it’s been three years. You’ve decided to move on, and this is just part of it. Like it or not, he’s my friend and my business partner. When everything fell apart, I supported you, and I’m glad I did, but he’s been there for me too. He’s put up a huge chunk of change to help me open the showroom, and I owe it to him to give it my best shot.” Eleni handed her a tissue.

“
I know you were hurt, but it’s time to let it go. The way you see things, think of them, determines what you do, and you can’t keep thinking this way. Look at you. I love you, but I’m worried about you. You’ve hidden yourself away from life. You don’t smile or laugh anymore, you’ve lost so much weight, you’re fading away, and I need you with me. I miss my sister. Have you even dated since then?”

Georgia shook her head. “I have no desire to put myself through that again.”

“That’s not a healthy attitude. Neither one of us wants to end up on the shelf. You have too much love to give for that. It’s time to bury the hatchet, preferably not in his back.”

She smiled weakly at her sister’s lame joke. To do that, she’d have to pull the hatchet out of her own heart first. She would probably bleed to death if she did!

Eleni continued.

“
Mark made a terrible mistake, and he’s regretted it every day since. You’d know that if you were willing to listen to him. You weren’t just in love. You were soul mates and friends. Friendship is too precious to throw away. You may think that the love isn’t there anymore, but the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. If you didn’t feel something, you wouldn’t still be suffering so badly.”

Georgia’s face hardened as she pulled her hand away. This was a fine time for her sister to become perceptive, more insightful than she would have preferred.

“Friends don’t do what he did. There is nothing he can say to undo what happened. He cheated on me, Eleni, three weeks before our wedding! She was my friend and she got pregnant. That’s not a small thing. You can’t just say ‘oops, sorry,’ and move on. At least, I can’t.”

“
Georgia,” said Eleni trying to be conciliatory. “Honey, I know you can’t, and I know that you don’t want to hear this, but I’m sorry. Lucy was equally responsible. In fact, I’ve always said she should have taken most of the blame, and as for the pregnancy, it was a false alarm. I never liked her. She used you and your contacts to get accepted by our crowd, but she was a viper, a poisonous one at that, and you just wouldn’t see it. What was she doing letting him into her apartment in the first place? Why wasn’t she with the rest of us?”

“
You know the answer to that better than I do. I refused to speak to her as well. I was shocked when she had the nerve to send me that wedding invitation.”

“
No one ever accused her of having a surplus of tact. Her excuse was pretty lame as far as I was concerned—too much cold medicine, my you-know-what! If he
did
show up there in a snow storm, she could have let him crash on the couch. At least she didn’t accuse him of forcing himself on her,” Eleni mumbled the last, just loud enough for Georgia to hear. “He’s a nice guy, an honorable man. Look, for what it’s worth, he doesn’t remember anything about that night. You’d know that if you let me talk about him once in a while.”

“
An honorable man would have kept it in his pants,” Georgia sighed. “If he’d wanted sex that night, why didn’t he come to me?”

And that’s the sticking point,
she thought.
It’s not as if I’d have turned him away. We weren’t celibate. Our sex life was just fine.
Since she had stopped taking her pills, they might have created their child that night, but instead her world had fallen down around her. When she thought of it, she still wanted to curl up in a ball and die.

The waiter came and cleared their plates away, giving Georgia time to compose herself. She was about to renege on the deal when Eleni looked at her with the ‘kicked puppy dog look’ that always got her what she wanted, and Georgia could never refuse. She had been prepared to face him, so why did having to see him more often seem so much worse?

“Seriously, if you can’t do it, I’ll find a way to get out of the contract. It won’t be easy and may cost me the business…”

Georgia sighed and shook her head. Eleni was a master manipulator. She knew how to push all the right buttons. She had been Daddy’s little princess, the one who always managed to need rescuing, while Georgia had been his little soldier, going out to take on the world and take care of her sister. When had that ended? When had she lost the ability to face the world?

She could not deny her sister anything. She had used this as her excuse to finally leave New York. She wouldn’t back out now.

“
I said I’d do this for you, and I will, but I’m setting some ground rules. You can inform Mark that I’ll accompany him to the Ball, but I will not be his
date
. There is only so much I can take. As soon as I can leave, I’m out of there. As for the rest of it, he can do what he has to do, but we aren’t friends anymore. In fact, other than business, we really shouldn’t have anything to say to one another. If he can’t abide by that, Meg or Sam can mind the store. I won’t leave Philly right away, and when I do, I won’t go as far away as I did, but I’m not ready to let bygones be bygones yet.”

Eleni sheepishly agreed and called Mark with the news. From the part of the conversation she could hear, he accepted her terms. Why wouldn’t he? They really had nothing else to discuss.

The rest of the evening was spent discussing expectations for the all-inclusive events and talking about the good old days. She was still annoyed with her sister, but realistically Georgia knew that Eleni would never change.

Eleni left early the following morning, and Georgia settled down to work the showroom. They had a few walk-ins, and she sold a number of the turkey coat pins that she had designed especially for Holiday Magic. The pewter holiday fowl wore pilgrim hats atop carnelian heads, and had gold leaf applied to their tail feathers and the pilgrim buckle on the hats. The eyes were made of hematite. The size of an orange, they were funky and popular.

Friday had been a slow day, and she had managed to finish her design for her newest brooch, ‘The Last Leaf’. The pin would have a brown enamel branch from which an amber elm leaf would dangle. It was simple and yet timeless, a moment in time captured forever.

Mark had not been in the shop all week, sending pay envelopes over by courier, a small gesture for which she had been grateful at the time.

Saturday night, Georgia reluctantly entered the hotel ballroom. This would be the first wedding reception she attended since her own aborted one three years ago. What on earth had she been thinking? 

She looked around the room, relieved, and nodded. Eleni had been right. When it was someone else’s event, you could be objective, especially when it was as far removed from her own theme as this one was.

Meg and Samantha were quite adept at following instructions. The room was gorgeous. The bride would be pleased. The black and white decorations looked both elegant and simple, the contrast adding to the lasting impression they would make.

On the black cloth-covered tables sat lustrous, white china, and black and white pillar candles in silver holders set atop small circular mirrors. Beside them stood double bud vases, their red roses, each boasting a single branch of green leaves, added richness to the scene that had surprised her. Takeaways—ceramic penguin bridal couples—added a touch of whimsy to the otherwise formal setting. Many species of penguins were notoriously monogamous and made excellent symbolic animals for enduring marriages.

Georgia, aware she was as much a part of the décor as was everything else in the room, had worn a floor-length Mandarin-styled black dress and pewter jewelry of her own making. Her hair had been tamed into a sleek chignon held in place by a clip that matched the toggles on the front shoulder of her dress and her earrings. The bride and groom were set to arrive at any minute, and with them would come Mark, the man she had avoided for the past three years.

She regretted that he had not come into the showroom. It since it might have been easier to see him there for the first time, than in a crowded room full of strangers. Her emotions were a tossed salad, and she hoped she could control herself enough not to spoil the event for the bride. She had been unable to eat all day, her stomach a veritable battleground of butterflies as she prepared herself for this ordeal.