Together for Christmas (19 page)

Casey remained silent . . . then he reached out to touch her hand. Kristen jerked, feeling that same electric connection pass between them. She whipped up her gaze, wondering for the umpteenth time if he’d felt it too . . . then realized that Casey was merely tapping her hand so she’d lift it and allow him to retrieve the paperwork she’d accidentally put her hand atop.

He tapped his papers on the table to square them, then slid them into his laptop case. Near it, his computer hummed. His pens and notepad stood at the ready. His cell phone buzzed again. Again, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Interesting theory.”

“
Correct
theory,” Kristen pressed. “You don’t have to go down to the set, full of Terminator-style sound and fury, and force everyone to do your bidding. Because you make sure they
want
to do what you want them to do. Which is probably what the network or the production company wants them to do. It’s—”

“Ingenious?” Casey supplied with a devilish eyebrow raise.

“—insidious,” Kristen countered. “Because nobody knows what’s happening. Yet I’ve seen it work over and over again this week. During the course of a conversation with someone from Heather’s TV special, you subtly slide in a solution to whatever problem is at hand—delays, disasters, disorganization—and then you simply . . . wait a while. Before long, the person you’re talking with inevitably comes up with
exactly
the same idea you had!”

“Hmm.” His smoldering gaze lifted to hers, compelling and attentive and mesmeric. “That’s quite a trick.”

“Yes, it is!”

“But it’s just that—a trick. I do don’t tricks.”

Undaunted, Kristen went on. “It’s the only way you can achieve the unprecedented success you’ve achieved—”

“Have you been checking up on me?”

“—because if you tried to strong-arm people into going along with your solutions, they would resist. Inevitably. It’s just human nature
not
to do what you’re told, if you can possibly help it,” Kristen told him. “If you barged onto the set and started issuing orders, people would argue with you.”

“Right. But since I’m somehow hypnotizing them . . . ?”

“It’s not hypnosis. It’s . . . skill. And it’s smart.”

She wished she could think of a better explanation for it, but that’s what it boiled down to. Casey possessed an unprecedented skill for understanding what people needed and then giving it to them, almost entirely imperceptibly. Unlike most people, Casey didn’t let his ego get in the way. He was willing to give other people credit—even for his own ideas. Once he’d succeeded, he wasn’t interested in crowing about it, either. “It’s . . . kind of remarkable,” she said.

“It’s troubleshooting.” He shrugged, full of apparent matter-of-factness. “Part of the job is leaving people happy when you’re done. Anyone can come in and be a hatchet man—”

“Like Heather accused
you
of being.”

“—but not everyone can devise real solutions.”

“Is that what Shane Maresca would say you’re doing?” Kristen pushed, reaching for the only reasonable counter-comparison she could make. “Devising real solutions?”

A frown. “He would say I’m getting in his way. I hope.”

“Still bloodthirsty, then?”

“Still winning.” Uneasily, Casey shifted. “I hope.”

Kristen shook her head. “What
is
it between you two, anyway? You were clearly close once. What happened?”

Casey frowned at his cranberry-pecan pie-in-a-jar with cinnamon whipped cream and streusel crumble. True to his word, he’d downed an entire mini pie every single day . . . and had nearly incited riots with his almost pornographic appreciation of it.

She’d say one thing for Casey: He delivered.

“Shane got what I wanted for Christmas one year,” Casey told her curtly. “I had a hard time getting over it.”

“Shane got the Tonka truck you wanted, and you didn’t?”

His jaw flexed. “Something like that.”

“No. That can’t be it. I don’t buy it.”

Casey lifted his gaze, dark and unfathomable, to hers. “Whether you do or not . . . that’s not my problem.”

The bleakness in his eyes made her sad. Impulsively, Kristen reached for his hand. She squeezed it. “Go on. Make it my problem. Tell me about it! Maybe you’ll feel better.”

He actually appeared to consider it. Then . . .

“You’d do better staying away from Shane Maresca. Tell Heather to stay away from him, too. She won’t take my calls, and I can’t get anywhere near her in person,” Casey said, “thanks to her very convenient quarantine.”

“‘Convenient’? You don’t think it’s real?”

“I know it’s real. That doesn’t mean it’s not convenient.”

“Well, either way, it doesn’t matter,” Kristen said. “Heather’s never even heard of Shane Maresca. I asked her.”

Casey frowned. “Then it’s worse than I thought.”

But before Kristen could ask what he meant, another member of Heather’s TV special production crew wandered in. She picked up a cup of coffee and a mincemeat pie-in-a-jar to go, spied Casey, then trundled over to his table with her bag in hand.

“Hey, Casey,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know that I
did
talk to Maggie about rigging the lights the way I knew they ought to be. We were able to come to terms with it.”

“That’s good news.” Casey smiled at her. “So you win!”

“Yep!” They high-fived. “Anyway, thanks for listening yesterday. That was a really enlightening conversation. Bye!”

Looking pleased, the crew member left the diner. Kristen watched Casey as he watched her leave. Then she pounced.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You talked to Maggie, too? And she happened to come to the same conclusion about the lighting?”

“Something like that.” Casey gazed at her. “What difference does it make? It’s a good thing when problems are solved.”

“It’s deceptive.”

“Maybe that’s just what I
want
you to think. Maybe my spellbinding troubleshooter mojo is getting to you, too.”

“Joke all you want. I’m onto you.”

“Does that mean you’re done interrogating me?” Adorably, Casey feigned disappointment. “I was just getting into it.”

“No, I’m not done yet.” Considering him, Kristen leaned more cozily into the booth. Around them, the usual hubbub of customers and crew went about their business, with their days brightened by Christmas carols and eggnog French toast. “I still want to know more about Shane. When I told you Heather hasn’t heard of him, why did you say it’s worse than you thought?”

With clear reluctance, Casey sobered. He wrapped his hands around his coffee cup—nearly succeeding in sidetracking her with thoughts of how skilled and manly and mesmerizing his hands looked—then squinted at the nearest of the diner’s two charity Christmas trees. She was surprised it didn’t burst into flames.

“Shane is an anti-fixer,” Casey finally explained, his tone wry but unswerving. “Since Heather’s TV special is already in trouble, he’s here to derail it completely.”

That
was unexpected. “Why would he do that?”

“For the insurance money. The production company takes out insurance on every project—every movie, every TV show, every awards show or made-for-TV docudrama . . . and every holiday special,” Casey said. “Rather than sink unrecoverable cash into an already troubled production, sometimes the company would rather cut their losses and collect the insurance.”

“You really mean this?”

A nod. “The fact that Heather hasn’t even met Shane yet—that she probably doesn’t even know he’s here in Kismet—suggests he’s succeeding, too. From behind the scenes, where people like him work best.”

“I dunno,” Kristen mused, considering everything she knew so far. “That sounds a lot like what you’re doing.”

Casey’s gaze darkened. “Shane is here to ruin things. It’s what he does best. He just does it with a smile, that’s all. Sometimes, he starts early—doubling his chances of being hired by creating on-set dissent where it doesn’t already exist.”

“But . . . an
anti-fixer?
” Kristen almost laughed. “That sounds so preposterous! That can’t be a real thing, can it? Come on. I might be a small-town girl, but I’m not
that
gullible.”

“If it helps, think of him as a consultant,” Casey suggested. “I don’t know if he’s working for Heather’s network or a rival network or another production company with a similar show in the works. He could have been hired by more than one entity. He could have laid a lot of groundwork by now, too. I promise you, Shane Maresca is real. And he means trouble.”

“Uh-huh.” She remained doubtful. “Whereas
you
mean . . . ?”

“Trouble.” Casey flashed her his most affecting, most flirtatious, most
irresistible
smile yet. “I never claimed to be harmless myself. I have a long and glorious history of causing trouble. The difference between me and Shane is that I’ve been spending my time making up for all the trouble I’ve caused.”

Skeptically, Kristen eyed him. It was tricky business. Mostly because that latest smile of his gave her a serious case of the want-mores. As in,
I want more of that smile. I want more of that rumbly, husky, bad-to-the-bone timbre to your voice
.
I want more of this conversation between us . . . and I want it to be personal, too
. It was making it difficult to concentrate.

Probably, Casey knew it, too. That’s why he’d chosen that particular moment to smile at her—to charm her into not asking any more questions. But Kristen needed to know the truth about what was going on . . . for Heather’s sake, if nothing else.

Defiantly, Kristen straightened her spine.

“Maybe Shane is just misunderstood,” she said staunchly. “Maybe he’s not ‘trouble’ at all. He seems nice to me.”

Casey merely shook his head. “He probably does,” he said casually. “But one of the advantages of growing up in a lot of different households is that you learn how to read people pretty quickly. You have to. Otherwise, you don’t survive long.”

“I see. Do you also learn how to manipulate people?”

He arched his eyebrow at her, not saying anything.

That’s how Kristen knew she’d struck a nerve.

Because Casey
always
had something to say. Usually (unlike her) he had the
right
thing to say, at exactly the right moment.

But Kristen couldn’t back down now. The words were already out there. The only thing that might possibly help was . . .

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was insensitive.”

“No, it was a reasonable question,” Casey disagreed. “I respect you for not tiptoeing around me. I’m not made of glass.”

“As far as I can tell, you’re made of machismo and dick jokes, with a big dose of charisma and pie love thrown in.”

“‘Pie love’? Is that what you’re calling it now?”

“You skipped ‘dick jokes’ to focus on ‘pie love’?”

Casey laughed, leaving her feeling immensely relieved that he wasn’t hurt by her off-the-cuff comment.
Whew
. That meant things were okay between them. Their camaraderie was intact.

Kristen didn’t want to risk dinging it again. Not even, she realized with a start, for the sake of getting to the bottom of Casey’s plans for Heather’s TV special. Because over the past few days, she’d gotten to know Casey much better. They’d hung out, they’d talked, and once—memorably—they’d even shot a few games of decidedly
non
-Christmassy pool at The Big Foot bar.

Being around him had been fun. They’d taken their instant bond to a whole new level. In fact, if Casey hadn’t already failed her usual “should I sleep with him?” litmus test . . .

Maybe, Kristen thought, he deserved another shot at it.

Or maybe she should just forget about her test altogether.

“What can I say?” he asked, obviously referring to his
very
convincing enjoyment of today’s pie-in-a-jar. “That walnut-caramel pie of yours is growing on me. Someday I might even like it.”

“My diner customers think you want to
marry
it,” Kristen joked, “after yesterday’s show-stopping performance.”

“Or at least take it out a few more times . . . show it a good time.” Casey pulled a funny face. Then, with abrupt seriousness, he said, “I don’t manipulate people. That’s not what I’m doing.”

“No. You’re just making them want what
you
want,” Kristen said. “If that’s not manipulation, I don’t know what is.”

Casey gave her another smile. This one reached all the way to her toes and made them curl up with tingly excitement inside her boots. How was it that she’d made a terrible conversational blunder, stepped all over his difficult childhood, and basically interrogated him since she’d sat down . . . and Casey somehow made her feel as if she was the most remarkable woman alive?

Going toe-to-toe with him this way was . . . invigorating. He made her feel unique. Fascinating. Brave.
Necessary
.

All the things she believed she was, deep down . . . but still longed, on the inside, to have confirmed by someone else.

“It’s called seduction, Pollyanna.” Casey pinned her with another knowing look. “It helps make the world go around.”

“Maybe for you, it does. I prefer the truth.”

Casey seemed taken aback by that. “Just because I might have made you want it doesn’t mean you don’t
really
want it. In the end,
you’re
still the one who’s feeling the desire.”

“Wait a minute.” Kristen blinked, feeling confused. “Are we still talking about fixing things? Or
not
fixing things?”

“I’m talking about manipulation, now that you’ve brought it up,” Casey said. “And the truth is, if you think you’re immune to being seduced, a hundred times a day, by the things around you and the people you meet . . . well, you’re just kidding yourself.” He relaxed in his side of the booth, visibly comfortable with the topic at hand. “But that’s all right. You’re in good company. Most people like to think they’re in control—”

“I
am
in control!”

“—when really they’re just operating on autopilot. That’s not living. That’s existing. And it’s prone to being nudged, with just the subtlest push, in any direction that comes along.”