Christmas At Cupid's Hideaway

“Damn straight,” he grumbled.

He grabbed a handful of clothing and walked over to the dresser across the room to put it away, stopping to glare at the reflection frowning back at him from the mirror.

“Gabriel Morrison,” he mumbled, addressing the worried-looking man in the mirror. “World’s greatest jingle writer. The guy who’s got more awards piled up in his office than even Latoya knows what to do with. Aren’t you the guy who’s never at a loss for clever words? The one who can write music in his sleep? The clown who unleashed the Love Me Tenders commercial and Duke the Dog on an unsuspecting and gullible public? Good going, Morrison.”

He yanked open the top dresser drawer, tossed his clothes inside and went back for another handful.

“A meeting in New York in two weeks and just like always, you’ve promised them the world, haven’t you?” he muttered when he was in front of the mirror again. “Only this time, things are different.”

The hard reality of the situation nagged at him while he paced between the kitschy fifties soda fountain and the pink Cadillac.

Things were different, all right. Because whenever Gabe had promised the world before, he’d always delivered it on a silver platter.

And this time?

This time, Gabriel Morrison, the Mozart of the advertising industry, the man whose name was synonymous with catchy tunes and clever lyrics and ad campaigns that never failed to raise clients’ notoriety as well as their profits…

This time, Gabriel Morrison had a major case of jingle-writer’s block.

“DELICIOUS!”

Meg didn’t have to turn around from the stove. She knew when her grandmother walked into the kitchen from the dining room where she’d just poured the morning orange juice, she was definitely not talking about the ham-and-cheese omelets Meg was making. There was a little nuance in Maisie’s voice, a little skip in her step that Meg recognized as having nothing to do with food—and everything to do with romance.

“Nice to know your guests are enjoying themselves so much.” Meg was an expert at both cooking and ignoring Maisie’s less-than-subtle hints, and she put both talents to use. She flipped the omelets, added a sprinkling of dill and firmly refused to get hooked by the bait Maisie was dangling in front of her. “The honeymooners are happy?”

“Nonsense!” Out of the corner of her eye, Meg saw her grandmother wave away the very thought. “Of course the Kilbanes are happy. Honeymooners are always happy. Since they’ve checked in, they’ve gone through two bottles of champagne, three boxes of scented candles and two pairs of those bubble-gumflavored edible undies we have on special in the Love Shack. They’re as happy as clams. I wasn’t talking about Brian and Jenny Kilbane, and you know it.”

“The nudists?” Meg slid the omelets onto china plates and passed the plates to Maisie. “Or the spy wannabes?”

Maisie nodded her approval of the omelets, but even so, she didn’t look very happy. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she said, frowning at Meg.

“I do.” Meg reached for the pan of hash-brown potatoes that was sitting on the stove. She scooped a pile of perfectly browned potatoes onto each of the festive plates—decorated with fir trees and snowflakes—that Maisie used only twice each year, in December and for Christmas in July. “I know you’re talking about Gabe Morrison.” Finished with the potatoes, she set down the pan, wiped her hands on her white apron and gave her grandmother her full attention. With any luck, Maisie would catch on to the fact that she wasn’t kidding.

Then again, if luck had anything to do with the way things were going, Meg wouldn’t have spent the entire time since she’d checked Gabe into the inn thinking all the things about him that Maisie thought she should be thinking.

All the things Meg knew she shouldn’t have been thinking.

Meg’s spirits plummeted. Delicious was the least of her problems. When it came to their newest guest, there was also charming to consider—in those few and far between moments when he seemed to forget himself enough to allow his natural sense of humor to come through. Then there was gorgeous, available and successful. Not to mention tempting.

Meg drew in a long breath to steady her suddenly racing heartbeat. “I’m not interested,” she told Maisie. And herself. “So whether Gabe is delicious or not doesn’t change anything…” She looked the breakfast dishes over one final time. “I need something,” she grumbled.

“Of course you do.” Maisie’s expression brightened. “It’s what I’ve said all along. You need something. A little companionship. Is that such a bad thing? Or how about a full-fledged, all-out, over-the-top fling?” Maisie laughed the same throaty laugh Meg had heard from her grandmother’s private rooms on the nights Doc Ross visited. “If you ask me, sweetie, an amour would do you a world of good. Help you forget that chef of yours, the one who had oatmeal where his brains were supposed to be and nothing but ice cubes inside his chest. You know, that what’s-his-name.”

“Ben.” Still staring at the hash browns and omelets, Meg supplied the name automatically. It took her a second to realize that saying it didn’t hurt. At least, not as much as it used to, anyway. “Ben,” she said again, testing out the theory and discovering that for the first time in the fourteen months she’d been back on the island and out of the magnetic pull of Ben Lucarelli’s overblown personality and his overrated talent, the very memory of him didn’t skewer her like a shish kebab.

“And I wasn’t talking about Ben.” She looked at the door that led into the dining room where Maisie’s guests were waiting for breakfast. “Or about anyone else, for that matter. I was talking about breakfast.” She studied the plates, and the answer hit her. “Strawberries,” she mumbled and she hurried over to the refrigerator on the other side of the room. She found seven of the plumpest, reddest strawberries she’d picked just two days before over on the mainland and, in a flash, had them washed, sliced, sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar and arranged on each plate.

“Much better,” She said with satisfaction. “The muffins are already on the table?”

“I did that first thing,” Maisie assured her. “And everyone’s enjoying them.” Her expression fell. “Everyone but poor Gabe.”

Meg already had four of the plates in her hands. She stepped back to let Maisie leave the kitchen with the other three, but not before she rolled her eyes, just so her grandmother would know what she thought of her little stab at theatrics. “And I’m supposed to care, right? I’m supposed to ask why he’s not enjoying the muffins. Or am I supposed to be worried about why you’re calling him ‘poor Gabe’?”

“Good heavens, dear.” Maisie clicked her tongue and went into the inn’s dining room. Although she didn’t have the nerve to pretend she was embarrassed, she at least had the decency to blush a shade darker than her hot-pink pantsuit. “You are so suspicious! You can’t possibly think I’m so meddlesome that…”

Her comment trailed away, and Meg supposed it was just as well. She didn’t need her grandmother to elaborate. Not about Gabe.

In the hours since she’d met him, Meg’s own imagination had done enough elaborating for the both of them.

That brought her up short, and right before she bumped the swinging door with her hip and entered the dining room, Meg paused to catch her breath. The last thing she needed were her own fantasies sneaking up to destroy her self-control. Not when she was about to walk into the dining room and come face to face with the man who’d inspired those fantasies. All night long.

Meg twitched the thought away as inconsequential, inconsistent with what she wanted out of her life and her career, and just plain old insane. She gave the door an authoritative smack and got down to business—which would’ve been considerably easier if it wasn’t for the scene that greeted her in the dining room.

Maisie was fluttering around the table pouring coffee and chatting up a storm, just as she did every morning when they had guests. The Kilbanes were holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. The nudists and the spies…

Meg glanced around the table. Because she wasn’t usually involved in the day-to-day operation of the inn outside the kitchen, she wasn’t sure which guests were the nudists and which were the James Bond fans. She did, however, know exactly which guest Maisie was referring to when she’d mentioned delicious.

Delicious was a word that didn’t adequately describe how Gabe looked early in the morning.

He was wearing khakis and an inky shirt that brought out the highlights in his dark hair, and though he was sitting with his back to the windows with their view of the lake, she could tell he’d shaved since she’d last seen him. Yesterday’s sprinkling of dark stubble was gone, replaced by a smooth sweep of jaw that was squarer—and more stubborn—than she remembered.

The impression did nothing to dampen the little thread of awareness that wound through Meg. Her mind on everything but the dishes she was placing on the table in front of their guests, she went through the motions, calling on a lifetime of experience in the restaurant industry and fourteen months’ worth of experience in the I’m-thinking-about-him-but-I’m-not-going-to-let-anyone-know-it department. She succeeded at both. By the time she got around to sliding his dish in front of Gabe, the other guests were murmuring their admiration of her presentation, nodding their approval of her menu selection and digging in.

Gabe, on the other hand, was staring into his coffee cup which, Meg noticed, was empty.

“Coffee?” When Maisie picked that exact moment to zoom by, Meg plucked the silver coffee pot off the tray she was carrying. She stepped back and waited for Gabe to answer and when he didn’t, she gave it another try.

“Coffee?” she asked again.

As if he’d been touched with a cattle prod, he snapped to attention and for the first time, Meg saw that while everyone else had been munching her island-famous blueberry muffins and making small talk, Gabe had been lost in his own world. He’d brought a legal pad down to the dining room and it was covered with doodles.

“Buildings.” She tipped her head and examined the pictures that covered the entire top page of the pad. Though she was no expert when it came to art of any kind, she knew good work when she saw it. And Gabe’s drawings were definitely good.

There was a sketch of the Chrysler building in New York on one corner of the pad. Another toward the bottom of the page reminded her of the glass pyramid at the Louvre. In between was a building she didn’t recognize, one with broad lines and a bold silhouette.

“You’re pretty talented,” she told him.

“No. I’m not.” Gabe frowned at the drawings before he ripped off the page and scrunched it into a ball. He glanced around as if he didn’t know what to do with it and Meg held out her hand. “I’m just doodling,” he told her, dropping the ball of paper into her hands. “Passing the time. Doodling.”

“Whatever you say.” Meg stuck the paper in the pocket of her apron and held out the coffeepot, trying again. Gabe finally took the hint. He held up his cup for her to fill and she had another chance to look at him. This close, she saw that there were still dark smudges under Gabe’s eyes. He was just as on-edge as when he’d arrived at the Hideaway. Just as tired-looking.

As if she’d seen it, too, Maisie stepped in. “I do hope you slept well, Mr. Morrison.” She offered him one of her patented smiles and an expectant look that told him whether he liked it or not, she was about to draw him into the conversation. “The Kilbanes here…” She tipped her head toward the honeymooning couple. “They were just saying that the bed in Close to the Heart is the most comfortable they’ve ever been in. For sleeping or for…” Maisie’s gentle laughter rippled around the room. “Well, they are on their honeymoon, after all!”

The other guests nodded and smiled, and one of the other men (either the nudist or the spy) raised his orange-juice glass and proposed a toast. Gabe didn’t say a thing. He drank some of his coffee and held the cup out for Meg to top off. When she was done, she backed away from the table and returned to the kitchen. Better to hide out with the dirty dishes and the greasy pans than to stand here and listen to Maisie’s barefaced attempts at drawing Gabe out of his shell and into a heart-to-heart.

Once the door was safely closed behind her, she breathed a sigh of relief.

The reprieve didn’t last long.

“I think it’s going very well.” Maisie breezed into the kitchen with the empty orange-juice pitcher, a smile on her face and a purr of satisfaction in her voice. “He’s fitting right in, don’t you think?”

“I think,” Meg told her, being careful to keep her voice down, “that he’s sullen and in a world of his own. Can’t you see that, Grandma? The man obviously has problems, and I don’t think your attempts to introducing hearts and flowers into his life will help. He’s worried.”

“He needs someone to help him not worry.”

“He’s crabby.”

“Who wouldn’t be if they were all alone?”

“He’s not interested.”

“Did I say anything about him being interested?” Maisie’s silvery eyebrows rose nearly as far as the sweep of fluffy white hair that touched her forehead. “Really, Meg, I think you’re way ahead of me here. You’re having ideas I haven’t even thought of. Do you want him to be interested?”

“I’m—” Meg grumbled her displeasure. Of Maisie’s shameless tactics. Of her own inexplicable reaction to Gabe. “It doesn’t matter whether I want him to be or not,” she admitted. “He’s obviously not.”

Maisie leaned against the countertop, head cocked, eyes sparkling. “How do you know?” she asked.

“How do I—” Too restless to stand still, Meg tugged her apron over her head and threw it on the countertop. “Did you take a good look at him?” She pointed toward the closed door and the dining room beyond. “How can the man be interested in anything? He’s preoccupied. He’s troubled.”

“Pish-tush.” Maisie tossed her head. “I haven’t met a man yet who’s too preoccupied to notice a woman noticing him. And if I haven’t told you this before, Meg, I’ve met plenty of men in my life.” Warming to the idea, she went over to the coffee maker to refill the silver pot they passed around the table. “Maybe he just doesn’t realize how interested he really is,” she said with a mischievous smile. “Or at least how interested he could be, if he had half a chance.”

“Oh, come on, Grandma!” Meg laughed, which was mighty peculiar considering she wasn’t feeling the least bit happy with the way things were going. “Are you telling me that if I threw myself at the man—”

“Would I ever suggest a thing like that?” Maisie’s cheeks went noticeably pale. “It’s so…so low-class, this whole notion of women coming onto men as if that was the only way to attract their attention. You know me better than that! What you need to do is be more subtle. More discreet. Take my word for it, that will attract a man’s attention surer than if you walked through the dining room stark-naked. Well…maybe if you walked through the dining room stark naked…”

“Oh, no! I’m not going for the Lady Godiva routine.” Because she knew a losing cause when she saw one, Meg gave up the fight. She took the coffeepot out of Maisie’s hands and turned toward the dining room.

“Bet you it’s true.”

The challenge was delivered in the sweetest tones, but it was a challenge nonetheless.

Meg turned and faced her grandmother head-on. “You mean about attracting his attention? Bet it’s not,” she said.

Maisie’s lips twitched with a barely controlled smile. “Bet if you flirted with him, he’d react. Big-time.”

Meg clenched her teeth. “Bet he wouldn’t.”

“You brave enough to find out?”

Whether it meant jumping into the lake from the highest rock on the shore, swimming the farthest, running the fastest or outrunning a storm in the family sailboat, Meg couldn’t stand to have her courage questioned. It was one of the reasons she’d gotten into so much trouble as a teenager. One of the reasons she’d had her eyes on a life on the mainland and her heart firmly set on Ben Lucarelli, even when everyone who’d ever met the man insisted he wasn’t right for her.

It was the one and only reason it had taken her so long to break up with Ben. Even when she finally found out that he wasn’t as interested in Meg the person as he was in Meg the chef, the woman who could make him—and his chi-chi Baltimore restaurant—a five-star hit.

Meg had never backed down from a challenge in her life.

And Maisie knew it.

“All right. You want proof. I’ll give you proof.” Meg raised her chin in the kind of I’m-not-budging-an-inch-on-this-look she’d learned at Maisie’s knee. She put down the coffeepot long enough to pull the elastic band out of her hair and combed through her ponytail with her fingers. When she was done, she shook her curls loose and grabbed the silver pot again. “I’m going in there and I’m going to flirt with Gabe Morrison. And it’s going to get me nowhere. Guaranteed.”

“We’ll see.” Maisie nodded. “And if I lose—”

“You will,” Meg assured her.

“If I lose and he’s not attracted to you…well, I’ll cook dinner for you one night. How about that? And if I win…”

“You won’t.”

“If I win…” She winked at Meg and, reaching for her, turned her toward the door. “If I win, you win, too. Now go get him,” she said, and nudged her out of the kitchen.

“Fine. Good.” Meg paused just outside the dining-room door, fighting the sudden urge to run.

She might have done it, too, if behind her, she didn’t hear the kitchen door open just enough to allow Maisie to peek out. “Remember, be subtle. Bet he’ll fall head over heels,” Maisie whispered.

“Bet he won’t,” Meg insisted, and because she knew she’d talked herself into something she couldn’t talk herself out of, she figured she had no choice but to get it over with.

Her shoulders squared, her jaw steady, her insides jumping like a fish at the wrong end of a hook, she marched back into the dining room to face Gabe Morrison.

And her own nagging insecurities.

Chapter Three

Gabe was drawing buildings.

Again.

Shaking himself back to reality, he studied the drawing that had somehow taken shape on the legal pad in front of him while he was lost in thought.

A facade that combined classical elements and post-modernist pizzazz. A frieze on the entablature. One that completely broke the rules when it came to horizontal bands of relief sculpture, dispensing with them altogether and replacing them instead with a loose pattern of lines that was less traditional carving and more like the empty staffs in an even emptier line of—

“Music.”

Gabe grumbled the word and glanced down at the drawing that was staring back up at him.

Kind of like the other guests around the breakfast table were staring at him.

He felt their eyes before he saw them, and because he knew that doing anything else would only make him seem crazier and more conspicuous, he forced himself to look up. Six pairs of eyes were trained on him, six expressions both cautious and curious. Six people were gawking at him as if he’d been talking to himself.

Which he had been.

Gabe made a sound that might have been a mumbled excuse. Or a growl of discontent. In keeping with the peaceful atmosphere of the Hideaway and the feelings of love that were as conspicuous as the swarm of chubby cupids that decorated the Christmas tree in the far corner, his fellow guests apparently decided it was an apology.

The fresh-faced, starry-eyed honeymooners across the lace tablecloth grinned in unison. The other two couples smiled and nodded and finished their meals. Watching them eat, Gabe noticed for the first time that there was food on the plate in front of him. And he hadn’t touched it.

“That’s right. You would like music.” The newlywed groom was done eating. He stood and because he was holding her hand, his bride popped out of her chair right along with him. “You’re staying in Love Me Tender. The music room. We haven’t seen it, but we hear it’s really cool.”

“We could switch. Rooms, I mean.” Gabe sounded a little too desperate, even to himself. He knew it. He didn’t like it. He couldn’t stop. The other rooms at the Hideaway might be heavy on the lace and light on the guy-all-alone-so-what’s-he-doing-in-a-place-like-this factor, but they wouldn’t remind him of the music he couldn’t compose or the lyrics that refused to form in his head. No matter how hard he tried.

At least they weren’t Love Me Tender.

This was his chance, and it might be his only one. He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t have much to pack. I could be out in less than ten minutes. If you’d like to check out Love Me Tender for the rest of your stay—”

“No way!” The groom might be a quicker eater than his blushing bride, but it was clear from the start who was going to make the decisions in the family. “Pink Cadillacs and Elvis pictures?” She barked out a laugh. “No—thank—you. Not exactly my idea of romantic!”

“That’s not what the Crawfords thought!” Chuckling, one of the other couples got up from the table. They were apparently regulars at the Hideaway and knew something Gabe didn’t know. He didn’t care, either, not if it meant he might get them to bite at his juicy offer.

He turned to them. “If you think Love Me Tender is romantic—”

Before he could even finish, both the man and the woman were shaking their heads. “Happy where we are,” the man told him. He looped an arm around his wife’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze before they walked out of the room. “‘Smooth Operator’ is our idea of romance, and besides, James Bond never visited Graceland.”

Gabe couldn’t argue with that. He turned his attention to the only couple left.

“Not us.” The man held up one hand, instantly rejecting the plan. “We love ‘Almost Paradise.’ The plants, the waterfall, even the jungle noises piped in through the sound system. That’s romance as far as we’re concerned. Besides, I hear the bar stools in Love Me Tender have vinyl seats and frankly, vinyl and nudists…” Even fully clothed, he squirmed in his chair. As if the suggestion was too much to take, both he and his wife got up and scurried out of the dining room as quickly as they could.

“Great.” Gabe mumbled the word. Even though he was feeling anything but. “Strike three. Me and Elvis. At least I don’t have to worry about the romance.”

“What’s the matter, Mr. Morrison? You don’t like romance?”

Gabe hadn’t noticed that Meg had come back into the room. A warm rush of awareness flooded the space between his heart and his stomach when her voice snuck up from somewhere behind him. Funny, although he’d been more than aware of Meg the day before, when she’d showed him to the fiasco that passed for his room, he’d missed the husky note in her voice. Ready to answer her—except that he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to say—he spun around in his chair.

And stopped cold.

He remembered plenty about Meg, all right. But he’d forgotten that she was so beautiful.

When she’d come into the room earlier to pour the coffee, he’d been too preoccupied with the empty legal pad that dared him to try and fill its pages with clever jingle material. Or-not-so clever jingle material. Or anything at all except the doodles that were the only things that managed to ooze from his pen. He hadn’t paid attention to the mossy green dress that floated around Meg’s ankles and made her eyes look smokier—and far more sultry—than they had in yesterday’s afternoon sunlight. He hadn’t seen that today she was wearing her hair down, and that it brushed her shoulders in a riot of red tones that brought out the heightened color in her cheeks and made a startling backdrop for the turquoise earrings that peeked out from the tumble of her curls.

He certainly hadn’t noticed her standing the way she was standing now, the silver coffeepot in one hand, the other propped on her waist, and her hip cocked just the slightest bit. Because if he had noticed…