Must Love Mistletoe - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,1

to live down the street from her family home. She supposed he still did. "What are you doing?"

He gestured to the car parked on the other side of hers. The one with "Retired Citizens Service Patrol" emblazoned on its side. It was gleaming white, official enough to have a cherry-red light on top and a sturdy-looking something that might be a cattle prod attached to the front grille. "I'm on the job."

"Oh, well." She tried smiling at him, hoping he'd remember some good deed she'd done for him as a kid. Maybe she'd retrieved his morning newspaper from the bushes once upon a time. "Me too. I put in a long day at the shop."

He leaned against the side of her car as a fond smile added new wrinkles to his liver-spotted cheeks.

Inside Bailey hope surged, until she realized he was gazing not at her, but over her shoulder, at the store that was the new albatross around her neck.

"I bought my daughter her first Christmas ornament there," he said. "She bought her daughter her first Christmas ornament there."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Bailey said. "It's an institution." Albatross.

"A landmark," the old man added, then bent his head back over his book of triplicate forms.

She wasn't going to take a ticket. "What are you, uh, writing there, Mr. Baer? Because, you see, I'm in a bit of a hurry. Mom's home alone, probably keeping dinner warm for me, and - "

"Dan's really moved out then?" He stopped writing to squint at her over silver-rimmed bifocals. "Heard he's in one of those ugly condos on the bay side."

"Um, well..." Bailey wasn't sure if her mother and stepfather's recent separation was public knowledge, but heck, this was 7.4-square-mile Coronado. Secrets were impossible to keep, plus perhaps she could use the sympathy to wiggle out of whatever the Retired Citizen Patrolman had written on that little form. "They've been living apart since September."

Mr. Baer nodded. "Heard one won't step inside the shop if the other one's there."

"That's true too." Which had resulted in the frantic phone calls she'd been fielding from the part-time assistant manager and the guy who did the books - both old family friends. With her mother and Dan refusing to share the same air space, no one was minding the store. During the season when they made seventy-five percent of their year's profits, this meant the likely end to a Coronado institution. A landmark.

The bankroll that kept her mother, stepfather, and freshman-in-college younger brother living in the style to which they were accustomed.

So she'd been guilted into coming home to save the day.

"I'm leaving on the twenty-fifth, though," she murmured.

"Eh?" Mr. Baer squinted at her again. "What's that?"

"I'm running the store," Bailey explained. "But only until Christmas." By then her mother would have accepted the hard lesson Bailey had taken to heart a decade ago. She even had her own private axiom to cover it, a Christmasy twist on the famous phrase from the Robert Frost poem. "Nothing flocked can stay."

"Eh?"

"My take on 'Nothing gold can stay' and my personal motto, Mr. B." A reminder that trusting in pretty promises and the lasting strength of romantic relationships was about as sensible as believing in Santa and all his itty-bitty elves. That kind of magic didn't exist.

"Now, about that ticket you're working on, you can't mean that..."

But of course he meant it for her. He even had a special measuring stick he'd made that proved she was nineteen inches away from the curb, one inch over what Coronado parking regulations allowed. And since she was an admitted perfectionist herself, Bailey took the ticket with as much good grace as she could muster.

Which meant that when he wished her a "Merry Christmas," she managed not to flinch.

After that it was in the car and the short trip to Coronado Island's Walnut Street. The "island," really a peninsula, had once been a wheat farm, a whaling station, and then, in the late 1880s, it had been turned into a tourist destination thanks to the founder of a piano company and his partner, a telephone executive. The superlative Hotel del Coronado had been built first, then more streets, housing tracts, a ferry landing.

To maximize all this prime real estate, the home lots were small, hence the houses were close together. Back in the day, presumably the community planners assumed vacationers wouldn't mind the close quarters. In modern times, the result was that the year-round residents inside the cheek-by-jowl Victorians, Craftsman cottages, and suburban ranches lived