Cinderella's Christmas Affair by Katherine Garbera Page B

herbal tea helped. Without thinking, she climbed up on the counter and opened the cabinet above the fridge.
    There sat an untouched box of HoHos. Why she liked them she didn’t know. They had no nutritional value. They didn’t even taste good if you savored them. She pulled the box down along with the unopened bottle of Bailey’s.
    Taking the snacks, the liquor and a snifter, she made her way to the living room. Thank God her mother hadn’t lived to see her daughter alone and afraid at the age of twenty-eight, reduced to spending her evenings with a bottle of after-dinner liqueur and children’s snack cakes.
    The music inside her head changed to a frenzied Mozart concerto with layer after layer piled on top of each other. In her mind she knew the layers were job, past, Tad, family and somewhere buried deep beneath the frenetically playing music was Catherine Jane, the real Catherine Jane. Not Cathy Jane or CJ. Just a girl who didn’t really know who she was or what she wanted.
    After forty-five minutes of analysis she realized she was waiting for something. Waiting for…someone.
    She reached for the HoHos box but dropped her hand. She wasn’t going to eat her way back to a size 16 over some guy. Except that Tad wasn’t just a guy. If he was she’d have gotten into the limo and gone to dinner with him. There was no pressure in dating a man she wasn’t attracted to. It was only the men who touched a deep emotional chord inside her that made her quiver with awareness.
    She went into the kitchen and started baking. The doorbell rang two hours later when she was in the middle of her grandmother’s famous pineapple cheesecake. She hesitated.
    Checking the gingerbread cookies baking in the oven, she walked slowly toward the door.
    She’d bet money that Tad was on the other side. She’d been waiting for him to come but when she opened the door she found instead a take-out deliveryman.
    “I didn’t order anything,” she said.
    “It’s a gift.”
    He opened the heat-sealed container and handed her a bag of food and a note. She tipped the deliveryman and he left quickly.
    She took the bags into the kitchen and opened them. Inside was a meal of Peking chicken and fried rice. The note had been written by Tad.
    Enjoy dinner on me, since you wouldn’t have dinner with me.
    She shivered a little. Felt like a big coward and knew that she’d hurt Tad. Something she’d never really intended to do. But she’d had no choice. She couldn’t risk losing herself again to the one man she’d never been able to forget.

    Tad pushed himself hard in the weight room in his condo. It took the edge off his anger. Anger he didn’t have another outlet to release.
    If he’d been at his folks’ place in Florida he would have visited one of his high school buddies and started a fight with him. There was nothing like a good fist-fight to get rid of rage. But they were miles away.
    He’d known that he was moving too fast for CJ. But standing him up—hell, that ticked him off.
    Women confounded him. He’d never really understood what Kylie had wanted from him until she’d walked away. He didn’t really understand why his mom was obsessed with grandkids. And most of all he didn’t understand why Cathy Jane Terrence—who dressed in suits, looked like she’d stepped from the pages of Style magazine and called herself CJ—was afraid to have dinner with him.
    The phone rang but he ignored it. Leaving the weight room and going to the kitchen, he filled a glass with filtered water and drained the cup. In the other room he heard his machine pick up. Heard his own voice telling the caller to leave a message and then CJ’s voice. Soft and tentative.
    He wasn’t going to listen to her message. Hell, when she was finished he was walking into the office and deleting it without listening to it. Tad Randolph wasn’t a guy she could manipulate whenever she felt like it.
    But he found himself walking down the hall in time to hear her say she