Coming Home For Christmas. Marie Ferrarella

saying that my agent sent you. I admit I’m out of my depth here, but my memory’s not exactly Swiss cheese. I remember you from this afternoon.”

      She made no comment on his response. Instead, she went straight to the part he needed to hear. “We went to school together.”

      His eyes narrowed as he focused on her face. “‘We’ as in you and I?” he questioned suspiciously.

      She nodded, then added, “And Amy.”

      Kenzie watched as her client’s face darkened. She could tell that he thought she was making this up. That for some perverse reason, she was using his sister to get him to trust her or open up to her.

      Nothing could have been further from the truth.

      “I don’t remember you,” he told her in a low, somber and dismissive voice. He meant for it to terminate the conversation before it went any further.

      But it didn’t.

      “I was in Amy’s homeroom and a few of her classes. We were friendly.” She could see that he still didn’t believe her—most likely because he still didn’t recognize her. In an odd way, she took that as a compliment. It had taken her a long while to learn how to play up her assets, how to style her hair and perform all the other small tricks that it took to make a silk purse out of what had been, in her opinion, a sow’s ear.

      Taking out her phone, Kenzie began to flip through something on the bottom of her screen.

      “Are you planning on calling someone to back you up?” Keith asked.

      “No, I thought this might jar your memory a little—not that we exchanged more than about five or six words in high school.” It had been the classic scenario. “You were the sophisticated senior at the time, and I was the klutzy sophomore.”

      What she was flipping through were the photographs on her phone. Most of that space was devoted to the merchandise she had acquired and was attempting to sell in her store.

      But in addition to those photographs, she also had a good many photographs of her family. And she had made it a point to have one photograph of herself in that collection. The photograph captured the way she looked back in high school. She kept it to remind her never to allow herself just to coast along. Appearance, success and everything in between required constant work.

      Settling for a status quo eventually led to failure.

      “This was me in high school.” Turning her phone around, she held it up for his perusal. “Now do you remember me?”

      He’d only meant to glance at it and dismiss what she was saying. But the second he looked down at the screen on her phone, a memory began to stir within the recesses of his mind.

      The distant memory that been elusively playing hide-and-seek with his brain was back again. He stared at the photo for a handful of minutes—and then the light bulb went off in his head. Stunned, he looked at her in disbelief.

      “You’re Clumsy Mac.”

      The wince was automatic. She hadn’t heard that name in years and would have thought she had risen above reacting to it.

      Obviously not.

      “Not the most flattering nickname, but yes,” Kenzie admitted, “I was called that.”

      Taking the phone from her, Keith stared at the screen, then looked back at her before looking down at the photograph again.

      There was only one word that was applicable here. “Wow.”

      Kenzie’s generous mouth curved. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

      He hardly heard what she said. He was having a great deal of trouble believing that Clumsy Mac and the woman standing before him were one and the same person. He asked the obvious.

      “Did you have surgery done?”

      She tried not to pay attention to the fact that his question could be taken as an insult. She sensed he hadn’t meant it that way, which was all that counted.

      “Actually, no. This is the result of a good hair stylist and learning how to use makeup.”

      “Learning?” he echoed. “I think you graduated,” he murmured, looking back at the person captured on her mobile phone.

      The difference between that teenager and the woman standing in front of him was like night and day—and, in his opinion, nothing short of a miracle.

       Chapter Five

      Keith wasn’t sure how he felt about the idea that he knew the person handling the so-called “estate” sale of the furnishings and other items within his mother’s house.

      In recent years he’d come to feel that there was something to be said for anonymity. Since he and Kenzie had, in a manner of speaking, a vague sort of history together, he had an uneasy feeling that he was leaving himself open to an invasion of privacy somewhere down the road. He had little doubt that Kenzie would believe their having attended the same high school entitled her to ask questions and be on a familiar footing with him, whereas if they were actually strangers, he would be able to keep her at a distance more easily.

      He was overthinking this, he told himself. After all, MacKenzie Bradshaw was a professional, and he sincerely doubted that his agent would have suggested her for the job if Kenzie wasn’t up to getting the job done—and more than just adequately.

      Besides, he wouldn’t have to put up with any of this for long. He was flying back to San Francisco the second the funeral was over. His presence here certainly wasn’t necessary for the sale of either the house or the things that were in it. That was why he’d come to Maizie Sommers to begin with.

      Sanctuary would be his very shortly, Keith promised himself—provided, of course, that he survived the next few days. There were times that he wasn’t sure of the inevitability of that outcome.

      In a bid for simplicity and moving things along at an acceptable pace, Keith had reconsidered checking into a hotel as he’d planned after the first night. He’d grown up in this house, he reasoned, so he could endure staying here for a few more days rather than commuting back and forth from the hotel, braving traffic and steep hotel rates.

      Ever practical, he saw no reason to complicate matters and have to pay premium prices just for a place to sleep, which was all that his stay at a hotel would have amounted to. The rest of his time while he was in Bedford would be spent either fielding Kenzie’s free-flowing questions or being involved in myriad details connected to his mother’s funeral.