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.