Family for the Holidays

by Victoria Pade

  “But there’s a pattern there,” Shandie insisted.

  “A pattern that makes me a bad risk.”

  “A pattern that says the way Allaire ended up, the way Lizbeth Stanton did, are likely the way I’d end up, too. And I have Kayla to think about because she’d go through her own share of misery.”

  “Nobody knows better than I do that I’ve already had one failed marriage and that I acted like an ass in rushing into that engagement with Lizbeth for all the wrong reasons, Shandie. Or that those two rash acts don’t make me highly recommendable. But this—” he did the finger waving again “—is nothing like either of those other two times. I’m not barely more than a teenager, the way I was with Allaire. And as for Lizbeth—yeah, there’s the speed issue in that this is as whirlwind as it was with her. But it’s the feelings that are different. There’s no show here. I didn’t even tell Grant or D.J. about you. Nothing about this is to prove anything to anyone. This is about you and me. And Kayla, who I swear to you, I would never, ever do anything to hurt.”

  “Oh, Dax…” Shandie sighed.

  “Don’t ‘Oh, Dax’ me like that. I know what I’m talking about. I feel different about you than I did about Lizbeth. I feel more different about you than I have about anyone in my life. Yes, it’s happened fast, but it’s still real—the real thing you said I haven’t ever actually felt. Well, now I have. Now I’m feeling it. And you’re right because it isn’t anything like what I felt before. That’s how I know this can work out. That this can go the distance.”

  “You’ve just had your first big victory in a long time,” she reasoned. “Don’t you think that what you’re feeling could be part of that?”

  “I think it’s separate from that. That that’s just the frosting on the cake—and you’re the cake.”

  He was boring into her with those dark eyes, his unbelievably gorgeous face tight with the tension she’d created, and she could see that she was taking the joy out of this day for him. She regretted that. But there was more at stake. For her. For Kayla. And Shandie couldn’t let herself lose sight of that.

  “I can’t just jump into anything,” she said.

  “Didn’t you just jump into selling your house in Denver, uprooting yourself and Kayla to move here, and investing in your cousin’s business?”

  “I didn’t just jump into any of that, no. I made changes, yes, but—”

  “You don’t consider it taking a chance to invest money in a business that’s been seeing a recent decline?”

  “It isn’t the same, Dax.”

  “You took that chance, Shandie. So take a chance on me.”

  In spite of what he was saying, Shandie didn’t see moving to Thunder Canyon, buying into the struggling Clip ’n Curl, as comparable to what he was asking of her. Failure on either count couldn’t wound her. It couldn’t scar her daughter. The consequences were so much more easily fixed if those things didn’t work out. But a relationship with Dax? An attempt at a future with him? If that didn’t work out it could do genuine damage.

  Shandie shook her head again. “No,” she said quietly, feeling every bit as bad at that moment as she’d expected to feel tonight when she’d been so sure Dax would be breaking up with her.

  But if this is how bad it feels now, how much worse would it feel if I was in even deeper?

  “You married a man you knew might not have a long life ahead of him, but you won’t give me a chance because of things that are totally in the past?” he said incredulously.

  He had a point, of course. But still—or maybe because of that—it sent a wave of anger through her.

  “When I married Pete, I was the only one I was putting out there on the limb. That isn’t how it is now,” she said stiffly.

  “So I’m crazy about your daughter and you’re making her the downfall of this?” he asked as if he couldn’t fathom that.

  But Shandie wasn’t going to argue that. “I just can’t, Dax. Your track record is too scary.”

  “Look at me,” he ordered. “I’m not scary.”

  She did look at him, and it nearly broke her heart to see that face that sent tingles all through her and still know she had to stand her ground.

  “Your history is,” she said.

  “And history repeats itself,” he mocked sarcastically.

  “I can’t risk finding out,” she nearly whispered, as her anger receded behind a rise of panic.

  He took a turn shaking his head once more, staring at her as if he were at a loss.

  “You don’t mean that,” he said then, giving it one more try.

  “I do. I have to,” she told him, even though she didn’t want to. Even though she wished she could do anything else.

  But tonight and feeling the way she had wasn’t something she wanted to do again. It wasn’t something she wanted forever looming in the background. And even if she had any illusions that she might be able to handle it, she couldn’t and wouldn’t put her daughter in a position that could potentially cause the little girl pain.

  “So I come to you with great news and hope for the future and you kick me out?” Dax challenged.

  “I just can’t be a part of it from here on in,” Shandie said.

  “You won’t be,” he accused.

  He gave her another moment under the penetrating scrutiny of those piercing eyes, but Shandie didn’t waver.

  Then he stood, grabbed his coat from the arm of the easy chair with a fierce swipe and stalked out of her house.

  In the silence that he left behind, Shandie just sat there on the couch.

  She’d felt bad when she’d said no to him. She hadn’t expected the feelings to grow bigger and stronger still once he was gone.

  But there they were, welling up in her, nearly strangling her, filling her eyes with hot, stinging tears.

  And that was when she wondered if she’d been fooling herself.

  If she was already in this further than she’d thought.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Kayla Jane Solomon, don’t do this to me…”

  Shandie muttered the plea to herself Friday evening when she went to the Clip ’n Curl’s break room to get her daughter in order to go home for the day. What she found was the little girl’s DVD playing but no one watching it.

  “Where are you, Kayla?” Shandie called in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the deserted salon.

  It would have been too easy had Kayla come running or popped out of a hiding place or called back from the restroom. But no, only silence answered Shandie and she knew why. It was the same thing that had been causing her problems for the past four days—Kayla had slipped through the utility room to go to Dax again.

  “Why couldn’t you just cut me a little slack this once, Kayla?” Shandie lamented, leaning wearily against the break room’s doorjamb and closing her eyes.

  She was so tired. She hadn’t slept more than two or three hours a night since everything with Dax had gone up in smoke. She hadn’t eaten much, either, and with all the stress and strain and late-night crying on top of it, she was a wreck. She was certainly not in any shape to see Dax.

  But she didn’t have a doubt that the motorcycle shop was where her daughter was. Not only had it become a pattern this week, but with the other salon doors locked while Shandie cleaned up after closing, it was the only place Kayla could be.

  Shandie hadn’t been sure how to handle Kayla after the breakup. It had seemed as if the split would be a bigger deal if she made a special point of sitting the three-year-old down first thing Tuesday morning and announcing that Dax would no longer be coming around. Besides, all through Monday night Shandie had hoped Kayla might not even notice his absence, leaving nothing to explain.

  But of course Kayla had noticed. She might have even sensed that something had gone wrong because, over breakfast Tuesday, the three-year-old had started asking when they were going to see Dax again.

  Shandie had been honest with her daughter, but she’d played it down. She’d told Kayla th
at they probably wouldn’t be seeing Dax again. She’d reminded her daughter that they’d talked about how Dax might not be a forever-friend, and how now it seemed as if that was going to be the case. That Dax would be going on about his business and they would be going on about theirs, and there wasn’t any reason for them all to get together anymore.

  Kayla had not accepted any of that as the last word. She’d demanded to know why. She’d refuted Shandie’s every stock answer and insisted that she liked Dax and wanted him to be their forever-friend. Then, in direct rebellion of her mother, every chance she’d found this week, the three-year-old had snuck through the utility room to the motorcycle shop.

  Asking her nicely not to do that, offering her bribes if she didn’t, threatening punishment if she did and ultimately taking away cookies and television for continuing to do it had all failed to stop the stubborn child from her determined pursuit of maintaining contact with Dax.

  Shandie had requested that the contractor in charge of the Clip ’n Curl’s remodel change the handle on the door that connected the garage to the salon so it could be locked, but that had yet to be done. And now Kayla had again disappeared from the salon. Only, to make it even worse, there were no fellow stylists to take pity on Shandie and retrieve her daughter for her—as there had been on every other occasion.

  Tonight, Shandie was going to have to do it herself.

  And come face-to-face with Dax for the first time since Monday night.

  She really, really didn’t want to do that.

  “Kayla Jane Solomon, where are you!” she shouted as loudly as she was capable, hoping that her voice might carry all the way to the motorcycle shop and that the three-year-old would return on her own.

  Then Shandie opened her eyes and waited, listening for any indication that the little girl was answering the call.

  But there wasn’t a single sound. And Shandie knew she was going to have to go over there.

  The thought of it made her want to crawl into a shell. She didn’t know how it had happened so quickly, but she felt more for Dax than she’d realized until he’d walked out of her house Monday night. Before that she’d honestly believed her feelings for him were under control. That she liked him—a lot—but not so much that it was anywhere near what she’d felt for Pete.

  Then Dax had left, and in the past four days the agony Shandie had been going through was close enough to what she’d gone through when Pete had died for her to take a second look at her feelings for Dax. And to discover that she cared much, much more than she’d thought.

  But that didn’t change her mind about being with him. He was still the guy with the rotten track record with women. The guy who got into relationships unwisely or on whims or because of peer pressure, and then got out of them when the bloom was off the rose.

  And she still had Kayla to protect from being hurt.

  So with her mind unchanged about chancing a future with him, Shandie decided she had to stick to her guns.

  This, too, will pass— that’s what she kept telling herself at her darkest moments this week. Like her grief over Pete, as miserable as she was without Dax, it would eventually go away. And then maybe she would be able to stand to see him. At a distance.

  But not now. Please, not now…

  Only now her daughter was at Dax’s shop with him, and she was going to have to see him.

  “Tomorrow I’m putting a lock on that door myself!” she vowed, angry at Kayla, angry at the contractor, angry at herself for getting involved with Dax in the first place.

  Just go and get it over with, she told herself, pushing off the doorjamb and heading for the utility room.

  Every step that took her closer to the motorcycle shop made her heart race faster.

  Would he be rude and obnoxious? she wondered. Would he be flip and smart-alecky? A wise guy? Would he be angry? Hostile? Or did he even care anymore? With his history, maybe he had never genuinely cared—regardless of what he’d said—and so he could get over these kinds of things without any problem…

  None of the possibilities made the walk through the utility room easier on Shandie, but with no other option, once she reached the connecting door—which was wide open—she knocked on it and said, “Kayla, are you here?”

  “She’s here,” came the answer in the familiar deep voice that just made Shandie ache inside.

  She couldn’t tell from those two simple words, though, what she was going to find when she got through the garage to the showroom, so she still went with a knot in the pit of her stomach.

  Dax and Kayla were sitting at the table beside the sales counter where Dax took customers to do paperwork when he made a sale. Shandie aimed her gaze directly at her daughter, only peripherally aware that Dax was leaning back, feet propped on the table itself, ankles crossed, balancing on the rear two legs of his chair.

  Kayla was perched on the second chair, her legs underneath her.

  “I’m talkin’ ta Dax,” the three-year-old announced defensively when her mother neared.

  “You’re supposed to be waiting for me in the break room,” Shandie countered tightly.

  “I wanna’d ta talk ta Dax.”

  Dax let his chair drop to all four legs then, dragged his feet off the table and stood.

  “Hi,” he said to Shandie as if he thought she might intend not to address him at all.

  She didn’t know what she’d intended to do so he could have been right. But now she had to. She also had to look straight at him.

  “Hi,” she echoed quietly as she was slammed with the full-on sight of him and what it did to her.

  He was dressed in a pair of disreputably age-worn jeans that would have looked like rags on anyone else but were sexy as all get-out on him. He was also wearing a plain white T-shirt under a denim jacket, which only added to his appeal.

  And he was appealing. With his dark brown hair rebelliously disheveled and the shadow of a beard lending a scruffiness to his starkly handsome face, and those intense eyes boring into her, it was all enough to make Shandie want badly to close the distance between them, throw herself into his arms and say, Forget everything, I just want you…

  But of course she wouldn’t let herself do that. Instead, very stiltedly, she said, “I’m sorry she keeps coming over here and bothering you.”

  “She isn’t bothering me. I’m always glad to see her.”

  Okay, so he was just going to be nice. Damn him. At least if he’d been a jerk it would have given her an excuse to grab her daughter and get out of there. Nice was so much more difficult than rude or obnoxious or wiseass. Nice she liked…

  “I’ve picked up the phone a hundred times since Monday to call you,” he said then.

  Shandie didn’t need to know that. She didn’t want to know that. It only made it harder. And she didn’t have a clue what to say in response to that information.

  “I heard through the grapevine that you were busy signing contracts with the resort and ordering snowmobiles and ATVs,” she said, repeating the talk that had circulated through the Clip ’n Curl in the past four days.

  “I was. But it didn’t help,” he confided.

  She also didn’t need or want to know he might have been hurting the way she was.

  “It’s good, though, that things are getting going for you,” she said too brightly.

  “Yeah,” he allowed. Then he seemed to try a different tack. “I understand Kayla Jane here is going to a sleepover tonight.”

  “At Bethany’s,” Kayla offered from the sidelines.

  It didn’t alter Dax’s focus on Shandie. “Maybe we could have dinner. Talk…”

  He would never know how much she wanted to say yes to that. So much that she couldn’t say no, she had to merely shake her head to turn him down.

  But he didn’t give up. “You’re the idea person and I could use a couple of good ones,” he said, slowly closing the gap between them until he was standing directly in front of her.

  “I’m sure you have ideas of your ow
n,” Shandie said as the blood seemed to pound in her ears.

  “None that seem like they’ll work,” he claimed.

  He carefully—and just barely—pressed his flattened palms to her arms, sliding down to her wrists where he took her hands in his.

  “See,” he said for her ears only, “there’s this person I’m crazy about and I’ve been racking my brain for a way to convince her that—”

  The touch of his hands, the faint smell of his cologne, just having him so close made Shandie panic. If he kept this up she knew she’d never be able to hold on to her resolves, and she needed to. She needed to…

  She shook her head vehemently again, stepped away from him and shot her gaze to her child once more. “Come on, Kayla. We need to get home,” she said firmly.

  “Le’s eat dinner wis Dax first,” Kayla suggested.

  “No, we have dinner waiting at home and then you have to get to Bethany’s.”

  “But I wanna be wis Dax,” Kayla whined.

  So do I…

  But neither one of them could be, Shandie reminded herself. For their own good, neither one of them could be.

  “Not tonight,” she told her daughter.

  “When? Tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “The nex’ tomorrow?”

  “Just come on, Kayla. Right now,” Shandie ordered.

  “I wanna stay here wis Dax. Pul-eee-ze…”

  Shandie went to her daughter, picked up the child and held her slung on her hip.

  “I wanna stay wis Dax,” Kayla complained with a quivering bottom lip. “Why can’ we see him no more? I wanna. I yike Dax!”

  “It’s okay, Kayla,” he soothed. “I’ll see you again.”

  “I wanna see you now!” Kayla wailed pitifully as Shandie headed for the garage and made a bee-line through it to the connecting door.

  But before she could disappear into the utility room Dax’s voice stopped her, coming from the entrance to the showroom.

  “How is it better to play it safe if it makes us all this sad, Shandie?”

  Shandie didn’t answer him.

  She didn’t look back.

  She just took her sobbing child away.