Together for Christmas

by Debbie Macomber

  She moved forward, so close he could smell her, like vanilla and almonds. His mouth instantly watered but he pushed it aside.

  “Several times,” she answered, oblivious—he hoped—to his sudden hunger.

  “Lydia has promised me that she and Ruby talked about it and Ruby promised her things would change. But nothing has.”

  The school term had been underway for a month now and he had been under the impression everything was fine. Pine Gulch, Idaho, wasn’t exactly overflowing with educational opportunities and the local public school was the only option for his five-year-old daughter. He could have hired tutors for Ruby when she reached school-age, but he wanted her to have the most normal life possible. To him, that meant school lunch and recess and spelling bees.

  All the things he never had.

  It was tough enough on a kid having a dad who had once been a celebrity. He hadn’t wanted to make things harder on Ruby by showing up at her school all the time and reminding everyone of it, so he and his aunt had agreed she would be his go-between with the school.

  Lydia served as his housekeeper, nanny and confidante. She had raised him, after all, and had been the logical person to turn to for help raising Ruby the day she had been dumped on him when she was only two months old.

  He loved Lydia dearly, but she did have a bad habit of trying to solve all his problems for him.

  “Lydia and Ruby never said a word about any trouble at school. In fact, all I hear from Ruby is how much she loves it. She talks about it all the time. About her friends and how much she’s learning and how much she loves her teacher. I guess that would be you.”

  Miss Barnes had been the major topic of conversation since school started a month ago, he reflected. Ruby had jabbered endlessly about how pretty and nice and smart her teacher was, until he had begun to dislike the woman before he’d even met her.

  Just now the nice, pretty teacher was staring at him as if he were the alien space creature from the single sci-fi picture he’d made.

  “She said she loved her teacher? Are we talking about the same child here? Mr. Hartford, your daughter hates school! And me! Or at least she manages to give a very convincing impression of a child who does.”

  “Hates it? You’ve got to be kidding! She doesn’t talk about anything else!”

  “The first week of the school year, things seemed fine. Ruby was making friends, she was enthusiastic about learning, she was attentive in class and participated in discussions. Then three weeks ago, everything changed.”

  “Three weeks ago?”

  “Right. I’ve seen a dramatic turnaround. Ruby has gone from being a sweet little girl to one who seems absolutely miserable, from the moment she arrives at lunchtime to when she leaves at the end of the day. She is sullen and uncooperative. If I call on her in class, she clamps her lips together, and she turns every assignment over on her desk without even putting her name on it.”

  Five

  HE STARED, his mind churning to make sense of this. “That’s not like Ruby at all. This can’t be right.”

  “Look, Mr. Hartford, I’m only trying to get to the bottom of the rapid change in Ruby’s behavior. Have you noticed a similar change at home?”

  “No. She’s been the same as always—energetic, curious, a little on the mischievous side, maybe. But overall, she’s a great kid.”

  Her prickly attitude seemed to soften a little at his words. “I’ll admit, I’m stumped. Did anything happen about three weeks ago that might have contributed to her acting out?”

  He racked his brain, trying to think back. They had made a quick weekend trip to L.A. to visit a friend who was having an engagement party to celebrate her second marriage. That was the only thing that came to mind. “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything specific.”

  “I must tell you, I’m wondering if perhaps Ruby is not quite ready for kindergarten. Some children take longer to mature than others, especially if there is some...upheaval in their lives.”

  She said the last part with such subtle contempt that he simmered. She didn’t know anything about him—except maybe what she read in the tabloids.

  “You’re wrong, Miss Barnes. Ruby has been ready for kindergarten since she was three years old. She is smart and precocious and curious and loves learning. I can’t imagine what’s happened since she started in your classroom to change that.”

  Her gaze narrowed and he realized how his words could be misconstrued. “You can bet I intend to find out,” he said quickly. “I’m sure once we sit down together we can figure out what’s going on. Ruby and Lydia have gone to Jackson, shopping for the day, or I would go grab her right now and have this out. Any chance you can come back later?”

  “I have plans tonight,” she said stiffly, a hint of color in her cheeks. A hot date? he wondered, and was stunned at his disappointment.

  “We can make an appointment to meet one day this week after school,” she offered.

  “I’m leaving Monday to go to Denver on a horse-buying trip until Friday. What about tomorrow night? We’ll even throw in dinner for your trouble.”

  A host of emotions flashed through those expressive eyes—reluctance at the forefront among them, something that suddenly annoyed him. “I... Yes. I suppose that would be all right.”

  “Does seven sound okay?”

  She nodded those soft curls. “Yes.”

  “This has got to be a big misunderstanding. Ruby is a great kid. You’ll see. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “I hope so. Ruby’s negative attitude is becoming disruptive to the entire afternoon class.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night, then. Oh, and Miss Barnes,” he said with a smile as he pushed the button to open the gate, “perhaps it would be better if you rang the buzzer when you arrive for dinner tomorrow. I wouldn’t want you to fall from the top of the gate next time and miss the appetizer.”

  He laughed at the hot glare she sliced at him. As he watched her march back through the gates and climb into her fluorescent car, he was aware of the unwilling attraction settling low in his gut.

  Six

  HE WAS CHARMED by her, Justin thought as he watched Ruby’s teacher drive away. He had to admire any woman passionate enough about her job to climb a fence, just to get her point across. Not to mention those delectable lips....

  Nothing could come of it. He knew that. Miss Ashley Barnes had commitment written all over her cute little face and he had a terrible track record in that department.

  He had decided after Ruby came into his life that he just had to close the door on anything long-term. He had been burned too many times. He picked the wrong kind of women to tangle with and then ended up paying for it.

  Ruby’s mother had been the final straw. Tamara Drake had been an aspiring actress he met at a party and dated a few times, unaware that underneath her fun, sexy act was a predatory woman who thought trapping him by becoming pregnant with his child would seal her celebrity status. Tamara’s pregnancy and her increasingly strident demands on him had been Justin’s wake-up call that his life was not traveling a course he wanted. He had fathered a child with a woman he barely knew and one he had come to despise, and the grim reality of it all forced him to take a good, hard look at himself.

  He hadn’t been very crazy about what he saw. He was just like Tamara, he had realized. He had become selfish, materialistic, shallow. He went after what he wanted at the moment without thought of the consequences, and he knew he couldn’t continue on that road.

  He started looking for a quiet western town to settle in, told Tamara he was leaving Hollywood and offered a financial settlement and annuity in return for her signing over parental rights to Ruby to him. Though she had been livid at him for walking away, she certainly hadn’t wanted to be saddled with a baby. She agreed with alacrity and died a year later of a drug overdose.

  It was an ugly st
ory, one that still made him ashamed of the man he had been six years ago.

  He had changed. Ruby had seen to that, but he still didn’t trust his own judgment about women. Tamara had just been the last in a long line of mistakes, and with a child’s fragile emotions to consider, he couldn’t afford the high price anymore.

  He avoided the spotlight now as much as he could, but to his jaded eye, it seemed as if every woman he met since Tamara was mostly interested in him for his ex-celebrity status, enthralled, for some crazy reason, to be seen with a man who had once been moderately famous.

  It turned his stomach. He wanted them to see beyond the image that had appeared on far too much movie-related merchandise. To see the man whose favorite things now were mowing the lawn on a warm summer afternoon, playing outside in the sunshine with his daughter, training a good horse.

  He didn’t trust many women and he certainly didn’t trust his own judgment. This way was better. Just him and Ruby and Lydia. They made a good team and there just wasn’t room for any more players.

  Not even cute-as-pie schoolteachers with dimples and hazel eyes and blond, starlit curls.

  Seven

  “ALL A BIG MISUNDERSTANDING. Right. Can you believe that man? Does he think I don’t know what’s going on in my own classroom?”

  “The nerve!” Josie Roundy exclaimed.

  “He should be horsewhipped,” Marcy Weller agreed.

  Her two best friends looked at each other and grinned, and Ashley fought the urge to bean them both with the wok she was setting up on the stove top.

  She should be grateful they were there, she told herself. They had both agreed to her last-minute invitation so she wouldn’t be consumed with guilt for lying to Jason Hartford.

  She hadn’t wanted to tell him the truth—that she had no plans other than lesson prep work—but she also hadn’t been ready to turn around and drive back to the Blue Sage that night, not without a little more time to psych herself up to facing him again. As salve to her conscience, she had called Josie and Marcy over for an impromptu party watching movies and making Chinese food and venting about the man himself.

  “You should have seen the way he looked at me, like I was some deranged fan come to steal his boxers or something. Good grief.”

  “Well, you did climb over his gate,” Marcy pointed out from the sink, where she was washing vegetables. “You can’t blame the man for being a little suspicious about you.”

  “If I were going to become a stalker, why would I pick a washed-up recluse of an actor?”

  “Because he’s a big hot bundle of yum?” Josie suggested.

  Marcy made a face. “Yum factor aside, you know perfectly well he’s not washed-up, Ash. He walked away at the top of his game. I bet right this minute he could still step into any role he wanted and find himself back on the A-list. He just doesn’t want to be there.”

  She had to admit, Marcy was right about that. Justin had the intensity and range of a truly great actor. And the cameras had loved him.

  “I still cry every time I watch him in Warrior,” Josie said.

  Ashley didn’t want to admit that she did, too—and that she’d watched the DVD just the other night.

  “How many times did we drive to Idaho Falls to see Last Chance when we were sixteen?” Marcy laughed. “At least a dozen. Remember how you used to have that picture of him in your locker with his shirt half ripped off and his sexy black Stetson and that hard look in his eyes?”

  Josie snickered as she twisted another egg roll. “If there was ever an obsessed stalker fan back then, it would have been you, Ash. I seem to remember you writing Mrs. Justin Hartford on everything from your algebra homework to the pizza napkins at Stoneys.”

  “Will you two just forget about that? For heaven’s sake! It was more than a decade ago. Marcy’s already given me a hard time about my stupid crush.”

  She loved her friends dearly. They had been friends since they were all in kindergarten and she found great comfort in that kind of continuity. She just sometimes wished they didn’t know every single detail about her life.

  “You’re supposed to be sympathetic here. I was a silly teenager. What did I know about what to look for in a man? All I cared about ten years ago were dreamy eyes and six-pack abs.”

  “Two things Justin Hartford still has,” Josie pointed out with a slightly overheated gleam in her own eyes. “He came into the hardware store last week for hex screws and I just about drooled all over his cowboy boots.”

  “Dreamy eyes are fine but not when they come as a package deal with a man willing to abdicate his responsibility to his child.”

  “That’s unfair,” Marcy spoke up as she drained the vegetables. “He invited you to come back and talk to Ruby about her behavior, didn’t he? I wonder if you would be so mad at him right now if you hadn’t had such a crush on him back in the day.”

  “Yeah,” Josie warmed to the theory. “Maybe you built him up in your wild little fantasy world for so long that finding out the real man is just a struggling father with the same problems as the rest of us has left you heartbroken and disillusioned.”

  She had to admit, there might be some truth in what they said. She had this image in her head of him as the hard-driving, hard-living hero he played so well. It was a little hard to reconcile that with the father of her biggest behavior problem.

  She sighed. She was not looking forward to dinner the next night. How did a girl dress to have dinner with her teenage crush?

  Eight

  BY THE NEXT EVENING, as he was prepping the steaks for dinner, Justin still didn’t have a clue what was going on with Ruby and school.

  He had tried to talk to his daughter about it a dozen times, but she had been acting strangely ever since she found out Miss Barnes was coming to dinner. She was popping out of her skin with an odd kind of excitement and every time he tried to bring up school, she made some excuse to escape.

  He hadn’t pushed it, though he knew he should. He didn’t really have a good handle on the extent of the problem, and he thought maybe it would be better if he waited until the teacher was there.

  Lydia hadn’t been much help, either. When he talked to her the night before, he found his aunt was firmly of the opinion that Ruby was only misbehaving as a coping mechanism to adjust to school. She wasn’t used to being around other children all the time, everything was new and she had the added complication of being the daughter of the town’s only celebrity, which automatically set her apart, Lydia thought.

  She had talked to Ruby several times and the girl had promised she would do better. Lydia wanted to give her a little more time to adjust and she hadn’t wanted to bother Justin with it, especially as they had agreed she would be the liaison with the school.

  She had nothing but praise for the teacher, though. Justin had had just about enough of hearing about all of Ashley Barnes’s wonderful qualities.

  He sighed. He already had enough trouble with the females in his life. Why did he even think for a moment he needed to add more? Still, he hadn’t been able to get the teacher out of his mind. He had dreamed of her last night and had awoken aroused and embarrassed and with an intense hunger for cream puffs.

  He jerked his mind away from those unruly images. “Ruby, you need to set the table,” he called. “Your teacher will be here any minute now.”

  “Coming, Daddy,” she called from the other room and a moment later she flounced into the room. Flounce was exactly the word for it—she was wearing the ruffly girlie dress she and Lydia had bought the day before in Jackson.

  She was all taffeta and lace, with mismatched ankle socks and her favorite sparkly sneakers.

  He hid a smile. “Honey, you can’t wear that. You’ll ruin the pretty dress you and Aunt Lydia bought to wear to Sierra’s mom’s wedding next month.”

  “I want Miss Barnes to see it. She’ll like the way it tw
irls. See, Daddy?” She spun in a circle, eyes wide with delight, and a lump rose in his throat. He loved this crazy, funny little thing so much it was a physical ache in his chest sometimes.

  “You’re having a hot dog, though, and you know how messy those can be. You wouldn’t want to spill mustard on your dress, would you?”

  Her brow furrowed as she considered and he pushed his advantage while he had it. “Set the table out on the deck and then go up and change into something else. After dinner maybe you can change into your new dress to show Miss Barnes.”

  He knew that before too much longer, he wouldn’t be able to convince her of anything so easily, but for now his logic could still sway her.

  “Okay.” She ran to the cupboard for the plates then stopped and gave him a considering look. “You should wear your blue shirt, Daddy. The one that’s soft and silky. Aunt Lydia said you turn all the ladies to mush when you wear it.”

  Before he could ask why she might want him to turn her kindergarten teacher to mush—a task he doubted he had the ability to perform, much as he and his libidinous dreams might like to—she rushed outside with an armload of plates and silverware.

  She had just returned for glasses when the buzzer on the front gates rang. Ruby shrieked with excitement. “She’s here! She’s here! She’s really here!”

  Nine

  RUBY RACED TO the intercom and control console for the electronic gates. “Miss Barnes! Miss Barnes! Hi, Miss Barnes! I’m going to push the button and open the gate, okay? Okay?”

  There was a slight pause then Ashley’s voice filled the kitchen and even through the intercom he could hear the amusement in it. “Thank you very much, Ruby.”

  She pushed the button then jumped away from the console. “You let her in while I go change, Daddy. I’ll be right back.”