She said in complete honesty, “I…I don’t know what to…do.”
“Of course you don’t,” he sympathized. “I guess your first consideration should be…” He hesitated, as though saying the words was difficult for him. “Whether you love him enough to try to save the marriage. If all the two of you have invested means more to him than Sherrie does, and if it means enough that you’d be able to forgive him—and her—and go on.”
Liza looked into his eyes, wondering if she’d completely misunderstood his reaction to the situation. He hadn’t once mentioned his place in it.
“Does the outcome matter to you?” she whispered.
His blue eyes looked into hers, clearly in pain. “Of course it does. I want you to be happy, whatever that takes.”
“With him,” she asked, her voice barely there, “or with you?”
His eyes registered the added pain of her question. “If it was just you and me involved, I’d say leave the bum tonight.” His expression hardened as he accepted the facts. “But you have three children who love Bill to think about. And…if I was to think about it without considering my interests here, I’d say…” He groaned, and went on grudgingly, “I’d say, Sherrie aside, Bill does seem to adore all of you. Maybe it was just a one-time thing. Maybe he had some problem he couldn’t bring to you with the show coming up and he…sort of…lost it. Maybe a good no-holds-barred talk between the two of you could straighten everything out.”
Then because the past few days had been terribly stressful on many levels, and because he displayed more moral fortitude than Liza could ever hope to have—thus making it clear to her that she didn’t deserve him anyway—she burst into tears.
Unable to draw breath and explain, Liza buried her face in Jeff’s shoulder. He wrapped both arms around her and let her cry, thinking, she was sure, that her outburst was in reaction to the news that he’d caught Bill kissing Sherrie.
She had to straighten that all out, of course. And she had to do it tonight She couldn’t let him believe Bill was the kind of man who’d cheat on a woman, or that Sherrie was the kind of sister who would betray her.
But right now she didn’t know how to put all that into words, so she didn’t even try. She just wept at all she was probably going to lose when she finally did.
It was some time later when she noticed that the lane had grown considerably rougher.
“Hey!” Jeff shouted. “Stan! We’re off the road! Stan?”
Liza looked up to see that they’d turned onto an unpaved road in the woods. The horse, apparently spooked by the eerie sound of the wind in the trees and the snow blowing across their path, had picked up speed.
The confined space prevented him from a serious gallop, but he was moving fast enough to cause concern for the sleigh’s runners in the tightly grouped trees.
Santa Stan didn’t respond to Jeffs shouts.
Jeff threw himself forward over the front of the sleigh, reaching for the reins. He swore, and Liza took that to mean that Stan no longer held the reins and that they’d fallen out of reach.
But that problem was solved for them a moment later when the left runner hit a tree, yanking the horse off his feet and flinging the sleigh sideways so that the back of it hit another tree.
As Liza held on for dear life, Jeff flew out into the snow, landing with a thud that was very loud in the sudden stillness.
Liza threw the blanket off and stood, staring in horror at the picture highlighted even in the darkness by the white snow that overlaid everything. There was the horse on its side, struggling to rise, and Santa Stan, lying in a heap in the bottom of the sleigh. She looked at the crumpled runner half torn away from the vehicle—and at Jeff, lying inert against a tree as snow began to fall in earnest.
Chapter Eight
“Jeff! Jeff! Oh, darling, please be alive.” Liza whipped off an oversize glove and patted snow onto Jeff’s brow and cheeks. “Jeff? Jeff! Oh, God!”
It was all her fault. Liza leaned over him and put her hand to his mouth. She almost wept with relief when she felt his breath against it. She ran her hands over his body, looking for broken bones. Wouldn’t it be in keeping with the way everything had been going for him to have escaped terrorists by the skin of his teeth only to end up dead of a head injury thanks to her and a sleigh and a Santa named Stan?
Stan. Liza looked back at the sleigh where Stan’s arm hung over the front. Had he had a heart attack? she wondered, her panic increasing. God! How was she going to explain a sleigh ride in the woods that had resulted in two lifeless bodies!
She tore her coat off and placed it over Jeff, then went to the sleigh to try to assess Stan’s condition. She didn’t need daylight to reach a diagnosis.
It became obvious immediately thanks to the loud snores and the odor of cheap alcohol issuing from his slack mouth. Santa Stan was in a drunken sleep!
With a cry of anger Liza punched his shoulder and ran back to Jeff.
“Jeff!” She dabbed more snow on his face. “Jeff, honey, please! I love you so much!”
She saw a wince on his face, heard a groan come from deep in his throat, then watched his hand come up to rub the back of his head.
Liza had never seen or heard anything so beautiful in her life.
“Jeff!” she said again, putting an arm around him to help him sit up. “Jeff, are you okay? Say something! Are you all right?”
“What…happened?” he asked, brushing snow off his face. “Where are…?” He stopped as his eyes tried to focus in the darkness. “God. It feels like Beirut again.”
“No,” she assured him quickly, rubbing at the back of his head. “We were taking a sleigh ride…”
“Oh, yeah.” He groaned again and tried to get to his feet.
Liza pushed him back again. “Just sit for a minute,” she ordered, casting a disparaging glance back at Santa Stan. “Santa’s all right. He’s drunk!”
Jeff turned his head gingerly from side to side. “Yeah. I smelled it on him when I reached over him to get the reins. Is…the horse all right? Why’s he neighing?”
Liza realized for the first time that the horse was making a considerable amount of noise.
“He fell on his side when we crashed,” she said, holding Jeff’s arm and putting a supporting hand to his back as he got carefully to his feet.
Her coat slipped off him and he grabbed it up and handed it back to her. “Put it on.”
He leaned on her for support and dug in to his pants pocket. He produced keys and a little puddle of light from a flashlight on the ring.
He went to the horse and flashed the light over the harness, then had Liza hold it while he unfastened him from the sleigh. Once free, the horse drew his legs under him and pushed to his feet, mercifully uninjured.
Jeff looped a couple of fingers into the bridle. “Whoa, Rudolph,” he said quietly, patting his neck to calm him. “Everything’s okay. Whoa.”
He drew a breath as though to try to clear his head and looked around at the weirdly light late-night landscape.
“Okay,” he said. “What have we got? Cell phone?”
“In my purse at the dance,” Liza replied.
“All right. So nobody’s coming to us. We have to get back to them.” He patted the horse. “Don’t go anywhere, Rudolph. We’re going to need you.”
“Rudolph?”
“He was pulling a sleigh, wasn’t he?”
“Cute. But what are we going to need him for? The sleigh’s creamed. It’s not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, well, this is starting to look like a blizzard. Here. Hold him.” He wound her fingers in the bridle as he’d done, and noted her bare hand again. “Where’s the glove?” he asked crossly.
She pointed to where he’d fallen. “I wanted to feel if you were breathing.”
He snatched up the glove, hesitated a moment to put a hand to his head as he straightened, then handed it to her.
“Dizzy?” she asked worriedly. “Maybe you have a concussion. Maybe we shoul
d just sit—”
“No time to sit. We have to get Santa under cover and get moving.”
The horse reared his head and almost lifted her off the ground.
“Hold him firmly!” Jeff snapped at her.
“All right!” she returned in the same tone. “Jeez. Are you always this crabby when you regain consciousness?”
“On my own,” he replied, “I seldom find myself rendered unconscious.”
“You’ll recall that this sleigh ride was your idea,” she said testily, surprised by his mood and a little frightened by their circumstances.
He gave her a look she couldn’t interpret, except to know that it wasn’t friendly, and went to the sleigh. She watched as he pushed it with great effort farther into the trees where the branches were so thick and closely entwined that the snow fell thinly.
He patted Santa down and found a pocketknife. He covered him with the blanket they’d used in the back of the sleigh, then laboriously cut off several broad branches of pine and laid them atop the blanket.
“To hide him?” Liza asked.
He frowned at her. “To keep him warm until we can get to town and send someone back for him. I thought you were a country woman.”
Annoyed with herself because she should have known that, she ignored him and stroked the horse’s nose.
With Santa Stan snoring loudly through his cocoon of pine boughs, Jeff went back to Liza and the horse.
“Do you ride?” he asked.
Knowing she was about to defeat herself again, Liza expelled a breath. “In a car, yes. On a horse, no. If that’s what you’re getting at. Besides, he doesn’t have a saddle.”
With a grumbled oath, Jeff took a fistful of mane, leapt and landed astride Rudolph.
Liza stared at him openmouthed, hoping he wasn’t expecting her to do that.
He leaned sideways off the horse and caught her around the waist. “Hold on,” he said. “It’s been a while since I stole a woman this way.”
She felt his fingers bite into her waist even through the bulky coat, then she was lifted off the ground and onto the horse. As he positioned her in front of him, she thanked the fates that had led her to choose the green pants outfit over the slim-skirted red dress when she got ready tonight.
“Which way do we go?” Liza asked, confused by the sameness of trees in every direction.
He pointed to the shallow ruts the runners had made in the snow. “Those’ll work for us, at least until we reach the road.”
“Why not after we reach the road?”
“The snow’s falling pretty heavily. They’ll be obliterated. You sure you grew up in the country?” He tightened his knees and the horse went forward at an easy walk. The same gesture also tightened on her thighs, tucked above his, and she remembered with sudden, alarming clarity that just before the crash he’d been trying to help her save her marriage. The one that didn’t exist yet somehow stood between her and him as stoutly as a ten-foot wall.
“I spent most of my time in the kitchen,” she said weakly. “Remember that it was my apricot-glazed ham that led you home, not my ability to track small game.”
“And the way you looked in the gingham apron.”
“That’s sexist.”
“I admitted that it was.”
“But you don’t feel you have to apologize for it?”
She heard his light laugh against the side of her hood. “No. I realize it’s no longer a popular concept, but I can’t help it. I spend a lot of time in wild, uncomfortable country, and when I fantasize about a woman, I see her as warm and plump and welcoming.”
“But the way you described Sylvia…”
“Sylvia’s kind of a law unto herself,” he said. “A curious mixture of old-fashioned and contemporary. She’s a great cook and always studying and testing to learn something new. But she has to have things her way or not at all.”
They’d reached the road, and out from under the shelter of the trees, Liza could see that it was nearblizzard conditions. There was no evidence of the trail the runners had left.
She pointed to the left. “That way. We turned right into the woods.”
Jeff pointed in the other direction. “We turned left. Besides, you were crying and not looking.”
“But I felt the turn.”
He made a disbelieving sound. “Yeah, right. You don’t know which direction is which when you can see it.”
She turned to look at him over her shoulder, having to move her hood aside to frown at him. “There’s no call to be mean.”
“I’m not being mean. But if we follow your sense of direction, we’d better know how far away the next town is.”
“It’s twenty-one miles. And if we turn left we’ll get to Rockbury, not to Oak Meadows.”
“We could get pretty hypothermic in twenty-one miles,” he said.
“But we won’t,” she insisted, “because it’s only about three miles to Rockbury, and it’s that way.” She pointed firmly left.
“All right.” Jeff urged Rudolph to turn left onto the road and huddled into his coat collar as they headed for Rockbury.
Only, Rockbury was in the other direction. That became clear after more than half an hour when they passed a ramshackle cabin and barn in a clearing off the road.
Jeff pulled the horse to a stop. “I don’t remember that from the sleigh ride,” he said.
The air was absolutely frigid, the snow was blowing into her hood, her collar and up her coat, and making visibility difficult. “I don’t, either,” she admitted reluctantly. “I guess I was…mistaken.”
“You mean wrong?” he asked, urging the horse toward the buildings.
“Mistaken. Wrong. What’s the difference?” she asked testily. “You listened to me.”
“I did,” he said. “Because you’ve lived here for seven years and I’ve never been to Connecticut in my life. What was I thinking?”
Liza was beginning to wonder if he was schizophrenic. For two days she’d seen the charming, sensitive side of him and now suddenly he was impatient and sarcastic. A corner of her mind not numbed with the cold realized that wasn’t an entirely fair assessment, considering she’d just guided him in the wrong direction in abominable conditions in a potentially dangerous situation, but she was tense and frightened and not anxious to own up to the fact that it was all her fault.
He guided Rudolph into a barnlike structure that was ancient but appeared to be sound. Jeff flashed the small light around, revealing several stalls. The horse went into one as though surprised and delighted to find comfortable accommodations.
Jeff lowered Liza to within a few inches of the ground, then let her go. She landed lightly but didn’t budge, unable to see a thing.
Jeff swung his leg over Rudolph’s head and leapt down beside Liza, shining the puny light into the corners of the stall. She heard scurrying sounds and saw curious movements of the straw on the barn floor.
“Stay right here,” Jeff said. “I’m going to look around and see if I can find something for Rudolph to eat.”
“But…there’s things moving around…” she protested, sidling closer to the horse.
Jeff had started across the barn, but his voice came dryly out of the darkness. “They won’t hurt you. I’m sure they have you pegged as a country girl.”
“I’m getting tired of your sarcasm!” she shouted, mostly to hear the sound of her own voice as his footsteps retreated into blackness.
There were a few long moments of silence, except for subtle rustling noises across the barn. Then Jeff’s light reappeared, followed by his tall form in the out-of-place overcoat.
“Found some hay,” he reported, placing a bale of it at the horse’s feet. “This place is in use by somebody. The hay is fresh. Someone must have used this building in the fall.” He took a clump of straw from the floor and used it to rub down Rudolph. “There you go,” he said, patting the horse’s flank. “Not exactly blue-grass quality, but it’ll tide you over until morning.”
He caught Liza’s arm and pulled her out of the stall. “Here. Hold your arms out.”
“Why?” she asked.
He placed a length of wood in her outstretched arms. “Firewood.” He followed that chunk of wood with several more, caught a few in his arms, then led the way out of the barn and turned toward the cabin, with the small swath of his penlight leading the way.
It was just enough to pick out several steps, a bench that had fallen over, and a door hanging lopsidedly on its rickety hinges.
“I wonder how old this is?” Liza thought aloud as Jeff’s light illuminated a small, rough stone fireplace inside. The single room had shelves in one corner that might have served as a kitchen, and pegs along the other side where a bed might have stood.
“Very old would be my guess,” Jeff replied, going toward the fireplace. He dropped the wood on the floor beside it and instructed her to do the same. “Middle of the last century, maybe. I can’t believe your historical society hasn’t restored it, or that some beautification organization hasn’t torn it down.”
“Maybe it still belongs to someone.” Liza watched him run the light atop a rough, dusty mantel. “What are you looking for?”
“Matches,” he replied.
“Are old matches still going to work?”
“Someone obviously uses the barn. I thought they might come into the old cabin to…” His hand slapped down on something and he said triumphantly, “You’re good, James. You’re really good.” He held the light to several books of matches. “Rockbury Tobacconist,” he read from one of them. “Oak Meadows Bar and Grill and The Fox Club in New York. Hmm. A traveler.”
He struck one of the matches against the strip on the back of a book. There was a sizzling sound, then the bright light of a flame.
He held it up and ran it over a rough wooden box on the floor. He kicked it open with his foot, then grinned.
“The fates are with us, Liza. Kindling and newspaper.”
“All right!” she said. “Warmth!”
In a few moments a smoky fire was burning in the fireplace and Jeff used one of the logs they’d brought in to nail the hinge back in place so that the door would close. There was still a drafty gap on the bottom, but he stuffed it with crumpled newspaper. He’d carried in the bench from the front porch.
Christmas In The Country Page 11
