Christmas In The Country

by Muriel Jensen

  “Oh, don’t get righteous with me,” she snapped. “You were Sylvia’s prisoner long before you were mine. I saw that look in your eye when she walked into the kitchen, and I saw that kiss. How could you toy with me when you felt that way about her?”

  He shifted his weight impatiently. “What you saw in my eyes was surprise. She kissed me, and it was just…a gesture between two people who’d once meant a lot to each other. Sylvia is passionate about everything. She’d worried about me while I was a hostage, and she was happy to find me free and well.”

  “Free.” She repeated his word. “You said it yourself. You’re free. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  “No, I won’t.” He caught her arm and pulled her back when she tried to turn toward to the house.

  She tried to yank free of him, but he caught her under the arms and lifted her onto the stone wall. It was cold and wet and she protested, but he pinned her there by standing in front of her and holding a hand to the wall on each side of her.

  “I know what’s going on here,” he said.

  “So do I and I believe it’s criminal,” she retorted, folding her arms and hiding her bare, cold hands in the fabric of her sleeves. “Holding a woman against her will is—”

  “Sometimes the only way a man can get her to listen to him,” he finished for her. “If you’ll just be quiet, I can be finished in a minute.”

  That was suddenly very desirable, because she wasn’t sure she could take much more of this.

  “I know you’re smart enough to understand Sylvia’s effusive reaction when she saw me. I think it’s easier to pretend that you don’t, because if you fought for me, you’d have to explain to Whittier what went on the past few days, and the national exposure of your television special is more important to you than I am.” He looked into her eyes, his own grim with his apparent acceptance of what he considered a truth. “You didn’t even give it a moment’s serious thought, did you?”

  “It looked to me,” she said, angling her chin, “as though you loved her.”

  “It looked to me,” he repeated, “as though you loved me. Goes to show you how appearances can be deceiving. You really are a phony, Liza De Lane. Your pretense goes beyond convincing everyone you’re married and have children and live in the country. You want everyone to believe that your whole life is family and warmth and the spirit of Christmas all year round, when actually all you’ve done is use your family for your own purposes, and your warmth and Christmas spirit run as deep as the person you present to the television camera.”

  He let that sink in and she stared at him silently, too hurt even to defend herself.

  He reached for her waist, lifted her off the wall and set her on her feet. “Well, I don’t need that in my life. I was a pawn in somebody else’s game for almost three months and I took the chance to escape because I was sick of it. I’ll be charming as hell for your big performance tonight, then I’m out of here. You can play your little games of Let’s Pretend with somebody else.”

  He stalked away from her toward the house.

  Liza watched him go, and in the silent, snowcovered Connecticut countryside heard the crash of her whole world falling apart.

  THE HEARTBEAT of the project was picking up. Liza could hear it in the busy sounds of the film crew testing their setups in the middle of the afternoon while they munched on sandwiches and fruit.

  Betsy was napping and Bill and the boys had been sent upstairs to shower and dress.

  Whittier followed Chris Page around like a shadow, making suggestions Chris listened to calmly then discarded as he explained patiently why they wouldn’t work.

  “I just want it to be really big, you know?” Whittier wheedled. “I want it to sing!”

  “It’s a Christmas special,” Chris observed kindly. “It’s going to be really big. Not because of any pretentious tricks on our part, but because of the house and Liza’s angels and because of the food being prepared in the kitchen. But most of all, it’s going to capture everyone’s affection because of the real warmth and charm of Liza and her family. There’s genuine love here, Mr. Whittier. It’s going to make music without our adding the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ as a background.”

  Whittier nodded and took the admonishment graciously. “You’re right,” he said. “Of course. You’re right.”

  Liza, who’d overheard every word, wanted to scream and call a halt to everything and spill her guts. But she’d dragged everyone into this and it was now too late to back out or call it off.

  And she couldn’t help but believe that if Jeff didn’t love Sylvia as he claimed, he’d have been more understanding of the spot she, Liza, was in.

  Sherrie prepared onions for baking in a shallow pan while Liza mixed the rest of the ingredients for the Boozy Butternut Flan.

  “Did you make it up with him?” Sherrie asked, taking a sip from the coffee cup that had been at her elbow all day long.

  “Nope,” Liza replied, taking special care with the measuring. “He chewed me out and told me it was over.”

  Sherrie set the onions aside then moved to a cutting board, where she chopped onions and celery. “Smart man. Who wants a woman who isn’t willing to stand up for him? To stand toe-to-toe with the woman who’s trying to take him away from her and tell her where to go?”

  Liza frowned at her. “Thank you, little Miss I Love Him But I Don’t Want To Get Involved Again. How dare you tell me how to be in love?”

  “Because you’re doing such a poor job of it and I don’t want you to lose him.” Sherrie put the back of her wrist to her forehead and rubbed. “I’d love to have him in the family.”

  “You can’t lose what you never had,” Liza said, looking into the bowl of apricots that remained unpeeled. “It was all just a wild fantasy I was trying to play out. I mean, how often do you hear a man announce on national television that he risked his life and accomplished the impossible all because of…an image of your face?” She had to swallow to say it, and then her voice was barely there.

  Sherrie stopped and turned to Liza. “Almost never,” Sherrie replied. “That’s why I think you should consider that this is Christmas. That God is always in the business of making miracles, but that He probably amuses Himself at Christmas by making some real stunners. And you’ve just been handed one.”

  “Could we just forget that for the time being,” Liza pleaded, “and get this meal together? We’re on the air in three hours. Shouldn’t the ham be in the oven by now?”

  Sherrie looked up at the kitchen clock, then back at Liza. She was pale, Liza thought, and looked just a little vague.

  “Yes, it should,” Sherrie said, rubbing at her forehead again. “I was thinking we had an hour more than we have. But don’t worry. There’s plenty of time. Help me peel these apricots.”

  “I insist that you stop and eat something,” Liza said, reaching for a paring knife on the cutting board. Sherrie pulled the bowl of apricots between them. “Take a break. I’ll get these done.”

  Sherrie shook her head. “No, I feel a little nauseous. You know how I am when I get nervous. If I eat anything, I’ll be sick.”

  Liza moved her coffee cup away. “If you drink any more coffee you’ll be sick. The caffeine must be burning a hole in your stomach lining by now.” She went to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of apple juice, which she poured into a glass. “Here. Have some of Betsy’s beverage of choice.”

  Liza helped Sherrie get the ham in the oven, then spent the next hour and half under Sherrie’s direction.

  She tried to protest when Sherrie handed her a recipe for eggnog snow pudding.

  “It’s gelatin and bottled eggnog,” Sherrie said. “Even you can’t mess it up.”

  Liza glanced worriedly at her sister, knowing it wasn’t like her to put any degree of faith in Liza’s cooking skills.

  Chris came into the kitchen as Liza poured the pudding into cups. He frowned. “You’re supposed to be in a bubble bath by now,” he said, “getting ready for yo
ur big night. Come on, now. We don’t need any glitches at the last minute like slacks that don’t fit, or a color of sweater the camera doesn’t like.”

  “Go.” Sherrie elbowed Liza. “I’ll run up when everything’s ready.”

  Liza did as he asked, almost colliding with Bill, Jeff and the boys as they came down the stairs.

  Bill and the boys were all outfitted in sweaters and cords. Jeff wore the black sweater and slacks he’d worn the day he’d arrived. She wondered how he could look even better in them than he had that day.

  The boys’ hair had been slicked back, making them look like perfect beings who resembled her nephews but had none of their identifying smudges and scrapes.

  A makeup girl met them at the foot of the stairs and took them with her to a corner of the living room.

  Davey talked the young woman’s ear off as she settled him in a chair. Travis looked lovestruck.

  “Took you guys long enough,” Liza said, sidling between them and up the stairs, avoiding Jeff’s eyes. “I’ll bet I can be ready in half the time.”

  “Of course you can,” Bill said. “You don’t have to clean up the boys.”

  “I shouldn’t have to,” she said from the top of the stairs. “I didn’t talk them into helping me clean out the fireplace.”

  Bill looked sheepish. “I didn’t think about the camera seeing inside it until Whittier pointed out that it would look dirty.”

  “Life is so much easier,” Jeff observed, “when there aren’t several million people looking in on you.”

  “I’m getting really anxious,” Bill said, “for all this to be over.”

  “Amen to that.” That came from Jeff.

  “Oh, grumble, grumble,” Liza teased airily, refusing to meet Jeff’s eyes. “You’re all going to love the spotlight. See you later.” She hurried down the hall to Bill’s room and the bathroom. She filled the tub with hot water, knowing time was short but thinking that a good twenty-minute soak would go a long way toward smoothing out her mood.

  She was suffering from abject depression, overlaid by tight nerves and a complete sense of futility. She’d thought earlier that now that she knew her personal life was doomed, she’d be able to devote herself wholeheartedly to the show and what it could ultimately mean to her career.

  But she didn’t seem to care. She felt as though everything in her life had lost meaning. There were cheerful red guest towels with green sprigs of holly on the towel rack, and Sherrie had put a Santa-face cover on the john and a cedar wreath with gold leaves and red berries on the wall, but Liza didn’t even find the picture festive.

  There was no sense of celebration in her. She knew that was a circumstance she was going to have to change before airtime, because she couldn’t disappoint the viewers who might be looking to her to put them in a Christmas mood when they were probably tired and stressed themselves.

  But for the moment she could simply wallow in hot water filled with bubbles and think about how radically life could change in three short days.

  What she feared most was that every time Christmas came around again in her future, this was what she would remember. Not the many happy Christmases past, but this one when she’d upset the lives of everyone she loved, fallen in love with a remarkable man, spent most of the night with him curled up in front of a cabin fireplace, then lost him because her lies strangled his love for her.

  She closed her eyes and sank down into the suds, trying to make her mind a blank for the next fifteen minutes. The trouble was, her mind refused to cooperate. It allowed her to forget the show, to forget that she’d lied to her boss and the entire country and that she would have to explain that once the show was over.

  But her mind had made a mental print of Jeff’s face, and it flashed behind her eyes. She screwed her eyes shut tightly. “Go away, Jeff!” she mumbled, moving her head from side to side. “I should never have fallen for your line in the first place.”

  “What line?” Jeff asked.

  For an instant Liza thought his image had spoken to her and that it was growing into a full-blown hallucination.

  Then she caught a whiff of his cologne and felt every nerve ending in her body flutter with awareness. She opened her eyes and saw that he was sitting on the edge of the tub, his black sweater and slacks an interesting counterpoint to the white room and the white bubbles that topped her bathwater.

  His eyes looked into hers, his earlier anger replaced by a quiet neutrality.

  “You feeling relaxed?” he asked.

  “If only that were possible,” she said, using his quiet and controlled tone. “No. I think I’ll make it through the show thanks to Sherrie’s expertise and my cue cards, but I will be anything but relaxed.”

  “I came to see if I could help with that.” He stood and reached for the little wad of nylon net hanging on a hook on the shower caddy. He took a bar of clear blue soap from the rack.

  Liza sat up in alarm, remembering to scoop some bubbles up with her. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll scrub your back,” he said as he knelt beside the tub and sloshed the nylon in the water just above her bottom. “And while I’m at it, I’ll give you a back rub.”

  “But Sylvia wouldn’t…”

  “Sylvia is following Chris and Whittier around, hoping to learn something about producing a cooking show.”

  She looked up at him scoldingly. “And what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt her if she did know,” he said, soaping the little wad of nylon.

  Resigned to her fate—and actually anticipating it—Liza drew her knees up and leaned her upper body over them to lend him access to her back.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because she doesn’t love me,” he said, running the soaped puff across her shoulder blades. “But I won’t go into that. It didn’t interest you the first time.”

  “Jeff…”

  “Never mind. Just concentrate on relaxing.”

  Right. As if she could do that with his knuckles rubbing against her bare flesh with every pass of the nylon puff, with his hand on the point of her shoulder for balance as he leaned over the edge of the tub. With him scooping up water in his hand and dropping it onto her sudsy back, then smoothing away the soap with his fingertips.

  “You looked happy to see her,” Liza said, despite his insistence that she relax.

  “I was,” he admitted. “She’ll always be a good friend. Just like you’ll always be a good friend.”

  Liza heard the softly spoken words with unutterable pain. “That’s all you want from me?”

  “That’s all you’re willing to give.” He took a towel off the rack and patted her back dry with it. “You made that pretty clear. When I thought you were married, I admired you for it. Now that I know you’re not, it makes me angry.”

  “If you loved me,” she argued, “you’d be more understanding about why I can’t just blurt out that I love you until after the show. There’s so much at stake for so many other people.”

  “I do understand that,” he said, tossing the towel at the closed lid of the john. His expression remained eerily free of anger or passion of any kind. He’d accepted that it was over. That was worse. “What I don’t like is that you were so ready to believe that I could chuck it all. You lied to me almost every moment of the last two days, and expected me to understand and support your motives. Then I indulge in one honest embrace with an old friend, and that somehow absolves you of the same kind of trust and support.”

  “It looked like you loved her.”

  “It looked like you loved Bill. Break a leg, Liza.”

  He left the bathroom, pulling the door partially closed behind him.

  Liza burst into tears.

  THE MAKEUP GIRL WAS very upset. “Circles I can fix,” she scolded. “But swollen, red eyes I can’t do much about.”

  “Just do your best,” Liza encouraged briskly. “I’ll keep to the shadows.”

  “With bright lights on
you, you can’t hide a freckle. Hold your mouth still.”

  Though it was an evening show, it had been decided that Liza’s makeup would be subdued and her hair caught up in a simple do in deference to the homey quality of the family Christmas.

  When the makeup girl had finished, she handed Liza a mirror. “Okay?” she asked.

  Liza thought she’d done brilliant work. She looked like a slightly younger, more contemporary Donna Reed, as though she took good care of her all-American-girl looks but gave up any time spent pampering them in preference to attending to her home and family.

  “Wonderful,” Liza said. “Thank you.”

  She went into the kitchen to find Sherrie still working over the baked onions. Liza remembered they took more than an hour to cook and wondered in alarm if they’d be ready in time. Then she noticed that Sherrie was still slicing apples for the cranberry-apple relish, and that the biscuit dough had yet to be cut.

  Panic clutched at her.

  But the room was filled with crew making last-minute adjustments to their setups, and Travis and Davey milled around among them, asking questions and serving as test subjects for lighting. Whittier stood behind a camera and looked through it at the boys to get an idea of their first inside shot.

  Liza put a hand on Sherrie’s shoulder, filled with guilt that she hadn’t been more help to her today, and jumped back with a start when Sherrie screamed, nerves obviously at snapping point.

  Sherrie spun around. The knife clattered to the floor and apple slices flew everywhere. Her face was white, her eyes enormous.

  “Sis,” Liza began, “you need to sit…”

  But nature was already taking care of that need for her on its own. Before Liza could react, Sherrie’s eyes closed slowly and her body folded gracefully to the floor.

  There were gasps and shouts, then as Liza knelt beside her, pushing the knife out of the way, the boys ran to her.

  Davey leaned over Sherrie and shouted plaintively, “Mom! Mom, what’s the matter? Mom!” Then, his face crumpling as he understandably forgot the role he was playing, he turned to Liza and demanded, “Aunt Liza! What’s wrong with my mom?”