A Christmas Blessing

by Sherryl Woods

  “No game,” she insisted.

  “You want something, though. What is it?”

  “It can wait. Enjoy your breakfast.”

  “Tell me now,” he ordered.

  She smiled. “I don’t think so.”

  She closed the door with quiet emphasis before he could even form another question. Suddenly, despite himself, he found himself laughing.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said aloud. “Maybe I underestimated you, after all, Jessie Adams. Seems to me you have gumption to spare, more than enough to take on the Adams men.”

  On the other side of the door, Jessie heard the laughter and the comment. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, Luke Adams,” she murmured sweetly.

  Unlocking the puzzle that Luke represented had become a challenge she couldn’t resist. And drawing Erik’s family back together seemed like the best Christmas gift she could possibly give to all of them. She’d come to that conclusion during a long and restless night.

  Erik wouldn’t have wanted his death to split them apart. He wouldn’t have wanted the unspoken accusations, the guilt and blame to stand between Luke and his parents. Whatever had happened on Luke’s ranch that day, Erik would never have blamed the big brother he’d idolized. He would have forgiven him. As much as Erik had craved his independence, he had loved his family more. If he hadn’t, he might have fought harder to break free from Harlan’s influence.

  If, if, if…so many turning points, so many choices made, a few of them deeply regretted.

  If she had accepted Harlan’s offer to fly to his ranch, then the storm and her unexpected labor wouldn’t have forced Jessie into accepting Luke’s help and his hospitality. If that wasn’t a sign from God, she didn’t know what was. Obviously, He had given her a mission here and the most readily accessible place to start was with Luke. After all, Christmas was a time for miracles.

  With the snow plows uncertain, she figured she had a few days at least to utilize her powers of persuasion. By the time the roads were cleared, she was determined that she and Angela wouldn’t be going on to Harlan and Mary’s alone to celebrate the new year and a new beginning. Their son would be with her.

  * * *

  By late that afternoon, Jessie’s plans and her temper were frayed. She hadn’t seen more than the flash of Luke’s shadow the entire day. He’d managed to sneak lunch onto the table and disappear before she could blink. She’d passed his office, just in time to see him vanish into the library. She’d bundled up and trailed him to the barn, only to see him riding away on horseback. A gimpy old goat had been gamely trying to follow him.

  Shivering, she had trudged back inside only to hear Angela screaming at the top of her lungs. Nothing she’d done had settled the baby down. Angela was dry and fed. For the past twenty minutes, Jessie had been rocking her in front of the fire in the kitchen. Angela’s great, hiccupping sobs continued unabated.

  “A few more minutes of this and you’ll have me in tears, too,” Jessie murmured in distress. “Come on, sweetheart. You’re tired. Go off to sleep, like mommy’s little angel.”

  Blessed silence greeted the suggestion. Five seconds later, Angela screamed even louder than before. Obviously she’d only taken time off to rev up her engine.

  Jessie could feel the first, faint beginnings of panic. Already uncertain about her mothering skills, her inability to soothe her baby seemed to confirm just how unprepared and inept she was.

  Because the rocking seemed to be making both of them more jittery than serene, she stood and began to pace as she racked her brain for some new technique to try.

  She tried crooning a lullaby, singing an old rock song at full volume, rubbing her back. She was at her wit’s end when she heard the back door slam.

  Luke hesitated just inside the threshold. “What’s all this racket?” he demanded, but there was a teasing note in his voice and a spark of amusement in his eyes. “I could hear both of you all the way out at the barn. Chester took off for parts unknown. The horses are trying to hide their heads under the hay.”

  “Very funny,” Jessie snapped just as Luke reached for the baby. She relinquished her all too readily.

  “Come here, angel,” he murmured consolingly. “You were just missing Uncle Luke, weren’t you?”

  Jessie’s traitorous daughter gulped back a sob, then cooed happily. Held in the crook of Luke’s arm, she looked tiny, but thoroughly contented. Jessie wanted to warn her that a man’s arms weren’t a guarantee of protection, but maybe that was a lesson it was too soon to teach. If the feel of Luke’s strength could silence the baby’s cries for now, Jessie had no complaints. She felt the oddest, most compelling yearning to have his arms around her as well. With her hormones bouncing around in the wake of the baby’s birth, she seemed to be more insecure than ever.

  Luke glanced her way. “Stop hovering. We’re doing fine. I’m going to start supper and Angela’s going to help, aren’t you, munchkin?”

  Jessie sank gratefully onto a kitchen chair and watched Luke’s efficient movements as he pulled packages from the freezer with one hand, all the while carrying on a nonsensical conversation with the baby. Jessie sighed with envy as she watched him.

  “How do you do that?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s like a horse. If it knows you’re afraid, it’ll buck you off sure thing. If you handle it with confidence, it’ll go along with you.”

  Jessie sorted through the metaphor and came to the conclusion he thought she was scared to death of her own daughter. “In other words, I’m lousy at this.”

  He shot a glance over his shoulder at her. “Did I say that? I thought I was saying that she senses you’re not sure of yourself.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “You will be.”

  “How did you get to be so good with babies?”

  “Three younger brothers, I suppose. All three of them had very different temperaments. Jordan was the charmer from day one. He could wheedle anything out of anybody. He gurgled and smiled and cooed. Even Daddy wasn’t immune to him. It’s no wonder he’s been such an incredible business success.”

  “And Cody?”

  “He’s the flirt. There hasn’t been a woman born he couldn’t win over. Daddy couldn’t handle him worth a lick. Come to think of it, Mama could never handle him either, but he could always make her think she’d won. He wrapped Consuela around his little finger and, believe me, she’s no patsy.”

  “What about Erik? What was he like?” Jessie asked cautiously, keeping her gaze on Luke’s face. His expression didn’t change, but he did hesitate. For a moment she almost regretted bringing him up.

  “Erik was the diplomat,” he said eventually. “He was the master of compromise. If Mama gave him two chores, he’d make her settle for one. If Daddy ordered him to be home at midnight, Erik would compromise for twelve-thirty. He never, ever accepted their first offer. If he’d been in the foreign service, it was a skill that would have served him well. As it was, he compromised himself into waiting for the life he really wanted by offering to prove himself first as a rancher.”

  There was a note of sorrow in his voice that resonated deep inside Jessie. “He wanted so badly to be a teacher in junior high, the age when kids are testing themselves, and he would have been good at it, too,” she said. “He just wanted to please your father.”

  “He should have known that nothing would impress Daddy except success,” Luke said bitterly. “If Erik had stuck to his guns and gone on to be a teacher, if he’d won recognition for that, it would have pleased Daddy more than seeing him trying to be a rancher and failing.”

  Jessie felt a surge of anger on Erik’s behalf. “Don’t belittle your brother for trying. At least he admitted that he was staying at the ranch in an attempt to gain your father’s approval. You won’t even admit that’s what you’re doing.” She waved her hand to encompass the kitchen, the whole house. “Isn’t that what all of this is for, to impress your father, to prove you could start from scratch,
without a dime of his money and have a bigger, more impressive ranch?”

  As if she sensed the sudden tension, Angela whimpered. Luke soothed her with a stroke of his finger across her cheek and a murmured, “Shh, angel. Everything’s okay. Your mama and I are just having a slight difference of opinion.”

  His angry gaze settled on Jessie. “I bought this ranch because ranching is what I do. I built this house because I needed a home.”

  “How many bedrooms, Luke? Five? Seven? More than there are over at White Pines, I’ll bet. And how many rooms do you really live in? Two, maybe three, if you don’t count the kitchen as Consuela’s domain?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That you’re every bit as desperate for approval from Harlan as Erik ever was. You’re just determined to do it by besting him at his own game.”

  “Or maybe I was just planning ahead for the time when I have a family to share this ranch with me,” he said quietly, his gaze pinned on her. “Maybe I was thinking about coming in from the cold and finding the woman I loved in front of the fire, holding my baby.”

  The softly spoken remark, the seductive, dangerous look in his eyes held Jessie mesmerized. His voice caressed her.

  “Maybe I was imagining what it would be like when this was no longer just a house, but a home, filled with warmth and laughter and happiness. Or didn’t you ever stop to think that I might have dreams?”

  “So why don’t you do something to turn it into a home?” she taunted before she could stop herself.

  The look he shot her was unreadable, but there was something in the coiled intensity of his body language that sent a thrill shimmering straight through her.

  “Perhaps I have,” he said, his challenging gaze never leaving hers.

  Then, while Jessie’s breath was still lodged in her throat, he pressed a kiss to the baby’s cheek, handed her back to her mother and sauntered from the room with the confidence of a man who’d just emerged triumphant from a showdown at the OK Corral.

  That was the last she saw of him until after the supper she’d been forced to eat alone. She’d spent most of the evening the same way, alone in the kitchen, pondering what Luke had said—and what he hadn’t. With the radio tuned to Christmas carols, her mood was a mix of nostalgia and wistfulness and confusion.

  She hadn’t especially wanted to spend the holidays with Erik’s family, hadn’t been much in the mood for celebrating at all in fact, but now that Christmas was only two days away, she couldn’t help thinking of the way it had been the year before. She wondered if she would ever recapture those feelings.

  The whole family and dozens of friends had been crowded around a gigantic tree, its branches loaded with perfectly matched gold ornaments and tiny white lights, chosen by a decorator. Mary had played carols on the baby grand piano, while the rest of them sang along, their voices more exuberant than on key.

  Jessie remembered thinking of all the quiet Christmases as she’d been growing up, all the times she’d longed for a boisterous houseful of people. With her hand tucked in Erik’s, she’d been so certain that for the first time she finally understood the joy of the season. Her heart had been filled to overflowing. In agreeing to go to White Pines this year, perhaps she’d been hoping to reclaim that feeling for herself and eventually for her baby.

  It seemed unlikely, though, that it would have been the same. Erik had stolen her right to be there from her, wiped it away in an instant of carelessness that she’d never really doubted for a moment was as much his fault as Luke’s. Sometimes, when it was dark and she was scared, she blamed Luke, because it hurt too much to blame her husband.

  Everything Luke had said earlier was true. Erik had hated working on the ranch, whether his father’s or his brother’s. He’d had other dreams, but his father had been too strong and Erik too weak to fight. He’d preferred working for Luke, who tolerated his flaws more readily than his father did. He’d accepted his fate by rushing through chores, by doing things haphazardly, probably in a subconscious bid to screw up so badly that his father or Luke would finally fire him.

  Well, he’d screwed up royally, all right, but he’d died in the process, costing both of them the future they’d envisioned, costing Angela a father and her the extended family she’d grown to love. Sometimes Jessie was so filled with rage and bitterness over Erik’s unthinking selfishness that she was convinced she hated him, that she’d never loved him at all.

  At other times, like now, she regretted to her very core all the lost Christmases, all the lost moments in the middle of the night when they would have shared their hopes and dreams, all the children they’d planned on having.

  “Jessie?” Luke said, interrupting her sad thoughts as he stood in the kitchen doorway, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. “Are you okay?”

  “Just thinking about last year and how much things have changed,” she admitted.

  Luke’s eyes filled with dismay. “I’m sorry. I know facing a Christmas without Erik is the last thing you expected,” he said, regarding her worriedly. “Why don’t you come on in the living room? I’ve started a fire in there.”

  Without argument Jessie stood and followed him. She was frankly surprised by the unexpected invitation, but she had no desire to spend the rest of the evening alone with her thoughts, even if being with Luke stirred feelings in her that she didn’t fully understand.

  When Luke stood by the fireplace, Jessie crossed over to stand beside him. He looked so sad, so filled with guilt, an agonizing of guilt that had begun some seven months ago for both of them. Instinctively she reached for him, placing her hand on his arm. The muscle was rigid.

  She tried to make things right. “I don’t blame you for the way things are, Luke. I wanted to. I wanted to lash out at someone and you were the easiest target. You were there. You could have stopped him.” She sighed. “The truth is, though, that Erik was always trying to prove himself, taking chances. You couldn’t have kept him off that tractor if you’d tried.”

  He shrugged off her touch. “Maybe not, but I blame myself just the same. Look what I’ve cost you.”

  Jessie wanted to explain that it wasn’t Erik she missed so much as the feeling of family that had surrounded them all that night as they sang carols. To say that aloud, though, would be a betrayal of her husband, an admission that their life together hadn’t been perfect. She owed Erik better than that. He had given her the one thing she’d never had—the feeling of belonging to a family with history and roots.

  “Regrets are wasted, Lucas. We should be concentrating on the here and now. It’s almost Christmas, the season of hope and renewal,” she said.

  She glanced around the living room, which looked as it would at any other time of the year—expensive and sterile. It desperately needed a woman’s touch. Even more desperately, it needed to be filled with love.

  “You’d never even know it was the holidays in here,” she chided him. “There’s not so much as a single card on display. I’ll bet you haven’t even opened them.”

  “Haven’t even been out to the mailbox in days,” he admitted.

  She lifted her gaze to his. “How can you bear it?” Before he could answer, she shook her head. “Never mind. That was what the cabinet full of liquor was all about, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure,” he said angrily. “It was about forgetting for a few blessed days, forgetting Christmas, forgetting Erik, forgetting the guilt that has eaten away at me every single day since my brother died right in front of my eyes.”

  Jessie flinched under the barrage of heated words. “Sounds like you’ve been indulging in more than whiskey. You sound like a man who’s been wallowing in self-pity.”

  “Self-loathing,” Luke said.

  “Has it made you feel better?” she chided before she could stop herself. She’d been there, done that. It hadn’t helped. “Has anything been served by you sitting around here being miserable?”

  He didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He just stared at her,
his expression vaguely startled by her outburst.

  “Don’t you think I feel guilty sometimes, too?” she demanded. “Don’t you think I want to curl up in a ball and bemoan the fact that I lost a husband after only two years of marriage? Well, I do.”

  She was on a roll now, releasing months of pent-up anger and frustration. She scowled at him. “But I for one do not intend to ruin the rest of my life indulging in a lot of wasted emotions. I cried for Erik. I grieved for him. But a part of him lives on in Angela. I think that’s something worth celebrating. Maybe you’re content to spend the holidays all shut up in this bleak atmosphere, but I’m not.”

  Oblivious to his startled expression, oblivious to everything except the sudden determination to take charge of her life again, starting here and now, she declared, “The minute I get up tomorrow morning, I am going to make this damned house festive, if I have to make decorations from popcorn and scraps of paper.”

  She shot him a challenging look. She had had it with his veiled innuendoes and sour mood. “As for you, you can do what you damned well please.”

  Chapter Six

  Sitting right where he was, staring after Jessie long after she’d gone, Luke realized he hadn’t given a thought to Christmas beyond being grateful that he wouldn’t be spending it with his family, enduring their arguments and silences, their grief. Consuela had dutifully purchased his gifts to everyone, wrapped them and sent them over to White Pines. He’d merely paid the bills.

  Now, though, he would have had to be denser than stone to miss Jessie’s declaration that the atmosphere around his house was awfully bleak for the season. That parting shot before she’d gone off to her room had been a challenge if ever he’d heard one. Just thinking about it was likely to keep him up half the night, wondering how he could give them both a holiday they would never forget. There was no question in his mind that with Jessie and Angela in the house, it would be wrong, if not impossible, to ignore the holiday—the baby’s first.

  A week ago he hadn’t expected to feel much like celebrating, but for the past forty-eight hours his mood had been lighter than it had been in months. Part of that was due to Angela’s untimely, but triumphant, arrival. She was truly a Christmas blessing. A far greater measure of his happiness was due, though, to this stolen time with Jessie and his sense that she truly didn’t blame him for Erik’s accident.