And there, with not only their bodies but their souls joined, this new baby had been conceived.
Teague looked worried. “Have you told Caitlin?”
“Of course I haven’t,” Joanna said. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“We’d better get you to a doctor.”
“Right now, this instant? I feel fine, Teague. Better than fine.”
“But you need to be on special vitamins and have sonograms and stuff. Joanna, we have to do this right.”
She stood on tiptoe, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him. “I’ve already called our doctor, and she referred us to an OB-GYN guy. My appointment is tomorrow morning at ten.”
Teague huffed out a relieved breath, but his eyes were troubled. “Joanna, you’re—we’re—not young. There could be problems.”
“There can always be problems, Teague. And these days, a lot of people are having healthy babies in their forties.”
“How do you think Caitlin will react?”
“She’ll be shocked at first,” Joanna said. “We’re her parents, and this is proof positive that we have sex.” She grinned, waggling her eyebrows.
“Sex?” Teague gasped, pretending to be horrified.
“Old and decrepit as we are,” Joanna replied. She moved to pick up the test stick and drop it into the trash.
“Wait,” Teague protested. “Shouldn’t we keep that? Put it in a frame or a scrapbook or something?”
“Teague,” Joanna pointed out, “I peed on it.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
She disposed of the stick and washed her hands at the sink.
“What do we do now?” Teague asked. “I guess the red-hot sex is out for a while.”
“Only if the doctor says so,” Joanna said. “As for what we do now—well, I’d like to see what progress you’ve made on that boat of yours. Then we could have lunch and take Sammy for a walk.”
Teague made a grand gesture, indicating that she should precede him through the bathroom doorway. “Your barge awaits, Cleopatra,” he said.
She laughed, dried her hands, and stepped into the corridor.
The “barge,” really a sleek twelve-foot rowboat, rested on a special arrangement of sawhorses in the garage behind the cottage. Teague had been as secretive about it as Joanna was about her novel, and probably for the same reasons.
Both the boat and the book were creations of the heart and mind, fragile in their beginnings.
Joanna drew in her breath. The craft was far from finished, still rough slats in need of endless sanding, not to mention varnishing—not unlike her novel, she thought—but the intent was there.
“Oh, Teague,” Joanna said, marveling. “It’s beautiful.”
Teague caught her face in his hands—the palms felt work roughened and strong against her skin. “You’re beautiful,” he said.
She drew in the Teague scents of sawdust, sun-dried cotton sheets, toothpaste, and soap. “I love you so much,” she told him.
He kissed her, long and deep. When he lifted his mouth from hers, he opened his eyes and said, “And I love you, Joanna. I have, always. Even when I didn’t know how to show it.”
She swallowed hard and nodded. It felt dangerous to be so happy, but delicious, too. “I don’t suppose you’d like to take a look at my novel, after lunch and Sammy’s walk?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” he said.
An hour later, with lunch over and Sammy sleeping off a happy trot down the beach, Teague settled into one of the armchairs in the living room, the sixty-odd pages Joanna had written in his hand.
His expression was solemn with concentration as he read.
Joanna tried not to watch his face, but she couldn’t help it. Every nuance either plunged her into despair or sent her rocketing skyward.
When he’d finished, he set the pages aside and stared thoughtfully through Joanna for a long time.
“Well?” she finally demanded. “What do you think, Teague?”
“I think you’re amazing,” he said.
“The book, Teague!”
He stood, crossed to her, and took her shoulders in his gentle boat builder’s hands. “It’s so good it makes me scared,” he told her.
“Scared?”
“Scared it won’t be enough for you, living here on the island, in this cottage, with Sammy and the baby and me. Scared you won’t want this simple life anymore.”
She touched his cheek. “Never gonna happen. I’m thriving here, Teague.” She laid her hands against her still-flat belly, and tears of joyous wonder sprang instantly to her eyes. “Are you? Are you happy here? Do you miss the mansion and the business and all those meetings?”
He placed his hands over hers. “I’m happy, Joanna.” A grin lit his face; he looked inspired. “And I can prove it.”
“How?”
Teague went to the coffee table, picked up that week’s issue of the Island Tattletale, Madge’s modest but interesting sheet, opened it, folded it, and brought it to Joanna.
“The classified ads?” she asked, confused.
Teague tapped one of the little squares.
Joanna beamed as she read the bold print.
It said: For sale cheap, one sports car.
Read on for an excerpt from Linda Lael Miller’s novella The 24 Days of Christmas, coming from Lyrical Shine this November!
Chapter One
The snow, as much a Thanksgiving leftover as the cold turkey in the sandwich Frank Raynor had packed for lunch, lay in tattered, dirty patches on the frozen ground. Surveying the leaden sky through the window of the apartment over his garage, Frank sighed and wondered if he’d done the right thing, renting the place to Addie Hutton. She’d grown up in the big house, on the other side of the lawn. How would she feel about taking up residence in what, in her mind, probably amounted to the servants’ quarters?
“Daddy?”
He turned to see his seven-year-old daughter, Lissie, framed in the doorway. She was wearing a golden halo of her own design, constructed from a coat hanger and an old tinsel garland filched from the boxes of Christmas decorations downstairs.
“Does this make me look like an angel?”
Frank felt a squeeze in his chest as he made a show of assessing the rest of the outfit—jeans, snow boots, and a pink T-shirt that said “Brat Princess” on the front. “Yeah, Lisser,” he said. “You’ve got it going on.”
Lissie was the picture of her late mother, with her short, dark and impossibly thick hair, bright hazel eyes, and all those pesky freckles. Frank loved those freckles, just as he’d loved Maggie’s, though she’d hated them, and so did Lissie.
“So you think I have a shot at the part, right?”
The kid had her heart set on playing an angel in the annual Christmas pageant at St. Mary’s Episcopal School.
Privately, Frank didn’t hold out much hope, since he’d just given the school’s drama teacher, Miss Pidgett, a speeding ticket two weeks before, and she was still steamed about it. She’d gone so far as to complain to the city council, claiming police harassment, but Frank had stood up and said she’d been doing fifty-five in a thirty, and the citation had stuck. The old biddy had barely spoken to him before that; now she was crossing the street to avoid saying hello.
He would have liked to think Almira Pidgett wasn’t the type to take a grownup grudge out on a seven-year-old, but unfortunately, he knew from experience that she was. She’d been his teacher, when he first arrived in Pine Crossing, and she’d disliked him from day one.
“What’s so bad about playing a shepherd?” he hedged, and took a sip from his favorite coffee mug. Maggie had made it for him, in the ceramics class she’d taken to keep her mind off the chemo, and he carried it most everywhere he went. Folks probably thought he had one hell of an addiction to caffeine; in truth, he kept the cup within reach because it was the last gift Maggie ever gave him. It was a talisman; he felt closer to her when he could touch it.
&
nbsp; Lissie folded her arms and set her jaw, Maggie-style. “It’s dumb for a girl to be a shepherd. Girls are supposed to be angels.”
He hid a grin behind the rim of the mug. “Your mother would have said girls could herd sheep as well as boys,” he replied. “And I’ve known more than one female who wouldn’t qualify as an angel, no matter what kind of getup she was wearing.”
A wistful expression crossed Lissie’s face. “I miss Mommy so much,” she said, very softly.
Maggie had been gone two years, come June, and Frank kept expecting to get used to it, but it hadn’t happened, for him or for Lissie.
I want you to mourn me for a while, Maggie had told him, toward the end, but when it’s time to let go, I’ll find a way to tell you.
“I know,” he said gruffly. “Me too.”
“Mommy’s an angel now, isn’t she?”
Frank couldn’t speak. He managed a nod.
“Miss Pidgett says people don’t turn into angels when they die. She says they’re still just people.”
“Miss Pidgett,” Frank said, “is a—stickler for detail.”
“A what?”
Frank looked pointedly at his watch. “You’re going to be late for school if we don’t get a move on,” he said.
“Angels,” Lissie said importantly, straightening her halo, “are always on time.”
Frank grinned. “Did you feed Floyd?”
Floyd was the overweight beagle he and Lissie had rescued from the pound a month after Maggie died. In retrospect, it seemed to Frank that Floyd had been the one doing the rescuing—he’d made a man and a little girl laugh, when they’d both thought nothing would ever be funny again.
“Of course I did,” Lissie said. “Angels always feed their dogs.”
Frank chuckled, but that hollow place was still there, huddled in a corner of his ticker. “Get your coat,” he said.
“It’s in the car,” Lissie replied, and her gaze strayed to the Advent calendar taped across the bottom of the cupboards. Fashioned of matchboxes, artfully painted and glued to a length of red velvet ribbon, now as scruffy as the snow outside, the thing was an institution in the Raynor family. Had been since Frank was seven himself.
“How come you put that up here?” she asked, with good reason. Every Christmas of her short life, her great-aunt Eliza’s calendar had hung in the living room of the main house, fixed to the mantelpiece.
It was a family tradition to open one box each day and admire the small treasure glued inside.
Frank crossed the worn linoleum floor, intending to steer his quizzical daughter in the direction of the front door, but she didn’t budge. She was like Maggie that way, too—stubborn as a mule up to its belly in molasses.
“I thought it might make Miss Hutton feel welcome,” he said.
“The lady who lived in our house when she was a kid?”
Frank nodded. Addie, the daughter of a widowed judge, had been a lonely little girl. She’d made a point of being around every single morning, from the first of December to the twenty-fourth, for the opening of that day’s matchbox. This old kitchen had been a warm, joyous place in those days—Aunt Eliza, the Huttons’ housekeeper, had made sure of that. Putting up the Advent calendar was Frank’s way of offering Addie a pleasant memory. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Lissie considered the question. “I guess not,” she said. “You think she’ll let me stop by before school, so I can look inside, too?”
That Frank couldn’t promise. He hadn’t seen Addie in more than ten years, and he had no idea what kind of woman she’d turned into. She’d come back for Aunt Eliza’s funeral, and sent a card when Maggie died, but she’d left Pine Crossing, Colorado, behind when she went off to college, and as far as he knew, she’d never looked back.
He ruffled Lissie’s curls, careful not to displace the halo.
“Don’t know, Beans,” he said. The leather of his service belt creaked as he crouched to look into the child’s small, earnest face, balancing the coffee mug deftly as he did so. “It’s almost Christmas. The lady’s had a rough time over the last little while. Maybe this will bring back some happy memories.”
Lissie beamed. “Okay,” she chimed. She was missing one of her front teeth, and her smile touched a bruised place in Frank, though it was a sweet ache. Not much scared him, but the depth and breadth of the love he bore this little girl cut a chasm in his very soul.
Frank straightened. “School,” he said with mock sternness.
Lissie fairly skipped out of the apartment and down the stairs to the side of the garage. “I know what’s in the first box anyway,” she sang. “A teeny, tiny teddy bear.”
“Yup,” Frank agreed, following at a more sedate pace, lifting his collar against the cold. Thirty years ago, on his first night in town, he and his aunt Eliza had selected that bear from a shoebox full of dime-store geegaws she’d collected, and he’d personally glued it in place. That was when he’d begun to think his life might turn out all right after all.
*
Addie Hutton slowed her secondhand Buick as she turned onto Fifth Street. Her most important possessions, a computer and printer, four boxes of books, a few photo albums, and a couple of suitcases full of clothes, were in the backseat—and her heart was in her throat.
Her father’s house loomed just ahead, a two-story saltbox, white with green shutters. The ornate mailbox, once labeled “Hutton,” now read “Raynor,” but the big maple tree was still in the front yard, and the tire swing, now old and weatherworn, dangled from the sturdiest branch.
She smiled, albeit a little sadly. Her father hadn’t wanted that swing—said it would be an eyesore, more suited to the other side of the tracks than to their neighborhood—but Eliza, the housekeeper and the only mother Addie had ever really known, since her own had died when she was three, had stood firm on the matter. Finally defeated, the judge had sent his secretary’s husband, Charlie, over to hang the tire.
She pulled into the driveway and looked up at the apartment over the garage. A month before, when the last pillar of her life had finally collapsed, she’d called Frank Raynor and asked if the place was rented. She’d known it was available, having maintained her subscription to the hometown newspaper and seen the ad in the classifieds, but the truth was, she hadn’t been sure Frank would want her living in such close proximity. He’d seemed surprised by the inquiry, and after some throat clearing, he’d said the last tenant had just given notice, and if she wanted it, she could move in any time.
She’d asked about the rent, since that little detail wasn’t listed—for the first time in her life, money was an issue—and he’d said they could talk about that later.
Now she put the car into park and turned off the engine with a resolute motion of her right hand. She pushed open the door, jumped out, and marched toward the outside stairs.
During their telephone conversation, Frank had offered to leave the key under the doormat, and Addie had asked if it was still safe to leave doors unlocked in Pine Crossing. He’d chuckled and said it was. All right, then, she’d said. It was decided. No need for a key.
A little breathless from dashing up the steps, Addie stopped on the familiar welcome mat and drew a deep breath, bracing herself for the flood of memories that were bound to wash over her the moment she stepped over that worn threshold.
A brisk winter wind bit through her lightweight winter coat, bought for southern California, and she turned the knob.
Eliza’s furniture was still there, at least in the living room. Every stick of it.
Tears burned Addie’s eyes as she took it all in—the old blue sofa, the secondhand coffee table, the ancient piano, always out of tune. She almost expected to hear Eliza call out the old familiar greeting. “Adelaide Hutton, is that you? You get yourself into this kitchen and have a glass of milk and a cookie or two.”
Frank’s high school graduation picture still occupied the place of honor on top of the piano, and next to it was Addie’s own.
; Addie crossed the room, touched Frank’s square-jawed face, and smiled. He wasn’t handsome, in the classic sense of the word—his features were too rough cut for that, his brown eyes too earnest, and too wary. She wondered if, at thirty-seven, he still had all that dark, unruly hair.
She turned her head, by force of will, to face her younger self. Brown hair, not as thick as she would have liked, blue eyes, good skin. Lord, she looked so innocent in that photograph, so painfully hopeful. By the time she graduated, two years after Frank, he was already working his way through college in Boulder, with a major in criminal justice. They were engaged, and he’d intended to come back to Pine Crossing as soon as he completed his studies and join the three-man police force. With Chief Potter about to retire and Ben Mead ready to step into the top job, there would be a place waiting for Frank the day he got his degree.
Addie had loved Frank, but she’d dreamed of going to a university and majoring in journalism; Frank, older, and with his career already mapped out, had wanted her to stay in Pine Crossing and study at the local junior college. He’d reluctantly agreed to delay the marriage, and she’d gone off to Denver to study. There had been no terrible crisis, no confrontation—they had simply grown apart.
Midway through her sophomore year, when he’d just pinned on his shiny new badge, she’d sent his ring back, by Federal Express, with a brief letter.
Though it was painful, Addie had kept up on Frank’s life through the pages of the Pine Crossing Statesman. In the intervening years, he’d married, fathered a child, and been tragically widowed. He’d worked his way up through the ranks, and now he was head man.
Addie tore herself away from the pictures and checked out the kitchen. Same ancient oak table, chairs with handsewn cushions, and avocado-green appliances. Even Eliza’s antique percolator was in its customary place on the counter.
It was almost as if the apartment had been preserved as a sort of memorial, yet the effect was heart-warming.
One Last Weekend Page 6
