Coming Home for Christmas

by RaeAnne Thayne

  It was supposed to be a tiny taste, just a polite kiss good-night, but the moment he tasted her, he knew he needed more. He had been dreaming of kissing her since the afternoon before.

  She wrapped her arms around his waist as she returned the kiss. They kissed for as long as he dared, with the kids waiting for him. Though he wanted more—so much more—he managed to ease away before things flared out of control.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he repeated.

  She nodded, eyes dazed, and he headed out the door. Only when he started to open the door to his pickup did he realize he was humming, happier than he’d been in a long time.

  * * *

  Two days later, Luke felt as if he were living in some kind of weird, distorted version of his dream life—like a pretty little snow globe that somebody had doodled on with permanent marker.

  When he and Elizabeth had married, this was exactly the sort of Christmas scene he’d imagined: the two of them working together with their children to make cookies while snow gently fluttered down outside the window, holiday music played in the background and the smells of sugar and cinnamon encircled them.

  That part was real enough. But he hadn’t imagined the woman who was helping decorate the cookies would be a virtual stranger to him and would look so different than the woman he had married. Or that he would find himself just as attracted to her.

  He had seen her every day since their Chinese dinner. The day before, he had managed to find time to take her to lunch while the kids were at school, choosing as public a venue as possible, Serrano’s. He would have enjoyed a quiet meal with polite conversation, but that particular restaurant at lunch was the worst possible place for privacy. They spent the whole lunch hour speaking to other people who stopped by to say hello. Later he had taken her to Shelter Springs so she could do a little Christmas shopping for the children.

  Somehow he had managed to keep his hands off of her, though it was becoming increasingly difficult.

  His feelings for her were growing along with his desire and he didn’t quite know what to do about either.

  “Your Christmas tree looks beautiful,” Elizabeth said.

  “Thanks,” Bridger said with a grin, before he aimed a guilty look at his sister and clamped his lips together. That had been the pattern for most of the day. Luke sensed that his son was desperate to make a connection with his mother yet was constrained because of loyalty to Cassie.

  Luke had no idea how to bridge the chasm. All of Elizabeth’s outreach efforts seemed to fall flat as Cassie grew increasingly withdrawn.

  He sensed their daughter wanted to begin forging a relationship with her mother but didn’t know how to let go of her anger and resentment. He had tried to talk to Cassie but subsided after she started to turn her anger onto him.

  The therapist she had seen a few years ago didn’t have any openings until after the holidays, so he had booked the earliest one available.

  “All the Christmas trees around here look great,” Elizabeth said to Bridger, admiring the cookies on the wax paper in front of him. “I really like the way you dusted powdered sugar on them to look like snow.”

  “Thanks. That was Cassie’s idea.”

  “It was a great one. They look terrific. Maybe you should save a few to put out for Santa.”

  “We’re too old for Santa,” Cassie snapped. Luke frowned at her. She might be. Her brother, at not quite eight, was still holding on.

  “You’re never too old to believe in magic,” Elizabeth said, her voice soft but firm. “For instance, never in my...wildest dreams would I have imagined a few weeks ago that I would be here with you guys, making...cookies. This is real-life magic.”

  He wanted to kiss her again, right there in the kitchen in front of the children.

  Luke caught himself. He needed to cut it out. He had a long way to go, working through his own feelings about Elizabeth’s reappearance in their lives. He wasn’t ready to simply jump back into things with her.

  He had been destroyed when she left. Heartbroken, angry, devastated. Yes, it healed a few of those scars to know she had been on her way back to them when she had suffered that terrible accident. Not all of them, though. He didn’t know how to get past the hurt from knowing she hadn’t turned to him when she found herself in such deep despair.

  He had loved her and wanted nothing more than to help her through her dark times, but she hadn’t let him inside. She had closed herself off. In effect, she’d done the same thing when she didn’t come back to them the moment she started to regain her memory.

  How could he trust that the next time something hard happened to her, Elizabeth wouldn’t crawl back into that dark space and close the door behind her, shutting him out?

  Some of his scars were so deeply etched, he didn’t know how they could ever heal.

  “Do you remember our first Christmas dinner together after we were married?” he had to ask.

  For a moment, she looked confused. Then he saw the memories come flooding back. Her face turned pink in that adorable way she’d always had, and Luke had to focus on the really terrible job he was doing decorating an ornament-shaped cookie to keep from pulling her into his arms.

  “One of the more...embarrassing moments of my life.”

  “What did you do?” Bridger asked.

  She touched her hands to her cheeks as if she could cool them down, another mannerism he remembered vividly. “It was our first Christmas together and I wanted to make it perfect. I was a young newlywed very much in love with my husband.”

  Cassie made a snorty sound of disgust but he noticed she was listening. He decided to take that as a good sign.

  “We were very poor,” Elizabeth went on.

  “So poor,” Luke chimed in. They had to scrape together every penny for the down payment on the Riverbend Road house and there had been little left for anything else.

  “I wanted to make Christmas Eve dinner amazing on a limited budget and I managed to save a few dollars from each paycheck until I had a nice little nest egg.”

  “What were you going to have?” Bridger was always interested in food.

  “Roast turkey.”

  “That’s Dad’s favorite,” Bridger told her.

  She glanced at Luke and smiled a little. “I...remember. I had never cooked a turkey before but figured it couldn’t be that hard.”

  “Yeah. I thought the same thing when I tried to do the first one on my own,” Luke said.

  “Everything went fine, I thought. I thawed it for three days ahead of time. I brined it. I took out the giblets and the neck. I marinated it. Except I forgot that I had added some dish soap to clean the bowl before I mixed the marinade and never rinsed it out. So after all that hard work, money and days of planning, I ended up injecting marinade mixed with dish soap into my beautiful twenty-five-dollar turkey.”

  “Gross,” Cassie exclaimed.

  “It was.”

  “Did you puke?” Bridger asked.

  It had been nasty, Luke remembered, but he hadn’t wanted to hurt Elizabeth’s feelings.

  “He ate an entire piece without complaining,” Elizabeth said. “He didn’t say a word. I finally took a taste and realized what I had done and was so mad at myself, but we just laughed and laughed. I was not a cook.”

  “You got better,” he said.

  She gave him a soft smile that sent heat and memories tangling through him. She didn’t tell them the rest, that after the disastrous dinner, still laughing, they had spent the rest of that Christmas Eve tucked together in bed, making love again and again and being deliriously happy together.

  It had been his best Christmas ever. Not just because he had his wife in his arms, but because his heart had been so full of love and joy and belonging. He had felt like the luckiest man in Lake Haven County, to know that Elizabeth Sinclair wanted to be with him.

 
The next year, hugely pregnant with Cassie, she had done her best to put on another memorable Christmas dinner, but her grief over her parents’ deaths that summer had sapped much of the joy from the holidays.

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t add dish soap to the soup I’m making in the slow cooker,” he said. “It should be ready anytime. We’d love to have you join us.”

  That was a bit of an exaggeration, at least on the part of his children, but it seemed the polite thing to say.

  “It smells delicious. I’m sure it will be wonderful.”

  Was it possible they could begin to build new traditions this year? Maybe he just needed to be brave enough to try.

  * * *

  Elizabeth wanted to pinch herself. Could she really be here in the kitchen of Luke’s beautiful new house, the home that they had designed in their heads together, making cookies and sharing memories?

  It was the most magical of Christmas gifts, more precious because a few weeks ago, she never would have expected it.

  “How many more cookies do we have to decorate?” Cassie asked in a put-upon tone. “I’m bored and I’m so tired of holding this knife.”

  If Elizabeth might have been a little tempted to think this was a perfect preholiday activity, Cassie’s negative attitude would have quickly convinced her otherwise. It twisted around and between all of them like barbed wire.

  Instead of easing, her daughter’s hostility seemed to be amplifying, and Elizabeth had no idea how to make it better.

  “We’ve got one more batch to decorate. Bridger and I can finish.”

  “Then can we take them to the neighbors?” her son asked.

  “We have to shovel after lunch,” Luke said firmly. “After that, we’ll take the cookies. That storm has dropped about four new inches and we need to clear it away.”

  “Why do I have to? Can’t you and Bridger do it? Maybe she can help.” Cassie didn’t look at Elizabeth, just said the feminine pronoun in a tone dripping with condescension.

  “I’m happy to,” Elizabeth said. She wasn’t the strongest with the shovel, but had discovered that physical activity of any kind helped keep her joints lubricated and reduced pain.

  “You’re helping,” Luke told Cassie in a tone that didn’t invite argument. “What do we do in the Hamilton family?”

  “We take care of business,” the children dutifully recited, but Bridger spoke with enthusiasm while Cassie sounded like she was on the way to the principal’s office.

  After they ate Luke’s delicious soup and had cookies for dessert, they put on their winter clothes and headed out into the snow.

  “Do you...have a shovel for me?” Elizabeth asked as Luke headed for a snowblower in the garage.

  “You really don’t have to help us,” Luke said. “The kids and I have a system. I use the blower or the four-wheeler plow on the driveway while they clear the walks with the shovels. We’ve got a couple of elderly neighbors who can’t do their own, so we usually start there, then work our way back here.”

  “I don’t mind helping, as long as you...have an extra shovel.”

  He frowned. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “I’m not an invalid, Luke. I’ll be fine. I want to help.”

  With a sigh, he handed her another shovel. The children had already gone outside, and she followed them down the street to a plain house with a pretty fir wreath on the door.

  “Where’s a good place for me to start?” she asked.

  “Cassie does the steps into the house and I do the sidewalk out front. You can help me there,” Bridger said.

  Other than Cassie grumbling about making cookies, the children didn’t seem to mind work. It warmed Elizabeth’s heart, another example of what a good father Luke was. He was showing them things they had talked about teaching their children together, how to work and how to serve others.

  Elizabeth started by the mailbox and began clearing. She couldn’t remember the last time she had shoveled snow but somehow the muscle memory was still there.

  She had to stop to take frequent rests, but she didn’t mind since it gave her the chance to admire her husband’s broad shoulders.

  They quickly finished that house and headed one more house down. Somehow she wasn’t surprised that he helped his neighbors. He had always done that, cared about others. It was one of the things she had fallen hardest for after they first started dating. She still found it one of his most attractive qualities.

  How had he managed to come out of his childhood with that compassion for others intact? She had no idea. Like so many other things, she gave much of the credit to Megan’s mother, Sharon, his stepmother, who had been a kind, warm woman who made the unfortunate mistake of marrying Paul Hamilton.

  When she and Luke first started dating, Elizabeth had no idea how difficult his home life was, the physical or emotional abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. She hadn’t a clue, actually, as Luke never talked about it.

  Megan was the one who had let a few of those details slip, only after Elizabeth had been dating him for several months, after she was already deeply in love and they were beginning to talk about marriage.

  Luke hadn’t wanted to tell her. As far as he was concerned, that was his past and had no bearing on what he did moving forward or the man he had become.

  When she pressed, he had finally told her a few things. Even now she probably didn’t have all the details, but what little she had learned about his childhood had only reinforced to her what an amazing man he was.

  He was still an amazing man, a man she had never stopped loving.

  Luke and the children were the first thing that popped into her head each morning and the last thing she thought about each night.

  She loved being with them, she thought as they returned to the house and started on his driveway. She loved everything about it, even working in the cold to shovel snow and even with Cassie’s belligerent attitude.

  How would she ever be able to endure her solitary life at Brambleberry House, now that she had come to know her family again?

  The question filled her with sorrow. Her life would be so much more lonely now that she had been given this tiny glimpse into how things could be.

  She swallowed hard against emotions welling up in her throat. No. She wouldn’t waste this precious time with them worrying about what would come when she left.

  She started to lift another shovelful of snow when she suddenly felt the impact of something square in the middle of her back.

  “Argh!” she exclaimed, turning to find Bridger standing some distance away, gloved hands folded behind him.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?” he asked, with an innocent expression that didn’t fool her for a moment. No doubt his gloves would still contain icy remnants of the snowball he had just hurled at her.

  She narrowed her gaze. “That was a sneak attack. No fair.”

  “Dad says all is fair in snowball fights,” Cassie declared.

  “Hey, leave me out of it.” Luke gave a mock frown to his children.

  “All is fair. Is that so?”

  “Except rocks,” Bridger answered. “We can’t put rocks in the snowballs, because that’s dangerous. My friend Carson did that once and broke a car’s windshield.”

  “All right, then. No...rocks. Anything else?”

  “Don’t aim for the face. That’s just mean,” Bridger added.

  “Got it. Let’s do this, then.”

  While she had been talking, she had also been surreptitiously edging toward a deeper pile of snow, and now she scooped down, picked up a wad of snow and hurled it straight toward Luke.

  “Hey!” he spluttered, snow dripping off his broad chest. “What did I do to deserve that?”

  “You set the ground rules,” she said over the children’s hoots of laughter. “Apparently you are the one wh
o said all is fair in snowball fights.”

  Luke’s smile left her breathless. Where was the stern, hard, furious man who had come to her door only a week ago in Oregon?

  “Okay. It’s on.”

  “Each man for himself?” she asked.

  He gave the kids a speculative look. “No. How about we split into teams? Boys against the girls.”

  “Perfect.” She had been hoping he would say exactly that. Cassie, on the other hand, opened her mouth to argue, but Bridger had already cheered in agreement and raced toward his father.

  After an awkward moment, Cassie hurried to Elizabeth’s side. They ducked behind a conveniently placed landscaping boulder and started stockpiling weaponry.

  “We’ve got this,” Elizabeth said.

  “You can’t even walk in the snow without a cane,” Cassie protested.

  “My...arms are stronger than my legs,” she assured her.

  She was still weak in many ways but years of physical therapy had helped build muscles she probably hadn’t had before the accident. In addition, her work at the garden center had built upper body strength that helped her even when her leg muscles didn’t want to cooperate.

  She wasn’t sure if Luke let them win or if they simply got lucky—or if Bridger was too busy laughing to throw very straight or duck out of the way—but she and Cassie definitely seemed to have the advantage.

  “Okay. I’m freezing,” Luke said, just about the time she was starting to wear out. “Why don’t we go in and have some hot cocoa?”

  “Admit it,” Cassie taunted as they headed inside. “We kicked your butts. We hit you with probably twice as many snowballs as you hit us.”

  “Only because my teammate spent half the time rolling around in the snow, busting a gut.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Bridger said. “You would have laughed, too, if you could have seen yourself. You looked like you had a snow beard. Like the abominable snowman or something.”

  Luke gave a mock growl, arms out like a menacing yeti, which sent Bridger into peals of laughter again.

  Elizabeth soaked in every second, tucking it close to her heart.