Once Upon a Christmas

by Lisa Plumley

  “So,” she went on, reaching behind her for the fuzzy white jacket she’d left there and smoothing it over her lap, “I came in and told him I wasn’t leaving until he changed his stupid throwback policy. I can’t believe the old protest ploy worked! I didn’t exactly have a good track record with that one, you know.”

  “The only thing you’re missing is that Brownie uniform of yours.” Nick put his arms around her waist. “Now there’s something I’d like to see.”

  “Actually, hot pink is more attention-getting.”

  “I’ll say.” He waggled his eyebrows as he looked her over.

  “But it was probably the baby. An extra sympathy measure I didn’t have when I was seven.”

  “Maybe.” Or maybe Mrs. Griggs had been pregnant once, too, and her husband had learned his lesson. It was better to roll with the lunacy than to fight it.

  Or maybe that just described life with women in hot pink and triumphant grins. Nick smiled back amid the chants and stomping feet and draped Chloe’s puffy jacket over her shoulders, then tugged her into his arms. The crowd cheered.

  “Let’s go home and celebrate.” God, she felt good against him. “I know just the kind of party you need.”

  She hugged him closer and raised on tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “A party of two?”

  “Something like that.”

  The crowd bumped and jostled them, milling toward the exit now that the excitement was over with. Effram Griggs, muttering and wringing the loan papers he’d taken from Chloe in exchange for the check, passed by on his way to the vault—probably planning to lock himself in until his personal nightmare had passed. Police officers loomed closer, probably wanting to make sure the poor pregnant women in Nick’s arms was all right.

  Or not. A sound at the back of Nick’s head, where Chloe had her arms wrapped around his neck, killed his poor pregnant woman theory in a hurry. Nothing else sounded quite like the metallic snick of handcuffs closing.

  “Chloe Carmichal?” one of the officers asked.

  “Hey!” She snared Nick as she tried to tug her bound wrists over his head. “Hey! I’m—I’m—”

  Stuck. Gently, Nick lifted her forearms past his nose. He hugged her against his side, turning them both to face a pair of Saguaro Vista’s finest.

  The men in blue smirked. “You’re in trouble, is what you are,” one said. “Disturbing the peace, harassment, destruction of property—”

  “Unlawful assembly, fire code violation,” the other officer continued, going on with a description of her rights.

  “But—but—” Chloe protested. “But I’m—”

  “Under arrest,” they finished in unison.

  “I still can’t believe you staged a sit-down strike to make Griggs give you your loan,” Nick said, squinting into the sun as it set over downtown plaza.

  “You can’t argue with success.” Smiling, Chloe slipped the loan check the police had returned to her in her white pillbox handbag and struggled to fasten the vintage latch. The stubborn old thing never had operated properly—just like Effram Griggs. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “To the tune of five hundred dollars in fines and bail. It would have been cheaper to marry for the money, like your friends in Baby Birthing 101 did.”

  “They didn’t! They just couldn’t get credit in their own names, that’s all, and—and you’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

  His sparkling eyes told her he was. The rat.

  “I would have helped you, you know,” Nick said. “Red and Jerry would have, too. You only had to ask.”

  “I know.” Chloe snuggled deeper in her warm, fuzzy jacket. “I just…thought I had time. I thought my way would work, if I only stuck with it long enough.”

  The town’s annual Christmas banners—red and green and gold—sparkled overhead as she and Nick headed for the curb where his motorcycle was parked. She took his arm as they passed the courtyard fountain. Its wintery spray misted them both, making Chloe shiver—but not with cold. Losing her pet store dream had come too close. All because she’d refused to try getting her loan another way.

  If I only stuck with it long enough.

  Maybe sometimes it was smarter to recognize what wasn’t working. Maybe dogged dedication to a plan wasn’t always a surefire tactic.

  Maybe not telling Nick the truth was exactly the same problem in different clothes, Chloe decided later as they zipped into Nick’s driveway. Maybe her Bruno alibi had outlived its usefulness. Maybe Nick could handle the truth.

  He’d been interested enough to critique her father and Tabitha’s choice of baby gifts, interested enough to set up the nursery and pack her refrigerator with milk for a crowd, interested enough to hound her about Twinkies and volunteer for hospital duty on junior’s birthday.

  She eased off his motorcycle—no easy task, now that she couldn’t see her toes anymore—and handed her purple helmet to Nick, still thinking. What if she’d been wrong about him all along? The evidence, when viewed in a certain light, pointed to a different Nick than the no-kids, none-of-the-time, marriage-as-obligation type she’d pegged him as.

  He blinked at her and straightened his glasses. “What’s the matter? All protested out? You look like I do when I’ve been working on an invention all day and it won’t quite come together. Like that damned growth accelerator…”

  Or maybe that yes-kids thing was only wishful thinking. Nick went on talking, telling her something about his invention and the meeting he’d set up for Wednesday with an interested investor in California, but Chloe could only listen with half an ear.

  His inventions will always come first, she realized. She watched his eyes light up as he described the prototype he’d come up with for the licensing meeting with the investor’s board of directors, and her heart sank. Always.

  “Come in and check it out,” he was saying.

  In encouragement, Nick’s fingers touched hers, warm in the twilight. Smiling that devastating, you’ll-like-it smile of his, he tugged her gently past the staked-out Christmas decorations in his yard.

  Her feet hit the porch floorboards at the same time her conscience made up its mind once and for all.

  “Nick, wait!” Chloe blurted.

  He squeezed her hand. “For what? If you’re worried about Larry, Moe and Curly—”

  “It’s not that.”

  “—and Shemp, I’m sure they’re okay.”

  “I, I, ummm…” Oh, God. When had telling the truth become so difficult?

  When you started lying for a living, Carmichal.

  Chloe twisted her handbag’s short straps and stared up at him, trying to dredge up some courage. Surely she had some beneath the layers of well-meant lies she’d told. She was the same woman who’d just staged a showdown at the bank, wasn’t she?

  Except looking at Nick’s tender expression and lopsided, familiar grin made everything twice as hard. Biting her lip, Chloe pulled her gaze from his face and looked at the soft-lit windows behind him instead.

  Just say it! she ordered herself. Nick, this is your baby. Sorry I’ve lied to you about it for the past nine months. Ha, ha!

  Right. That would go over like Curly’s exercise ball sinking in the fish tank.

  “Chloe?”

  She tried again. “Remember how you said you’d go to the hospital when the baby’s born, if I needed you?”

  “Yes.”

  Something in the way he said it drew her gaze back to him. He’d put on that analytical scientist’s expression of his—the one she’d dreaded all these months. Was she giving off lie-detector signals, or what?

  “I meant it, and I will.” Nick bent to speak to her navel. “Wouldn’t miss your debut for anything, big guy.”

  Tenderness washed over her. He loved the baby already, and he didn’t even know the truth.

  The truth. Get back on track, she ordered herself.

  “What if it’s a girl?” she asked instead. Where had that come from?

  “A girl?”

 
“You said, ‘big guy.’ What if it’s a girl?”

  He straightened and gave her a quizzical look. “Then I’ll teach her to play football anyway.”

  Behind him, something bumped inside his house. Chloe thought she glimpsed something dart past his half-opened blinds.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.” He took her hand again. “Look, let’s talk about this inside.”

  “No. I’ve got to tell you this now.” Sheesh, she sounded like a spoiled brat. Next she’d be stomping her foot. “It’s…” Her breath caught in her throat, making her gulp for air. “…about Bruno.”

  Another noise inside made her jerk. And breathe harder. Suddenly, Chloe couldn’t get enough air. Beside her, Nick’s image wavered like the Day-Glo castle inside her aquarium.

  His voice yanked her back to the land of the listening, but that didn’t help her breathing any. Probably a panic attack, she figured, brought on by the stress of actually telling Nick the truth.

  Not to mention risking the loss of the man she loved. Forever. Dear God, he’d never forgive her for this.

  “Huh, huh,” she gasped, grabbing his arm for support. Help. I’ve become physically incapable of honesty.

  He mistook her grappling for something else. Insistence that he listen to another Bruno story, probably.

  “We can’t do this now.” Abruptly, Nick hauled her inside his front door.

  “Wait, I’m—I’m—”

  Lights burst on in a blinding flash. No wait. Those were flashbulbs popping all around her. Noisemakers screamed. What looked like a hundred people surged up from their hiding places in the tropical rainforest that Nick’s living room had become.

  “Surprise!” they yelled.

  “…hyperventilating,” Chloe finished weakly.

  Then the world turned black.

  Chapter Eleven

  Surprise parties were underrated, Chloe decided once she’d come to and been ensconced in the chair of honor—in this case, Nick’s weathered Barcalounger, specially decorated with pink and blue balloons and pastel stick-on bows. Because this party, this surprise, had saved her from making a potentially disastrous mistake.

  Telling Nick the truth.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have to, some cowardly part of her thought. To look at him now, surrounded by all their friends and most of his family, it was easy to believe they could go on the way they had been…partners in parenthood, just like they’d been partners in pregnancy. Even without the white picket fence and the ring and the happily ever after. Any guy who’d stage a surprise baby shower couldn’t be all work and no baby, could he?

  From across the room, Nick’s voice drifted toward her. “That’s right,” he was telling Red’s husband, Jerry. “A growth accelerator. I’ve been working on it night and day.”

  Then again, she might be wrong.

  Beside her, Nick’s mother patted Chloe’s hand. “Poor dear. You still look a little pale. But I guess a day like the one you had would make anyone feel a bit peaked, wouldn’t it?” Heads nodded all around their little Barcalounger ladies’ group. “Are you feeling better now?”

  Chloe gazed fondly at Mama Steadman. Except for wanting to leap in your warm, hugging arms and never let go? Sure! She’d never envied Nick his close-knit family as much as she did at this moment, when they were all around her.

  Just as though she were part of a real family.

  “I’m fine.” Your son is going to be a daddy. No, she couldn’t say that.

  “Nick told us about your showdown with Griggs,” Red said, speaking around her faux-cigarette carrot stick. It was her latest concession to a smoke-free, baby-ready environment. “Congratulations, hon. I was starting to wonder how many of those developers I’d have to trot in front of you before you got the hint.”

  “You knew?”

  “‘Course, I did. But I also knew you wouldn’t accept my help if I offered it, so I decided to give you a nudge in the right direction instead.”

  The five Steadman “N” women murmured to each other, heads together. Nancy leaned over the coffee table to cut the Italian cream cake she’d made, and Naomi handed out thick slabs of it.

  “Nicky says Chloe’s stubborn as a mule,” she told Red as she handed over a tottering, white-iced slice. “That’s why we had to surprise her with the party. He said she’d never agree to it otherwise.”

  “As if Nick doesn’t have a monopoly on stubbornness himself,” Nora said with a snort. She ducked beneath a towering rubber tree plant and sat on the sofa opposite Chloe, then waved her arm toward the rest of the plants cluttering the living room. “Just look at this place! All these plants around—it’s like a greenhouse in here.”

  “This latest invention is the worst,” Nancy agreed. The Steadman women nodded, looking concerned. “He acts as though he’ll actually make money from this one!”

  “With that investor of his in California,” Nadine put in. She forked up some cake and gave her brother a pitying glance. “Can you imagine, embarrassing yourself in front of an entire board of directors? This hobby of his has gone too far.”

  “He’s going to get hurt,” Naomi murmured. “Danny says he blows things up pretty regularly.”

  Nancy put down the beribboned silver cake server and shook her head toward Nick. “Someone really ought to speak to him.”

  Nadine nodded. “I don’t see why he can’t just find a nice girl, settle down, and have kids, like the rest of us.” She paused to wipe her toddler son Nigel’s nose with a tissue. “What’s so wrong with that? That’s what I want to know!”

  “He’s got a perfectly good job at BrylCorp, too.” Mrs. Steadman sighed. “Exactly the type of thing to support a growing family, the same way his father and grandfather did. I wish he’d stick with that and stop all this inventing nonsense.”

  Chloe couldn’t stand it any longer. “It’s his dream! How can he give that up? He’s worked so hard, for so long, and—”

  “—and maybe that ought to tell him something,” Nadine interrupted gently. “Like maybe he’s not cut out to be an inventor. Like maybe life’s passing him by while he chases some impossible dream.”

  Chloe stared at her. No wonder Nick works so hard, she thought. He’s trying to make them all believe in him.

  Suddenly she was glad she hadn’t added one more expectation, one more obligation, to the ones he already shouldered. Suddenly she was glad she hadn’t confessed out on the porch and given him another reason to give up.

  “How can you say that? Don’t any of you have dreams?”

  “Shhh.” Nancy cast a furtive glance toward Nick. “He’ll hear you!”

  “Maybe he should hear me!” Chloe cried. “Nick’s brilliant. And creative. If working night and day will let him share all that with the world, I think he ought to do it.”

  The room had gone silent, she realized. Even the CD player had stopped between Christmas carols. Nick’s head turned toward the ladies, and the troubled expression on his face was one Chloe had never hoped to see. Had he heard what they’d said?

  “What’s all the fuss about?” he asked.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Nadine moaned beneath her breath. “We never meant to hurt him. Now he’s on to us.”

  “He was already on to you,” Chloe told her.

  She waved cheerily at Nick, just in case he didn’t know what they’d been talking about. It was possible, between the Jingle Bells music and the crowd—and the sound-muffling qualities of his Amazonian plants—that he hadn’t heard all of it. She plastered on a big, bright smile.

  “We’re just fighting over the last piece of cake,” she called. “You know us women. Calorie deprived.”

  He bought it, thank God. United in their common, be-nice-to-Nick cause, the women clustered together. In mutual, unspoken solidarity, they started discussing something else.

  “Oh, look!” Nadine said. “Nick’s brought out the baby shower gifts we dropped off earlier.”

  He had. Nick emerged from t
he hallway with an armload of them. With Jerry’s help, he piled them on a ratty bachelor chair beside the TV and started going through them.

  “Uh-oh,” Naomi murmured.

  “What?”

  “That. Watch. You’ll see.”

  As instructed, Chloe watched in amazement as Nick picked up one of the oddly shaped, gaily wrapped gifts and bashed himself in the forehead with it. Grinning, he nodded and put it in a separate pile.

  “I didn’t have time to check all these earlier,” he told Jerry.

  “He’s been doing that with every one of them,” Nora whispered. “He said nobody got into the party with a…a…shoot, what did he call it, Nadine?”

  “A baby basher.”

  Nora snapped her fingers. “Yup, that was it.”

  “He wouldn’t let us put anything in boxes before wrapping it, either,” Nadine added.

  Chloe flashed on the monogrammed silver rattle from her father and had to smile. This time, Steady Steadman was taking no chances.

  “No boxes, huh? I guess that might have interfered with his bash-detection device.” She tried hard not to giggle as Nick picked up anther gift and, looking intensely serious, bonked himself on the side of the head with it.

  “My husband Rikk got kind of crazy like that, too, right before our youngest was born,” Nadine confided. “I thought it was kind of cute.”

  All four sisters smiled fondly.

  Behind them, Nick frowned at a purple-wrapped package and walloped it over his head for a second time. Must be a tough case, Chloe thought.

  Nancy, the eldest sister, plunked her chin in her hand and rolled her eyes. “He’s so protective of you and the baby. You’d almost think Nick was the father, wouldn’t you?”

  For the second time, silence descended. Dammit, did the CD player have a Social Mortification detector, or what?

  “Almost. Ha, ha,” Chloe choked out, strangling on a bite of Nancy’s Italian cream cake. She managed to get her napkin to her mouth seconds before causing a mascarpone cheese disaster.

  “So!” Naomi slapped Chloe’s knee cheerfully. “Why don’t you tell us all about your guy?”