Yuletide Protector (Love Inspired Suspense)

by Lisa Mondello

  Daria must have thrown an afghan over him while he slept. As Kevin lifted himself to a seated position, the blanket fell until it was half on the sofa and half on the floor. He picked it up, taking in the scent of it as it drifted to him. It smelled like Daria.

  He made a tired attempt at folding the blanket, and set it next to him. But it ended up looking like a crumpled ball.

  “I’ll be fine. I just needed a catnap.”

  Daria leaned against the doorjamb. “I kept dinner warm. I figured you’d wake up at some point and be famished.”

  He scrubbed his hand over his face. “What time is it?”

  “Around ten-thirty or so. Maybe later.”

  “Wow. I didn’t mean to sleep that long.”

  “I found the Christmas decorations upstairs. There’s not nearly as much as I thought I had. So the tree will be a little bare. But I strung some popcorn, and Christmas-tree lights always make a tree look festive.”

  “You dressed like that for popcorn garland?”

  She quickly glanced down at her sweatshirt and made a face. “I finished quick, then got a little sidetracked working on the bathroom.”

  Kevin looked at her quickly and blinked. “I can’t believe I’ve been asleep for four hours.”

  “You were exhausted. I’ll get your dinner.” Daria scuffed her socked feet against the floor as she made her way to the kitchen.

  Kevin started to follow on her heels and looked back at the tree propped up against the window.

  “Why don’t I get the Christmas tree set in the stand while you get that plate?”

  He was starving. But he didn’t want to eat his dinner while she watched. Getting the tree ready would give Daria the opportunity to decorate the tree while he ate.

  Within a few minutes Kevin was on his knees tightening the last screw against the tree trunk. The smell of hot food had his stomach growling.

  “It’s crooked,” Daria said, putting his dinner plate on the coffee table.

  “I know,” he said, climbing out from under the branches. “But the tree is crooked so if you try to straighten it, it’ll be too heavy and off balance anyway. This is the best I can do to keep it standing.”

  “Oh. I wasn’t paying too much attention to how straight it was. I just wanted a nice tall tree that was full.”

  Kevin brushed the pine needles from his shoulder. “You got that.”

  He pointed to the plate that seemed to be calling out to him. “Do you mind if I dig in while you decorate?”

  “Knock yourself out. But you’re not off the hook. I want you to help me when you’re finished.”

  Daria felt giddy as she rummaged through the box of decorations. The room seemed to come alive again now that Kevin had woken up from his nap on the sofa. All the same, it was hard to keep from feeling guilty for wanting his company when he so clearly needed the rest.

  Daria liked seeing him sleep, but liked even more when he was awake and she could gaze into his expressive eyes. She loved his eyes—their depth, crystal-blue color and the light that danced in them when he looked back at her. His hair was still tousled from sleep. Strands of gold and brown had fallen forward, giving him a rumpled look. The effect was completely adorable.

  She’d been happy living alone in this house. Or so she’d thought until Kevin had shown up. In truth, she’d kept herself too busy to think about loneliness. It wasn’t until she was sitting beside Kevin as he slept that she realized just how empty the house felt.

  Shaking off the feeling enveloping her, she settled on the box of Christmas decorations she’d pulled out of the attic and began searching for the lights.

  Without a word, Kevin sat down on the sofa and gave his attention to the dish she’d placed on the coffee table.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “I ate earlier.”

  Funny how in the last six months she’d been alone here. But tonight, for the first time since she’d moved in, her house breathed with life. It felt like a real home.

  “What made you decide to buy this beat-up old place anyway?”

  She lifted an eyebrow in challenge. “Why? You don’t like my house?”

  Kevin chuckled, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “I can see I’m going to have to tread lightly on this subject. All I meant is there is a lot of work here for one person. And it looks like you’re doing most of it yourself. That has to be hard.”

  “You don’t think I can handle it?”

  “I think you can handle pretty much anything you put your mind to. I just can’t figure why you’d want to bother with all this work in such a big house. Why not a smaller house that was move-in ready?”

  She looked at him wistfully as she set another wound-up strand of lights on the chair by the tree. Satisfied she’d found all the lights, she put the box down on the floor.

  “There’s something about getting your hands dirty, building your own space to call home. It may not look like much now, but it’s shaping up to be a nice home. One day I hope it’s filled with a lot of kids.”

  “You planning on having a husband with those kids?”

  “That’s the plan. But not for a while.” She sighed, pulling at the first string of lights to untangle it. “There’s a lot I need to get through before that can happen.”

  He nodded his understanding. How could she even think of having a husband and family while George was after her? She hated the idea that her life was on hold this way, especially when she wanted to explore the possibility of something more with the man sitting in her living room right now.

  Kevin seemed oblivious to her musing.

  “At most I think I’ve lived in three different places my whole life,” he said. “And the first one had no space at all. It was probably the size of your kitchen and living room total. When I was real young, I shared a room that was about the size of a broom closet with my older sister, Judy.”

  “You must have hated that.”

  He shrugged, watching as she struggled in vain to untangle what was a massive nest of Christmas-tree lights. “It wasn’t so much sharing space as fighting for it. Between my sister’s mountain of stuffed animals and her endless supply of perfume and girlie things, I barely had an inch of space to my name. I still don’t know what half of that stuff was.”

  “We girls do tend to collect things.”

  In frustration, she gave up on the string of lights she’d been working on that refused to come untangled and picked up the next set, holding one end and bouncing them up and down in the hopes they’d fall loose.

  “When Mom married my stepdad,” Kevin continued, “we moved into a house in a neighborhood a lot like this one. I was about eleven then. It’s actually not all that far from here.”

  “Really? Do your parents still live there?”

  “No. They moved down south. Dad couldn’t take the cold and he likes his fishing. He can do that year-round in Florida.” He dropped his fork on the empty plate along with the crumpled napkin. “This was really good. Thanks.”

  Kevin started to get up with the plate still in his hand, but she waved him back.

  “Leave it there. I’ll get it later when I finish the rest of the dishes.”

  Kevin settled back on the sofa, rubbing his stomach as if he was satisfied.

  Daria smiled. “Tell me more about your family.”

  “Dad married Mom when I was eleven. I wasn’t too happy about it at the time. I figured I’d lived without a father my whole life to that point, why bother having one at all? But he raised me. He’s the only father I know.”

  “You get along well with him?”

  “Now I do. Not in the beginning, though,” he said, reaching across the sofa to rummage through one of the boxes she’d taken down from upstairs. One by one he pulled her carefully packed ornaments out of the box and placed them on the coffee table as he talked. “Making us a family was a hard job for my mom. But she did it. I know it’s stupid, but I sort of felt a little left out when Mom got remarried. But I th
ink Dad knew that.”

  “What changed things?”

  “Sailing,” he said, a smile splitting his face. “Have you ever gone?”

  Daria shook her head.

  “Ah, that’s too bad. You really should sometime. There’s nothing like catching the wind and flying with it.”

  He stopped what he was doing only for a brief moment. His hands went up in the air as if he was mimicking his words and he was flying. Then he went back to his task.

  “I remember one day a few months after we moved to the new house I was sitting in my new room with all this space, feeling pretty pitiful because I didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood yet. I heard my stepdad pull into the driveway towing a small dinghy. Nothing special. Just an eleven-footer. They’d just bought the house and it was all he could afford. I’ll never forget the look on his face though. It was if he’d just bought the Queen Elizabeth II.

  “Mom was pretty ticked off he’d spent the money on the boat since she’d been eyeing some new furniture. Judy couldn’t have cared less about taking a sail, but me, I just about jumped on the back of that thing. I would have ridden all the way to the boat ramp sitting in the back of the trailer if I could have.”

  Kevin laughed at the memory. “It was the first time me and my stepdad ever spent any real time together. Before that I was mostly afraid of him. He yelled a lot, had a short fuse where kids were concerned. He didn’t have any kids of his own and then in one fell swoop, he got two.”

  “It must have frightened you when he yelled.”

  “A little at first. But I quickly learned how much he cared about us. He taught me a lot, mostly about God and faith.”

  She paused in her efforts to pull the lights free. “Your mom wasn’t a Christian when they got married?”

  “Not when they first met. Dad used to say that Mom was looking for something and needed direction. He just pointed her in the direction of the Lord. By the time they got married she’d become a Christian. It took a little longer for me though. I credit my stepdad for bringing me to the Lord at a time in my life when most kids think they know everything and need no one.”

  “Aside from weddings and funerals, I’ve never been to church. I wouldn’t know what to expect. My parents never talked about God and faith.”

  Kevin glanced at Daria then. She sensed there was something he was about to say and then didn’t. The silence that dragged between them was unsettling.

  Noticing she was still struggling with that string of lights, he got up from the sofa and said, “Give me those things. You’re making a mess of them.”

  “Gee, thanks. I thought I was doing okay.”

  She handed him the tangled mess she’d been working on and turned her attention to the box of ornaments. He’d already emptied one box on the table, so she opened the package of hooks and started connecting them to the ornaments.

  “Do these work?” Kevin asked, finally getting them free.

  “Last time I used them they did.”

  “How are your electrical outlets?”

  “You’re not going to get zapped when you plug them in, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Good.”

  With all the hooks connected to her ornaments, she went back to work on the lights as Kevin plugged the string into an extension cord.

  “Do you mind my asking what you were praying about?” Seeing the surprised look on Kevin’s face made her heart drop. “I just…when I walked in I heard you. I’m sorry. Is that something I shouldn’t ask?”

  His lips lifted into a slow smile. “You can ask me anything you want. I tell you what, though, why don’t you come with me to church this Sunday? I think you’d really like the pastor. And maybe he can help answer some of those questions you have spinning in your head.”

  Did she want to go? She really didn’t know what to expect. It had never been that she’d rejected the idea of God and faith. She’d just never taken a step toward getting to know more. Like Kevin’s mother, maybe all she needed was direction.

  “I don’t know.”

  Kevin’s eyes were warm when he looked at her. “It takes a first step to let God in. Just a step.”

  “Can I get back to you on that?”

  “Sure.”

  Kevin reached behind the Christmas tree and plugged the extension cord into the wall. The lights immediately started to glow and twinkle. As she admired how they reflected in the window, doubling the glow, a movement outside caught Daria’s attention. She took a quick step back, dropping her string of lights to the floor. The noise it made startled Kevin, who moved away from the window just in time before a large object flew through the glass and into the room.

  Kevin grabbed her and instinctively pulled her away from the window. “Stay down,” he ordered.

  Peering out the window, he added, “Did you see who it was?”

  Blood pumped through her and as she leaned to pick up the string of lights she’d dropped, her hands shook. “That’s just it. I didn’t see anything. It was a shadow. I thought I saw something moving outside. And then something came at the window and I reacted.”

  Kevin had already shrugged into his jacket and was headed toward the door. She followed him and placed her hand on his arm. “No, don’t go.”

  “Why?”

  He’d already changed from the carefree friend who’d been stringing her Christmas-tree lights, to the police officer who was there to protect her.

  “I…just want you to stay.”

  He looked at her for a brief moment. “Stay away from the windows and don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back.”

  The front door opened and brought a gust of cold air into the foyer and then closed again, leaving her alone. Ignoring his request, she peered through the gaping hole in her window and watched Kevin walk around the snow-filled front yard.

  The brick that had made the hole was now lying on the floor next to the coffee table. It was filled with snow and dirt, as if someone had dug it up from her front yard.

  She couldn’t sit still. She needed to do something. So she went to the kitchen and grabbed the broom and dustpan from the cabinet. She swept the floor, careful not to disturb the brick in case there was a way to get evidence off it. She didn’t see any writing on the outside.

  As she dropped the shards of glass into the garbage can in the kitchen, she decided she’d seen too many movies. It was probably the same kids who’d left that bird on her door coming back to get another thrill. They probably saw her and Kevin in the window and thought they’d get a good laugh for themselves.

  It was expected to snow most of the night, leaving her with another mess to clean up in the morning in the way of snowfall. And if she was going to get to work on time, Daria was going to have to get up early anyway to shovel the driveway. It was nearly eleven o’clock already and chances were she wouldn’t finish putting the tree together before it was time to turn in for the evening, even with her meager Christmas decorations.

  Cold air was gusting through the window as she made an attempt at putting the lights on the tree while she waited for Kevin. But her nerves were shot. Someone had thrown a brick through her front window and left an angry hole in its place.

  Daria finished stringing the last strand of lights and checked out the window again, wrapping her arms around herself to keep from shivering. She had a scrap piece of plywood in the basement to cover the hole, but it was going to be an ugly reminder of what had just happened.

  She quickly ran to the basement to retrieve the plywood and then brought it to the living room. When she looked outside again she couldn’t see Kevin out front.

  The door opened and closed, jarring her.

  “So?”

  “There’s so much snow that it’s hard to see, but there are definitely tracks in the snow out front. I think they pulled a brick from your walkway to do the honors.”

  She pointed to the brick that still lay on the floor. “I figured as much. I brought up a piece of plywood to cover the hole.”


  Kevin was still standing by the doorway. “I’ll help you get that plywood up on the window.”

  She waved him off and took a step toward him. “Nah, I can do it. I’ve nailed everything else into this house. What’s one more board.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Will you be okay tonight?”

  He was acting strange, not at all like he’d been earlier.

  “You’re here,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  Their gazes locked for a short moment. Daria wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew the look of a man who was interested in more than just a casual way. She had to admit, the lines had somewhat blurred between them.

  She watched the rise and fall of Kevin’s chest beneath his jacket, saw his lips part ever so slightly as he took another step toward her. He was going to kiss her. She was sure of it.

  But when he bent his head and she lifted her face to him, he surprised her yet again by kissing her on the forehead.

  “Thank you for dinner. It was really good,” he said quietly. “Good night, Daria.”

  Her eyes widened. “You mean you’re leaving? Just like that?”

  “Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’m going to hang on to that blanket you gave me last night. It did a lot to help ward off the cold. It made last night bearable. I’m going to pull my SUV into your driveway, too, so the snowplows can get down the street easier, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. But I thought you wanted to talk.”

  Kevin already had his hand on the doorknob. “I did. But it’s been a long day and I want to give Ski a call to see if your ex has settled in for the night. As soon as I know that, I’ll feel better and maybe get a little more sleep in the car.”

  The door was half-open when she blurted out, “Stay the night in here. I…mean, I’d feel safer with you in here than outside. I know it sounds strange. I’ve been living alone here for six months. But…there’s no reason to sleep in the car when I have a perfectly good sofa right in the living room. It’s so cold outside. Surely there’s nothing improper about you staying on the sofa. Unless you’re afraid of another brick coming through my window.”