Deflated, Ricky sighed. “Okay. C’mon, Mama,” he urged impatiently. “Before someone else buys our tree!”
Cris had a feeling that it was probably useless to point out to her son that the lot was still empty and most people usually bought their trees closer to Christmas. Logic was not about to curb her son’s eagerness or his impatience.
So she took his hand in hers, saying, “Well, we can’t have that, can we?” and together with Shane they went in search of the man operating the lot.
“Hey, mister, we found our tree!” Ricky announced to the lot manager, whose ID tag on his chest proclaimed his name to be Howard.
“You did?” Howard asked with a toothy grin. “Good for you. Which one is it?”
“The big one!” Ricky declared.
“We’ll show you,” Cris interjected, knowing that given her son’s height, Ricky’s description applied to practically any of the trees.
“Lead the way,” Howard stated, gesturing in the general direction they’d come from.
With Ricky straining against the hold his mother had on his hand, the boy led them to the Christmas tree he’d fallen in love with.
“That’s a beauty, all right,” Howard proclaimed expansively.
Cris had a feeling that had they pointed to a scrawny twiglet, Howard would have said the same thing with the same amount of enthusiasm. However, the man was likable, so she didn’t feel he was just trying to snow them.
Rather than speaking to either adult, Howard looked down at Ricky. “This the one you want to take home with you?”
Solely by Ricky’s expression, he had his answer long before the boy cried, “Yes!”
Howard then turned to Shane and asked, “You folks sure you’ve got enough room for this in your house? These trees look a little smaller outdoors than they really are.”
“Actually, it’s for the main room at an inn,” Shane explained.
The information aroused Howard’s interest. “Oh? Which one?” he wanted to know.
“Ladera-by-the-Sea,” Cris said, studying his expression, wondering if he was genuinely interested or was just saying whatever came to mind to appear even friendlier than he already did.
Howard smiled, nodding. “I’m familiar with it,” he told them. “I drive past it on my way to work. Nice place,” he added amicably. “So do you two own it or just run it?”
“My grandpa owns it,” Ricky spoke up, appearing very proud of the fact.
“Pretty bright boy you have there,” Howard commented, turning to Shane.
“Thanks, but I can’t take any credit for him,” Shane answered. “He’s her son. I’m just the hired muscle who’s driving back the tree.”
Cris looked at Shane, her expression saying he was a little more than that.
“Oh.” Howard laughed, his ruddy complexion turning just a little ruddier at his error. “Sorry, didn’t mean no harm by what I just said. Natural enough a mistake to make,” he told them. “You three act like a family, so I just thought—”
Blushing, Cris cut in, “Do you think there would be any trouble taking this tree on the back of his truck?” she asked.
“Tell you what, let’s go have us a look-see,” Howard offered, glad for the shift in topics.
Shane led the lot manager over to where he had parked his truck.
They were still some distance away when Howard began to nod. “Looks fine to me,” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem getting that tree up on your truck. One word of advice, though. If I were you, I’d drive real slow. Otherwise, either the tree—or your truck—is gonna wind up being airborne.”
“Why?” Ricky asked, his eyes huge at the prospect of a flying truck.
“Air gets between the truck and your tree,” Howard answered. “Even at regular speed it’s gonna start lifting you up. Going slow is your only option.”
Ricky turned toward Shane, excitement written all over his face. “Can we do that? Can we see if your truck flies?”
“Not this time,” Shane said. “We want to get the tree to the inn, not to Oz. Right?”
“Right,” Ricky agreed with a quick nod. Only Cris caught her son’s slightly wistful expression before it vanished.
“So should I write this up?” Howard asked, dutifully turning toward Cris for an answer.
Cris nodded. “Please,” she urged. Ricky fairly jumped up and down as they went back to Howard’s register to finalize the transaction.
Once the tree was purchased, Shane and the lot manager began the somewhat awkward task of preparing the tree for transport. The task went a great deal faster than Cris had anticipated, despite Ricky’s help.
The tree, which measured closer to eleven feet than ten, was expertly bound and carefully tied to the truck, its trunk secured to the top of the truck’s cab and the rest of the tree attached to the vehicle’s body.
The process, from start to finish, took close to an hour. But by the end of it, the tree gave every indication that only a capricious twister could separate the tree from its mode of transport.
“Now remember, you drive real slow, like you’re trying to maneuver that truck of yours on eggshells without breaking them,” Howard told them, leaning in and addressing his words to Shane, “and you should do just fine.”
“Eggshells,” Shane repeated, banking his amusement. He nodded. “Got it.”
Howard stepped away from the truck. Once the man was clear of his vehicle, Shane started it up and made his way out of the lot at what felt like an inch at a time.
“Good thing this lot isn’t all that far from the inn,” Shane commented, seriously thinking that he could walk at a faster pace than he was driving. “Otherwise, we’d get there in the middle of next Tuesday,” he cracked. And then he smiled to himself.
“What’s so funny?” Cris asked, curious.
“I’ve never driven this slowly before, not even when I was learning how to drive.” He shook his head as he struggled to hold back laughter. “If I was going any slower, I’d be going backwards.”
“Can we go backwards?” Ricky piped up, tickled by the idea.
Rather than tell the boy no, Shane said, “Maybe next time.”
The answer seemed to placate Ricky.
That it did was not lost on Cris. “You’ve really got a way with kids,” she told Shane.
Shane took the compliment in stride, saying, “I should.”
“Why’s that?” she asked. Was Shane good with kids because he had one of his own whom he hadn’t mentioned? Was there a child out there with his face? Had he deliberately not told her about being a father? But why would he keep that secret from her?
His simple answer caught her off guard. “Because I was one myself.”
“Most everyone was,” she pointed out. “And few of us act accordingly.”
That was because most adults practiced amnesia, he thought, forgetting all about the path that had brought them to their present station in life.
“Yeah, well, I remember what it was like. Distinctly. And I use that,” he added. “Most people can’t remember what they had for breakfast, much less what it felt like to be a kid and have their opinion dismissed out of hand because they’re young.” Since he was driving slowly enough to be outpaced by a snail with a limp, he spared Cris a look as he continued. “I’ve got a great sense of empathy. It lets me put myself in most everyone else’s shoes.”
“Doesn’t that pinch?” Ricky wanted to know.
“Nope,” he replied to the boy as if his question had received serious consideration. Ricky ate up the respect.
“Even women?” she queried, wondering just how far Shane was willing to carry this. The man was definitely beginning to sound too good to be true—and she knew that when things were too good to be true—they usually weren’t.
“My
rule applies to people, not gender,” he answered. “Far as I know, women are people just like men.”
“Not just like men,” she emphasized. “But we definitely are people,” she said and laughed, agreeing with his basic theory.
Silence accompanied them for a couple of minutes. Now would be the best time to clear the air, Shane decided. Turning toward Cris, he said, “I hope you didn’t get too upset.”
She hadn’t gotten upset at all, nor was there any reason to, as far as she could see. “Over what?” she finally had to ask.
The topic made him feel antsy. “Over that lot manager, Howard, thinking we were a married couple.”
Cris shook her head in response to his statement, then said, “It didn’t bother me.”
Actually, it did. But not because she was offended by the mistake. What bothered her was how much being mistaken for a married couple had actually pleased her.
She wasn’t supposed to feel that way about someone else when Mike couldn’t feel anything at all anymore, she silently lectured herself. Alex’s lecture about regaining complete control over her life notwithstanding, Cris felt bad that she was attracted—strongly attracted—to another man.
She had no time for that, no place in her life for that, she insisted. Raising Ricky and working at her father’s inn was all she had time for, nothing more.
Certainly not a man, no matter how nice he seemed or how much her son liked him.
So why was she trying to justify her feelings to herself?
“Good, I wouldn’t want you to be offended,” Shane was saying.
“That never even crossed my mind,” she said, then decided that they needed a change in topic before Shane could discern the truth—that she liked that they looked like a family to other people.
Liked it so much that for a few seconds back there, her imagination had created lovely scenarios that truly warmed her heart and made her smile.
Cris deliberately looked at her watch. “How much longer do you think it’ll take us to get back to the inn?”
“Why? Getting impatient with the slow pace?” he couldn’t resist asking. He had to admit that it felt as though they weren’t even moving at all.
“It’s not that.”
And it wasn’t. There was precious little she enjoyed more than being in the cab of Shane’s truck with him behind the wheel and her son sitting in back.
But right now something else was bothering her. “I should be getting ready to serve dinner to the inn’s guests,” she told Shane.
“Why don’t you call and tell your father we’re on our way, albeit slowly, and ask him to have Jorge get started without you?”
“Right.”
How come she hadn’t she thought of that, she chided herself. It was as obvious as the nose on her face.
Because, Cris was forced to admit, being in this situation with Shane and Ricky seemed to have done away with a large portion of her brain. In Shane’s company, she’d ceased being the practical, logical creature she’d been brought up to be and became a woman who suddenly relished living in the moment. Enjoying the moment and trusting the rest of the day to take care of itself.
Get a grip! Cris ordered herself.
She pulled out her cell phone, pressed the numbers on the keypad and called her father at the inn.
Alex answered the landline, the only number she had for her father at the inn. Old-fashioned almost to a fault, her father didn’t own a cell phone. He considered it a frivolous indulgence, although he thought nothing of calling her and her sisters on their cells.
That was her next goal, she decided. Get her father a cell phone and teach him how to use it.
“Ladera-by-the-Sea,” Alex’s melodious voice stated. “How may I help you?”
“Alex, it’s Cris,” Cris began. “Tell Dad that we found a tree—”
“I found the tree, Aunt Alex!” Ricky called out loudly so his aunt could hear.
“It’s almost eleven feet tall,” Cris continued. “And we’re on our way home with it, but because it’s so big and we have to drive slowly, it might take us a while to get there. Could you have someone ask Jorge to stay and start dinner for the guests? I’ll get there as soon as humanly possible,” she added.
“Jorge—dinner—right. Shouldn’t be a problem,” Alex said, “if I can catch him before he leaves. He just punched out a couple of minutes ago. Anything wrong on your end?” she asked as an afterthought.
“No, but if we drive fast, the wind might catch the tree and we just might end up flying off with the tree.”
“Not a pretty image, although I’m sure Ricky would love it,” Alex said with a laugh. “Let me see if I can catch Jorge before he pulls out of the parking lot.”
The next minute Alex was gone, the hum of a dial tone replacing her voice.
As she closed her cell phone, Cris mentally crossed her fingers. If Alex didn’t catch Jorge before he left, she herself would be facing a lot of hungry, less-than-happy guests of the inn.
As if reading her mind, Shane assured her, “Don’t worry, we’ll be there sooner than you think.”
She smiled at him, once again grateful for his words of encouragement.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“STOP FIDGETING, RICKY,” Cris said as she tried to undo the seat belts tethering him to his car seat. “I can’t get these straps to open if you keep wriggling like that.”
“Hurry, Mama, hurry,” Ricky urged, his feet swinging impatiently as he watched the front door of the inn. “I wanna tell Grandpa we got the Christmas tree!”
“I have a feeling he probably already knows,” Cris responded, working another strap free.
“But what he doesn’t know is how perfect the tree you picked out is,” Shane told the boy, bringing Ricky’s wide grin back with that small compliment.
“He’s really gonna be surprised, huh?” Ricky asked eagerly, his eyes dancing with excitement and anticipation.
“You bet he is,” Shane agreed with the same measure of enthusiasm.
Shane really had the inside track on being on the same wavelength as her son, Cris thought. She felt bad that Shane had never had the chance to be a father to his unborn child. He would have been fantastic—and his baby would have been one lucky little boy.
“There, you’re free,” Cris announced, lifting the boy out of the seat and placing him on the ground.
Ricky’s feet hardly seemed to touch the concrete before he took off, running up the front steps.
“Grandpa, Grandpa, come quick! Come see our beau-ti-ful Christmas tree,” he called as he yanked open the front door and charged into the inn.
“Be careful not to run into anyone,” Cris called after her son, then turned to look at Shane. “Boy, if I could just tap into that energy for a day,” Cris said wistfully.
“You’re not exactly a slouch in the energy department from where I stand,” Shane told her.
“Smoke and mirrors,” she confided with a self-deprecating laugh. “Beneath is a very, very exhausted woman.”
“Well, you could have fooled me,” Shane replied with an easy smile.
Rousing himself, he turned his attention to the mute passenger that had come to the inn with them. He studied the Christmas tree in silence for a long moment, as if trying to decide the best way to approach the task ahead of him: getting the tree off the roof of his truck as well as the long bed, and up the steps, into the inn’s main room.
Cris watched him regard the tree. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to know what was going on in his mind. “You’ll need help, you know,” Cris told him.
The grin curving his mouth was lopsided. “Don’t think I can handle a ten-foot tree by myself?” he asked.
She couldn’t tell if he was being serious, but she knew what her honest answer had to be. “No. And
it’s closer to eleven feet tree than ten feet.”
When he didn’t respond immediately, she thought she’d insulted him, damaged his ego, but then Shane nodded.
“Smart lady,” he pronounced. “Got any suggestions? I can’t ask your father to help.”
She said the first thing that came to mind. “I can pitch in.”
He frowned. She couldn’t be serious, could she? “No, you can’t.”
“Because I’m a girl?” she asked. She wouldn’t have thought him guilty of that sort of prejudice, but that just proved she didn’t know anyone as well as she thought she did.
“No,” he replied, “because you’re petite and delicate.”
She looked surprised at his assessment. Obviously the man was paying closer attention to her than she figured. The thought warmed her. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
His eyes held hers for a long moment. “Oh, I noticed all right.”
The next moment, they were no longer alone. Ricky had returned not only with his grandfather in tow, but two of his aunts and Wyatt, as well.
“See?” Ricky gestured at the tree proudly. “Isn’t it beau-ti-ful?” he asked, expecting a chorus of agreement from the people he loved.
“Well, it certainly is big,” Alex allowed. “But it’s a little hard to tell if it’s beautiful when it’s tied up like that.”
“First step is to get that baby down,” Wyatt said, coming forward. “We’ll need a knife to cut it free from the roof,” he noted, surveying the way the tree had been tied.
“One knife coming up,” Stevi volunteered, going back into the inn.
She returned in a few minutes, holding a long knife aloft. “Okay, let’s get to it.”
“Where did you get that knife?” Cris asked suspiciously.
“From my own personal knife collection,” Stevi cracked. “What do you mean, where did I get it? From the kitchen, of course. Where else would I get a knife this big? Why? Do you have a special knife for cutting cords I don’t know about?”
After taking the ten-inch knife from her sister, Cris examined it. “Just making sure it’s not part of my boning set.” It wasn’t. “They’re expensive,” she explained.
[Ladera by the Sea 01] - A Wedding for Christmas Page 13
