Have Yourself a Crazy Little Christmas

by Megan Crane

  And sure, he’d thought she was a little too pretty when she was living in his house as a seventeen- and eighteen-year-old. It had made everything that much more impossible and messy, back then.

  There was no reason to make things even crazier now, he told himself soberly. This Christmas was going to be challenging enough, since his father had never been one to listen to reason when it diverged from his intentions. Frederick Taylor was stubborn as a goat when he wanted to be—a trait Vaughn couldn’t deny he’d inherited himself. But Vaughn knew better than to let himself get tied in knots by Melody Grey or her equally problematic daughter.

  And yet, for a moment there in the back seat of that taxi, he couldn’t seem to come up with a single decent reason to keep his hands to himself.

  Still. He managed to do it anyway.

  Barely.

  “I don’t think you want our parents together any more than I do,” he managed to say, going for the voice of reason.

  “I want my mother to be happy,” Devyn replied, possibly from between her teeth. “Whatever that looks like.”

  “I feel pretty confident it’s not going to look like my father. Cooler heads need to prevail here and let’s face it—that’s certainly not going to be your mother.”

  He made a little noise and shouldn’t have.

  “Careful.” Devyn eyed him, and shook her head. “There’s only one person in this car who can say stuff about my mom, and it’s definitely not you.”

  “I like your mother,” Vaughn said, and there was too much of that heat, that hunger, in his voice. It made him sit too close. It made him forget all the terrific reasons why he shouldn’t get this close to this woman. “That doesn’t mean I want her as a stepmom. Or you as a stepsister.”

  Devyn’s blue eyes flashed with a lightning Vaughn could feel all over.

  “Now you’re just hurting my feelings,” she replied, but there was that same kick of electricity in her voice, and he knew he hadn’t hurt her at all.

  That whatever this was—and he had a few very distinct ideas he refused to entertain—it wasn’t hurt—

  But Vaughn would never know what he might have said to that. Or worse, done. Because the taxi pulled up in front of his hotel in downtown Jackson, and suddenly there was light and a doorman at this first stop on their little itinerary. Because Devyn had to go and stay in her mom’s house, a little bit outside of town, closer to the actual ski resort.

  “Well,” Devyn said stiffly, and her gaze was focused just to the right of his face, as if she didn’t dare catch his gaze. As if she was feeling the same way he was, then. It felt like they’d both woken up from some strange dream. Or had been caught doing something a bit more questionable than getting a ride from the airport together. “It was nice to see you, Vaughn. Whatever it is you do now.”

  “Oh, I bum around Nashville with a guitar and a dream,” Vaughn said, grinning at her, because he was pretty sure that was her worst nightmare. “Couch surfing and hustling. Living day to day, you know.”

  “As long as you’re happy,” Devyn said, with admirable calm, Vaughn thought, when he knew she likely viewed ‘living day to day’ with sheer horror. “That’s all that matters, right?”

  And the crazy thing was, he wanted to tell her who he was. What he really did. He wanted to impress her. He wanted to knock that polite smile off her face. He’d spent years downplaying what he did to keep the parasites at bay, but he wanted this woman to look at him with stars in her eyes the way so many others did. He wanted to wow her.

  There was no pretending he didn’t know why, Vaughn thought as he watched the taxi take her off into the darkness.

  Or that it wasn’t only his father who had something to lose this Christmas.

  Chapter Three

  Devyn was in her mother’s house—a rambling western fantasy that modeled itself on a daydream of a log cabin that no one who’d ever seen an actual log cabin would consider similar in any way aside from all the wood—for all of five seconds before she wanted to make a break for it.

  But this was Christmas. Barely a week before Christmas, in fact, and that meant it was very unlikely that she would find a room anywhere in a well-known resort ski town like Jackson.

  Or even that flight out she kept fantasizing about.

  “Mom,” she said. Again. In the voice she used to cut through office nonsense and/or have those discussions no one ever wanted to have about unpopular things like budgets. “I don’t understand what the problem is.”

  She had walked into whatever this was. She’d waved the taxi driver away when he’d tried to help her with her bag and had walked right in to find her mother mid-tantrum, cursing the heavens. Or maybe just cursing, standing there in the middle of her open-plan living room and addressing the huge, overly decorated Christmas tree that took over the great window that would otherwise show the twinkling lights of Jackson in one direction, down across the winding Snake River, and the glorious sweep of the Tetons in another.

  Melody looked the way she always did. Young and bright, though she liked to complain she was neither. She might have been moments away from a landmark birthday, but she certainly didn’t look it. Her hair was long and blonde, and she liked to claim that she still hadn’t found a single gray hair—something no one but her hairdresser could possibly know for sure.

  Of course, no sane person would dare ask, either.

  “I don’t think it’s too much to ask that there be a sleigh ride, Devyn,” Melody replied, at last, as if Devyn was the one being unreasonable.

  It had been less than two minutes and Devyn already felt as if she really was being irrational and insane, a normal reaction to her mother’s cloud of drama. Or maybe she’d just left what passed for her equanimity at that hotel downtown with Vaughn—but she wasn’t thinking about that. Or him.

  “A sleigh ride,” she repeated carefully, on the off chance sounding out the words could make this all make sense.

  “A real, honest to goodness sleigh ride,” her mother said, nodding as if they were agreeing. “Not just another visit to the elk refuge. I’ve done that a million times.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve ever done it.”

  A trip to the elk refuge outside of town was an experience, to be sure, but it involved sitting quietly and listening to lectures about the elk herd and various conservation and study initiatives, none of which Devyn could imagine her mother caring about in any way.

  Melody ignored her comment. “I want to feel like I’m living in a Christmas carol,” she said. “Sleigh bells ring, listening to the bells, whatever it is”

  “I know the songs, Mom.”

  Devyn supposed she should have been happy that her mother wasn’t singing.

  “It’s supposed to be jingle all the way,” Melody retorted. “Elks don’t jingle, Devyn. Everybody knows that.”

  It was moments like this that Devyn fought really hard to remind herself that she ought to treasure her mother’s childlike wonder at things like Christmas, because it was a rarity in this world—and something she was likely to miss one day.

  Instead of gripping her cell phone in one hand, desperate to start looking up hotel rooms. Somewhere warm and tropical and far away from Christmas carol madness.

  “It’s really nice to see you too, Mom.”

  She watched the tantrum ease out of her mother, the way it always did. Melody was a woman of storms. They would kick up, take over, and then clear out as if they’d never been. Melody was bright like her name, made to dance and smile and flit from place to place, and sometimes that flitting came with the odd tornado.

  Things Melody was not made for included: parenting, emotional support in any dependable sense of the term, or much in the way of useful advice. Unless that advice was on how to indulge in body paint like a hippie chick well into middle age, and how best to dance naked beneath a harvest moon, to pick two of the topics Melody had been determined to discuss at Thanksgiving this year.

  There were probably words for Melody�
��s behavior over the years, many starting with various takes on selfish, but Devyn thought that was missing the point. Her mother wasn’t going to change. Either she didn’t want to or she couldn’t, but it didn’t much matter which. Melody was Melody, and if Devyn wanted her mother in her life, this was the deal.

  She reminded herself—a little forcefully—that she did, in fact, want her mother in her life.

  Today Melody was dressed like some kind of western daydream. Turquoise necklaces, each one bigger and more dramatic than the next. Showy clothes with embroidery thrown over a pair of faded jeans and cowboy boots Devyn could tell at a glance cost well over five hundred dollars and weren’t to be worn in snow, mud, rain, dirt, or really out of the house at all.

  Devyn might have gotten an accountant’s degree, but she’d long since given up trying to track her mother’s mysterious sources of income. The truth was, the less she knew about her mother’s version of a barter economy, the better.

  “My sweet baby girl,” Melody said, all smiles. “Welcome home.”

  She moved across the living room floor and enveloped Devyn in a hug. And she smelled the way she always did. Vanilla and spice, like some kind of chai. That was Melody. And Melody was still and forever Devyn’s mother, as she’d tried to tell Vaughn in the taxi. Devyn might be all grown up and over everything, but she still closed her eyes when her mother hugged her, and felt it shift something deep inside of her.

  So much so that she didn’t have it in her to point out, for the hundredth time, that this house in Jackson Hole was not her home and never had been. The last time she’d lived with her mother they’d all been with Frederick and Vaughn Taylor in a big old brick house in Huntsville, Alabama.

  “So there’s no sleigh ride?” she asked when Melody released her from a long hug that made Devyn feel better despite herself. Carefully, because she didn’t really want to kick-start the tantrum all over again. “Was that one of the planned activities?”

  But the storm had passed. Melody only waved a languid hand.

  “I just thought it would be fun. But it’s silly. Not necessary at all.” She smiled, as wide and as bright as all the twinkling lights on her Christmas tree. “Not like having you here. That’s nonnegotiable, of course. I thought your sister would be here too, but I suppose you can’t have everything you want all at once.”

  There was a time when statements like that could veer quickly into self-pity and a different sort of storm, so Devyn found herself defending her sister when really, she kind of wanted to kill her.

  “She said she’d be here this weekend,” she assured her mother. Maybe if she acted like that had always been the plan, Melody would simply believe it. The same way she believed in magic, when it suited her, and the kind of temporary deafness that allowed her to block out Grandma’s nastier comments.

  “I suppose she can’t get away,” Melody mused. “She never can. Busy busy busy, that one. Poor Sydney. Nobody would want to stay at work at this time of year if they didn’t have to.”

  As her mother padded across the room toward the kitchen and set about making her famous Irish coffees, Devyn bit back all the usual family grievances that bubbled up inside her. That Melody wouldn’t know what people who worked might like or not like at any time of year. That Devyn, too, was busy busy busy, not that anyone was ever impressed with the things she did to make a living. That her managing to be here wasn’t because her life was less busy or important, but because she was capable of making a plan and sticking to it. That Sydney always flaked on things at the last minute—and had long before she could hide behind her classified job at the Pentagon—while Devyn, dependable Devyn, always came through.

  And yet Melody excused Sydney in a way Devyn knew perfectly well her mother would never excuse her had she not showed up, because the rules were always different for Sydney.

  But she’d been in her mother’s presence for all of five minutes. If that.

  She could suck it up and manage, somehow, not to act like a thirteen-year-old for five minutes, surely. Maybe even an entire day. Or what was the point of pretending she was an adult at all?

  The doorbell rang as Devyn was still standing there, trying to decide if she should chug a few Irish coffees to fling herself into a festive mood, or maybe claim she needed to find a guest room to lie down in for a while. To recover from her flight, or from Vaughn Taylor, or any number of other things that she thought required a little bit of a reset.

  “Will you get that, sweetheart?” Melody trilled from the kitchen.

  Devyn shoved her phone into the back pocket of her jeans, because there was no point pretending she was really going to call Sydney and yell at her. First, because Sydney wouldn’t answer her phone. And second, because even if she did, she’d just laugh at Devyn, making it impossible to stay as angry as she’d like. It was her sister’s superpower.

  And Devyn decided that she’d much prefer to stay mad tonight.

  She retraced her steps to the giant front door, stretching some ten feet up. Outside, Melody had decorated the required western antlers with Christmas lights, which lit up her entryway and made it shine.

  It was the incongruous lit-up antlers that Devyn couldn’t seem to get out of her head when she swung open the door and saw the man standing there with that light shining down while snow flurries danced lazily around him.

  He was big. Very big, and solid in a way that whispered a very particular threat at a glance. He usually wore bandannas on his head, or he did in Devyn’s memory, but tonight she could see all of his dark black hair, only a little shot through with white around the edges. He had a beard that made him look even more dangerous, and he wore a hoodie beneath his thick leather jacket, along with jeans and steel-toed boots.

  Devyn blinked. “Dad?”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, girl,” her father said in his gravelly way. There was something like amusement in his blue eyes, but not the faintest hint of it anywhere else on his tough, hard face. “I don’t think I died. Yet.”

  Devyn shook her head. “I’m just not used to seeing you...”

  Her father let out a bark of laughter, deep and rowdy, just like him. “Not on a Harley? Maybe you noticed it was snowing outside. It’s not exactly motorcycle weather.”

  Devyn stepped aside and let her father in, because it wasn’t as if she had a different option, but her head was spinning. Derrick Voss was an intimidating man. Half of that was by design, she’d always thought, but it turned out he didn’t need the rumble of his Harley and the backing of all his equally disreputable biker buddies. He was intimidating just standing there, wearing a lot of black, as was his custom—though he wasn’t wearing the usual leather cut that proclaimed his club association to all and sundry.

  He shrugged out of his leather jacket in the front hall, then unzipped his hoodie, too, his canny gaze on Devyn.

  “You got something to say?” he asked, mildly enough. But her father wasn’t a mild man. And he had a whole thing about disrespect. Devyn knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would die before he hurt her. But that didn’t mean he’d spare her his temper. Or tolerate it if she told him exactly how weird it was that he was standing here in this western fantasyland in Wyoming rather than back where he belonged, in a much warmer and less snowy mountain town in California, where he was king. “Or are you going to give your father a hug?”

  She hugged him, hard, remembering when it felt as if a hug from her tough, dangerous father could solve any problem she might have. If she was honest, it still felt that way, especially when he lifted her off her feet like she was still a little girl. Even here in her mother’s house, where she’d never imagined she’d see him. In point of fact, she’d stopped daydreaming about ever seeing them in the same room again long before she’d reached her tenth birthday.

  “I can’t see your tattoos,” she told him when he set her back on her feet again. “It’s weirding me out.”

  “They’re still there, kid. I didn’t sand them off.” />
  “I didn’t expect you until closer to Christmas. I thought it would take you forever to drive over the mountains.”

  That gleam in his gaze intensified, which she knew was him laughing at her. “Why would I drive over the Rocky Mountains at this time of year? Do I look suicidal?”

  Devyn stared at her father’s expression of stone. “Well. I mean.”

  “I flew on a regular airplane like a normal person,” her father said, and she couldn’t tell if that was laughter or offense in his voice. “You need to watch a little less Sons of Anarchy.”

  “Derrick,” Melody said, sounding fluttery, from behind Devyn.

  “Melody.”

  And there was something about the way her father said her mother’s name, lazily and with a whole lot of other things she refused to identify, that was nothing short of horrifying.

  But it was like Devyn was trapped in her own body. Her mother handed her and her father a mug of Irish coffee each, and then they were all sitting in Melody’s living room off the kitchen, which looked like something lifted directly from the pages of a western home-style magazine. Pendleton blankets tossed here and there on leather couches. Random skulls of dead creatures mounted artistically above the looming fireplace. The dramatic Christmas tree, blazing with lights and forced cheer.

  Devyn had always wondered what it would be like to sit with her parents, anywhere, and now she knew. It tasted like dark, rich coffee shot through with whiskey, bitter and strange and too hot against her tongue. It left her feeling raw.

  Her father, who she usually visited out in California in his very different world where his word was law, should have looked out of place here, but he didn’t. He lounged in the armchair between the two facing couches as if this was his house, his throne. And Devyn’s mother should have been flustered, surely—but if she was, she was hiding it with a lot of smiling and laughing and—