A Mommy for Christmas

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  Something seemed to be on his mind. Holly wondered if it had anything to do with his unexplained absence earlier that afternoon, his reason for getting Mrs. Ruley to babysit, without telling her. “A cherry Coke would be great.”

  He got two out of the machine and led her over to a table. He waited until they were settled opposite each other, then said, “I have something to tell you. And I’m not sure how you’re going to feel about it.”

  Chapter Seven

  THIS SOUNDS OMINOUS, HOLLY thought. Which was not a feeling she usually associated with her dealings with Travis. “Okay.” She tried not to jump to conclusions. “I’m listening.”

  His dark brown eyes met hers. “This afternoon, I had a meeting with Laura Tillman, the private detective who does all the background checks on potential employees for me.”

  Holly shrugged. “Okay.” She still didn’t see what this had to do with her. Or why Travis looked so concerned.

  His expression remained impassive. “I hired her to find out what she could about your ex-husband.”

  For a second, Holly thought she hadn’t heard right. She leaned closer, struggling to understand.

  “I wanted to know what’s behind his sudden interest in seeing your kids,” Travis explained brusquely.

  Holly stared at him in disbelief. His actions went counter to everything she thought she knew about him. “Without consulting me?” She couldn’t contain her hurt.

  Travis nodded halfheartedly. “I wasn’t sure you’d agree to it,” he said finally. He leaned toward her and flattened both hands on the tabletop in front of him. “Hell, why not be honest? I wasn’t sure I fully supported the decision.”

  That sounded like the man she knew. She hitched in a tremulous breath, aware this unfolding situation with her ex was going to force her to be stronger than she ever had been. “Then why did you go through with it?” she asked Travis.

  His lips twitched. “Because I had to know,” he said flatly.

  Now, unfortunately, so did Holly. “And?” she asked, her heart pounding.

  Briefly, Travis went over the facts the investigator had uncovered.

  “So you think Cliff might want to start seeing the kids in order to give Penelope Kensington the family she has always wished for?” Holly guessed.

  Travis tilted his head. “It would be one way for them to get what they want.”

  Holly shut her eyes, trying to reconcile the Cliff who had left her and the kids without a backward glance with the wannabe daddy Travis was describing.

  She opened her eyes. “No…that’s not it.”

  He lifted a brow. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know him.” Holly flashed back on Cliff’s refusal to even hold the twins in his arms more than once or twice. His feigned happiness when they were born, to his outright irritation when they woke him repeatedly with their crying at night. “I don’t know what he’s trying to achieve here,” Holly said finally. “But I know in my gut he is no more interested in being a father now than he ever was.”

  “Then why does he want to see the twins?” Travis persisted.

  Holding on to her composure with effort, Holly searched her mind for possibilities. Silence ticked out between them. “Maybe Cliff’s concerned about the way the custody arrangement looks to others,” she theorized eventually. “Or perhaps he’s trying to impress a boss who has kids, in order to move up another rung on the career ladder.” She paused for affect. “But whatever this is about, it’s not about Cliff genuinely wanting to step up and be a father to the boys.”

  “You seem certain.” It was Travis’s turn to be surprised.

  Holly sighed. Gulping back the anxiety rising up within her, she twined her fingers with his. “I’ve had a little over a week to think about it. And the message through Cliff’s attorney, saying he wanted to bring presents, has kept me considering his motivations off and on all weekend.” She’d put it out of her mind, only to start thinking about it again at some random time.

  “And?” Travis looked down at their clasped hands.

  Holly drew a deep, enervating breath. “I think, as much as it pains me to admit it, we’re going to have to wait and see—and try not to let any of this ruin our holiday in the meantime.”

  Travis let his gaze drift slowly over her before returning to her face, then leaned across the table toward her. “Has anyone ever told you that you are a remarkably resilient woman?” he murmured.

  Loving the way her hands felt in the comforting grasp of his, she smiled. “You have—at least a hundred times.”

  He grinned, pushed his chair away from the table, then shifted her out of her seat and onto his lap. Her arm immediately encircled his shoulders and neck as they got comfortable. Travis wrapped one arm about her back, the other around her waist. As their eyes met once again, he said, “That’s only because I admire you so much.”

  “And yet—” Holly absently traced the shoulder seam on his shirt, knowing they had to talk about this, too “—you didn’t feel comfortable enough to inform me what you wanted to do regarding the private investigator before you acted.”

  Travis clamped his lips together and remained unrepentant. “I didn’t want to upset you if there was no need, and there was a chance absolutely nothing would turn up.”

  Trying not to notice how masculine and capable he looked in a warehouse setting, Holly slid off his lap and meandered over to the row of vending machines. She stared indecisively at the array of granola bars, chips and cookies. “Did you tell anyone else what you were doing?”

  Travis stood, too, and sauntered closer. “Grady, Dan, Jack and Nate.”

  No surprise there. The five guys were not only business partners, they supported each other through thick and thin. Holly propped her hands on her hips. “I thought you and I had the kind of relationship where we could tell each other anything, too.”

  The corners of his lips curved upward. “We do.”

  “Then,” Holly asked bluntly, “what’s changed?”

  MY FEELINGS, TRAVIS THOUGHT, leaning against the vending machine. Without even thinking about it, I’ve started protecting you the way a man protects the woman he loves.

  But unable to tell Holly that without violating a very fundamental tenet of their relationship, which was to keep things close but casual, Travis focused on what he could say to her.

  “You and the boys have become such a big part of mine and the girls’ lives. I don’t want anything jeopardizing that,” he said gruffly. Especially not the louse of an ex-husband who didn’t have sense enough to appreciate you and his kids in the first place. “I love you all, Holly,” Travis repeated emphatically.

  Not, Holly noted sadly, “I love the boys and I’m in love with you.” But “I love all of you.”

  What had she expected? she wondered miserably. For Travis to suddenly burst into some song and dance about how he was falling for her, as quickly and unexpectedly as she was falling for him?

  Not very likely.

  Aware that her own emotions were fast spiraling out of control, Holly swallowed. Said the words she was pretty sure Travis needed to hear, instead of the truer ones brewing deep inside of her.

  “I love you and the girls, too, as friends and family.” She looked him straight in the eye. And I might be very, very close to falling in love with you.

  For both their sakes’, however, she didn’t tell him that.

  Best to leave things as they were.

  Travis went back to retrieve his soft drink. So did she. The silence between them felt awkward. His cell phone sounded an alert. He looked at the screen, picked up and read the text message.

  Wordlessly, he showed the screen on his phone to Holly.

  The SOS was from was Mrs. Ruley. At home, apparently all hell had broken loose during the cookie-decorating session, and she was calling for reinforcements, pronto.

  “Guess we better go,” Travis said.

  “ASAP,” Holly agreed.

  TRAVIS WAS NOT HALF AS r
elieved by the timely interruption as he should have been, because he felt things were left unsettled between the two of them.

  The fact of the matter was he’d been out of line, hiring a private investigator to do some behind-the-scenes sleuthing regarding her ex-husband. Holly had had every right to be furious with him for messing in her business that way, yet she’d been more curious than annoyed. She had calmly given him a chance to explain—which he had—and then accepted thoughtfully what he’d revealed.

  The right words had been said and peace had been restored…so why did he still feel so dissatisfied with the way their heart-to-heart talk had ended?

  As they drove home in companionable silence, Holly seemed okay outwardly, Travis noted. It was inwardly, he deduced finally, that concerned him. It was clear from the pleasant but deliberately inscrutable expression on her face that she now had her guard up where he was concerned.

  Travis supposed, on one level, he couldn’t blame her.

  He had taken her by surprise, going behind her back that way. He had stunned himself with his intimate involvement in what would normally have been someone else’s problem, demanding no more than a sympathetic ear or a word of advice from him, had it been any other friend.

  The thing was, Holly wasn’t just any other friend, he realized with growing clarity.

  She was more to him than that.

  Much, much more.

  “HE STARTED IT!” SOPHIE declared the moment Travis and Holly walked in the front door of his home.

  “No, I didn’t. She started it.” Tucker was just as adamant.

  “Actually,” Mrs. Ruley intervened, from her place at the bottom of the stairs where the time-out for all four children was taking place, “it was pretty much an all-inclusive free-for-all. Needless to say,” the nanny continued, eyeing the sulking, resentful expressions of all four children, “I couldn’t take my eyes off them for one second until you got here to take over.”

  “No problem,” Travis said. Exasperated by their behavior, which they clearly knew was wrong, he gazed at them sternly. “What do you have to say to Mrs. Ruley?”

  Silence.

  Travis arched a brow, as did Holly. “We’re waiting,” she said, backing him up the way he always backed her up in these challenging situations.

  Big sighs resulted. “We’re sorry,” Tucker growled, sounding anything but.

  “Try that again,” Holly ordered firmly with another reprimanding lift of her brow.

  “I’m sorry,” Tucker said sincerely.

  “Tristan?” she prompted.

  “I’m sorry, too.” He sounded contrite, but continued to scowl.

  “Sophie?” Travis commanded.

  The four-and-a-half-year-old’s lower lip shot out. “Fine,” she pouted cantankerously. “I’m sorry, too!”

  “That didn’t sound like a sincere apology,” he observed.

  Sophie lowered her eyes and said meekly, “I’m sorry.” She sounded truly apologetic this time.

  “Me, too. I’m sorry,” Mia said.

  A collective sigh of relief followed. None of the children liked getting into trouble, and they usually took pains to avoid it.

  Mrs. Ruley turned to Travis and Holly. “If you’ve got this handled…”

  The two of them exchanged glances and agreed. “We’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Travis said.

  With a commiserating sigh, the nanny grabbed her coat and purse and headed out to her car.

  The kids remained on their individual steps on the staircase. “Anyone want to tell me what this was about?” Travis asked, lounging against the wall.

  Holly waited on the other side of the stairs, her back to the curving end of the oak banister. It was times like this that she really appreciated not having to parent entirely on her own, but could rely on Travis for backup.

  Tucker spoke first. “We said we needed to ask Santa to help us find a daddy for Christmas, too, and Sophie said we don’t because we already have one! But we don’t have a daddy, do we, Mommy?”

  Oh, dear, Holly thought. She really should have handled this a lot earlier.

  When they’d been infants, she’d had no words that would have adequately explained what Cliff had done, in abandoning them, so she had simply told her children they lived in a house with a mommy and two little boys. Since the family next door was comprised only of a daddy and two little girls, it had seemed a “normal” situation to them. Now that they were three and a half, and midway through their first year of preschool, they were beginning to notice that some families had two parents. But they hadn’t questioned why they didn’t. Until now.

  “Actually—” Holly took a deep breath “—you do have a daddy.” She had known for a week now she had to talk to them about the fact that Cliff wanted to visit, but she hadn’t because she kept hoping her ex-husband would chicken out again before next weekend rolled around.

  “No, we don’t!” Tristan argued logically. “We never seen one!”

  “You have never seen one,” Holly corrected automatically. “And that’s because your daddy has been working very very far away.”

  “So is he coming for Christmas?” Tucker asked curiously.

  Like it or not, maybe now was the time to broach the subject she had been dreading. “Yes,” Holly said, curtailing her own reluctance—for their sake—and replacing it with a cheerful tone. “He is.”

  “When?” Tristan demanded.

  “Next weekend, if all goes according to plan,” she replied.

  “Is he going to bring presents?”

  Holly crossed her fingers that intent translated into action where Cliff was concerned. “He said he might.” If not, she’d have something stowed away just in case.

  “Oh.”

  Tristan turned to Sophie. “How come you know’d we had a daddy and we didn’t?”

  “I told her that a long time ago,” Travis interjected, sending a look of apology Holly’s way. “The beginning of the school year, I think. When Sophie’s class was doing a unit on family, she asked if the twins’ dad was deceased, like her mom, and I explained. And we went on to talk about other things.” He winced, obviously feeling contrite. “The subject never came up again and I never gave it a second thought.”

  “So we’re going to have a mommy and a daddy now,” Tristan deduced.

  “Because Kayla says having a mommy and a daddy at the same time is the bestest thing,” Sophie interjected in excitement. “And Savannah says so, too. She really likes having Alexis as her mommy.”

  “We want a mommy and a daddy, too,” Mia declared.

  Sophie spoke for the entire group. “And that’s all we want for Christmas!”

  “Talk about a one-track mind!” Travis murmured in an aside to Holly.

  They shared a look of mutual consternation, then he said, “This calls for a family meeting in the living room.” He herded all the children to sit on the sofa, then took a seat on the thick leather-bound steamer trunk that served as a coffee table in the more formal, but still masculine surroundings.

  Holly sat next to him on the trunk, facing the kids.

  Travis braced his forearms on his spread knees and leaned forward. “I thought we were past this,” he said.

  Sophie and Mia exchanged looks indicating that was definitely not the case. Tucker and Tristan took their lead from the girls.

  It was clear the kids had their minds made up. They wanted what they wanted. So Travis talked. Holly persuaded. Together, they both cajoled. All to no avail. The four children remained convinced that the best thing in the world would be to have a mommy and a daddy at the same time instead of one or the other.

  And really, Holly thought, who could blame them?

  Wasn’t that what every child wanted? What most of their friends at preschool had? A complete family? In the boys’ case, by having their dad stay on and live with them, and in Travis’s…since Santa could not bring a mommy, by him finding a wife to marry….

  Finally, in exasperation, Travis said,
“Look, I understand the girls feel like they are missing out by not having a mommy, and the boys feel like they are missing out by not having a daddy, so how about we all stop trying to focus on what we don’t have and instead come up with a different plan that will meet everyone’s needs?”

  Four sets of brows furrowed as the children regarded him warily. Clearly, the question was far too complex for them to grasp, but Holly got it, and the excess wordage did have the consequence of stopping their interruptions midsentence as they tried to comprehend what he meant.

  “What did you have in mind?” Holly asked Travis, trusting it was good.

  He turned toward her, his muscular thigh nudging hers. “Simply that whenever the boys have something that requires a daddy, I step in to help them out. And whenever the girls have a situation that demands a mommy, you step in.”

  Holly picked up the baton and ran with it. “It’ll be sort of like having a next-door mommy and a next-door daddy,” she said.

  The children briefly looked intrigued.

  The interest faded as quickly as it appeared.

  “No,” Sophie said, stubborn as ever. “I want my own mommy.”

  “Me, too,” Mia agreed.

  “And we want our own daddy,” Tristan said.

  And that, it seemed, was that.

  “WE TRIED TO EXPLAIN,” Travis said wearily, thirty minutes later. He had sent the children out to the backyard for fifteen minutes of playtime before dinner, so they could have a chance to figure out what they were going to do next.

  Holly helped herself to one of the gingerbread men the kids had decorated with Mrs. Ruley. “And did not succeed.”

  Travis munched on a cookie, too. “Once they see their real gift from us—the playhouse and the spaceship—they’ll forget all about this mommy and daddy business. And I meant what I said in there.” He inclined his head in the direction of the living room. “I am available to your boys whenever they need an on-premises daddy.”

  “And I am, of course, available to your girls,” Holly said.