[Kate's Boys 03] - Mistletoe and Miracles

by Marie Ferrarella

  He struggled to ignore the effect her voice had on him. Maybe she wasn’t aware that she was lying, he thought. But he was. If she’d trusted him, really trusted him, then Cody would be their son, not just hers, because they would never have broken up.

  then Cody would be their son, not just hers, because they would never have broken up.

  But she hadn’t trusted him, and they had broken up. Even so, there was no use in his pointing that out to her. Laurel would only deny it. The past was the past and it needed to remain that way, especially if he intended to do the boy some good—

  which he did.

  “Good,” Trent finally said, glancing in Cody’s direction. The boy was completely focused on the game, his body moving with the cars as they hugged the road, first left, then right, then left again.

  Satisfied that the boy had calmed down and was engrossed in the racing game, crashing cars when the opportunity arose, Trent nodded toward the kitchen. “I believe that we’ve got two cups of rather cold coffee still waiting for us.”

  She’d forgotten all about that. Forgotten, too, what his smile could do to her. Tie her stomach up in knots. “I can make fresh coffee,” she volunteered. He shook his head. “No need. Most of the coffee I drink is cold by the time I get around to it. I still have questions,” he said conversationally.

  “I might have answers,” she countered, trying her best to sound cheerful.

  The operative word here, Trent thought, was might.

  Chapter Six

  Trent had just settled in to catch up on some paperwork when his phone rang. He noted the caller ID a second before he put the phone to his ear and said, “Hello.”

  “If you want me to tutor Cody today, you’re going to have to swing by the house to pick me up.”

  No social amenity had preceded his sister’s statement. He’d wondered why Kelsey would be calling him at this hour of the morning. It was nine and she was supposed to be en route to Laurel’s house to work with Cody, the way she’d been doing for several weeks now. Kelsey had been very faithful about giving the boy some of her spare time on weekends. When he’d thanked her, she’d shrugged it off, saying that working with Cody was good practice for her. She’d confided that, despite his silence, she was making some headway and that she really liked the somber sixyear-old.

  A Marlowe through and through, Kelsey admitted that she saw getting Cody to talk as a challenge she was fully determined to meet. She’d gone as far as offering to make a little side bet on who Cody would speak to first. Because it added a little color to the situation for her, Trent had finally agreed. It took him a second to process her impatient statement. Kelsey hated being late these days. It was a byproduct of going to college. Prior to that, time had been an arbitrary factor in her life.

  Trent switched the phone to his other hand as he pushed papers back into a manila file. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be getting to them this morning. “Something wrong?”

  He heard a rustling noise in the background. “Only if you call a dead car battery something wrong. Mom and Dad are out and the car refuses to start. I could get a jump-start from the guy next door,” she told him, “but then what do I do once I get to Cody’s house?” She answered her own question. “Get another jump-start?”

  Because she left the last sentence hanging in the air, Cody realized she expected him to jump in and volunteer his services. The notes he’d brought home to transcribe would just have to wait. He rose to his feet.

  “Okay, hang on. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he promised. “Lights permitting.”

  Some of the tension left her voice as she told him, “I’ll be the one standing next to the dead car.”

  “Thanks,” he deadpanned, getting his keys off the bureau. “Otherwise I would have asked you to hold on to a red rose so I could recognize you.”

  “Wiseass,” she murmured under her breath.

  He laughed, terminating the call and shoving the phone into his pocket. “Right back at you, Kel.”

  Laurel was more than a little surprised when she saw Kelsey and Trent coming up the winding front walk. A moment ago, she’d glanced out her window to see if Kelsey was pulling into the driveway. It had been ten minutes into the young girl’s time with Cody, and Kelsey, just like her brother, was never late. Ever since the accident, the word late held particular uneasiness for her. Because late could very easily mean never. Throwing open the front door, Laurel banked down the urge to meet them halfway. Instead, she stood in the doorway. Kelsey seemed a little agitated.

  “Something wrong?” Laurel asked.

  Kelsey let out an annoyed breath before answering. “My car died,” she said, crossing the threshold into the house. “Trent volunteered to drive me over.”

  “The kind of volunteering they do in the army,” Trent elaborated. Laurel appeared uncomfortable, he noted. As if his unexpected arrival had thrown her. He thought they’d gotten past that. Obviously not. “I can wait in the car if you like,” he offered.

  “No, no, don’t be silly.” She looked toward Kelsey. “Cody’s upstairs in his room.”

  Kelsey was already at the stairs. “I figured,” she responded cheerfully.

  Alone with Trent, Laurel collected herself. She wiped the palms of her hands on her jeans. “I can make you some fresh coffee,” she proposed. Trent shook his head. “I don’t want to interrupt anything. Go back to whatever you were doing,” he urged, adding, “Just pretend that I’m not here.”

  She laughed softly under her breath as she turned on her heel and made her way to the kitchen. “That’s like standing in the presence of the aurora borealis, pretending that the sky is the same black color it always is at that time of night.”

  “Okay,” he allowed, walking into the kitchen behind her. “Don’t pretend I’m not here.” He slid onto one of the two stools that were usually tucked under the counter.

  “Talk to me instead.”

  Why did that elicit such a nervous flutter in the pit of her stomach? “About?” She did her best to sound almost disinterested.

  “Anything you want,” Trent told her glibly. And then his voice dropped. He continued watching her. “Or don’t want.”

  “Trying to get me to bare my soul again?” she asked. He’d already attempted that twice and she’d avoided his questions both times. She wasn’t comfortable talking about her life after she and Trent had broken up.

  She moved about her kitchen like a butterfly that had no idea where to land for more than a single heartbeat. Yes, I want you to bare your soul to me, he thought. But out loud, he said, “Not really.”

  Because she was moving about so nervously, he slid off the stool and leaned his hip against the long, blue-black granite counter. He studied her for a moment. She looked like a woman on the verge of a breakdown.

  And why not? Look what she had to deal with. Her husband had been killed in a freak accident and her son was in a prison of his own making.

  “Are you talking to anyone?” he asked her softly. Laurel’s head jerked up. The coffee ready, she pushed a cup in his direction, taking hers in both of her hands. He couldn’t read the expression on her face. He proceeded on as if she were merely puzzled and not indignant or annoyed. “About how you feel about everything that’s happened,” he elaborated.

  Laurel’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need a psychiatrist,” she told him tersely. Not everything could be solved by sitting around and talking. There’d be no absolution for her no matter how long she talked.

  “I didn’t say you did,” he answered mildly. Still holding her cup, Laurel walked back out to the family room and he followed. “But everyone needs someone to talk to.”

  He sincerely felt she needed to open up—and was fairly certain that she hadn’t. “They don’t necessarily need a professional license on the wall to be able to listen.”

  Laurel placed her cup on the coffee table but remained standing, as if it would allow her to deflect his words more successfully.

  “I’ve made my p
eace with everything.”

  His eyes held hers. “Have you? Every time I ask you about your marriage, you shut down or change the subject.” So far, he had tried several times, broaching the subject from different directions.

  How much of it was for Cody’s sake and how much of it was for your own? he silently challenged himself. She hurt you. Get over it. Laurel swung around, glaring at him. “Because it doesn’t have anything to do with Cody’s problem.” And then she paused, not quite as sure as she had been a moment ago. A little of the fire left her eyes as she asked, “Does it?”

  He sincerely believed it did. “We are a product of everything,” Trent explained.

  “Not just genes, not just environment, but everything. We take things in and put our own spin on them, our own stamp that makes our reaction unique to us.” And then, to get his point across, he gave her an example. “Two kids can be teased exactly the same way in school. One becomes an overachiever, bent on becoming a success to show his long-ago tormentors that he’s better than they are, and the other becomes a serial killer, dealing with his feelings of inadequacy in a decidedly different way.”

  His examples unsettled her. Her eyes widened as she asked, “Are you saying that…?” Laurel couldn’t bring herself to finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. Trent cut her off before she could complete the painful—and completely inaccurate—connection.

  “I’m saying that if you and your husband fought or there was an undercurrent of trouble in the marriage, it might be affecting how Cody responds to you now.”

  Laurel shook her head. “Cody wouldn’t have known,” she protested. “Matt and I were careful not to let him hear us when we were arguing.” She deliberately made it sound as if the discord were two-sided. But it was Matt who had raised his voice, Matt who had threatened. Matt who had made her feel so inadequate.

  “You’d be surprised what kids pick up on and hear.”

  The thought of Cody hearing what Matt had said to her, the names he’d called her, caused a shiver to race down her spine. She couldn’t bear the idea.

  “Cody was five at the time,” she reminded him. At five, the world was still small, still manageable. Friends, play, school, just a few ingredients. She realized that she’d left out home. “All he cared about was cartoons.”

  That was far too simplistic, Trent thought. She was deliberately clinging to that in order to deceive herself. He was right, there had been problems in her marriage. Apparently big ones.

  “Cody was—and is—exceptionally bright. Your own words,” he reminded her. “If he gave no indication that he sensed that you and your husband weren’t getting along, he was trying to protect you. Or hoping that if he didn’t acknowledge it, whatever was wrong would go away and you and Matt would be happy again.”

  She clung to her stand for dear life. “Cody’s bright, but you’re giving him far too much credit here.”

  Trent fell silent for a moment. It wasn’t his habit to interject his personal life into his professional life. But this situation was rather unique. Laurel had been in his personal life, had once represented a very large part of it. And surrendering this piece of information was relevant. It just meant opening up a place that he wanted to keep untouched.

  Still, this was to help her understand why he was asking her about her marriage—

  not as the man she’d left but as Cody’s therapist. He braced himself before he spoke. There was no way to distance himself from what had once been. Just as he really couldn’t distance himself from Laurel, couldn’t think of her as just another patient’s mother.

  “Shortly before my mother was killed in a plane crash,” he began, “I heard my parents arguing. It seemed that he wanted a family—us—and even though she’d given in, she felt trapped being a mother, especially since there were so many of us and we weren’t exactly the most docile kids.

  “She told my father she wanted to feel free again.” The past vividly shimmered before him. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “If she’d lived, they probably would have gotten a divorce eventually. But at that point, Dad was desperate. He encouraged her to take a short vacation—a break from us and from him—to see if she still felt trapped.”

  His mouth curved sadly. He remembered pressing his small body against the wall so that they wouldn’t see him, listening and feeling strangely hollow inside, as if someone had emptied out his stomach. “It might have given her a chance to miss us.”

  He took a breath before continuing, doing his best to sound clinical—and failing miserably.

  “That was why she was on that plane. She turned out to be the only fatality.” A great many people had been hurt, he recalled, reading the article he’d found online years later, but Jill Marlowe had been the only one to die. “I blamed my father for

  ‘chasing’ her away. I blamed myself and my brothers for not being ‘good enough’

  to make her want to be with us. In my own way, I guess I was pretty messed up and I coped with it by acting out.” That had been perhaps the blackest period of his life

  —except the day he’d discovered that Laurel had all but disappeared into thin air.

  “My brothers and I drove away three or four nannies in pretty short order before Kate came into our lives and had the wisdom and the patience,” he underlined, “to deal with us.

  “My point here is that I was five when my mother died and all this was going on in my head. I didn’t realize it until I was older. And my behavior wasn’t exactly unusual.”

  He looked at her pointedly. Listening, uncomfortable with what he was saying to her, she sank down beside him on the sofa. “Cody probably heard, or maybe even sensed, that things were not good between you and Matt. Kids are just short adults, Laurel. They pick up on vibes as well as words.”

  Finished, he let his words sink in as he listened for the sound of his sister approaching. But Kelsey was giving Cody a longer session than she’d anticipated. There was time for more questions. If Laurel was up to it.

  He picked up his cup and took a sip of coffee before quietly asking her, “Why were things not good between you and Matt?”

  She shrugged. Where did she start?

  “Why’s the sky blue, Mommy?” And then she flushed. “Sorry, that was flippant.”

  To her surprise, Trent laughed softly. Laurel blinked. Had she missed something?

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know you could be flippant. You’ve changed since…” To his credit, he managed to retain the smile on his lips, even if it had abruptly left his soul.

  “Since,” she echoed. There was no reason to go over their past history together. She knew she was to blame for what had happened. And she had paid dearly at the hands of another man. How often had she lain awake late at night, fervently wishing that she could go back in time. That she hadn’t allowed her demons to make her walk away—no, run away from Trent.

  With Trent beside her, she might have been able to deal with what had wound up sending her into Matt’s arms. What had made her marry him.

  “Yes, I have changed,” she agreed. The changes should have been for the better, but she knew that some of them weren’t. “Grow or die, right? Except that with Matt, there was no room for growth,” she heard herself saying.

  It was almost as if the words were rising to her lips of their own volition, tired of remaining in the dark, tired of existing in silence. She tried to backtrack, to save Matt’s reputation because he was Cody’s father. And because she looked like a fool for staying with the man she’d discovered beneath the polished veneer.

  “Matt was the big, dynamic knight in shining armor who swept me off my feet. He was the type who, if he wanted to have Italian food, would have his pilot gas up the jet and fly to Rome for the evening. That was pretty impressive in the beginning.”

  She remembered being initially awestruck by him. And stunned that out of a world full of women, he’d chosen her. That was before she knew that the choice wasn’t permanent. Or exclusive.
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br />   “What happened?” Trent asked.

  “I got jet lag,” she quipped. Her voice lowered, becoming more serious. “And Matt got bored.” It was easier to say that than to admit the real truth. And, in a way, it was true. Matt had gotten bored. Because she couldn’t be the woman he had wanted her to be. “I should have realized that a man who juggles half a dozen companies isn’t the kind who can be tied down for long.”

  “I take it there were other women.”

  There was no point in trying to keep up the charade, especially if it got in the way of helping Cody.

  “Yes, there were. Legions. I asked him to stop. He said he would. He didn’t. So I threatened to leave him.” Her mouth twisted in a humorless smile. “And he said

  ‘fine.’ But then he said that he was going to keep custody of Cody.” That had been her Achilles’ heel. Cody. “That kept me in my place for a long time—how could I fight someone as powerful as Matt Greer?

  “But then my complicity with his lifestyle wasn’t good enough for Matt. He’d gotten bored controlling my life and wanted to move on. He ‘told’ me that we were getting a divorce just before he left with Cody that day. And he also said that if I contested the divorce in any way—the terms, custody, anything—he’d make me sorry I was ever born.” Laurel pressed her lips together. Remembering left such a bitter taste in her mouth. “My last words to him were ‘I hate you.’” She looked at Trent. “And then he was dead.”

  “And you feel guilty?” He could hear it in her voice. The thought almost left him speechless.

  “Yes.” She shook her head, knowing she was being stupid. “No.” But there were ambivalent feelings knocking around in her. She sighed, raising her eyes heavenward.