Coming Home for Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I know,” he bit out impatiently, “but what I remember is you taking over my mother’s funeral arrangements—not that I’m not glad you did,” he quickly interjected, afraid that she might just back off and subsequently out of everything if she thought he was complaining. Now that apparently everyone was coming to the house after the funeral, he definitely wanted Kenzie to remain and act as his buffer.

  Looking to move on, Keith picked up the mug from the coffee table. The coffee immediately drew the focus of his attention. In this day and age of designer coffee, his own taste in coffee had remained unchanged.

  After taking an appreciative first sip, he raised his eyes to hers and asked, “How did you know that I take it black?”

  “I guessed,” Kenzie confessed. “No cream, no sugar, just black. It seemed to me that would be your style,” she added.

  “And strong.” Which he discovered after taking his second sip of the hot brew. His first reaction hadn’t been a fluke. The coffee tasted as if it could double as a paint remover.

  “Another guess,” she admitted. “There’s also breakfast in the kitchen if you like,” she added. Keith must have looked puzzled, because she elaborated. “Eggs, bacon, toast. Nothing fancy, just hot.”

  “I didn’t see any eggs or bacon in the refrigerator.”

  “That’s because there weren’t any. I stopped at the store on my way here.”

  That seemed to him unnecessarily complicated. “Would’ve been easier stopping at a drive-through,” was his assessment.

  “Maybe,” Kenzie conceded. “But I like to cook, and most breakfasts are simple enough to make. This certainly was,” she added. “So, if you’re interested, the plate’s on the stove, still warm.”

  With that, she turned away and headed toward the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Keith asked. He got up, holding the coffee mug in both hands.

  “Upstairs. Inventory,” she answered again. Then she asked with a patient smile, “Remember?”

  Keith frowned. He figured that he had to in order to maintain the ruse that he was effectively keeping Kenzie at arm’s length, even though that length was definitely shrinking—by the moment, it seemed.

  He wasn’t happy about it. At the same time, he didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.

  In self-defense, he allowed his temper to surface.

  “Yes, I remember,” he answered curtly. “I’m not senile yet.”

  “Yet,” Kenzie echoed with a grin, clearly amused.

  It was slowly working out, she thought as she hurried up the stairs. He sounded reasonably awake and somewhat cheerful—until he realized he was thawing and made a stab at grumpiness. She figured it was best to quit while she was ahead.

  Besides, she had a lot of work cut out for her that had nothing to do with the state of his disposition—even though it interested her a great deal.

  Later, she promised herself.

  * * *

  He’d finished eating and the dishes were in the sink, obviously waiting to be washed at some future date, whenever he felt like getting around to it.

  Since Kenzie hadn’t been gone all that long, he was surprised to see her.

  The expression on her face was difficult for him to decipher. As a lawyer, he’d learned how to read jurists, but she was a challenge. Though she was deceptively laid-back with amusement in her eyes, he knew there was a great deal more to her than was visible at first.

  “Something wrong?” Keith asked.

  She wouldn’t have called it “wrong” but just something that needed to be addressed. “I found a box,” she began slowly, wondering how he was going to react.

  “So?” he asked, waiting for some sort of further explanation.

  “It’s a box of letters,” Kenzie told him, sounding slightly breathless as she placed the box on the coffee table in front of him.

  Keith shrugged. He refrained from touching it, as if not touching the box allowed him to negate the validity of whatever might have been inside. He regarded it uneasily without knowing why.

  “Put it in the trash,” he told her. “Nobody’s going to want to read someone else’s letters.”

  “The letters are ones your mother wrote to you,” she told him quietly.

  Keith looked at her sharply. There was an angry accusation in his eyes.

  What sort of game was she playing? “I never got any letters from her,” he informed Kenzie coldly.

  “They weren’t mailed.” She glanced down at the box. “They were addressed, stamped, signed, but she never mailed them.”

  He felt a ripple of curiosity forming—and smashed it. “I told you, put them in the trash.”

  She stared at him as if he’d just instructed her to set the house on fire. “Don’t you want to read what she wanted to tell you?”

  “If my mother wanted to tell me anything, she would have mailed the letters,” he said coldly. “Consequently, what she wrote there was for her own conscience. It had nothing to do with me.”

  She didn’t believe that—and neither did Keith, she thought. “But—”

  Keith cut her short. “Look, I know you think you’re helping, but you’re not,” he said forcefully. “You’ve already done more than you’re supposed to, and no matter what misguided notion you might have, it’s not your job to be my conscience. Either stop, or I’ll pay you for the time you’ve put in so far, and I’ll get someone else to handle this so-called estate sale.”

  She suppressed a sigh, picking up the box again. “You’re going to regret not reading these.”

  “My letters, my regret.”

  Kenzie looked down at the box she’d picked up, then moved it against the crook of her arm. “Have it your way.”

  Finally!

  “Thank you,” Keith said. The words were polite and perfunctory. He’d honestly expected more of an argument out of her than that.

  Kenzie merely nodded her acknowledgment as she walked out of the kitchen, carrying the offending box of letters out with her. She cradled the box against her as if she were carrying a baby.

  She disappeared from view, and Keith turned back around again, fairly certain that the incident was closed. Nonetheless, he strained to hear the familiar sounds of Kenzie going out of the house so that she could throw the letters away.

  And then he did.

  He heard the front door open and then close again. He sat, waiting to hear it open again. When it didn’t, he began to wonder if Kenzie had opted to take him up on the alternative that he offered and decided to leave.

  He remained at the table, straining to hear some movement from the front of the house.

  When he finally heard the door opening again, he released the breath he’d unconsciously been holding.

  She hadn’t left.

  The relief he felt surprised him.

  And worried him, as well.

  Chapter Seven

  Keith had no time to examine his rather strong—and positive—reaction to the fact that Kenzie hadn’t left. The moment she walked back into the room, she hit him with a question.

  “Are you planning on going to the funeral home today?”

  He thought it was rather an odd question, coming from her. After all, her actual function here was to organize what was in the house, put a price on it and, hopefully, sell it. Granted, she was being helpful in other ways, but she had volunteered her services. He hadn’t recruited her. In no way was that even remotely associated with his attendance—or nonattendance—at the funeral home.

  “No,” he responded. “Why would you want to know that?”

  She shrugged carelessly and said, “No reason. I just thought you might want to be there to talk to some of her friends in case they had any questions or just wanted to talk to you.”

 
; “I’ll be at the funeral,” he reminded her somewhat stiffly. “If they have anything to ask, they can do it then.” Although the very thought of being subjected to any sort of questions regarding his mother’s final days—or even her final years—left him feeling exceedingly uncomfortable. He wouldn’t be able to answer any of them because, quite frankly, he didn’t know anything about the last ten years. His mother’s supposed letters to him notwithstanding, there had been no contact between them during that time.

  “Or they can ask you at the reception,” she reminded him.

  For a second, he’d forgotten about the reception. More to endure, he thought wearily. He didn’t even bother attempting to contain the less than happy sigh that escaped. “Yeah, there’s that, too.”

  She squashed the desire to offer him any comfort. The Keith standing before her wasn’t the type to accept any overt gestures. That was why she had to go the indirect route she was taking.

  “Well, if you’re not going to the funeral home, why don’t you come with me?”

  “Come with you where?” he asked suspiciously.

  Instead of answering his question, Kenzie hit him with a question of her own. “You don’t like surprises, do you?”

  “Surprises don’t usually turn out to be a good thing.”

  She thought of the family gathering she was trying to bring him to. A fondness slipped over her, the way it always did whenever she thought of her family en masse. “Well, in this case I can guarantee you good food, good spirits and maybe even some singing.” He still appeared rather skeptical about the whole idea—and she could tell that the singing part was definitely not a selling feature. Still, she tried to make him come around by promising, “It’ll be good for you.”

  The frown on Keith’s face deepened. “The last time I heard that line, I was facing a plate of steamed vegetables.”

  Kenzie suppressed a laugh. “I promise this experience will be way better than a plate of vegetables. And it’ll help you unwind.”

  That only managed to put him on his guard. “What makes you think I need to unwind?”

  Kenzie rolled her eyes in response to his question. She couldn’t help it. “Oh, please. I’ve seen balls of yarn that were less wound up than you.”

  Passing by him at the table, she crossed over to the sink. Kenzie turned on the water and began washing the dishes.

  Still nursing the last of his coffee, Keith half rose in his seat. “You don’t have to do that,” he protested.

  Maybe not, but someone had to, and she’d learned that molehills were a lot easier to tackle than mountains.

  “Mrs. Sommers’ll be showing the house soon. You don’t want to let things like dirty dishes start accumulating.”

  She was doing it again, acting as if she knew him better than he knew himself. “What makes you think I wasn’t going to wash those?” he asked.

  Kenzie stopped washing for a minute and looked at him over her shoulder. Her answer to that was simplicity itself. “You’re a man.”

  Keith scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The smile on her lips softened the sting. “There are certain edicts out there in the cosmos. One of them states that men don’t do dishes. They buy dishes, break dishes, sometimes borrow dishes, but they don’t wash them if they can avoid it at all.”

  “Doesn’t that smack of sexism?” he asked, prodding her.

  “Maybe,” Kenzie allowed generously. “That still doesn’t change the fact that it’s true,” she concluded with a smile, then got back to her initial topic. “So, since you’re not going to the funeral home, two o’clock okay with you?”

  He was still distrustful of where this was going. Being a lawyer had changed the way he looked at everything. “For what?”

  “For me to pick you up so you can come with me,” she told him innocently, then asked, “Are you always this inattentive?”

  “Only when I’m not interested,” Keith replied truthfully.

  “This’ll do you good,” she promised.

  “You keep saying that. Just what sort of good would going off with you do me?” he asked.

  Was she coming on to him? he suddenly wondered. He wouldn’t have thought so. He had to admit that the idea was definitely not without its appeal. The woman was extremely compelling and, under other circumstances, he could see himself being really attracted to her—and acting on it. But he wasn’t going to stay here long enough to even entertain that possibility, much less explore it. And he had never been into one-night stands.

  “That’s where the surprise part of this comes in,” she told him glibly, coming full circle.

  He fixed her with a look. “I think we’ve had this dance before.”

  Kenzie merely smiled, unfazed by the fact that he was leveling an accusation at her. “We have,” she acknowledged, then proposed, “This time, just for fun, why don’t you let me lead?”

  What did he have to lose? Keith asked himself gamely. After all, in just three days, four at the most, he wasn’t even going to be in the same longitude and latitude as this woman or as anyone else around here, for that matter.

  Besides, he had to admit he did like her company—for the most part.

  “Okay, why not?” he said with a shrug, surrendering—for now.

  “Great,” she answered. This had actually turned out to be easier than she thought.

  Enthused—and because she did know him and they did go back all the way to high school—Kenzie allowed herself to go with her impulse. It was her way, but not usually with someone as standoffish as Keith had become.

  Turning from the sink, her hands still wet from the dishes she’d just finished washing, Kenzie threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Her aim—and intention—had been to kiss his cheek. But, surprised by her sudden movement, he’d turned his head at the last second to look at her, puzzled.

  He was about to ask her what she was doing, which was how his mouth happened to be open when her lips missed their intended target and instead locked onto his.

  To say that he was surprised would have been a huge understatement.

  In actuality, they were both surprised.

  And even more surprising than that was the realization that something was going on here that went beyond the simple contact of lips. Way beyond.

  This was the fantasy that she had nurtured the two years they had both been in high school at the same time. Night after night, she’d dreamed about what it might actually feel like, kissing Keith. Being kissed by Keith.

  Dreams, she now realized, didn’t begin to do the actual sensation justice, even though this kiss had been unintentional.

  Kenzie felt as if she had swallowed a match. A lit match, and it was setting her on fire. But it was a very pleasant, enjoyable fire, and with very little effort—

  No, hold it, the voice of common sense all but screamed in her head in an attempt to redirect her attention. This just couldn’t happen. At least, not by accident. If it did, that almost made her a predator. Whether he would admit it or not—whether he even knew it or not—Keith was very vulnerable right now, and she was taking advantage of that as surely as if she was a stalker, jumping at the first glimmer of an opportunity.

  It didn’t matter that she was as caught by surprise as he was. That she hadn’t meant to do anything more than kiss his cheek. Circumstances had abruptly changed, and she needed to take that into account and backpedal as quickly as she could before something happened that couldn’t be undone.

  In a second, something inside her promised breathlessly, stalling for time.

  He’d told Kenzie the truth. He didn’t like surprises. But this—this was different. While it still fell under the general heading of being a surprise, it was so much more. He had no idea where to begin to categorize it or file it away. He clea
rly hadn’t meant for this to happen, but now that it had, he was forced to look at Kenzie in a whole different light.

  This was the girl he had gone to school with? The one everyone had laughingly referred to as Clumsy Mac? Talk about still waters running deep. There was an entire sea here.

  When contact between them was abruptly severed—and she had been the one to sever it, just as she had been the one to initiate it—Keith saw her flush and then mumble something that sounded like “Oops.”

  The word echoed back in his head, as if he’d somehow hit instant replay. The whole scenario struck him as ludicrous.

  Before he could stop himself, he started to laugh.

  Laugh so hard that his sides actually shook. And then tears came to his eyes. Whether they’d initially been stored there against anticipated further sorrow, he didn’t know.

  The laughter and the accompanying tears didn’t abate immediately, not until he was almost exhausted.

  Kenzie joined in and couldn’t seem to stop, either, not until they both collapsed onto the floor in a crumbled heap, both too exhausted to move.

  Finally, drawing in deep breaths, Keith found that his sanity was slowly restored.

  “What just happened here?” he was finally able to ask, still bemused.

  “I’m not sure,” Kenzie told him honestly as she gathered herself together. “But I think we both needed it.”

  Though he wanted to protest, he knew she was right. He didn’t exactly feel rejuvenated, but the oppressiveness that had been weighing him down the last few days seemed to have taken a few steps back, allowing him to regain his sense of self.

  “So now what?” Keith asked, curious as to what she would say.

  “Now we each take care of a few minor things that we need to see to, and I’ll be back by two to pick you up.”

  Keith took in a deep breath. He was already having second thoughts that he’d said yes too soon and that he was going to regret this.

  “About that—” he began.

  Kenzie immediately began to shake her head, as if his words wouldn’t be able to gain access to a moving target. “Sorry,” she said, cutting Keith off before he could get any further. “My hearing seems to be clogged. Must have happened during that laugh-fest we just shared. Gotta run,” she announced quickly, deliberately talking too fast for him to be able to get in a word edgewise.