In Love by Christmas: A Paranormal Romance

by Nathan, Sandy

  The stone monasteries with tile roofs. Monasteries where the nuns sang. He asked his guides to point them out. Nothing existed that could point to Kathryn Duane’s whereabouts—except in Leroy’s brain. He recalled every detail of the photo of the tile roof and its odd little gargoyle. Kathryn’s soul had absolved him from searching for her, but if he ran across that monastery, he’d know. She was Cass’s mother. She might need help.

  He stayed at a villa in Venice. The front end of it was open to the canal. Carved stone furniture and luxurious pillows furnished the wide veranda. Silk draperies billowed with the wind. The place was beautiful and old and ornate. He liked Venice the best of everywhere he’d gone. A town without streets. The sun went down and the water and stone buildings glowed gold. The light was like opals and milk. He had a guide, as usual. They walked all over the city.

  “Venice does not smell, as some say,” said his guide. Leroy hadn’t known that Venice was supposed to smell.

  He hit a low ebb, surrounded by the splendor of Venice. He wanted to share it with Cass. He wanted to glide along a canal with her and feel the magic of gondoliers and moonlight. He’d looked into her eyes for a few seconds, but they had branded him forever. Will said she was doing fine, gaining weight. No, she hadn’t asked for him. He knew that was a lie. She remembered him. She wanted to be there with him. But Cass wasn’t the only one haunting him.

  At night, he felt soft arms around him, smoothly covered with white flesh. He saw light blue eyes and nougat-colored hair. Lady Arabella. He buried his lips into her hair, only to have Cass’s tortured face leap at him, terrified. Don’t leave me, Leroy. Don’t forget me. He could hear her silent voice.

  In the day, dark eyes caught his. Dark eyes and glossy black tresses. He couldn’t get away from the Italian women. The content of his dreams seemed to be broadcasting from his forehead: come to me.

  His clothes became a problem. Silk boxers sliding across his buttocks. Fine cotton shirts slipping over his arms, touching his back. When he brushed his trousers, the feel of their fabric clung to his hands and lingered. Touches, sights, sensations.

  Women. Leroy had never been bothered by sexual urges. Oh, maybe once in a while, but not like this. He felt like his body might set his clothes on fire. Or worse, he might throw off his clothes and go after one of the lovely signorinas that were everywhere.

  He had no dinner parties in Venice. A few luncheons, mostly with businessmen, occasionally a woman. The women dazzled him. He wanted to run. The beauty of Venice was a temptress wanting to coil around him.

  Leroy was delighted when Will sent him to Milan. Maybe the fire that Venice stoked would simmer down.

  “It’s where Italian fashion begins,” Will said, “Go shopping Leroy, get the best.”

  Milan was having a week of fashion shows. Leroy got ready for them without thought, putting on an easy-fitting, slubbed silk jacket with a finer black silk shirt under it.

  He walked loosely, as though his joints weren’t quite jelled. His walk had changed since England. There he watched men move like they were holding a raw egg between their butt cheeks, very different from his rangy lope. That lope got him from his barn to the house efficiently when he was at his ranch. It didn’t work here.

  In a sudden burst, he figured out how to walk like the elegant men around him. He slunk along on the balls of his feet as though he was trying to catch a spooky horse out in the pasture. Worked perfectly. He put an eagle feather in his ponytail for the fashion show.

  “Oh, trés chic,” said the Fashion Woman Will hired to escort him, looking him up and down. His gut said she was as old as the Elders at the Meeting, but she had utterly smooth skin and teeth so white they glowed. She dressed like a teenager in shocking pink and shiny black shoes.

  “We are going to the shows of …” she reeled off a bunch Italian names he’d never heard of. “We were lucky to get tickets.”

  Leroy was glad he was wearing his eagle feather. Fashion Woman turned out to be the most normal person he saw, but one. Every place they went was an auditorium with a raised walkway. Every single one had a backdrop going up to the ceiling behind the stage. Movies were projected on the backdrop. They ranged from a multi-color waterfall to men wearing suits rolling around on the floor shoving their butts in the air. Loud rock music blared.

  He couldn’t imagine anyone wearing the clothes anywhere. One show was built around women wearing tight-fitted pink panties with see-through pink jackets hanging open with no blouse underneath. People applauded. Some cried.

  Leroy ended it by jumping to his feet and bolting for the door. Fashion Woman stood up, bewildered. The models were so thin; they were dying. They reminded him of Cass. Where was she? Was she dying?

  He made it out to the executives’ parking and signaled their driver. Photographers were everywhere. They took pictures of him; they seemed to think he was famous. He waved his hand and shook his head, saying, “No”. Didn’t stop them.

  Then he saw her getting into her limousine. She was older now, but she looked wonderful. Her hair was smoother and not bushy the way it had been. Her fine Creole skin glowed. She wore a skirt above her knees, showing off those great legs. Everything about her was beautiful. Not thinking, he walked over.

  “Ma’am, I admire you more than any woman on Earth. I have been your fan as long as I’ve been alive.” Her bodyguard started to push him away, but she stopped him.

  She looked Leroy up and down, the way almost every woman seemed to those days, smiling broadly. “Oh, my. You are something fine. Come over here, my young man.” She held his hand to her cheek through the car window. About twelve paparazzi jumped them, shooting wildly.

  Her driver moved the limousine out of the lot.

  Leroy wanted to invite her for dinner. The woman from Nutbush, Tennessee, would love his father’s barbecue sauce, no matter how high and far she had flown.

  20

  Out of the Ballpark

  “Leroy, you hit it out of the ballpark!” Will Duane sounded delighted. Leroy had called him to check on Cass. “I got calls from three CEOs and a duke telling me how much you impressed them. Everybody loves your barbecues. And Tina Turner’s agent called wanting to sign you as a model. Or an actor. He wanted you. Did you see the Enquirer and every other rag? You and Tina are front and center. You are on a roll.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ve still got France, then Germany and Scandinavia to visit. How do you like being a world traveler?”

  “After I stopped screaming when I got on a plane, it wasn’t so bad.” Will was silent, not appreciating Leroy’s joke. “No. I love it, Mr. Duane. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and all the money you’ve spent. And the stipend you been sendin’ …”

  “Don’t worry about it, son. I consider it an investment. We have a future, you and I.”

  “OK. Yeah. Mr. Duane, how is Cass?”

  “Doing as well as you are. She’s gained twenty pounds and is adjusting to life at the hospital. No incidents of any kind.”

  “That’s really good. Can I talk to her?”

  “Not advised at this point, Leroy.”

  “Does she know who I am?”

  “No, Leroy. The doctors said it was best to keep things simple. She almost died. While you’re waiting, I have a job for you. It will be a departure from the trip we had planned, but it will be interesting for you. I’ll pay you a good salary.”

  “You’ve been doing all this for me. I don’t need to get paid.”

  Will chuckled. “Never say no to money, Leroy. That’s the first law of getting rich. You can never have too much money. How much are you worth?”

  Affronted, Leroy barked, “More than you could ever count.”

  Will laughed. “That’s what I like. Chutzpah.”

  Leroy knew what chutzpah was from his rabbi friends, but he didn’t like the feel of the conversation. “What do you want, Mr. Duane?”

  “I’m never going to get you to call me Will, am I?” He didn’
t wait for an answer. “What we’ve seen from you so far is super-fast learning of everything we’ve put in front of you. You get an A+ in everything.”

  The fact that all he did was being graded galled Leroy. As did the feeling he was an animal being tested. Was he good enough for Cass? Was he good enough for Numenon? Mostly, was he good enough for Will?

  “What I’d like to do is enroll you in a language school in Switzerland. I’ll be in France for the Economic Summit meetings in a couple of months. It’s a conference for the top industrialists from all over the world. The Summit meetings are private, unlike the G8 Summit, which is for governments. Bill Clinton goes to those.

  “At the Economic Summits, a few of the most influential guys in the world get together and kick the can about world economic problems. We talk about how we can iron out tensions between us. I don’t need an interpreter; I’ve got several. I want someone to tell me if what the interpreter tells me is what was actually said. Billions of dollars hang on those meetings, Leroy. I want someone to cover my back.”

  Leroy frowned. This was big, not just learning about tableware and how to say hello properly. “What do you want me to learn?”

  “All the Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. And as many Eastern European languages as possible. German, the Slavic dialects. Russian. As many as you can. My next meeting is in mid-October, the eighteenth and nineteenth. You can study until then, and then sit with me at the meeting. It usually averages about twenty hours over two days.”

  “I can’t do that. No one could do that. You should get different people who have studied all those languages.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Leroy. No one will suspect that you’re doing what you’re doing. They’ll see you as a stranger, a country boy. You can blindside them. And I think you can do what I ask, or give it a pretty good shot.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Your golf score. No one could score like you did the first time on the range. My informant was thrilled.”

  “Are you having me followed?”

  “Not exactly. I know the people who have entertained you. They’ve given me feedback on their experience of you.” His tone was cool and level. Something about it told Leroy that he was being followed everywhere he went and evaluated. This clenched what he’d felt every time he left a guide or instructor: Will would get a blow-by-blow account of his performance. He was a rat in a maze, being graded before being let loose.

  “You know, I’m really homesick,” Leroy said. “I’d like to go home tomorrow.”

  “What!? I’m giving you the chance of a lifetime.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re seeing if you can turn me into a trick poodle you can control the rest of my life. You can’t. If I stay here, you won’t get another one of those ‘feedback’ reports. You will tell people not to tell you how I’m doing. If I feel any of that’s going on, I’ll take the next plane home.”

  “Do you have the money for an international flight?” Will’s voice sounded innocent.

  “Mr. Duane, if I want to get home, I’ll do it if I have to sit on a stewardess’s lap. Don’t you worry.” Leroy could not remember being so angry. This man would destroy him if he allowed him. What was it like for Cass, growing up with Will as a father?

  “We need to get straight on some things. I appreciate what you’ve done for me—every minute of it and every penny you’ve spent. But I am not a monkey, or a parrot, or a trained dog. I will never be any of those for you. If you’d like me to pay you back everything you’ve put into me, I’ll do it.”

  Will sighed. “Leroy, it would take you a lifetime to pay me back.”

  “If that’s what it takes, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Will sounded chastened when he spoke. “Leroy, I don’t know how this conversation got so sidetracked. I didn’t mean for us to fight. I need your help. How do I get it?”

  Another long silence. “Well, Mr. Duane, you could call me back tomorrow and ask me what you want in a nice way. And tell me what I have to do to get it done.”

  21

  Foreign Language

  Turned out, it wasn’t so hard. He’d never tried to learn a language, but he did know Spanish fluently from the hired hands on the ranch. Nobody taught him; he just spoke the language. When he started studying, turned out that Italian and Portuguese were very similar and just as easy to learn. And so was French. He left his teachers applauding.

  “Oh, my goodness, Mr. Watches, you are a prodigy.”

  He was not so much a prodigy as a shaman who had the power of bending language so he could understand and be understood. Didn’t seem to matter what language was involved. That probably came from all the languages his People spoke at the Meeting and whenever he was with Grandfather. He knew them all, but he couldn’t remember learning them.

  The language school did something else. He could understand, remember, and speak languages very easily. He could never read or write very well. His handwriting embarrassed him. All through school on the reservation, his teachers had chided him, given him terrible grades, and never helped him one single bit.

  “Oh, Monsieur, you are dyslexic.” The instructor was kind. “Do you know what that means?”

  He knew that letters and numbers seemed to arrange themselves differently on the page for him. He knew that what he saw must be different than what others saw.

  His teacher said, “We cannot believe that no one diagnosed you. We will help you.”

  They fitted him with a special computer. He spoke into it, and it spelled for him. They gave him a recorder that he could talk to and then play into the computer. It wrote up whatever he said. He could read and write without having to figure out which way the letters went.

  “Almost makes me cry. School was so hard. I tried,” he said to his instructor, moved by the help the school had given him. His teacher was a late-middle-aged, large-breasted Swiss woman who wore grey suits almost to the floor. She reminded him of the English dowagers.

  “It almost makes me cry that you were not diagnosed all your life,” she replied. “So much needless suffering.”

  “Please, let me pay for the computer and recorder myself.” He didn’t want Will to add “handicapped” to his score.

  “These things are part of your program, Mr. Watches. Now, you must practice what we teach.”

  And he did, moving from language to language. German and the Eastern European languages were harder. Russian almost killed him.

  So did his ass. He hadn’t ever sat that long. He finally got the lessons on CDs and walked around town listening to them and talking into his recorder, then studying what the computer did with his words. His chest swelled. Finally, what was on the page made sense. After that, Leroy spent as little time as possible in the classroom. He was learning faster than he imagined he could.

  He sat at a few favorite cafés, listening to people talk and sipping a latté, a habit he’d never cultivated before. He’d never before been anywhere that had pastries and strudels and all manners of irresistible sweets. Leroy kept walking so he didn’t end up a caffeine addict and a lard-butt.

  “Oh, monsieur, all of the tables are taken. Do you mind if I sit with you?” A pretty face and big eyes, eyelashes flapping like fly swatters. That happened all over. All kinds of girls approached him, blond, brunette and everything in between. He could have gotten laid ten times a day. But he didn’t. He kept his eye on the scenery, the kind with mountains and buildings.

  Switzerland was as tidy and crisp as Venice had been romantic and lush. He liked them both. Switzerland reminded him of Yosemite. They thought their mountains were grand, but he thought Yosemite’s grander.

  On weekends, he traveled, taking his language lessons, laptop, CD player and recorder, being a tourist and doing his own research projects. Special maps of monasteries existed; he hadn’t known that. Tourists liked to make pilgrimages to them. He did a lot of walking thos
e weekends, passing by untold numbers of stone monasteries and nunneries. None of them had the distinctive tiles or the funny gargoyle. Lots of walking and looking. He didn’t get fat.

  Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark. He saw many of the places Will had originally scheduled him to see, just faster. Turned out that many of the monasteries were renting out rooms, or acting almost like hotels, to make ends meet. He stayed at the convent of St. Birgitta in Denmark, in Abbaye Notre-Dam des Niges in France. So many monasteries, none of them right.

  By that time, Leroy felt like he was running, not walking. He was making himself obvious by touring monasteries. He knew he should stop his “casual” search, but kept on. Kathryn’s soul had warned him off. Why didn’t he heed it?

  And then it was time for that economic meeting. He shared a three-bedroom penthouse in Paris with Will Duane. Will called for him and Leroy climbed on a plane as ordered. A car met him at the airport and took him to the apartment building, if you could call it that. Set on a street slightly better-groomed than the English royals he’d met, the edifice had carved stone pillars, a canopy and two doormen in front. He entered the building, flanked by Will’s guards. The floor was inset with pieces of different colored marble. One of Will’s black-clad strong men carried his bags to the apartment. When the door opened, the entrance hall and living room beyond were as extraordinary as the palaces he’d visited. Home, sweet home, Numenon style.

  Will was there, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He swung his fists in arcs; he pulled them in front of him and then swung them out to the sides. He was scared, Leroy knew it the instant he saw him.

  “Ah, Leroy. I’m glad you’re here.” He took Leroy’s hand and patted him on the shoulder. “I took that room,” he pointed in the direction of what was undoubtedly the largest bedroom. “You can pick which you want of the other two.” He kept talking rapidly, acting wired.