He shouldn’t have gotten so annoyed with her on the phone last night, either, though he was pretty sure that same sort of frustration had been at least partially to blame. But the storm wasn’t letting up anytime soon, the thickening ice made escape next to impossible and he didn’t want this evening to be any more difficult than it needed to be. Short of apologizing to her, which he had the feeling would only make matters worse, especially for the kiss part, he’d do his best to put her at ease with him some other way.
She’d just reached up to hang a fallen ornament high on the tree. As it had every other time she’d reached that high, the motion exposed a thin strip of pale skin between the hem of her short white turtleneck, shorter green vest and the dark denims hugging her sweetly rounded backside.
“So,” he said, forcing his focus to something he wanted to know, anyway. “What’s with the ‘magic’ ornaments?” He nodded toward the empty shoe box on the end table. “You told Tyler all those you took out of that box appeared out of nowhere.”
The tiny crystal ice skates, the little Eiffel Tower stamped Paris, Texas, the miniature pink-and-white cupcake—all the ornaments in her “magic” collection looked much like the other decorations sparkling on the tree. Yet she’d even handled them differently, more carefully, he supposed.
“That’s because they did,” she replied, lowering her arms to pack up more empty boxes. “It didn’t matter where my parents and I were, every Christmas morning I’d open the door and there would be a package with a gold box tied with a red bow. Inside would be an ornament that had something to do with where we were staying. Or something I was into at the time.”
“Did your parents leave them there?”
“They had no idea who sent them. There was never a return address.”
“So that’s why you call them magic,” he concluded.
“It was more than that.” Conscious of him watching her, she packed the boxes into the bin he’d set on the coffee table. “It was what I felt when one of those little packages appeared. That’s what made them magic. At that moment, no matter what town we were in, with Mom and Dad mine for the day and that gift in my hands, I had the feeling that everything was right in my little world.” That was the feeling she wanted Tyler to know. He deserved that. Every child did. “I wound up with fourteen of them.”
“It sounds like you moved around a lot.”
“We did. Mom and Dad still do.” Their mailing address was their agent’s. “They’re musicians.”
His brow furrowed. “So what’s wrong with that?”
The question brought a quick frown of her own. “I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.”
“I didn’t mean you. You said the other day that Curt’s parents had a problem with you being his secretary instead of a lawyer. That things got worse when they found out your ‘people,’” he repeated, making air quotes, “weren’t the right pedigree. What’s wrong with being a musician?”
Her instinctive defense eased with his mystified tone. Marginally.
Apparently he had her a little edgier than she’d realized.
“There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with it if they’d played the violin or French horn in a symphony, but Dad plays bass guitar and Mom is a singer in a rock band. That was not the image Audrey wanted their friends to have of their son’s wife.” She closed the lid on the now full bin and moved to fill another. “On the rare occasion mention of my family came up, she said they were in the music industry and changed the subject.”
Unlike nearly everything else she’d exposed about herself the last time Erik had been there, she’d forgotten she’d even alluded to her parents. She’d be the first to admit that their decidedly bohemian lifestyle hadn’t provided the most stable environment, but it wasn’t as if they’d tattooed her forehead and named her Moonbeam or Thistleweed. They were good people who just happened to be creative, extroverted free spirits who’d never figured out which of them possessed the recessive “conventional” gene each accused the other of passing on to her. They were her mom and dad. She loved them. She didn’t understand them, but she loved them.
“Are they any good?”
“They’re very good.”
“Where do they play?”
“Sometimes they get a gig doing backup for tours,” she told him, grateful for the ease of his questions as they worked. Relieved, too, that he wasn’t letting her dwell on her former in-laws’ biases.
Trying to appear as comfortable with their present situation as he did, she looked around for anything she’d missed. “Mostly they’re on a circuit where they play small venues for a few weeks at a time.”
“That had to make for an interesting childhood,” he muttered, and handed her the stack of boxes from the sofa.
“I suppose it was.” After adding what he’d given her to the last bin, she snapped on its lid. “I just never knew where we’d be next, or how long we would be there.” Fluid, her mom liked to call their lives.
“But a little gold box showed up everywhere you went.” The container now filled, Erik picked it up to stack with the others. “Just trying to get the rest of the story,” he explained, and waited for her to move so he could carry it to the door.
She stepped aside, pretty sure he would have moved her himself if she hadn’t.
With him carrying away the last bin, she scooped up a few of the crystal icicles and snowflakes still on the coffee table, started hanging them on the tree. “They showed up every year until I stopped traveling with my parents,” she told him. “Mom and Dad had been playing in Seattle and I didn’t want to move around anymore. I’d just turned eighteen, so I stayed here when they left for their next engagement. That was the first Christmas a package didn’t show up. We finally figured out it was their booking agent’s wife who’d been sending them. Apparently, he represented a few other artists who traveled with their kids and she did it for all of them.”
“Nice lady.” Erik came up beside her, pulled one of the icicles from her hand. “So where will your parents be this Christmas?”
“Colorado. They’re booked through New Year’s.”
He glanced at her profile as she lifted another bit of crystal above her head to hang on a high branch. She wouldn’t have family around, he realized. Not liking that thought, not questioning why, he took the icicle from her and hung it below the white angel on top. As he did, he caught the clean scent of something herbal mingling with pine. Her shampoo.
The fragrance was subtle. Its effect on him was not.
Intent on ignoring both, he took one of the snowflakes. “So what will you and Tyler do? Go to a friend’s house? Have friends over?”
He was just making conversation. Rory felt certain of that. And the question seemed casual enough. It was his nearness, and the answer, that gave her pause.
“We’ll just stay here. My girlfriends from Tyler’s school will both be out of town.”
“What about other friends?”
“Except for work and Tyler’s school, I wasn’t involved in much the past year. Most of the other people I socialized with were in Curt’s circle. Members of the firm and their spouses,” she explained. “I don’t belong in that group anymore.”
For a moment Erik said nothing. Beyond them, the low voice of the weatherman droned on, the fire snapped and crackled. He could let it go, move on to something less personal. His mention before of the man she’d married—his relatives, anyway—had dented the calm facade she’d worn for her son the past few hours. But her guard with him had finally slipped, and his curiosity tugged hard.
“You said Curt had a different area of practice,” he reminded her, “but was he in the same firm as his father and brother?”
With a faint frown, she handed him the last two ornaments she held and turned to pick up more for herself.
“Different firms. B
oth firms belong to the same country club, though. It’s where the guys play racquetball and squash and wine and dine their clients. For the most part,” she qualified, moving back to the tree. “Curt liked us to entertain at home.” He’d seemed proud of her skills as a hostess, too, she thought, only to banish the memory before others could take hold. The moment she’d seen his stocking a while ago, the old doubts had rushed back, adding a different sort of disquiet to an already challenging day.
“You lived in the same circles as his parents?”
“It’s not like we saw them all the time,” she replied, hearing the frown in his voice. “But the wives of some of the partners in Curt’s firm were on the same committees as Audrey and her friends. The ones who don’t work outside their homes, anyway. Symphony. Heart Ball. That sort of thing.”
“And you?”
“I was on them, too. For a while.” She’d done her best to help Curt’s career any way she could. They’d been a team that way, a more intimate extension of the partnership they’d developed when he’d been her boss and she his secretary. Or so she’d thought. “Our personal friends were more into getting together for dinners, or taking the kids out for lunch after T-ball.”
“What about them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you ask them over? I bet Tyler’d be up for it.”
She was sure he would. It just wasn’t that simple. And what Erik was asking was really quite sweet. Surprising. Unexpected. But sweet—if such a word could be applied to the six feet plus of disturbing male quietly messing with her peace of mind.
It seemed he didn’t want her and her son spending Christmas Day alone.
“That’s the group I don’t belong to anymore.” The other one, the country club set, she’d never really had. “I was part of a couple with Curt,” she explained, wondering how long it had taken the man beside her to think of himself as an I rather than a we after his wife had gone. “After he died, the guys didn’t have their colleague and I was a reminder to the wives of how their lives would change without their husbands. Or how their lives might not even be what they’d thought they were,” she concluded, only to find herself in the one place she hadn’t wanted to go.
The place where so many questions begged for answers that would never come because the only person who could provide them was no longer there.
She wasn’t at all sure how their conversation had taken such a swerve.
“What part wasn’t what you thought it was?”
Her eyes met his, old pain quickly masked as she glanced away.
“All of it.” She gave a brave little laugh, tried to smile. “So any advice you have about how to move beyond something I can’t do a thing about would be greatly appreciated. Something more immediate than a five-year plan would be nice.”
Perspective. That was what she needed. Since she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever have it where her marriage had been concerned, the least she could do was maintain some about the too-attractive man who’d kissed her senseless four days ago and now acted as if nothing had happened at all—which she would be eternally grateful for, if she could somehow forget it herself. He was her mentor. Granted, he was her business mentor, but maybe the more she reminded herself of his place in her life, the less she’d be affected by things like the swift concern lowering his brow. Since his place in her life was to provide advice, she might as well take advantage of his counsel.
“Do you want to be a little more specific?” he asked.
Pretty certain the tensions of the day had just caught up with her, she dropped her glance to the slender ornament between her fingers. What she wanted had nothing to do with the store. But Erik did have a certain amount of experience in this particular area. He’d lost someone who’d once been important to him, too.
“I overheard some things at Curt’s funeral that I can’t seem to forget. About our marriage,” she explained, her voice quietly matter-of-fact. “Since he’s not here for me to ask about them, I think what I really want is to know how long it will take before the answers don’t matter so much.”
Erik watched her blink at the ornament, her eyebrows knitted as she stared down at what she held.
She’d never told him what had happened to her husband. Neither Phil nor Cornelia had mentioned it, either. And he hadn’t wanted to ask. It had seemed to him that the less he knew about her, the easier it would be to keep her pigeonholed as a project, a duty. Something with a start and end date that required nothing of him in between but a little business advice and elbow grease.
It would have helped enormously if her little boy had been a brat.
It would have helped even more had she not been trying so hard to move on.
“What happened to your husband, Rory?”
Her focus remained on the light reflecting off the crystal. “He was on his way home from work. It was late and a drunk ran a red light.” The twin slashes between her eyebrows deepened. “He was dead at the scene.”
The unnatural calm in her voice belied how totally her world had shattered at that moment. That same stillness held her there, motionless except for the movement of her finger along the spiral facets.
“And what had you heard that you couldn’t ask him about?”
She barely blinked. “That he’d married me to spite his parents.
“It was after Curt’s funeral,” she added quietly. “At the reception.” His parents had wanted the reception after the service at the club. She hadn’t cared where it had been held, had been fine with going in whichever direction she’d been pointed. Other than Tyler, she hadn’t cared about anything at all.
“I was in the restroom when some other women came in. They didn’t know I was there because I overheard one of them ask how long Curt and I had been married. One of Audrey’s friends told her, then said I was nothing like the women he’d usually gone out with. Refined women, she’d called them. I heard someone else say that everyone knew he’d married me just to spite his parents. Apparently, not long after Audrey heard we were dating, she started setting him up with women she thought more appropriate. The more polite consensus was that he’d married me to get her off his back.”
That was the only clear memory she had of that entire day. So much of it had been a fog of hugs, sympathetic murmurings and just wanting to find the friends watching Tyler and get her son out of there.
She absently hooked the icicle she held onto the nearest branch. “He’d never told me his mother was doing that. But it could certainly explain why he’d wanted to elope.” She’d thought at the time that his idea to run off to Lake Tahoe had sounded wonderfully romantic. But at barely twenty-one, what had she known?
“I’d been happy. I’d thought he was, too.” Her hand fell, her voice along with it. “He’d always put in long hours. But that last year he’d put in even more. He’d been trying to make partner,” she said, though she had no idea why the detail even mattered now. “After hearing those women, I couldn’t help wondering if he was really away so much because of work. Or because he just didn’t want to be there with me and I’d been too naive to realize it.”
Her throat felt oddly tight. It had been well over a year since she’d verbalized that fear. She’d found out later that some of their friends had heard the rumors that day, too. Audrey, grieving herself, and in an apparent effort to save face for both of them, had even called her the next day to apologize for her friends’ “lack of sensitivity at such a time.” She had not, however, denied their conclusions.
Rory swallowed. Hard.
Feeling nearly as bewildered and betrayed as she had that awful afternoon, she pushed her fingers through her hair, trying desperately to force a smile. “I think now would be a really good time for you to give me the estimate I’m looking for. Six more months? A year? Please just don’t say ‘never.’”
For l
ong seconds, Erik said nothing. He remained an arm’s length away, his thoughts about the women’s thoughtlessness anything but charitable, and fought the instinct to pull her into his arms.
He’d had closure when his marriage had fallen apart. He’d had answers to his questions. After he’d divorced, there had been no doubt in his mind that his marriage had been irreparably broken. The way this woman’s had ended, she was left with questions that could never be answered.
Not by the man she’d married.
He seriously questioned Curt having had any ulterior motive when he’d married her. There was far too much about her to be attracted to, too much to truly care about.
Since the guy wasn’t around to tell her what all those things were, he’d just have to enlighten her himself.
“Come here.”
Taking her by the hand, he led her toward the wing chair by the sofa, muting the television on the way, and nudged her to the cushion. With his side to the fire, he hitched at the knees of his jeans and sat down on the heavy hassock in front of her.
Resting his forearms on his thighs, he clasped his hands loosely between them. “You want my take on this?”
Her arms crossed protectively at her waist, she murmured a soft, “Please.”
“For starters,” he began, being as objective as possible, “it’s far more logical to conclude that he married you not to spite his parents, but in spite of them. You’re beautiful, smart and easy to be with. For the most part,” he qualified when she blinked at him in disbelief. “You can be pretty unreasonable at times,” he pointed out, mostly so he wouldn’t have to consider how unwillingly drawn he was to her himself. “But, trust me, he was attracted to you. He had to be.” Especially if she’d showed up at the office looking the way she had the other night in that suit and heels.
Her Holiday Prince Charming Page 13
