Lucy Drake, tall and lovely with long dark curls, gave her a smile. “I understand I need to pick your brain while I’m here. Aidan says you’re the one who added all the wonderful little touches to our rooms like the water carafes by the bed, the basket of fuzzy socks, the little gift bags of fresh cookies.”
“I would love to talk with you,” she answered. “He says you have an amazing bed-and-breakfast in Hope’s Crossing.”
Lucy blinked. “Aidan called Iris House amazing? Our Aidan?”
“Yes. He had nothing but good to say about it. It sounds absolutely delightful.”
“Okay.” Charlotte leaned forward. “What is going on with him?”
Eliza studied the women warily. “With Aidan? What do you mean?”
The women exchanged glances. “This whole party!” Charlotte said. “Inviting us here.”
“Most years we can count ourselves lucky if he flies in for a few hours on Christmas Day,” Erin—the schoolteacher, she remembered, married to the attorney—made a face. “This year he was absolutely insistent that we all come and spend several days here at his new place. Do you know how tough it is to get us all together, with everybody’s crazy schedules?”
She could only imagine. She had a feeling this was not a family that sat home waiting for life to happen to them.
“So what’s the story with him?” Genevieve pressed.
Eliza shifted and tried to keep her features as impassive as she could manage. “I guess he has this lovely new house and was eager to show it off.”
It sounded totally implausible, even to her, but she wasn’t about to reveal the secret he had demanded she keep for him.
“That’s another thing,” Erin pressed. “Why this house? Why here? Why not buy in Hope’s Crossing, where he could be closer to all of us?”
“I’m sure he had his reasons. You should ask him,” she said, trying to edge away from the group.
“No, something is definitely up,” Charlotte said. “This afternoon, he spent an hour playing billiards with the guys. An entire hour! Right after that, he was down here reading a Christmas story to your darling little girl and Faith and Carter.”
“Why is that such a shock?” Eliza asked. Aidan had showed remarkable patience and kindness to Maddie from the moment they met.
“It just seems...out of character. Don’t get me wrong. I love my brother dearly. He’s probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. He’s loving and loyal and brilliant. But as long as I have known him, he has also been the most driven person I know.”
“Personally, I find it odd that he invited us all here, spent a few hours with us and then disappeared the rest of the evening.” Katherine Caine, Aidan’s new stepmother, had a worried light in her eyes. “Is he ill?”
Oh, she had a horrible poker face. Nevertheless, Eliza tried her best. “I believe he has a project he’s busy with right now.”
“See, that’s more like the Aidan we know and love,” Lucy said. “It’s the whole, come stay at my new digs, I’ll fly you out thing that seems out of character to me. Something is definitely up.”
Eliza picked up a couple of empty nut bowls from the table, careful not to meet anyone’s gaze. “He loves his family very much. I think he just wanted a chance for everyone to be together.”
That was as much as she was willing to say. Much to her relief, Maddie came galloping in with Carter and Faith close at her heels. As Aidan had predicted, the three of them had become immediate friends and Maddie appeared to be having a wonderful time with children close to her age.
“Mama, when is the sleigh ride? We want to go now.”
“I don’t know, honey. Soon, I’m sure.”
“We’re going to sit together and sing ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’ and ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Way in a Manger.’”
Aidan had been right about this, too. She couldn’t have separated her child from the family activities. Maddie would have been devastated at being excluded. She was already having the time of her life and his family hadn’t even been here half a day.
“Why don’t you children go find your coats and hats and scarves so we don’t have to look for them later?” Erin said in what was obviously her best schoolteacher voice. “I’ll try to find out where things stand with the sleigh ride.”
“And I need to take care of these,” Eliza said, gesturing to the dishes in her hands. She hurried away from the women, grateful she had escaped what she feared would have soon become an interrogation.
His family had already been so kind to her. He had been right, they had absorbed her into their circle from the first moment, as if she had always been part of it.
She loved watching their interaction—the teasing of his brothers with each other, their careful respect for Dermot, the affectionate touches between husbands and wives. This was a family overflowing with love.
Half a day and she already felt as if the women could become good friends to her—if she could only keep from spilling secrets that weren’t hers to share.
She delivered the dishes to the kitchen. The men had finished cleaning up—sort of. They had left a jumbled pile of soaked dish towels on the counter. She picked them up and carried them to the laundry room off the mudroom to add to the pile left over from the lunch cleanup. Hoping to save a little time later, she threw them in the washing machine and was adding laundry soap when she heard someone come in.
“Eliza. What are you doing in here?”
Her traitorous heart gave that silly little skip it did whenever Aidan was close. She looked up with a shrug. “We’re already running low on dishcloths. I guess that’s what happens when you have eight or nine people helping in the kitchen after every meal.”
He laughed as he pulled on his coat, sending a ridiculous shiver down her spine.
Smokin’ Hot Spence Gregory was great-looking, sure, and she could admit she still had a little bit of an embarrassing celebrity crush on him—but he had nothing on Aidan, with those lean chiseled features, vivid blue eyes behind his sexy geek glasses and that slow smile that made her feel like her nerves were stuck on some permanent agitate cycle.
“I warned you how it would be,” he said. “Crazy and chaotic. The noise level from this house alone might be an avalanche danger for the surrounding mountains.”
“They’re wonderful,” she said quietly. “If everything else you ever had was stripped away tomorrow, you would still be the most fortunate man I know. I am absolutely green with envy, Aidan. I wish they were mine.”
His eyes softened. “El.”
He stepped closer and she was mortified at the sudden burn of tears that sprang up out of nowhere. She had no way to protect herself when he called her that, like a sweet and private endearment.
She cleared her throat and pushed them away. “A word of warning. I was just cornered by the women of your family. They’re quite formidable as a group, by the way.”
“Tell me about it. They scare the hell out of me.”
She smiled a little and busied herself by reaching into the dryer for a load of extra bath towels she had left there earlier. “Yes, well, they know something is up with you. You’re acting very out of character, apparently, sending up red flags all over the place. Buying this house, inviting everyone here for the holidays, reading to the little ones. Everyone is very suspicious of your odd behavior.”
“Did you tell them anything?”
She snapped a towel out between them, filling the air with her annoyance along with the sweet scent of laundry soap. “What do you think?”
He sighed. “I think it’s probably not fair for me to ask so much of you.”
Why did he have to make it so tough to stay annoyed with him? “It’s not. You’re a terribly cruel boss. I should complain to someone.”
He laughed. “Take it up with Sue. She pr
obably has a raft of complaints.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure. That you pay her too much and don’t eat enough of her snickerdoodles.”
He grinned down at her just as Dermot came in carrying a few more towels.
He stopped in the doorway and studied the pair of them. “Oh. Sorry to interrupt.”
Eliza could feel herself flush. “You’re not interrupting anything, Mr. Caine,” she said swiftly. “We were just discussing the, um, fabric softener. Your son is very particular about what he wants, you know.”
“Oh, yes. He always has been.”
After a slight pause, he smiled. “If we don’t go on a sleigh ride soon, I’m afraid there are some children out there who might start staging a revolt.”
Aidan seemed to collect himself. “Jim should be bringing the sleigh around to the front right now. Eliza, grab your coat.”
“Yes, my dear,” his sweet father added in that irresistible Irish accent. “And don’t forget your gloves, will you? It’s a bit nippy out there.”
Eliza headed for her coat on the hook, aware there would be no point arguing with either one of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HIS FAMILY APPARENTLY had disappeared.
Christmas Eve afternoon, Aidan emerged from his office to a house that seemed to echo with emptiness.
Where was everyone? The great room fireplace was on but the room appeared to be vacant.
How did twenty rambunctious people vanish into thin air?
He looked around, a little bleary-eyed from the three hours of sleep he’d had the night before—and about the same the night before that.
After the perfect moonlit sleigh ride the night before, which his family had loved, he had escaped to his office to work until the early hours in the morning, had crashed on the sofa there for a few hours in an attempt to recharge, and then hadn’t budged from his office chair since 4:00 a.m. trying to nail down the specifics of the project he was working on.
He was close. He could feel it. He wasn’t sure he would be able to pull it off in time but if he failed, he would at least know he had brought his A game.
But he was completely exhausted, too. Apparently a man of thirty-seven couldn’t run a marathon on a few hours of sleep as if he were still in his twenties—though still being trapped in recovery mode from brain surgery might have something to do with his fatigue.
“Looking for someone, are we?”
His father’s brogue sounded from deep in one of the wing chairs by the huge Christmas tree.
“Hey, Pop.” He really must be tired if he hadn’t even noticed Dermot there.
He headed over as Dermot set his book down on the table beside him. A Christmas Carol, he noted. His father had reread Dickens every Christmas season Aidan could remember.
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
“Oh, here and there. If I’m not mistaken, your brothers and the teen crowd took those snowmobiles in the garage out for a test ride around the meadow behind the house. Katherine and the girls went into town for a little last-minute shopping. I believe the little ones are up in the game room working on a special surprise with the lovely Eliza. I keep hearing random giggles floating down the stairs.”
“Ah.”
Just hearing her name made his heart give that funny little helpless tug.
He pictured her as he had seen her last, on the sleigh ride with his family, her cheeks pink from the cold and her face lifted to the moonlight.
Despite all the arguments she had mustered against going with them, he knew she and Maddie had both enjoyed themselves when their turn to ride the sleigh had come around.
“And where have you been keeping yourself all day?” Dermot asked.
Yeah, he was just about the worst host in the world. He had lost a house full of twenty guests, hadn’t he?
He sat down now on the sofa next to his father. “Working,” he answered. The fire felt lovely. A few snowflakes fluttered down outside and beyond the trees, the lake was a vast, peaceful blue.
“It is Christmas. You remember that, don’t you?”
“I know. I just have something I have to wrap up. It’s taking more energy than I expected, that’s all.”
Dermot sniffed. “I won’t tell you that you work too hard. We’ve had that argument more than a few times over the years, haven’t we?”
“Yes.” Aidan stretched out his legs, certain that if he sat here long enough he would fall asleep. “I still find the lecture quite ironic, coming from a man who has been known to spend every waking hour at his café.”
“Only after your mother died,” Dermot pointed out. “She insisted I keep to regular hours while you children were at home. I tried my best. I’m afraid the last few years I did spend more time than I should have at the Center of Hope, with all of you gone. The silence at home, you know. Sometimes it was more than I could bear.”
The honest admission touched a chord deep inside him. Yes. That was it. The fundamental shift in himself he had been trying to pinpoint. He had always been content with silence. He wasn’t an introvert, as he loved his family and his few close friends like Ben Kilpatrick, but he had always been perfectly content on his own with a book or a computer.
Being the middle child in a large family and always feeling the odd one out had taught him to be independent and self-reliant, both good things.
He didn’t want to be alone anymore. He wanted laughter and music and heady kisses.
He wanted Eliza.
“Everyone is having a wonderful time being together. What a gift you’ve given us, son.”
He managed a smile. “I’m glad.”
“Perhaps you should stop hiding out in your office so you can see for yourself.”
“I only need a few more hours and then I’ll be done. I’m sorry I interrupted your book. Go ahead and read, if you want—though don’t you have it memorized by now?”
“Everyone should read Dickens once a year to remember the message in it. That we only find joy when we’re giving of ourselves to others.”
Dermot picked up the book again. Aidan sat on the sofa and closed his eyes, thinking this wasn’t at all a bad way to spend Christmas Eve, drawing on his father’s constant, steady strength while the snowflakes drifted down outside and the flames danced in the fireplace.
He might have fallen asleep just for a moment—or perhaps longer, he didn’t know—but the sound of giggles woke him. He looked up and spotted Eliza and the children coming down the stairs. She was holding Faith’s and Maddie’s hands while Carter and a couple of the little dogs scampered ahead of them.
For one glittery moment, their gazes met. Her smile slid away and she gave him a solemn look then hurried into the kitchen, pulled along by the children.
“She’s a darling,” Dermot said, looking over his bifocals as the group disappeared down the hallway.
“Maddie? Yeah, she’s a great kid.”
“Maddie, yes. Her mother, as well. You could do far worse,” Dermot observed.
“I know, Pop. Believe me. I know.”
“You care about her, don’t you?”
He thought about passing off a trite answer but didn’t see much point. Dermot had always been entirely too perceptive. When they were kids, they could never try to slip a fib past him without those blue eyes picking out the truth.
Care was a mild word for this yearning, this thick ache in his chest. He loved her. She was everything he never realized he wanted.
“Yes,” he finally answered. “I care about her. Very much.”
Just saying the words seemed to free something clogged inside him, as if he had lifted a fallen tree trunk out of a riverbed to let the water flow freely.
He loved her. He needed her in his life, rather desperately. And Maddie, as well, with her gen
erous smile and sweet courage. Now he only needed to convince Eliza that perhaps she might need him, too.
“Well, then,” Dermot said, looking stunned and pleased at the same time. “Well, then.”
“She doesn’t want me. She told me as much. She thinks we come from different worlds. I’m not sure how to prove her wrong.”
“You’ll figure it out, son,” his father said, with a perfect confidence he found humbling. “It’s what you do, isn’t it? Take a puzzle and work it through? But you might want to keep in mind that you can’t win the girl when you’re sitting at your computer.”
He rose, reinvigorated to return to his project. In this case, he was hoping his father was wrong.
“Thanks for the advice. I’m going to put in a few more hours but, I promise, I’ll see you at dinnertime.”
“Just keep in mind what Charles Dickens said.” He tapped the book in his lap. “No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.”
“I got it. Thanks, Pop. See you at dinner.”
* * *
JUST BEFORE SIX on Christmas Eve, Eliza looked around the heavenly-smelling kitchen. “I think that’s everything. What are we forgetting?”
Sue took in all the dishes and the warmers waiting to be carried into the dining room in a few moments. Though Eliza had helped out where she could in creating the feast—along with most members of the family at one point or another—Sue was quite firmly back in charge in her kitchen. Her foot wasn’t hurting nearly as badly, she claimed. With the little knee walker, she could get around wherever she needed in the kitchen.
“That should be everything. The ham has been glazed, the potatoes are crispy and perfect, the rolls are baking. I think the only thing left to do is for you and I to freshen up for dinner.”
Eliza shifted. “I still feel a little weird crashing their family dinner, don’t you?”
“Not a bit. After all you’ve done to throw this whole house party together this last week and a half, you should be sitting at the head of the table. Everything has gone smoothly because of you.”
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