A Child for Christmas

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “Rescuing you from Bennett Ludlow.”

  “I didn’t need rescuing.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “Sawyer—”

  “Ryan told me where you were.” He slowed to a crawl until a trio of children could finish dragging their sled across the street. “I realize good manners should probably prevent me from asking you at this last minute, but I’ve got a feeling manners were never real big on my list.”

  “Asking me what?”

  “If you’ll go to the dance with me.”

  She stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “As a heart attack.” His lips twisted. “Or a case of amnesia.”

  “I don’t date.” The usual response came automatically.

  “Then just come back to my motel room and sleep with me.”

  She gaped.

  He laughed abruptly. “Ah, Becky Lee, if you could see your face.”

  Rolling her eyes, more certain than ever that he was goading her, she turned and looked out the window. “You’re spending a lot of time with Sheriff Hayes.”

  “You’ve been keeping tabs on me.”

  She’d only wanted to change the subject. Trust her to jump right into the fire. “I’m your physician, Captain Clay. I’m concerned about you overtaxing yourself. You’re still recovering. You can’t expect to have as much stamina as you ordinarily would.”

  “Bec, my stamina is just fine. And we’re long past the ‘Captain’ stage, don’t you think?” He pulled up behind her garage.

  “I think you’re more dangerous than Bennett,” she said, and hopped out of the Jeep, pulling open the garage door so he could pull inside. Leaving him to it, she hurried through the kitchen door, found Ryan talking on the phone, just as he’d been when she’d left, then busied herself with that day’s mail.

  “You didn’t give me an answer,” Sawyer said from the direction of the kitchen.

  There was no pretending she didn’t know what he was talking about. “It’s not a good idea.”

  “Yeah, but good ideas are often boring as hell. So live dangerously.”

  It must have been because she’d spent most of the past week too aware of the distance between them. Because agreeing with him seemed ridiculously attractive. She swallowed as he advanced toward her. “I’m the town doctor. I can’t live dangerously. I have a reputation to maintain.”

  A faint grin tilted his mobile lips. “This town talks even when there’s nothing to talk about. There’s not much else to do. Give ’em a thrill.”

  “There’s lots to do around here.” She defended the town she’d adopted as her own. “You always did have an attitude when it came to your hometown.”

  “And you ended up here. Quite a coincidence.”

  Rebecca turned to the tree and fiddled with an ornament that Ryan had made out of tongue depressors when he’d been in the first grade. A coincidence. “So did you remember Bennett?”

  “Stop changing the subject.”

  She pushed her fingertips into the front pockets of her slacks and sighed. “Sawyer—” Her pager beeped.

  Sawyer muttered an oath and paced impatiently around the living room while Rebecca went into her office to return the call. She came back within minutes with her bag in hand.

  “I’ll tell Ryan,” he said. “That is, if you can trust me that far.”

  She hesitated, mother instincts warring with her physician’s call. “I shouldn’t be long.”

  He shrugged. “It’s lunchtime. I’ll grab something for your boy.”

  She blinked, sure that she should refuse. “Okay. Ah, thanks.”

  When she returned, Sawyer and Ryan were gone. Having lunch at Ruby’s Café, according to the note Sawyer had taped to the refrigerator door.

  Sitting around waiting for them only made her more anxious. But she didn’t want to drive over to the café, either. To do so would only confirm Sawyer’s mocking taunt that she didn’t trust him.

  And do you?

  The question churned in her mind as she riffled through her closet, trying to figure out what to wear that evening. They still hadn’t returned when she finally selected a royal blue sheath that had been shoved in the rear of the closet, so she decided to take a shower, which turned into a long bubble bath, instead.

  When she came out and pulled on a clean sweatsuit, Ryan’s bedroom door was closed and she could hear music coming from inside. But not his usual music. She listened. Tony Bennett, if she wasn’t mistaken.

  She shook her head and checked the dress she’d left hanging in the steamy bathroom. When she passed her son’s room this time, the smooth voice coming through the door was distinctly out of place. “Ry, open up for a second.” She knocked on his door, speaking above the music as she pushed open the door. “Since when do you listen to Frank Sinatra?”

  The sight inside the room caught her broadside. Her son, cheeks flushed and ball cap twisted around backward, was carefully positioning his feet on the series of X’s that had been taped to the carpeted floor. Sawyer, looking equally hot and frazzled, was standing to one side, near the bed they’d shoved out of the way of their impromptu dance floor.

  Ryan turned even redder when he realized she was standing in the doorway, watching them. She looked at Sawyer. “I didn’t realize you were here, too.” She didn’t know, in this instance, if ignorance was bliss or not. “I take it I interrupted some dance instruction?”

  Ryan grimaced and flopped dramatically on his bed. “Melanie is gonna end up dancing with Jason Reese and I’m gonna stand there all night looking like a dork, ’cause there’s no way I’m gonna learn this stuff.”

  “I told you that you ought to ask your mom to show you how to dance,” Sawyer said.

  “Dance with my own mom?” Ryan’s voice rose.

  Rebecca crossed her arms, leaning against the doorjamb. Amusement outweighed her indignation. “What’s so appalling about that?”

  Her son just groaned. Frank finished his song, and The Temptations filled the room with smooth sound.

  “Maybe if you watched how it’s done,” Sawyer suggested, and Rebecca swallowed a nervous start when she realized he was looking expectantly at her.

  “I don’t dance,” she said hurriedly.

  He stopped in front of her, a glint of challenge in his dark blue eyes. “Yet you’re on the planning committee for a dance?”

  “It’s a community event.”

  “Come on, Mom,” Ryan said. “Sawyer says if I wanna impress a girl, I gotta be able to dance the yucky way. ’Cause women are all soft and funny about that sorta thing.”

  She couldn’t quite deny the truth of that statement, even if she wasn’t thrilled with the disgruntled male tone in which it was delivered. “Since when are you interested in what a girl thinks?”

  Ryan’s flush continued flourishing. “Jeez, Mom.”

  “I was just asking.”

  Sawyer chuckled under his breath and took her in his arms, pulling her over to the taped X’s, moving easily with the music. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked you to the dance, after all,” he said for her ears when she stumbled twice. “I don’t have any steel-toed boots in my suitcase.”

  “Very funny.” Her pulse pounded in her ears. “This isn’t teaching Ryan anything,” she said loudly and pulled out of his arms. “Ryan, come here.”

  Her son’s expression was priceless. But apparently this Melanie he wanted to impress was more important than his feelings about dancing with his mother. So Rebecca found herself in the bittersweet position of teaching her son the box step in order for him to impress a girl who’d apparently stolen his young heart.

  When Ryan jittered around his bedroom after a couple of successful sweeps of the temporary dance floor, Rebecca knelt down to pull up the masking tape from the carpet. Sawyer leaned over and helped.

  She looked at his hands—long blunt fingers and strong, tapered wrists. Ryan was dancing behind them with an imaginary partner to music that played only in his head.


  She brushed her wet hair behind her ears. “Yes, Sawyer. I’ll go to the dance tonight with you.”

  Chapter Ten

  “He sure does have a way about him, don’t he?”

  Standing near the punch bowl, Rebecca glanced at Sawyer’s father. But her eyes didn’t stray long from Sawyer, who’d succeeded in charming Hope Leoni out onto the dance floor. “Yes,” she murmured. “He does.”

  “Where’s Gloria?”

  Squire’s lips twisted. “She decided not to come tonight.”

  She took a closer look at him. He was a striking man, with his thick silvered hair brushed away from his hard, angled face. Though she’d tried to keep some measure of professional distance from the Clay family, the fact of the matter was that they, and the whole town of Weaver to boot, had welcomed her with disarming generosity. Squire had been on the committee that had hired her and basically funded the acquisition of the equipment in her offices. And Rebecca had been trying to get Gloria to agree to work in her office ever since.

  It was pointless to pretend that she wasn’t intensely interested in the Clay family as a whole. “Is she not feeling well?”

  “Aside from being a confounded female, I’d guess she’s fit as a fiddle.”

  Rebecca looked past the shrug he gave to see the strain in his expression. She set their drinks on the table and tucked her arm through his before she could think twice about it. “I seem to be in need of a dance partner. Would you be willing?”

  He grunted. But he patted her hand and accompanied her onto the floor, and she felt a small bit of pleasure that she’d pleased him. “There’s a nice turnout tonight, don’t you think?”

  He led her easily around the floor, reminding her strongly of Sawyer. “Pretty fair,” he agreed.

  “I do like the holidays.”

  “Haven’t celebrated ’em too much myself,” he admitted. “My boys’ wives are working on changing that, though.” His eyes took on a distant cast. “My wife died on Christmas Eve,” he said abruptly.

  Rebecca’s heart squeezed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Was a long time ago.”

  “And time dulls the pain, but it doesn’t make up for the loss.”

  “You lost your husband shortly before you came to us,” he remembered. “I always thought you were too young and pretty to be a widow.”

  She smiled slightly. “And you were too young and handsome to be a widower.”

  His eyebrows worked. “Handsome,” he snorted, the tension easing from his shoulders. “Mind answering a question for me?”

  “If I can.”

  “Would you get married again, if you had the opportunity?”

  Rebecca realized she was watching Sawyer again and stumbled as Squire’s words sank in. “I... well—”

  “Of course, Gloria’s lived a mite more’n you. Had a longer life with her husband than you did, before he passed on. And I—”

  “You’re thinking of proposing to Gloria?”

  He didn’t answer right away. One song changed to the next. “She says if I don’t want to get hitched, she doesn’t want to keep seeing me,” he finally said. “Helluva thing to say, if you ask me.”

  “What do you want, Squire?” Rebecca asked softly, looking up into his face.

  His gaze drifted toward the left and she knew instinctively that he was watching Sawyer. Then his attention drifted further and she guessed he was watching his other sons, Jefferson, Daniel and Matthew, who were at the moment occupying a round table with their wives and daughters. “Have you met my youngest boy?” he questioned, instead of answering.

  “I’ve heard about him,” she said. “From your family as well as an article here and there in the media.” Tristan Clay, from all reports, was as rich as sin and as handsome as all his brothers combined and too fully grown to be called a boy.

  “I wish my boys to be happy,” he said. “Three out of five ain’t bad, but it ain’t enough.”

  “You’re assuming that because they’re unmarried, Sawyer and Tristan are unhappy.”

  “Sawyer always went his own way,” Squire reflected, a faint smile on his lips. “I said north, he said south. He knows more about ranching than some folks could forget in a lifetime, but he lit outta here before he’d even graduated high school.”

  Rebecca started. She hadn’t known that.

  Squire didn’t seem to notice, though, as he continued. “Boy had half-a-dozen universities panting to get him into their mathematics programs, and all he could think about was seeing the world. Joining the navy. Don’t know where that desire came from. And not just the service, either. No, sir. He had to be a SEAL. Comes from farmers and ranchers, and that boy wanted to live in a wetsuit treading water off the coast of some godforsaken country. And then he decides he wants even more excitement, getting into some even more hushed-up intelligence thing.”

  “You’re very proud of him.”

  “Proud, sure. Understand him? No. And now he’s got a crimped circuit in his brain that keeps him from remembering us, but he still walks his own path. Look at the way he moved into town the way he did.”

  “Sawyer’s condition isn’t that uncommon, Squire. He sustained quite a trauma in that accident. There’s no reason to think he won’t make a full recovery.”

  “And he’ll leave his home behind again to go back to the life he wanted.”

  The knot lodged in her throat doubled size. “But if his naval career is what makes him happy, then you’ve gotten your wish.”

  Squire’s gaze narrowed. “All right,” he allowed. “I wish they could be happy right here. On the Double-C, or in Weaver, at least.”

  “That’s understandable,” she murmured. She knew that Sawyer would leave again. When he was fit again, she’d sign that release form. He’d return to the love that had always come first with him. His naval career. A thought that caused a pain in her midsection that she didn’t want to come close to acknowledging. “So you want your sons to be happy. But what about Squire being happy?”

  “Who says I ain’t?”

  She held his ice-blue gaze with her own, not flinching away in the least at his disgruntled tone. “I think you wish you were dancing with Gloria Day,” she said mildly.

  “Too smart for your own good, that’s what you are.”

  “All those years in med school had to do something for me,” she replied. “Life is too short, Squire,” she said softly. “You of all people should know that.”

  He grunted. “Maybe I do, at that.” His attention focused over her head for a moment. “Mebbe you need to remember that fact, too,” he returned.

  “Mind if I cut in?”

  She realized Sawyer was standing behind them and felt as awkward as a gawky teenager when Squire thanked her cordially for the dance and surrendered her to his oldest son. She noticed that he didn’t return to the table with the rest of his family, but headed, instead, for the exit. And Gloria, she suspected.

  “Considering I brought you to this shindig, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to get you onto this floor or not.”

  Her heartbeat skittered around when Sawyer folded her hand in his. Considering the “practice” session earlier in Ryan’s room, she ought to be over the worst of the shock of being in his arms. Only she wasn’t. “I have a lot of duties here,” she said, appalled at the breathlessness in her voice.

  “Yeah, I noticed old Bennett keeping you company whenever he could. Thought you said you didn’t date.”

  “I don’t. And Bennett is just a—” She didn’t know how to categorize Bennett. “Friend” would be overstating it on her part, though Bennett had made it abundantly clear he wanted more.

  “Bennett is probably the same stuffed shirt he always was,” Sawyer said. “More impressed with himself than any ten people in this town combined.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember him.”

  “I remember he couldn’t take no for an answer from more than one girl in high school. Watch out for him, Becky Lee.”

>   She focused on the sinfully soft cashmere sweater he wore. Along with his finely tailored black trousers and the silver-tipped waves tumbling over his forehead, he was the epitome of rough elegance. “I’m a big girl,” she said, as much to remind herself as him. “I’m perfectly capable of handling the likes of Bennett Ludlow.”

  “Sure. That’s why you practically raced toward me earlier today when he was bugging you.”

  “It looked like Hope enjoyed her dance with you,” she said deliberately. “Did she mention that she is a new teacher at the elementary school?”

  “Changing the subject?”

  “Seems wise.”

  His lips curved. “And you pride yourself on being wise and sensible and the ever-upstanding town doctor.”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  He shook his head slowly, sliding his hand more firmly around her waist. “I find it amazingly appealing,” he said softly. “You look beautiful tonight, did I tell you that?”

  Her mouth ran dry. “I believe you mentioned it when we left home.”

  “You look good in blue. But what I like most, I think, is the length of the dress.”

  “The lack of it, you mean,” she corrected dryly. She’d debated that the dress was too short.

  “You’ve got fabulous legs, Doc. Show ’em off, I say.” His fingers caressed the small of her back as they moved slowly, barely dancing among the crowd. “It does make a man wonder, though, what you’ve got on underneath.” His soft words stirred the hair at her temples.

  Her cheeks heated. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Only speaking the truth.”

  She swallowed the moan that climbed into her throat when he drew his warm fingers up her spine and back down again. The cashmere was soft against her cheek, but the chest beneath was wide and hard. “Sawyer.” She sighed. “This is madness.”

  “Madness is pretending we don’t feel this.”

  She closed her eyes. Bing Crosby’s voice swirled around them, mingling with chatter and laughter and the clink and tinkle of glasses and bottles. He led and she blindly followed. “There is probably some woman waiting for you in Maryland,” she said somewhat desperately.