“The bride,” he said.
“Yep, this is my honeymoon,” she ventured, trying to take it all in. She stood up again but Zoe clung to her legs and didn’t let go. “What are you doing here?”
“This is the kids’ house.”
“I was told it’d be empty.”
“It’s not.”
“Right.” She couldn’t think of where to go from here.
“Are you here for Christmas?” Zoe asked her, and she shook her head.
“Nope.” Definitely not. Not now.
The faces of the three children drooped.
“It’d be good if you could stay for Christmas,” Lily whispered, and Joe looked at her sharply.
“How do you know the kids?” he asked, and Molly glanced across the room at Charlie and Lily and her heart gave a sudden lurch. She’d spent only a little time with these children, but even in that time…she’d realized just how lost they were.
“They were supposed to be my ring bearer and flower girls,” she said.
“Because they were Connor’s relations. Not yours.”
“What’s his was supposed to be mine,” she said, striving for lightness. “Connor and Vincent were friends, as well as cousins. Connor and I have been…together…for three years. So the kids and I have seen each other on family occasions.”
“Connor and Molly had Christmas with us last year,” Lily volunteered. “Molly didn’t like our white Christmas tree, either. When the grownups started arguing, she took us for a walk and we looked in all the shop windows and decided what we’d buy if we had all the money in the world.”
Molly swallowed. She’d hated it. They’d been at an opulent hotel in New York. “Let’s abandon the family for Christmas,” Connor had said, and even though Molly had known how hurt Letitia would be, she hadn’t been able to resist. She had no family of her own apart from Sam, who was off doing his own thing as he always was. The thought of a Christmas in Manhattan with just the two of them sounded great. Only, of course, Vincent and Erica had been there with their kids. Connor hadn’t told her they would be.
He hadn’t told her lots of things. The relationship had been all surface, she thought. It had been a convenience. She’d never really bothered peering under the veneer.
Like last Christmas. She’d been surprised when she’d discovered Vincent and Erica were in the same hotel as they were. Her idea of an intimate Christmas dinner had turned into a much bigger occasion, a dozen or more people in the vast hotel dining room. The men had seemed…somehow grim. Talking in undertones. Arguing. Disappearing from the table.
The women were a type—accessory wives. They tittered and gossiped. At the end of the table a pale-faced nanny called Mandy had sat with the kids. Her job was to keep the children silent. Still in her teens, white-faced and lonely, she seemed almost to be one of the kids herself. She was surely just as miserable.
Finally Molly could bear it no longer. She’d excused herself, but the kids and Mandy had looked at her with such desperation as she left the table that she’d had little choice.
“We’ll walk off some of our turkey,” she’d said, but no one had listened. She’d taken the kids and Mandy away, and Erica hadn’t so much as asked where they were going.
“We had fun,” Lily remembered, in a tight little voice that said she hoped desperately it was true. “Only then Dad sacked Mandy and then…and then…”
Then their parents had died. “But this is still Christmas,” Molly said gently. “You must be looking forward to it. Your cousin Betty had the key to this house and she told me it’d be empty. She said it’d be good if I could check up on it. But now you guys are here… I’ll leave you to it.”
“Where will you go?” Joe asked. He’d been watching her as if she were a genie who had suddenly appeared from a bottle and he didn’t quite believe she was real.
“To a hotel,” she said, and backed away from that look. The last thing she needed was a needy male.
“You can stay if you like.”
“I don’t like,” she said flatly, and then winced at the look on three kids’ faces. She regrouped. “Sorry, guys, but I’m feeling a bit sad at the moment. Because of what happened at my wedding.”
“What happened to Connor?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “The police are still looking for him. They think he might have done something bad.” How to tell kids that not only was he suspected of stealing the diamonds, but he was also implicated in three murders—two of which were these kids’ parents.
“He did a bad thing not marrying you,” Lily said stoutly, and Zoe hugged Molly’s legs tighter as if it was astounding that anyone could be so stupid.
Strangely it helped. She hadn’t wept—not for the entire time since her abandoned wedding—but now she found herself suddenly blinking away tears.
“We’re sad, too,” Charlie said cautiously from the settee. “Maybe we can all be sad together.”
“Welcome to my world.” Joe’s expression was cautiously hopeful. A man who’d seen a chink of light. “Endless reruns of the Road Runner.”
“The Road Runner’s good,” she told him.
“In moderation.”
“You have a beach.”
“The kids don’t like the beach.”
“You don’t like the beach?” She disentangled Zoe and stepped back, gazing first at the kids and then out to where the Pacific Ocean lay in all its glory. “Why not?”
“It’s scary,” Lily whispered.
“But you have your uncle Joe to look after you.”
Their glance at their uncle Joe said it all. They didn’t know him. They’d been tossed into a terrifying environment where the rules weren’t the same. They didn’t know how to handle it.
“We always have a nanny,” Zoe said. “The nanny tells us the rules.”
“I suspect your uncle Joe knows some rules.”
“He doesn’t tell us.”
“So why not?” Molly asked him, and Joe looked flummoxed.
“Hey. I told the kids to do what they like.”
“Right. Kids need rules. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
“You can’t go,” Joe said.
“Why not?” She gazed at him in astonishment.
“You…hell, you just can’t.”
“You throw me into a rose garden at my own wedding. You rip my gown—which, I might add, cost me a king’s ransom—and now you tell me where I can and can’t go?”
“I need you.”
WHERE HAD THAT come from? He’d never said such a thing in his life.
He didn’t need anyone.
But desperate times called for desperate measures. Sure it was a cliché, but someone had made it up for good reason. Now was as desperate as he was ever likely to get.
He had four days to go before Christmas. He was so far out of his depth with these kids he felt like drowning.
This woman knew them. She had some sort of link to their past. She’d spent last Christmas with them.
Zoe was back clutching her legs.
“No,” Molly said.
“No?”
“It’s my honeymoon.”
“You can have your honeymoon with us,” Lily said, but she sounded doubtful.
“We’re nicer than Connor,” Charlie said, and she looked across the room at him and she thought about it and she sniffed.
It was a pretty decisive sniff. Joe thought back to the last woman he dated. Elspeth would have given away her Manolo Blahnik shoes rather than sniff.
He didn’t do emotion. He didn’t do needy females.
That sniff sort of…touched him.
“You know, it’s Christmas,” he said gently. “Every hotel in Australia will have been booked out months ago.”
“I still have my booking at the…” She stopped.
“Where?” he prodded.
“The Paradise Island Honeymoon Resort,” she said on a little gasp, and he wasn’t fast enough to repress a smile.
“I’m not laughing.” He schooled his expression into seriousness.
“I can still go there.”
“You’d hate it.” His voice became gentler. “Molly, we have a huge house. Five bedrooms. The kids and I are upstairs using two bedrooms between us. The whole bottom floor can be yours. There’s even a little kitchenette down there.”
“So Mom and Dad can eat up here and the nanny and us can eat downstairs,” Lily said.
“That sounds real cozy,” she said, before she caught herself.
“It’s not great,” Joe said. “Nothing for these kids has been great.”
She fell silent. There was a long pause while Joe wisely decided not to say anything at all.
“I don’t even know you,” she said at last.
“I’m Joe Cartland. Erica’s brother.”
“I know that much at least,” she snapped.
“Letitia knew we’d be here. I can’t understand why she didn’t tell…”
“If you think Letitia was capable of a coherent thought, you’re so far off reality there’s no help for you. Her son’s wanted for…” She gasped and stopped and looked at the kids. She reformatted whatever it was she was about to say. “Her son’s wanted for theft. Her husband’s useless. Henry just nods and smiles like one of those bobble-head dogs you see in the back of cars.”
“That’s Great-Uncle Henry,” Lily said wisely. “He nods all the time.”
“He does look like one of those dogs,” Charlie said, and giggled.
They all drew a breath. Joe looked across at Charlie. He’d giggled.
It was the best sound.
Charlie had taken on the weight of the world since his parents’ deaths. His little sisters had clung to him and he’d reacted with a strength that belied his age. He’d asked for help from Joe because he didn’t know what to do, but it wasn’t working.
This woman had been in the house for five minutes and Charlie was giggling.
“You have to stay,” he said, and he didn’t even try to disguise the urgency in his voice.
“I don’t want to.”
“What else do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she wailed. “Set the clock back. Not get engaged to Connor in the first place. Beam me up to some planet where none of this exists.”
“Well, while you’re waiting for your spaceship, why don’t you go downstairs, get into a swimming costume and then join us in the pool.”
“I wanted to escape.”
“I guess we all want to do that,” he said. Then, at the look on her face—a combination of anger, bewilderment and despair—he took a couple of strides across the room. He lifted Zoe away from her legs and popped her behind him.
“Let’s give Molly some space,” he said. “She needs to make her own decision.”
“Right,” she said. “As if I can. Blackmailing…”
“I’m not blackmailing.”
“I don’t know what else you could call this. It’s a trap, ready-set.”
“Not by me.” He said it steadily, meeting her gaze with what he hoped was his most honest, reliable, nonconfrontational expression.
It didn’t work. “Men,” she said with loathing. “They’re all the same.”
“I’m not the same as Connor.”
Her glare said she didn’t believe him. “If I stay here, I stay completely separate.”
“But you will have a swim with us?” Charlie said, sounding bewildered.
She cast a despairing glance across at him. “I might have known it. You’re male, too.”
“I’m just a boy,” Charlie said.
“Me, too,” Joe said virtuously, and she glared some more.
“Right.”
“But you will stay.”
There was another pause—even longer than the last one. He watched the warring emotions flitting across her face. She was right in thinking this was a trap, he thought. It was a trap for both of them. Three orphans for Christmas.
Three orphans and Molly. A battered bride.
It’d be interesting, he thought, and the gray fog that had surrounded him from the moment he’d heard of Erica’s death lifted a little.
Just a little. There was no point in getting his hopes up yet. But his hopes were up. He forced himself to stay quiet, to school his face into impassivity, to try and make it seem like it was all her decision and he wasn’t forcing things.
“You’re a bottom feeder,” she said into the silence, and he blinked.
“Um…why?”
“Because you’re male and I hate the species.”
“Except for me,” Charlie said anxiously, and she sighed.
“Yes, Charlie, apart from you.”
“Try and forget I’m male,” Joe said hopefully.
“Yeah, right.”
“But you will stay?” Lily asked, and Molly threw up her hands in surrender.
“Fine. I’ll stay. Let’s have Christmas. But if I’m staying, I refuse to watch the Road Runner. I want a real Christmas.”
“Of course we’ll have Christmas.”
“No,” she said decisively. “Not a white-plastic-Christmas-tree Christmas. A proper Christmas. I want a real tree and plum pudding and mistletoe. I want Santa Sacks and church at midnight and all the trimmings. I want ten miles of paper chains hung all round this crazy white house, and I want paper lanterns everywhere. It’ll keep our minds off everything and that’s the most important thing right now. Joe, pour me a drink. Zoe, Lily, come and help me unpack. Charlie, the handle came off my smallest case out by the driveway. Can you go collect my cosmetics, please? Not that I’ll need them here. And, Joe Cartland, if you so much as think about being male, I’m hightailing it out of here so fast I’d leave the Road Runner for dead. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said faintly.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s get Christmas on the road.”
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT HAD SHE agreed to do?
Molly stood in front of the big mirror in the downstairs bedroom and stared at her reflection in consternation. She was wearing her brand-new bikini. It was a slash of scarlet designed to make Connor’s eyes water. It had cost a fortune.
She was wearing it for Joe and three kids.
There was no going back now. The kids had helped her unpack, she’d sent them upstairs to put their own bathing gear on and they were expecting her by the pool.
Joe was expecting her by the pool. He was up there making her a drink.
He was too good-looking by half. He’d hauled her into the rosebushes with such force that she still had bruises. But the cops had looked at the bullet holes in the chapel entry and had nothing but praise for the guy.
“Tommy was specifically aiming for your bridesmaid and his shots were wild,” they’d said. “One of the other guys started shooting, as well. Everyone was in danger. We had no choice but to shoot back. If Letitia hadn’t collapsed and this guy hadn’t pushed you sideways, you’d probably both be dead.”
“So you guys were shooting at me?” she asked, astounded.
“You don’t understand, ma’am,” they’d replied patiently. “Tommy opened fire indiscriminately. He was firing on wedding guests, as well as us. We had no choice but to take him out.”
“But you didn’t,” she’d snapped. “He got away.”
It made her nervous. Connor was still out there somewhere. Who else was with him?
They’d made threats against these kids. She thought about it now and wondered whether Joe was aware of it. Maybe that’s why he’d brought them here, she thought. Australia was about as far as you could get from Dallas and Connor and his thugs.
And evil.
She shivered, feeling sick as she did every time she thought about it. How close had she come to marrying the guy?
Why had Connor wanted to be married to her? But she knew the answer to that. She was a high-profile lawyer. Her firm repres
ented Boston’s old money. She had it figured now. Connor was a crooked cop. He needed respectability and she could give it to him.
That was why the sudden pressure to marry. Apparently rumors had been spreading in the force and he wanted them squashed.
So much for wanting to impress Connor with her bikini. She stared into the mirror and winced. Had he even wanted her? Had he seen anything other than the respectable, boring, legal side of her?
She shivered, feeling lonely, sick and sad.
Maybe it was just as well she’d committed to spending Christmas with three kids, she thought. Otherwise…well…
“Otherwise” didn’t bear thinking about.
But the package included Joe.
There was something not to think about. Joe with the kindly eyes, but the look that said he saw deeper. He was disturbing. Too big. Too male.
He was waiting with a drink.
She was committed. She had to go. But she picked up her sarong and tied it round her waist; then rethought and tied it higher.
Respectable Molly.
SHE WALKED THROUGH the glass doors leading to the pool and he almost dropped his beer.
This was the third time he’d seen her. The first time she’d looked like a rumpled piece of overly ornate candy floss. Then, when she’d arrived today, she’d been wearing a business-type skirt and jacket. It had been red but it was conservative. She’d even been wearing nylons.
But now…
The sliver of a sarong was transparent enough for him to see the outline of a smashing bikini underneath. Nothing else. Her legs were bare. She’d hauled her hair out of the knot she’d had it in, and her curls were brushing loosely against her bare shoulders.
She looked young, he thought. He knew that she was a lawyer—a partner in one of Boston’s bigger law firms. She had to be in her thirties.
She looked about nineteen.
“Hi,” he said for want of anything better, and she cast him a scared glance, accentuating his impression of youth.
“Hi, yourself.”
“Molly,” the kids yelled. They were sitting on the edge of the shallow end of the pool, lined up like three little birds.
“Why aren’t you in the water?” she called.
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