Christmas Getaway

by Anne Stuart, Tina Leonard

“You were planning a nice normal marriage? With kids?”

  “No kids.” She said it before she realized she intended to say it. It just came out, bang, a straight, flat rejection of the whole thing.

  “Normal marriages have kids,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t about to let her off his carefully prepared hook.

  “Not mine.”

  “So you were brought up with a nanny, nannies are okay, but you never want kids.”

  “This has nothing to do with nannies,” she said.

  “So why don’t you want a family? You’re good with kids. You’re great.”

  “I had a daughter,” she whispered. “Once. I’m never going there again.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHY HAD SHE TOLD HIM THAT?

  She set her glass carefully down on the glass table beside the chaise and she felt absurdly proud of herself that she managed it without tipping it over.

  She’d never told anybody. No one. Not her parents. Not Connor.

  Not even Abby’s father.

  She felt as if her heart had just been ripped open, exposed for all the world to see.

  “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. She somehow got herself to her feet. “I didn’t mean… I’ve never said…”

  He was standing up, too. In one graceful movement he set his own glass aside and was holding her. His big hands held her shoulders in a grip she remembered from the wedding. Strength. Warmth.

  Security.

  It was an illusion, she told herself harshly. Caring was an illusion.

  “If you really don’t want to talk about it,” he said gently, “then I’m sorry I asked. But if you want to tell me…”

  It was too much. The night. This man. The cumulative shock of the past few days—hurt, humiliation, fear. She’d spent years working on her defenses and they crumbled in a nanosecond…in the time it took to register the warmth of his hold and the sincerity of his words.

  “I had a baby,” she whispered.

  “When?”

  “When I was at university. I was eighteen.” She shoved herself back, away from his hold, and crossed her arms over her breasts. It was an age-old gesture of defense. She felt exposed, alone, but she knew she was going to continue.

  “What did you call her?” he asked, and she thought of all the things he could have asked and she hadn’t expected that one.

  “Abigail. For my nicest nanny.”

  “Abby for short?”

  “Yeah.” She hugged herself even harder, remembering those hours spent holding her tiny daughter. The beauty, the perfection. The vulnerability. The appalling devastation when they’d told her…

  “How long did you have her?”

  “Just…three weeks.”

  “You didn’t have her adopted.” It was a statement. He already knew the answer.

  “She died. She had a problem with her heart. They operated. One of those pieces of miracle surgery you read about in the papers. Only there’s a reason they report it as a miracle. Most times the surgery doesn’t work. Abby died on the table.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s a long time ago.”

  “I can’t imagine,” he said softly, “ever losing that sort of pain. So you and Connor decided you wouldn’t have kids because of it?”

  “Connor didn’t know.”

  “He didn’t know you had a daughter?”

  “No.”

  He frowned. “So what sort of support did you have? The father?”

  “The father was a professor of family law at my university,” she said. “He invited me to his rooms for a private tutorial. He spiked my drink. I was too young and too stupid to go to the police.”

  “But…”

  “So I did it alone. My parents wouldn’t want to know. The only person who did… Sam found me right at the end. My brother. He and I had never been close—too big an age difference, raised by too many different nannies. But he dropped in to see me unexpectedly the night after Abby died. I didn’t want to tell him, either, but he guessed. If it hadn’t been for Sam…”

  “Sam’s a lawman, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can imagine him taking the guy’s heart out.”

  It was a flat statement of intent, so cold, so hard that she blinked. Joe would do it for her, she thought. The anger on her behalf was implacable.

  “Maybe he would but I didn’t tell him. I just said it was another kid, a student as young and frightened as me. Even then he pushed for a name but I wouldn’t tell him. What was the point? Abby was dead.”

  “Hell.”

  “It’s a long time ago,” she said wearily, and then regrouped. Sort of. “I’m sorry. I have no idea why I dumped that on you. I never have before. I need to go to bed.”

  “I think we need to put up a Christmas tree,” he said, and the transition was so sudden that she didn’t understand.

  “Pardon?”

  “Do we need a pine tree?” he demanded, seemingly off on another track and running. “Why can’t we use palm fronds?”

  “For a Christmas tree.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great if the kids woke up tomorrow morning to Christmas?”

  “I guess.” She tried to focus. “But I’m tired.”

  “If you go to bed now,” he asked, his voice gentling again, “will you sleep or will you cry?”

  There was a loaded silence. Her arms were still crossed over her breasts. It might look like a gesture of defense and maybe it was. The memory of the warmth of Abby’s little body in her arms was as real this night as it had been all those years ago.

  “I thought so,” he said, without waiting for an answer. “Okay, then. Christmas tree it is.”

  “Do we have any decorations?”

  “There are bound to be. There’s a vast storeroom out the back and I know Erica and Vincent spent at least two Christmases here.”

  “Did you come?”

  “I don’t do Christmas.”

  “But you’re doing it now.”

  “If you’ll help.”

  She thought about it. She uncrossed her arms. It hurt to do so. Like she was letting go.

  But this man had needs, too, as did the three kids sleeping above them. She could do this.

  “Okay,” she said cautiously.

  “Good girl.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I never would,” he said, throwing his hands up in surrender. “I’d get knocked down in flames. So no patronizing. No sympathy. What we need is ‘Jingle Bells’ on the sound system. Let’s get Christmas underway.”

  THE STOREROOM WAS HUGE. It took them half an hour to hunt through it and in the end they found three Christmas trees.

  All of them were appalling.

  They were all fake—magnificent-fake, but fake for all that. They’d been purchased already decorated. They were color-coordinated. One was a huge confection covered with crimson and gold, the next a purple-and-silver fantasy and the third, Molly’s personal favorite, was a black-and-gray Goth-looking monstrosity.

  “Ugh.”

  “It’s revolting.” Joe was lining them up in a row, gazing at them in distaste. “How Erica and I ever came from the same parents… But there’s stuff here we can use.”

  “Is there?”

  “I remember helping Ruby decorate our tree,” he said. “We’d haul in a branch of whatever we could find and stick on whatever we could make. She had a bunch of assorted decorations she’d collected over the years—a real mishmash. Our tree always looked like a dog’s breakfast but a magnificent dog’s breakfast.”

  “You want a dog’s breakfast?” she said faintly.

  “Yep. So we butcher these. Figure out what’s the most kid-friendly decorations and strip ’em off. We’ll put ’em together and see what we come up with.”

  So they attacked the three designer wonders. Molly hauled off the most garish of the flashing lights. “I do like a bit of bling,” she admitted.

  Joe grinned and said, “I knew
that as soon as I saw your bridesmaids.”

  He was hit on the nose by a golden angel.

  “Ow!”

  “Maybe we need two sides of the tree,” she said serenely, slicing off an angel. “Yours and mine.”

  “Five sides,” Joe said. “Yours and mine and Charlie’s and Lily’s and Zoe’s.”

  “Is that the way you and Ruby did it?”

  “She had seven full-time foster sons plus the occasional ring-ins like me.”

  “No girls?”

  “One.” His face softened. “Ellie. Just for a while. Ellie and I still keep in touch. I was supposed to be going to her wedding until I had to step in and take care of the kids. I should ring her.” He shook himself, moving on. “No matter. She’ll be on her honeymoon I guess, and she won’t have missed me at the wedding. Anyway, mostly Ruby just cared for boys. At Christmas she divided the tree into however many kids she had at the time. She took overall operation control with lights and the angel and we did the rest.”

  “She does sound great.”

  “She is.”

  “Why don’t you spend Christmas with her? Or with Ellie?”

  “Ellie’s in the States now. We’re not that close. And Ruby wasn’t my full-time foster mother. The times Social Services tried to arrange for me to be with Erica saw to that. And besides, she’s put up with me for long enough,” he said lightly but she knew the statement wasn’t light at all.

  “It sounds as if she loves you.”

  “Yeah,” he said uncomfortably, and she backed off. There’d been enough emotion for one night. She’d forced him to listen to her sad little tale. She had no intention of pushing personal boundaries further.

  They worked, in silence. She was so exhausted she should be unconscious, but she’d gone past tired. What she was doing was so far out of her normal framework that it almost felt as if she had gone to sleep and this was some crazy dream.

  They stripped the horrible trees of everything they thought was cool. Then they went out to the patio and Joe fetched a ladder and hacked off a couple of dozen palm fronds. They found a bucket, Joe made a swift trip to the beach to fill it with sand, they tied the fronds into a tight woven stem at the base and then wedged them into the wet sand.

  The fronds fell over. Joe immediately purloined a curtain rod to use as a spine. Pity about the curtains. “But who’s looking in?” Joe demanded. “And this place will go on the market soon anyway. Creased curtains might knock it down from oh, say seven million to six million, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and two dollars and three cents.”

  Molly giggled. She’d hung candy canes everywhere she could reach and she was now threading ornaments so she could tie them onto the palm fronds. It felt ridiculous. She felt ridiculous. She felt light-headed and weird and strangely free.

  They worked on, side by side, in a silence that was strangely easy. Eating the odd candy cane on the side. Something about crying on someone, telling them all your life secrets, was strangely liberating, Molly decided. Joe had seen her at her worst. After squashing her in the rosebushes she could hardly be seen as cool, calm and capable. Her corporate self was a long way away.

  Playing with a Christmas tree. A fantastic Christmas tree. It looked… Wobbly. Garish. Weird.

  Wonderful.

  With all the ornaments on Joe flicked the light switch. Red, purple, green and gold lights flickered all over the place.

  “Awesome,” Molly breathed, but it was as if a switch had been flicked somewhere else.

  There was a wail from the bedroom, high-pitched and terrified. Before Molly could register what was happening, Joe was gone, striding swiftly into the bedroom and flicking on the light.

  “Hey, Zoe. Hey.” By the time Molly reached the door he had the little girl in his arms, cradling her against him. But she wasn’t to be cradled. She fought against him, screaming, still in the grip of terror.

  “No. I want Mandy. I want to go home. No, no, no, no, no.”

  Charlie and Lily were stirring now, roused from sleep by the light and the screaming. Lily lurched sideways as if she’d done this a hundred times before, grabbing for her little sister’s hand.

  “It’s okay, Zoe. We’re here. We’re here at Uncle Joe’s.”

  It was too much. Molly stood in the doorway and she looked at Zoe, fighting Joe, then glanced at Lily and Charlie, who looked almost as frightened as Zoe was, and she thought her heart would break. How was Joe to handle this?

  “Who’s Mandy?” she asked Charlie, and Charlie cast her a look of desperation.

  “Dad sacked her ’cos he said she had a big mouth.”

  “Oh, no.” To lose their nanny, as well as their parents… Vincent’s timing had been appalling. “That’s right. I remember her from last Christmas. And now you’re stuck with us this year,” she said softly. And then, since Zoe kept screaming, she added in a louder voice, “Hey, Zoe, wake up! Come and see what Uncle Joe and I have been doing.”

  It took a couple of tries before her words got through and even then Zoe was dazed with the remnants of whatever terrors had got to her in her sleep. But Joe carried her out to the living room. Molly followed, holding hands with a child on either side of her.

  They’d turned off the overhead lights to see the effect of the Christmas tree lights. For the sleepy children it must have seemed a true transformation. When they’d gone to bed this living room was designer chic. Now…it was messy and non-designer and Christmas.

  It really was the weirdest Christmas tree, Molly thought as she looked at their strange artistic creation and waited for the kids’ reaction. These kids were accustomed to designer magic. What were she and Joe doing, hoping to impress them?

  But…

  “It’s made with palm trees,” Lily whispered, awed. “Palm trees.” “There were lots of palm trees at the first Christmas,” Molly said, and if she sounded defensive she couldn’t help herself.

  She didn’t need to be defensive. Lily was walking forward, her face a mixture of incredulity and delight.

  “Here’s my angel,” she whispered.

  Molly and Joe exchanged cautious glances of hope. At the bottom of each of the designer trees, tied in the centre so they could hardly be seen, they’d found kids’ stuff. Every year when Molly was a kid, school activities had included make-your-own Christmas-tree decorations. Paper lanterns. Angels made with macaroni. Baubles made from Ping-Pong balls covered with sequins.

  It had obviously been the same for these kids. Erica must have reluctantly put the kids’ homemade decorations on the trees, but kept them well-hidden.

  Joe and Molly had given them pride of place.

  “There’s the paper chain we made the year before last,” Charlie said to Lily, awed, and he touched the chain. “Do you remember?”

  “I think so,” Lily whispered.

  “We could make another one tomorrow,” Charlie said. “To go on the other side.”

  “But Uncle Joe and Molly decorated the tree,” Lily said, reproving. “It’s finished.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Joe said, swinging Zoe down and setting her on her feet so she could join Charlie at the tree. “It’s quite nice so far, but it’s a work in progress. Charlie’s right. It definitely needs another chain on the other side.”

  “You mean, we can put stuff on it?” Lily whispered in quiet amazement.

  “I mean, you have to put stuff on it,” Joe said. “It’s our very own Christmas tree. Molly and I have started but you guys need to fill all the blank bits. If we run out of spaces, all we need to do is tie on another palm frond.”

  “Cool,” Charlie breathed. And then he looked embarrassed, like he’d remembered he was eight years old and maybe too old for this sort of thing.

  But Joe was grinning. He picked him up and hugged him, and Charlie let himself be hugged.

  “It’s definitely cool,” he said. “I think Christmas is here, starting tonight. It started the minute Molly walked in the door. I think Molly is our Chri
stmas angel.”

  “That’s silly,” Molly said, but there was a little bit of her that thought it wasn’t silly at all. She’d never been anyone’s idea of a Christmas angel. She wiggled her shoulder blades tentatively.

  “My wings are under here somewhere,” she said, and the kids giggled.

  Great. It felt great. She was grinning like a fool and Joe was grinning with her. She felt…

  Like something was opening up within her that had closed the night her baby died. She gasped and stepped back.

  “What’s wrong?” Joe asked, his expression changing to concern, but she shook her head.

  “Nothing. I need to go to bed. It’s way, way late.”

  “It is,” Joe said, and he set Charlie down. “Christmas tree in the morning. I want you three back in bed straight away. You can go to sleep, planning what else we need to put on the tree. And what else we need to decorate the house. We only have four days ’til Christmas. We have to get moving.”

  The kids were already moving, scuttling back to bed as if getting there fast would bring the morning sooner.

  “You want to help tuck them in?” Joe asked, but Molly was backing toward the door. All of a sudden it seemed too intense. Too personal. Too emotional by far.

  “I’ll go to bed myself,” she whispered. “And I’ll do my own tucking in.”

  SHE DIDN’T QUITE. She was in bed, but she was fighting with the too-stiff sheets when there was a light knock on the door.

  She froze. “What?”

  “I wanted to say good-night.”

  “Good night,” she said breathlessly, and then gasped as the door opened a crack, allowing a faint chink of light in. Joe was behind the chink of light.

  Joe took her breath away.

  “Good night,” she said again, and he chuckled and opened the door wider and came on in.

  “I thought you’d be in bed. You want me to pull those sheets out?”

  “No. I mean…”

  “Whoever made up the beds has hospital corners down to a fine art. I found that out the first night and I knew your bed would be the same. You lie under the sheets like a corpse—they don’t move with you an inch. And they’re tucked under so far it takes Superman to pull ’em out.”