I'll Be Home for Christmas

by Dawn Stewardson

  “While you’re poking around after those...those criminals,” his father had snapped at one point, “just remember you’re a writer, not Magnum, P.I., or Dirty Harry.”

  “Hey,” his father was saying now, “I think we should let your dad get going, Cody—before it’s too late for your grandmother to read you a bedtime story.”

  “Well...okay. Bye, Dad.”

  “Night, sport.” Logan called another goodbye to his mother, then ruffled Cody’s hair and opened the front door, saying, “You be good, and I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

  When he walked out into the night, his thoughts immediately turned to Ali. It wasn’t late. Barely eight o’clock. But in the dead of winter, like this, it was dark before six, and he hated the idea of her being alone in that big old house, with only her thoughts for company.

  Navigating his way through the residential maze of Don Mills, he reached Lawrence and headed for the Parkway, his mind drifting back to the afternoon...to holding Ali and kissing her. She felt so incredibly right in his arms, as if she belonged in them. At least, that’s how it felt from his side. He wasn’t sure how it felt from hers.

  She certainly hadn’t rejected him. Far from it. Hell, just recalling how arousing her kisses had been was turning him on. But maybe, with the way things were, all she’d really wanted was to be held, to be close to someone. And he’d been right there—ready and willing.

  God, so ready and willing it was unbelievable. He’d never felt this way about a woman before. His feelings for Loretta hadn’t even come close. It might have taken him a long time to realize he was in love with Ali, but now that he had...well, all those months of biding his time and playing things cool had only made him want her more. Which got him back to the question of how she felt.

  He could hardly press her to answer that question at the moment, though. Not under the circumstances. A horn blasted, telling him he was driving erratically, and he realized he’d made it onto the Parkway and almost all the way down to Bloor.

  Pulling over to the right-hand lane, he flicked on the signal for his exit and let his thoughts drift back to Ali. What was going to happen when he went to L.A. next month? The answer was obvious, and he didn’t like it. He’d go, but Ali would stay here.

  She regretted having dropped out of university the first time, so she wouldn’t make the same mistake again. And since she already had provisional acceptance to grad school next fall...

  Of course, he might not be in California forever, but odds were he’d be gone a long time. His agent seemed certain he’d be asked to adapt the other two books that were optioned, and that could well lead to other projects. He reached the corner of Palmerston and turned down the quiet old street, deciding to leave the Jeep in his own drive, then walk along to Ali’s—just make sure she was okay.

  And then he saw it up ahead. Parked almost directly in front of his place, with a perfect view of Ali’s, was the Caddy she’d told him about. Black, with dark windows that even in daylight would hide the interior from prying eyes.

  Who was inside it? Nick Sinclair and Chico Gonzalez? Waiting to see if Bob Weyden came calling in the middle of the night? Pulling into his driveway, he climbed out of the Jeep and started back toward the street—feeling eyes watching him from behind those dark windows.

  His initial impulse was to stop and knock on one of them, find out exactly who was in the car and what the hell they figured they were doing. Then he thought about the way Vinny Velarde had looked this morning. And about the fact that his father had been right. He was Logan Reed, writer, not Magnum, P.I., or Dirty Harry.

  That took care of his initial impulse, but what other options did he have? He could phone the police. And what would he say? That he didn’t like the looks of a car sitting outside his house? One parked in a perfectly legal space? Yeah, that would really get them here with their sirens screaming.

  Realizing his options were extremely limited, he walked on by the Caddy—so preoccupied with it that he didn’t notice, until he’d turned up Ali’s walk, that there was only a single light on in the house.

  It was upstairs, in her bedroom, and seeing that made him swear to himself. She liked to read in bed, so even though it was early she’d probably settled in for the night. Which meant she wouldn’t appreciate company. But he was damned if he’d go home and leave her alone. Not with that car lurking.

  For the first time in his life, he wished he had a gun, and that started him wondering if he’d buy one after he moved. From what he’d heard, everyone had them in L.A. But he wasn’t in L.A. yet. He was still in Canada, where strict gun laws meant that ordinary citizens like him never had them. He glanced back at the Caddy, certain the guys inside weren’t ordinary citizens.

  That thought preying on his mind, he headed up Ali’s front steps and turned the old knob that rang the bell, hoping he wasn’t scaring her half to death. After a minute or so the stairway light came on and she appeared on the stairs, wearing her bunny slippers and a long fuzzy pink robe. It hid all her curves, yet somehow still managed to make her look sexy. She flicked on the porch light, saw it was him and smiled—a smile that went straight to his heart.

  “Sorry,” he said as she opened the door and gestured him inside. “I didn’t want to get you up, but...”

  “It’s all right, I’m glad you did. I was trying to read, but I couldn’t. In fact, I was just thinking about coming down and making hot chocolate. Want some?”

  “Sure.” What he really wanted was to take her in his arms, but something told him not to, so he simply turned and hung up his jacket while she headed for the kitchen. Then he just stood staring at the front door for a minute, wishing she had a solid steel one without a square inch of glass in it.

  He’d never worried much about the doors in these old houses—had never even given them much thought before last night. But things were hardly the way they’d been before. Now things were scary as hell.

  * * *

  ABOVE THE LOW HUM of the microwave, Ali heard Logan heading down the hall. By the time she glanced across the room, he was standing in the kitchen doorway. Looking at him, she couldn’t help remembering how comforting his arms had been this afternoon or how much better his kisses had made her feel—if only for a while.

  And even though she was trying to see him objectively now, she was certain he had the most sensuous mouth in the entire world. The broadest shoulders, too—amazing, when he was essentially tall and lean. When you added in his chiseled features and deep, blue eyes, he was an exceptionally attractive man.

  Just as her thoughts reached that point, he smiled at her. It was such a warm, easy smile that her objectivity slipped entirely away, and she began thinking that if her whole world wasn’t turned upside down... She looked away from him. Her whole world was turned upside down and would be until Robbie was home. She might not regret having found comfort in Logan’s arms once, but she wasn’t going to be foolish.

  They were good together as friends. Very good. So allowing their relationship to change would be very foolish indeed—particularly right now, when she was an emotional wreck and Logan was about to pack his bags for California.

  He started across the kitchen. Then the microwave pinged, telling her the hot chocolate was ready, and she turned to get it.

  “Was everyone glad to see you?” she asked a moment later, handing him one of the mugs and sitting down across from him.

  “Uh-huh. And Cody’s okay with staying there a little longer. How about you? You call Nancy back? And Bob’s mother?”

  “I tried Nancy, but I only got her machine. And Celeste...oh, Logan, I was too chicken to even try her. She’s been through so much, thinking Bob was murdered and everything. She just doesn’t need the stress of knowing Robbie’s gone and all.”

  “She’s going to find out what happened eventually.”

  Ali shrugged, knowing that was true. If she didn’t tell Celeste, Robbie would be certain to—assuming he came through this fine. And if he didn’t... She
did her best to force away the fear that Robbie might never tell Celeste anything again.

  “I just couldn’t figure out what I’d say to her,” she explained at last. “I mean, no matter what I thought of, it was going to come out sounding like a good-news-bad-news joke. The good news is that your son isn’t really dead. But the bad news is that he’s taken off with Robbie, and I’m scared to death I won’t get him back safely.”

  “Ali, you are going to get him back safely. We are.”

  “You’re right. We are.” She had to keep believing that. And she had to stop thinking about Robbie every single second, because it was driving her crazy with worry.

  Using all the mental energy she could summon, she managed to focus her thoughts on another subject. She was, she realized, becoming an expert at compartmentalizing everything in her mind and temporarily locking up the various compartments.

  “You had a visitor while you were gone,” she said. “She arrived when I was feeding Sammy.”

  “She?”

  “Your wife.”

  “You mean my ex-wife,” he said.

  His expression revealed nothing more than mild surprise, but the way he emphasized the ex gave her a twinge of guilt. He’d told her he was divorced, and she’d never known him to lie. But when Loretta had distinctly said she was “Logan’s wife...” Ali had been wondering about that off and on, although she didn’t know why. What difference did it make to her whether Logan and his ex-wife had bothered to legally finalize things?

  “What did she want?” he asked at last.

  “I...just to see you, as far as I could tell. And to see Cody.”

  “That would be a first,” he muttered.

  By taking a slow sip of hot chocolate, Ali managed not to ask what he meant by the remark. Both she and Logan liked to keep their private lives private. Before this afternoon, she hadn’t even known Loretta’s name. So as curious as she was about the woman, she didn’t want to pry.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. If she thought she could pry without seeming obvious, she would. But she couldn’t think of any innocuous-sounding questions. When Logan remained silent, she tried volunteering more details. “She said she’ll be in town until after New Year’s Eve. And that she’s staying at the Chelsea— She’d like you to call her.”

  Logan gave a noncommittal, “Hmm.”

  Ali ordered herself to keep quiet after that, but her curiosity eventually got the better of her. “She said she’s here for a gig. At Bourbon Street, so I guess she must be good.”

  That elicited another “Hmm.”

  “I didn’t even know she was a singer. You never mentioned that.”

  Logan caught Ali’s gaze in the blue depth of his. “You want to hear the story, don’t you?” he asked quietly.

  She shrugged, as casually as she could. “I’m kind of curious.”

  “Yeah, well—” He raked his fingers through his hair, then sat staring at the table. “Okay, here’s the short version,” he muttered at last. “When Loretta and I met, she was trying to become the next Carly Simon, which meant spending a lot of time on the road. And I was hustling freelance articles to every editor who’d look at them, trying to pay the bills—and spending the rest of my time writing novels that publishers didn’t want to buy. Neither of us was looking for anything permanent. Certainly not marriage.”

  “But?” Ali prompted when he paused.

  “But we started seeing each other whenever she was in town and—hell, Ali, it’s hard to explain how things were, because it’s going to sound so shallow....”

  She shrugged. “Who am I to pass judgment? Don’t forget who I ended up married to.”

  That made Logan smile. “Well,” he went on, “my point was that Loretta and I weren’t desperately in love. We had fun together, but that was really the extent of it. And then...well, then I got her pregnant.”

  “Ahh...so you did the right thing by her, as they used to say.”

  “No, that wasn’t it. I mean, it wasn’t that straight-forward. She didn’t want to marry me. She didn’t want a husband and she definitely didn’t want a baby—said a kid would be a death sentence to her career. So she’d gotten the name of a doctor in Buffalo...”

  “Ahh,” Ali murmured again. In her mother’s day, back before abortions had been legal in Ontario, there’d been a special meaning to the phrase “shuffle off to Buffalo.” A special meaning for unhappily pregnant women in Toronto, at least, with the New York State border only ninety miles away.

  And even though the province had legalized abortions long before Robbie and Cody were born, there’d been an incredible amount of red tape involved in getting one. So a lot of women had still slipped down to Buffalo, rather than face a panel of Ontario doctors and try to convince them to approve the procedure.

  “If Loretta’d had any money,” Logan continued, “I don’t think she’d even have told me she was pregnant. But she didn’t have two cents, and I was the obvious one to help her get hold of some. When she told me, though... I mean, when she said she’d already decided on an abortion, I couldn’t handle the idea.”

  Ali instinctively wrapped her arms around her stomach, knowing how she’d have felt if anyone had suggested an abortion when she’d been pregnant with Robbie. Suddenly thinking about him again brought tears to her eyes. She wiped them away before Logan saw them, but she was clearly still a long way from an expert at compartmentalizing her thoughts.

  “My reaction surprised the hell out of me,” Logan was saying, “because I’d always figured I was such a liberal thinker. But when it was my child we were talking about...”

  “I understand.”

  “At any rate, I finally badgered Loretta into marrying me and having the baby. Told her she wouldn’t have to look after it—that I could, because I worked at home most of the time. Promised her it wouldn’t interfere with her career, that I wouldn’t mind her still being on the road. And you know, I didn’t.

  “But...well, it didn’t take me long to realize how unfair I’d been to her, forcing her into something she hadn’t wanted. And it didn’t take Loretta long to decide the whole charade was ridiculous. What we’d ended up with wasn’t a marriage. It was Cody and me, and this woman who dropped in and stayed with us every now and then.”

  “Not exactly the perfect family.”

  “No, not anywhere near.”

  The guilt was audible in Logan’s voice, but Ali knew if he had it to do over again he’d do the same thing. He’d no more look at Cody and feel he’d made a mistake than she’d look at Robbie and wish she hadn’t met Bob.

  “So it was no time at all,” he was saying, “before Loretta said she wanted a divorce. Since then, she sends Cody presents on his birthday and at Christmas, but...well, I know it’s because she feels she should keep in touch rather than because she really wants to. It’s been over a year since we’ve actually seen her.”

  When Logan lapsed into another silence, Ali said, “You’ll call her, though?”

  “Yeah, I’ll call her. But I won’t set anything up with her until after you and I have got Robbie—”

  The doorbell rang—cutting Logan off midsentence and starting Ali’s heart pounding.

  Chapter Nine

  The sound of the doorbell died, but Ali just sat staring across the table at Logan, silently ordering her heart to stop racing. She wasn’t expecting anyone and she’d had her fill of surprise visitors. She relaxed, though, when they headed out into the hall and saw it was Nancy McGuire on the porch.

  “I guess,” Ali said, “she’s stopped by for an update.”

  “Be careful what you say,” Logan murmured.

  She nodded, but she didn’t need reminding. As concerned as she knew Nancy was, she couldn’t risk telling her much. Not when Nancy would repeat everything to Kent. Not when Kent would feel obliged to speak out if he knew Bob was after the insurance money.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Nancy asked when Ali opened the door.

  “No
, come on into the kitchen and—”

  “Oh, thanks, but I can only stay a minute. Kent’s working out of town this week and said he’d call me at ten. But I was catching up on things at the clinic, so I thought I’d just check in on my way home—make sure you were okay and see where things stand.”

  “Well, I think everything’s going to be all right. I talked to Robbie this morning and he’s fine.”

  “But what’s the story? Where’s Bob been all this time? Did he know everyone thought he was dead? And taking Robbie like that—surely he doesn’t want custody, does he?”

  “I...Nancy, Bob said—”

  “He doesn’t want her talking about what’s going on,” Logan interrupted. “I know she’d like to tell you, but it’s better if she doesn’t. Not until after she and Bob have finished sorting things out and this is over. You understand.”

  Ali flashed him a look of gratitude for bailing her out.

  “Yes, of course,” Nancy said. “I just thought, if there was anything I could do to help...”

  “Oh, I know,” Ali said, giving her friend a quick hug. “And if there’s anything I need, you’re the first one I’ll call.”

  “Well, all right. If you’re sure there’s nothing.”

  “Not right now. But thanks. Thanks so much.”

  Nancy opened the door and Ali started out onto the porch with her.

  “Wait,” Logan said. “Don’t go out there with just your housecoat on. You’ll freeze.”

  “I’ll only be a second.” She took another couple of steps, then stopped in her tracks. Over Nancy’s shoulder she could see the black Caddy.

  “What?” Nancy asked, eyeing her curiously. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. The cold just hit me.” She wrapped her arms around herself and pretended to shiver. “Go. I’ll watch you to your car.”

  As Nancy headed over to the driveway, Ali turned to Logan. “You knew they were out here. You saw them earlier, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I figured telling you would only give you another sleepless night.”