“Hi,” she said. Her voice sounded a little raspy, though he wondered if that was his imagination.
He finally remembered he needed oxygen and sucked some into his lungs.
“Hi. I’m a little early, I’m afraid.”
He didn’t bother telling her he had been watching the clock for the last hour of his shift at the sheriff’s office, while he sat at his desk finishing paperwork.
“Not a problem. We’re all ready.”
Before she finished speaking, cute little Mia peeked around her mother. “Hi, Deputy Ruben.”
“Hello, Miss Mia. What a pretty dress. Does Pia have one like it?”
“Not this one,” she said with a grin, twirling around to show off the red knit dress and her knee-high boots.
“Guess what? We got a Christmas tree but we can’t make it stand up straight. Mom tried all afternoon and finally she said a bad word and threw her gloves at the wall.”
“Thanks for sharing that, honey,” Dani said, color climbing her high cheekbones.
Ruben laughed. “We’ve all been there. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got a few minutes before we have to leave for the concert, if you’d like a little help.”
“I had to take a thirty-minute shower to get all the sticky sap off earlier. I’m not anxious to go through that again, especially when I’m already dressed for the concert.”
“You look lovely,” he said, then wished he hadn’t when wariness crept into her expression.
He wanted to tell her she was more than lovely, she was breathtaking. He caught the words just in time. He had a feeling if she had any hint that he dared consider this anything like a date, she would shove him back through the door, slam it in his face and forget the whole thing.
“Let me take a look and see if I can figure out where the problem is. Maybe I can get you straightened out.”
“I’m fine,” she said tartly. “It’s the tree that needs work.”
“That, too.”
He smiled and after a moment, she sighed and led the way into her living room. The tree they had selected was a smallish Scotch pine with a pretty conical shape. It listed drunkenly to one side and he could see immediately why.
“The trunk on this one is too thin for the tree stand. You need a couple of plywood blocks to keep it in place. Any chance you have a hacksaw?”
“Sure. I keep it in my purse. A girl never knows when she’s going to need a hacksaw.”
He grinned, delighted with the sense of humor she hid too often. “Around here, you really do never know.”
“I guess I’ll have to get one, then.”
“You can ask Santa to bring you one for Christmas,” Mia said.
“Great idea.” Dani ran a hand over her daughter’s hair with a sweet smile that did funny things to him.
“I have one at home. When the concert’s over, I’ll stop and grab it.”
“What about the churros?” Mia asked, brow furrowed with alarm.
“We won’t miss them, I promise. We can fix your tree after the churros.”
“Whew.”
Dani looked at her tree, then back to him. “I don’t want you to go to any trouble. I can probably figure it out.”
“It will take me five minutes, I promise. Maybe less. And save you all kinds of frustration in the long run.”
“You’re undoubtedly right. I apparently don’t have a high level of tolerance for Christmas tree aggravations.”
“Who does?” He smiled. “I hope you’ve got more tolerance for Christmas concerts.”
“Depends on the Christmas concert. But in general, yes. I like Christmas music.”
“Good. Should we go?”
She called Silver to come out and the older girl actually greeted him with a smile, which he considered great progress in his relationship with the Capelli females.
* * *
Ruben Morales was entirely too appealing.
She watched him interact with his family at the concert, laughing down at his petite mother with the dark hair and bright eyes, at Dr. Morales, at his sister, Angela, who looked like a smaller, more feminine version of Ruben.
It had been a long time since she had been part of a big, noisy family, even on the periphery.
She hadn’t really thought this through, the fact that his entire family would be there when she and her girls arrived with Ruben.
She didn’t miss the speculative look his mother and his sister gave her and then each other. They weren’t the only ones, either. When she walked into the church with him, she saw a few raised eyebrows coming their direction from other people she had met since she and the girls came to town.
She did her best to ignore them but she wanted to immediately separate from his family and sit on the other side of the church. She really didn’t need people thinking the two of them were seeing each other.
Her discomfort didn’t ease when the lights dimmed. She found it just as difficult to ignore her awareness of him beside her, big and tough and gorgeous.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Ruben whispered after a few songs, his warm breath tickling her ear and doing funny things to her insides.
“Very,” she whispered back truthfully. Did her voice sound as breathless as she felt? “Your sister has talent.”
The jazz combo wouldn’t have been out of place at the Blue Note or the Village Vanguard in New York, with a smoky sound that added an original twist to the Christmas classics.
“I’m not sure how she ended up with the singing gene, but she’s the only one of the four of us who did.”
On his other side, Ruben’s mother shushed him and Dani winced. She didn’t need Myra Morales on her bad side, so she settled back to enjoy the music.
When the concert ended and the performers gave their final bows and left the small stage, the crowd rose and began milling around, with people moving to speak with acquaintances and calling out to friends.
“Wasn’t that wonderful?” Myra exclaimed to Dani when Ruben moved into the aisle to talk to his brothers and Angela’s husband, Reed, a lanky cowboy with a slow smile and a clearly defined hat line around his brown hair. “Gets you right in the holiday spirit, doesn’t it?”
Dani thought with guilt about how she hadn’t exactly been overflowing with holiday spirit the last few years, too busy dealing with her daughters and school. How sad that she had allowed the chaos of her life to steal that joy away from her.
“Yes,” she said softly. “It really does. How kind of you and Dr. Morales to invite us.”
To her shock, Myra reached out a hand to clasp Dani’s. Her hand was warm, soft, and the kindness in the other woman’s eyes stirred a lump in Dani’s throat.
“I know I’ve said this before but I’m going to repeat myself. I can’t thank you enough for taking a chance and coming here to Idaho to help Frank out at the clinic. I know it hasn’t been easy for you and your girls and I wanted to tell you how much it means to me. He’s not as young as he used to be. He thinks he can do everything he did when he was your age and he just can’t. Having you here to take on some of the load has been wonderful for him.”
Frank, she saw, had joined his sons and son-in-law and the men were laughing at something one of them had said. To her mind, he looked pretty hale and hearty, as if he could keep going for decades, but Dani was glad Myra thought her presence had been helpful.
“I’m grateful he took the chance on me,” she said.
“From all accounts, you’re doing a wonderful job.”
She knew that wasn’t completely true but she couldn’t politely disagree. Before she could come up with an answer, they were joined by McKenzie Kilpatrick, the mayor of Haven Point.
The other woman was about the same age as Dani. She had always been kind and welcoming, but right now McKenzie was the last person in town Dani wanted to see.
McKenzie would have to know about Silver’s little graffiti spree. Dani had the impression the woman made it a point to know everything going on in her town.
Was she coming to tell Dani and her spray paint–wielding daughter to go back to where they came from? Dani drew in a sharp breath and frowned, her shoulders suddenly stiff.
She had been waiting for someone in town to say something about the vandalism. Instead, McKenzie gave her a warm smile, greeted Dani with her usual friendliness, then turned to ask Myra a question about some scarves Ruben’s mother was knitting to sell in a booth at the town festival the following weekend.
Dani felt her shoulders relax a little, but the tension didn’t completely trickle away.
The easy familiarity between the two women was a firm reminder that Dani didn’t quite belong here in this crowd full of people who had known each other for years.
She wasn’t sure if she ever would.
* * *
A woman could get positively inebriated from that scent.
An hour later, Dani stood in the doorway to Myra’s neat kitchen, inhaling the scent of chocolate and cinnamon and frying dough.
She wanted to stand here and simply let the scents flood through her, but she had spent too many years in foster care to be comfortable doing nothing while someone else was working.
“Is there something I can do to help?” she asked Myra.
The other woman looked up from the large six-burner stove where she was carefully piping dough from a pastry bag into hot oil for the churros.
“You’re a guest. Guests don’t have to work in my house. Sit down and visit.”
“This guest would love nothing more than to help you. Please.”
Myra shrugged. “You don’t have to do a thing except sit back and enjoy yourself, but if you insist, you could roll these churros in the cinnamon and sugar.”
“Sure. I can probably handle that.”
Dani had learned early how to work in a kitchen in the various homes where she had stayed, though if she were honest, her best skill was washing dishes.
Rolling churros in cinnamon and sugar didn’t sound particularly daunting.
She was in the middle of it when Ruben’s older sister, Angela, came in. She did a double take when she spotted Dani at the counter. “Wow! How did you get so lucky? Mom usually never lets anybody make the finishing touches on her churros.”
“Oh, no pressure now,” Dani said. While her words were flippant, she still felt a flutter of nerves, an age-old desire to please that she couldn’t shake.
Angela grinned. “I’m just teasing. We’re the most casual family around. Mom always told us we couldn’t do anything wrong in the kitchen, as long as we were trying. Even if you burn something, it just means you’ll know better next time.”
Dani had spent several wonderful years in one foster home where a similar attitude had reigned. She had hoped to stay with Betsy Williams forever but the woman had become too ill to care for the foster children she had taken in. Leaving the woman’s home had broken Dani’s heart, the one she might have thought would have been indestructible by then.
How lucky for Ruben and his siblings, that their mother was so patient and loving.
“Grandma, can we have the first churro?”
Ruben’s little nephew Charlie, who belonged to Angela and her husband, Reed, was about the same age as Mia and they had apparently become the best of friends. They leaned against the island, looking longingly at the plateful of churros.
“You can have the first ones,” Myra said, “as long as you take the garbage out first.”
“I can do that, Abuela,” Charlie said.
“Me too, Abuela,” Mia said, which made Myra smile, and Dani give a little internal wince at how quickly her youngest child had been absorbed into the Morales family.
Silver, too, seemed to be enjoying herself. Ruben had a nephew and a niece around her age, Angela’s son Zach who went to Sil’s school and a girl, Esme, who apparently lived in Shelter Springs with her mother, Ruben’s brother Javier’s ex-wife, and went to school there. Last she had checked, the three of them were hanging out in a corner of the living room. Dani had even heard laughter coming from there several times.
One part of her was delighted that her daughter was making more friends, but she worried about both of her girls becoming too entangled in the family. She couldn’t give them this big, noisy, happy family. Not forever. She knew what it was like to yearn for something she couldn’t have and she didn’t want her daughters to suffer that same pain.
“Thank you,” Myra said with a delighted smile as the children returned from taking the full garbage bag out to the trash.
“De nada, Abuela,” Charlie said.
“De nada,” Mia repeated with a giggle. “Now can we have a churro?”
“Don’t forget the chocolate. That’s the best part. There’s a perfect spot for churros and chocolate at the table. Have a seat.”
Using tongs provided by Myra, Dani rolled two long pastries in the cinnamon and sugar then set them on a plate. Myra ladled the thick, rich-looking hot chocolate into a mug and set it in the middle of the plate and carried the whole thing to the children.
“Here you go. Be careful. The chocolate is still a little warm.”
The next few minutes were filled with sounds of exaggerated delight as the children enjoyed the sweet treat that drew the teenagers into the kitchen for theirs, followed soon after by everyone else.
Fifteen minutes later, Dani had dredged a dozen churros in cinnamon sugar and was looking for more when Myra handed her one on a plate. “This one is yours. Here. I insist. I’ve saved the best churro of the lot for you.”
Dani went easier on the cinnamon sugar for her own. She wanted to eat it standing up there in the kitchen area of the open plan living space but Myra would have none of it.
“You’ve been on your feet long enough. Go sit down. I’m coming, too.”
Dani moved out to the table and was dismayed that the only open seat was next to Ruben, almost as if he had been saving it for her.
He was in the middle of a conversation with his brother Javier, whom she had just met that evening, and his brother-in-law, Reed, but paused to give her a bright smile that nearly made her stumble and spill her hot chocolate all over the place.
Wouldn’t that make a lovely impression on the Morales family?
Ruben patted the seat next to him and for a wild moment, she was tempted to race back into the kitchen, throw the dessert into the sink, grab her daughters and flee.
Her heart was in serious danger. She could easily see herself falling hard for Ruben. She might even be halfway there, a realization that filled her with panic.
She drew in a breath, gripped the warm handle of the mug and made herself move forward. She slipped into the chair beside him, aware as she did that it wasn’t only the fried churro and the sugary chocolate drink that were bad for her in this family.
8
“I like your family very much,” she said later as he held the door open for Silver and a sleepy Mia to load into the rear seats of his late-model pickup truck.
He smiled down at her and her pulse seemed to kick faster. “They’re pretty great. I did okay in the family department.”
She hoped he knew his family was much better than okay. Compared to the chaos of her childhood and adolescence, Ruben Morales won the family lottery.
“Did you have fun tonight?” Ruben asked when they were on the road heading the short distance to her house and his next door.
“I did,” Mia said sleepily.
“What about you?” he asked Silver.
“The churros were good,” she said.
“You seemed to be getting along well with Esme.”
“She’s nice,” Silver said.
“She is. We don’t see her as often a
s we’d like since she’s with her mom most of the week. It’s always a treat when she can come to family things. Too bad she doesn’t go to Haven Point Middle School like you and Zach. I guess you probably know him from school.”
“Yeah. I know him. We have English together and his locker is close to mine.”
If Dani hadn’t been turned around to check to see if Mia had fallen asleep, she might have missed the rather dreamy look on Silver’s expression.
Oh, no. Apparently she and her daughter were both susceptible to the charm wielded by the men in the Morales family.
“You probably know he’s on the middle school basketball team.”
“Yes,” she admitted, in a nonchalant sort of voice that didn’t fool Dani for a moment. “It’s kind of hard to miss since the cheerleaders decorate his locker every time we have a game. Everybody makes such a big deal over the basketball players in the halls and at the pep assemblies.”
“Right. He’s really busy this year with practices and games. Which actually brings me to something I need to talk to you about,” he said as he pulled into Dani’s driveway.
“To me?” Silver asked warily.
“All of you, really. But mostly you. Because of Zach’s basketball practice and game schedule, I’m running into a little conflict. I think you might be just the person to help me out.”
“With what?”
“The last few years, Zach has helped me with a little project my parents wrangled me into, but I think he’s going to be too busy for the next few weeks to help me out. You would be the perfect person to step in and give me a hand.”
“Again, with what?”
“I’ll tell you, but I have to swear you to secrecy first.”
“Do we have to take a blood oath or something?”
While Silver spoke with her usual edge of sarcasm, Dani could hear the curiosity underlying it.
“Pretty close.”
“What’s a blood oath?” Mia asked.
Season of Wonder Page 10
