A Baby In His Stocking (Harlequin Treasury 1990's)

by Hayley Gardner

  She had to remain strong. She had to show Jared what she knew about the joys of Christmas, her small-town life and children and hope it would be enough to help him find some happiness in his own life.

  Pushing the painful question of their relationship to the back of her mind, Shea walked over to the three boxes of stockings filled with little plastic toys they were giving out the next day. Everything looked fine, which meant the Grinch was still out there, getting ready to strike—and that meant that Jared needed to stick around another day.

  One more day to try to reach him.

  “I’m really proud of you, you know,” she said, turning toward him, smiling, wanting him to know how happy she was that he was helping the store to succeed. But then she saw he was half dressed, pulling on his flannel shirt over bare arms and a solid torso, and her heart did a double flip. He’d obviously been working out. He’d always been in good shape, but this was...was... “The new and improved Jared,” she managed to say lightly, hoping her desire for him wasn’t written all over her face. How could she want a man so desperately who was all wrong for her?

  “Impressed?” he asked, buttoning his shirt and giving her a crooked grin. “I’ve had a lot of spare time on my hands. I’ve used it to work out.”

  Impressed wasn’t the word for what she was feeling, but she couldn’t tell him that. Reminding herself it was wrong to only want him for his body, she leaned back against the table and wondered what had happened to her common sense. She was ready to throw her happiness away, go back to him and beg him to take her.

  Right now.

  On the worktable.

  She shook her head to clear it. He was staring at her, and she blinked and smiled.

  “Are you staying to watch me switch to my jeans?” he asked, pointing to his floppy red Santa pants.

  “No!” Her face heating, she rushed toward the door and slid out into the magical world of Christmas at Denton’s. She’d change at home, she decided, safely away from Jared.

  As she headed for the escalators to tell her dad she was leaving for the day, humming along with the Christmas carol and waving at customers who grinned at her in her Mrs. Claus outfit, she realized she was happy.

  Happy. For now. Because of Jared. If only she could pull off a miracle...

  But she knew she couldn’t. He needed to learn not to be afraid to open himself up and care about people and the little things in life that meant so much to others. It would take years for her to work that kind of total change in him—if she ever could. And she couldn’t spend years of her life, only to end up unhappy if she failed at helping him.

  She couldn’t chance getting that involved. She was too afraid that he would change her and make her close down her emotions just to be able to cope, and she didn’t want to be like that, not caring about the wonderful things in life. She didn’t want him to change her.

  The trouble was, much as she was afraid she’d be unhappy with him, she was beginning to wonder if she was going to be just as unhappy without him.

  The next day went more smoothly; Jared even felt like he was getting the hang of things. While he couldn’t say he was exactly enjoying himself, playing Santa wasn’t the torture it had been the day before—unless you counted the fact that he was, at times, once again inches from Shea.

  He ached deep inside with the awareness that every second they spent together brought him one minute closer to his returning to Topeka and the countdown to their divorce. And the divorce was inevitable. He couldn’t ask Shea to be anyone but who she was, with her constant search for happiness and perfection in a world that had anything but. Still, he thought he could live with her being that way as long as she would accept him exactly the way he was in return. But she couldn’t seem to. He really couldn’t blame her. After all, he didn’t want her to live her life being miserable.

  And then there was the matter of their child. He would have to change entirely to be a good father. Yet he knew he couldn’t change the way he was. Much as he would like to be, he’d never be like Mack with his love of his hometown and its traditions and his ability to relate and reach out to people. It was clear that that was what Shea wanted for their child so it would have a life like the one she’d had. Shoot, if truth be told, that would be his wish for their baby, too. A daddy who could show his love.

  That’s why he knew the divorce had to go through.

  Shea was going to make a wonderful mother, Jared mused, as he watched her handle the kids in line. She leaned over the next child, a toddler who looked like he didn’t particularly want to meet Santa but had a mother who insisted. The way Shea quieted the child with a gentle touch on his cheek and soft words Jared couldn’t hear made him yearn for what he had missed in his own childhood, growing up with a father who didn’t know the word hug. It was this part of Shea that made him wish he could be what she wanted and needed for herself.

  The boy finally stopped crying, and Jared felt relieved. Only his relief was extremely short-lived as the mother, who looked just out of her teenage years and rather frazzled, brought the toddler up to him.

  “I was hoping to get a picture of Bryan with Santa for his great-grandmother,” the young woman said, setting the child on his lap. Her brown eyes were serious. “She’s really old, in a nursing home, and children are the only thing that make her smile.”

  Jared looked from the mother to little Bryan, who pouted and scrunched his eyes. “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

  Looking doubtful, the mother headed down the ramp, raised her camera and waited.

  Jared leaned down close to the toddler’s ear and said in a cooing, sympathetic voice like the one he’d heard Shea use on a little one earlier, “So, tell me, kid, how do you like growing up in Quiet Brook? Is it nice here? You’ve got to tell me, because I know a little baby who’s going to be around here soon and I want him to be happy.”

  The toddler forgot to pout and looked up at Jared with interest, and that’s when Jared felt the lump in his throat.

  “Atta boy,” he said. “Smile for your greatgrandma so she’ll smile back when she sees your picture.” Little Bryan let out a couple of syllables and smiled, and his mother snapped a picture. Bryan put a tiny hand on his beard and pulled. Jared laughed. “Yeah, kid, there is a real man under all that fluff.”

  Bryan let out a gurgle of sheer happiness that chipped away an inch or two of the ice around Jared’s heart, and he felt an overwhelming need to connect with Shea. Looking up, he found her in the crowd. She was already watching him, a smile on her face. As the little boy toddled down the ramp with his mother, Shea approached him, and he rose.

  “What did you say to that child?” Shea asked softly. Once again, just like the day before, her spicy perfume filled the air, making him think of warm cookies and motherhood and love. “Jared?” she prompted.

  He met Shea’s eyes. Little Bryan. Oh, yeah. “I told him that Santa was going to bring him goodies.”

  One dark eyebrow lifted. “I tried that. It didn’t work.”

  “Well, you weren’t Santa,” he said, grinning.

  She laughed suddenly, merrily, her laughter harmonizing with the jolly Christmas carol that was floating down around them. Then, just as unexpectedly, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him, her lips covering his with warmth and sweetness. And right before she pulled away, she added in a soft, breathy whisper, “Merry Christmas, Jared.”

  Not wanting to lose the moment, he reached around and pulled her to his pillowed girth, kissing her back, losing his mind in that kiss, until applause exploded around them.

  Breaking away, he grinned sheepishly at the mothers and the older folks seated at the refreshment area who were clapping. “I can’t say I’ve ever felt this appreciated—and needed—before,” he told her.

  “Not even by me?” Shea asked lightly, but there was a trace of seriousness edging her voice.

  He shook his head. “Maybe at first, for a little while. But after that, you stopped showing me.”

  “I di
d?” she asked, looking so very puzzled Jared didn’t know what to think. But he did know what he wanted to do. Catching her to him again, he finished what he’d started, kissing her as if they’d been married as long as the real Santa and his wife, kissing her as if they were never going to part.

  Finally, the clapping quieted, and remembering where they were, Jared reluctantly let her go. He expected her to ask if he’d lost his mind, but she just gazed at him, looking as dazed as he felt.

  “We need to talk, I think,” he said.

  She nodded solemnly, backing away as a trio of mothers ventured forth.

  “And here we were thinking that no one stayed married anymore,” one of the women said, giggling.

  At that innocent comment, Shea’s heart clenched and her eyes heated with tears. It, along with Jared’s remark that she’d stopped showing she needed him and his hot kiss that made her think she was crazy for leaving him, made her feel unsure what she really wanted anymore.

  Taking a step backward, she left Jared with the women and turned to go to the storeroom to wait by herself for him to finish talking to the happy moms. She could hear them buzzing around him, which she loved. He needed to know the good he was doing.

  “You were a miracle worker with little Bryan,” one woman was saying. “That child cried all through the church service last Sunday. How did you do it?”

  “I’m Santa Claus,” Jared said. “And someone very wise told me this is the season of miracles.”

  She’d told him that the same time as she’d told him she was carrying his child. He’d been listening to her after all, Shea realized, her heart filling with joy. While she waited, she thought over the questions she wanted to ask Jared. He’d kissed her as if they had plenty of tomorrows. Were his feelings changing toward her? Why had he thought she didn’t need him? Had she stopped showing him?

  Did they have a chance?

  She clearly had some self-examining to do. Could their breakup really have been partly her fault? Could she have forgotten to show Jared how much she loved him?

  Filled with confusion and self-doubt, Shea opened the door to the storeroom, slipped inside almost soundlessly and shut out the world behind her. She needed to know...to talk to him...to figure it out—

  “Tarnation!”

  Still caught in tumultuous thoughts of Jared, Shea stared at a man with eyes just as shocked as hers. He was kneeling next to the two remaining cardboard boxes of stockings Santa was going to hand out to the children... and sabotaging them with lumps of coal from a pile near one booted foot.

  Shocked, Shea only had time to mutter, “Why are you doing this?” before the Grinch rose to his feet and tore off through another door leading directly into a side hall and then outside Denton’s, leaving her only with questions rather than answers—and a more immediate problem.

  Now that she’d discovered the identity of the Grinch, how on earth was she going to keep Jared in Quiet Brook?

  Chapter Eight

  Every instinct told Shea she had to follow Mr. Griswold, the Grinch, not only to buy time to consider what to do now about keeping Jared in Quiet Brook, but also to find out why on earth the elderly man had been up to such mean-spirited tricks. Thanking her lucky stars that she’d kept her leggings, socks and long sweater on under the Mrs. Claus outfit for padding, Shea hurriedly stripped off the costume, changed shoes and grabbed her jacket. But she was seconds too slow. Just as she was about to slip out the same door Mr. Griswold had gone through, Jared joined her.

  They stood there staring at each other, Jared on his way in and Shea on her way out, her hand on the doorknob, the door partially opened.

  “This isn’t how it looks,” she said. “I really want to talk to you, Jared—only not right now. Something’s come up I have to attend to.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. He took on the same guarded look he’d worn so often during their marriage, and she knew this time, it really was her fault. This time, he’d been reaching out to her, but she was too afraid to tell him the truth, that he no longer had a reason to stay.

  What if he agreed?

  “We’re going to talk as soon as I get back, Jared,” she promised. “I really want to.” And then, convinced she was doing the best thing for them, she hurried out.

  Now that, Jared thought, staring at the empty place where Shea had just been, was the last thing he’d expected when he’d walked through the storeroom door. She didn’t really think he was just going to sit around and wait for her to return and tell him what that was all about, now did she? Surely she knew him better than that—didn’t she?

  A quick scan of the room confirmed what he had half guessed—that the only thing more important to her, at the moment anyway, than cementing their relationship for the baby’s sake, was catching the store’s Grinch. It was clearly evident that someone had been there wreaking havoc. Coal spilled out of an overturned burlap sack, and in its midst was a handful of hard candies in shiny green, red and white wrappers that had originally been in one of the Christmas stockings. She must have caught the practical joker in the act when she’d left him earlier.

  Knowing that with his fake beard and his street clothes on underneath his heavy Santa suit, he was padded well enough against the cold that he didn’t feel anyway, Jared followed her through the door. In the hall, he saw the fire-exit door shutting behind her, so he turned and headed toward it. After that, it was a relatively easy matter to trail her, keeping enough distance behind so she wouldn’t particularly notice him unless she turned fully around.

  “Merry Christmas, Santa!” a woman called out cheerfully as she passed him near the very next storefront. “Good to see you out here!”

  “Merry Christmas to you, too,” he replied. At least that part was becoming easier after all the practice with the kids. He wanted to walk faster so the rest of the pedestrians could tell he was a Santa on a mission and leave him alone, but if he went too fast, he would catch up to Shea. So he continued to stroll, keeping Shea in his sights.

  And as he walked, waving with his white gloved hand at the people who smiled at seeing a sidewalk Santa roving Main Street again, he started noticing the details of the upcoming holiday he hadn’t paid attention to in a long, long time. Christmas lights, strung high in the air, stretched across the street every twenty feet or so in the patterns of a reindeer, a Christmas tree and then a green-wrapped box with a red bow. Since the sky was already growing dim with approaching evening, they were lit, adding to the holiday sparkle. In one storefront window to his left were presents on display, their wrapping paper sporting cartoon characters dressed up like Santa. At the corner store, a wooden toy soldier towered over Jared. And someone, somewhere, had turned on a speaker, and a choir was singing a Christmas hymn.

  But suddenly noticing all these things didn’t change the simple fact that he wasn’t feeling whatever the hell it was he was supposed to be feeling. Spirit? Joy? All warm inside? All he felt was a kind of emptiness, a Santa just going through the motions.

  No, more precisely, he felt like a man just going through the motions of living. He no longer had the wife he’d loved as best he could; he wouldn’t be a fit father for his son—or daughter—and he was going to spend the rest of his life alone.

  Just like his Grinch of a father.

  After crossing the street, Jared stopped short near the courthouse, a two-story limestone building with a courtyard in the front. In the midst of the courtyard was a huge Christmas tree, and it was there, a few feet down on the walkway that curved around the far side of the tree, where he spotted Shea with Mack’s elderly neighbor from across the street. Gris something. Griswold, that was it.

  Rounding the reverse side of the tree, he moved in closer until he could hear them, then stood there like a Santa mannequin posing in a Christmas scene. He ought to feel guilty for eavesdropping on Shea, he supposed, but he didn’t. Now that he was thinking about it, in fact, he wasn’t too happy with Shea for not telling him that the Grinch had been discovered befor
e she headed out the door.

  Their voices lowered, and to hear them he moved into the branches a bit more.

  “Even if you don’t care about Dad and our store,” he could hear Shea saying, “don’t you understand how you almost ruined Christmas for all the kids?”

  Keeping a wary eye out for anyone leaving the courthouse, Jared moved a branch to get a better glimpse of Shea. Her hand was on the elderly man’s forearm. To keep him from running away? He didn’t know much about Mack’s neighbor, except what Shea had told him, but he didn’t think the guy was dangerous. Still, it seemed as if he should be on the alert, but for what, he didn’t know.

  “I never worried about the kids,” Griswold said, sounding winded from the chase. “I only knew everybody in town was having too much fun. In the store. Outside. Everybody’s happy but me.”

  “It hasn’t particularly been my year, either, Mr. Griswold,” Shea said with a sigh that cut through Jared. “But that’s what Christmas is for. To renew your spirit, remind you how good the world is.”

  Griswold muttered under his breath.

  “Was that humbug you just said?” Shea asked. Jared could hear the hint of laughter in her voice, but a casual bystander who didn’t know her as well would think she was scolding. “Shame on you, Mr. Griswold. This is serious. Do you know how much Dad has been worrying? Your shenanigans have been hurting business in the store and causing him stress. If we have a bad Christmas after the slowdown and renovations earlier this year, we could lose Denton’s. I don’t even want to think about what that might do to him. He has heart problems, you know.”

  There was a pause. “I didn’t know that.” Another pause. “Things aren’t that good at the store?”

  “No, they aren’t,” Shea said firmly. “The children all wanted to see Santa, so their parents have been driving them to the mall and shopping there instead of with us. Fortunately, with Jared playing Santa yesterday, sales picked up some in the evening, and I’m looking forward to an even better report today.”