A thunk hit dead center in Renzo’s chest, because there wasn’t anything anyone could do. “I don’t think you can,” he admitted. “No one can. Dad’s prognosis is terrible, Kyle’s being a jerk and the girls’ long-lost aunt has shown up out of the blue and wants custody of them, which a smart judge will probably grant because there is no reason on earth not to. And that’s just been the past forty-eight hours. So how’s your day going?” he quipped, knowing Tug’s day had to be better, because it couldn’t be worse.
“An aunt?” Tug repeated. “There is no aunt, Renzo. Jenn was an only child. Adopted.”
“Well, it seems there were two children adopted that day, one to a family in Seattle, and Jenn to the Drews. Jenn died without knowing she had a sister, and the sister discovered the relationship through a DNA service. Now she’s here to restore her family, and I can’t even hate her for wanting to do that. Believe me, I’ve tried to dislike her. It’s quite impossible. Did I mention she saved Dad’s life when he crashed on the living room floor?” he added.
“Renzo.” Tug paused a moment. “Man, I’m so sorry. I don’t have easy words. I can’t soften any of this stuff with your dad, and I can’t imagine what’s going on with Kyle, but I can run interference with this woman. Do a background check on her. Make sure she’s legit. Let me take over on that, and—”
“No.” Tug meant well, and Renzo knew he’d go to the ends of the earth for him, but he couldn’t have him investigate Sarah. “She’s so beyond legit as to make us look like criminals. She totally looks like Jenn. Even has those same quiet gestures. I thought I was seeing a ghost when I found her taking pictures of the girls at the park. No, don’t investigate her. She’s actually staying here for a few weeks to help. Her and her mother. They’ll get to know the girls, and the girls will get to know them.” The triplets seemed to reach a mutual agreement about something at that moment. They turned en masse and headed his way. “Gotta go. I’m shopping with three little kids, and my time is up. Come by the ranch, though, Tug, okay? I want you to meet her. I want your opinion to make sure I’m not being snowed.”
“No one has ever snowed you, Calloway. Well, except Kitty Carson in eleventh grade—”
“Hey! I was sure I’d found true love, but she only wanted me to get even with her college boyfriend.” The memory made him almost smile. It had seemed so tragic then. “Lesson learned.”
“I’ll come by this week. Where’s your mom staying in Seattle? We want to send flowers,” Tug continued. “To her and your aunt. Brighten their room.”
Renzo gave him the hotel name as the girls gathered around him. He put away the phone and looked down.
Chloe held up holiday-themed cupcake liners. “Can we get these, Renzo? They’re so cool!”
“With snowflakes on them!” added Kristi.
“And can we get marshmallow snowmen, too?” said Naomi. “So they can march around the kitchen keeping everyone safe.” She pretended to march down the grocery aisle, drawing smiles from other shoppers.
“Do they make marshmallow snowmen?” he asked, but when the girls led him back to the baking kiosk, he saw that they did.
“We want to bake stuff to send to Mama G.,” Chloe explained. “If it’s cheerful, she won’t worry about us.”
“Not one little bit!” insisted Naomi. “She’ll know we’re having fun.”
“And we can still pray for Papa all the time,” Kristi assured him. “Even while we’re making stuff.”
Bless their hearts. Leave it to their sweet natures to combine holiday fun with altruism. He nodded and motioned to the cart. “Let’s get a bunch of stuff and that way Uncle Kyle or I can take them a delivery every few days, okay?”
“Can we come, Renzo?” Chloe gripped his arm in her classic ironclad grasp. “We’ll be so good. We promise!”
“No kids allowed on his unit, sweetness, so no. You have to wait until he’s better,” he told her. “But if we take good care of Aunt Shelly and Mama G., then they can take good care of Papa. All right?”
“And you’ll tell her how much we love her?” Chloe persisted. “And that we’ll never, ever go away?” She met his gaze, and he met her eye to eye and lied to her for the first time ever.
“I’ll tell her.”
“Promise?” she demanded.
Leave it to Chloe to realize there was more at stake than a friendly family visit going on. “I promise. Let’s get this done and get back home so you guys can start projects.”
He let the girls pick an assortment of decorations for gingerbread houses, including the marshmallow snowmen, decorated cupcake liners and holiday sprinkles. And some harvest-themed candies for Thanksgiving. When they were done, the cart was full of baking essentials and several nonessentials, as well.
He paid for the groceries at the cashier while the girls helped bag everything as best they could, then they carted it all home. When the girls lugged in bag after bag of baking supplies into the kitchen, Sarah stood there watching them, her arms wrapped around her waist. Then she smiled. First at them. Then him. And when she did, something soft and undeniably sweet hit him in the chest, especially when she lifted one eyebrow in his direction and posed a question to him. “Please say you like to bake. At least a little, okay?”
“I do, actually.”
She brushed a hand to her forehead for the girls’ benefit. “Phew!”
“You don’t know how to bake anything? Like anything at all?” Kristi looked up at Sarah, dumbfounded.
“Not even brownies in a box?” asked Naomi.
“I bet our mother could bake everything,” muttered Chloe, just loud enough to be heard. “I bet she liked doing things like that all the time.”
“Well, I can learn,” Sarah assured her. “I’m pretty smart, and how hard can it be?”
“That’s what I tried to tell her,” Naomi indicated Chloe as she set four packs of marshmallow snowmen on the counter. “But Chloe doesn’t always like to listen to people.”
“Well, Chloe and I have that in common,” Sarah confessed. “I tend to go my own way, too, even when it might be way easier to learn from the mistakes of others.”
Chloe didn’t look at Sarah, but Renzo spotted the girl’s thoughtful expression. She erased it quickly. “I think we can bake some stuff for Thanksgiving, and then Christmas cookies, okay? And send them to Mama G.? And Papa, if he can eat them.”
Sarah bent low and surveyed all the baking essentials. “I think that’s a marvelous idea. And while I’m not a great baker, my mom is, and I take really good pictures. How about if I take videos of you guys making things? And then we can send little movies to Mama G., too?”
“That is such an excellent idea!” Kristi grabbed her in a hug. “Then they can see us and maybe Mama G. can take pictures of them eating everything and send them back! Can we ask her, Renzo? Please?”
“Of course. And Sarah, she’d be over the moon if you did that.” He’d crossed the room to tuck the milk and eggnog in the refrigerator. She’d done the same with three dozen eggs, and there they were, at the fridge, hands full, but neither one was looking at the fridge. She was looking up at him.
He was looking down at her.
His throat went tight. So did his chest, and when she quirked a smile his way, he had to smile back. It wasn’t her beauty that drew him. It wasn’t her relationship to three children he loved.
It was her.
She was clearly brilliant. No one got that far in medicine without being brilliant, but she didn’t laud her intelligence or her degrees. She was down-to-earth, and that amazed him. Frankly, she amazed him, and he wondered what it would be like to close the gap between them.
He shut that thought down swiftly, but as they loaded the refrigerator, the scent of her surrounded him. Floral and fruity. As she leaned forward to position the eggs, her hair fell forward, too.
Was it as soft as it
looked?
He guessed that it was, but right now his options weren’t just limited. They were nonexistent. With Dad’s condition and Kyle’s attitude, everything Roy Calloway and his father had built could come crashing down, and then what would his father have to come back to?
Nothing.
Renzo couldn’t let that happen.
He backed away from Sarah, not because he wanted to. Instinct was pulling him in a very different direction. But because he had to, and that was a different situation altogether.
Chapter Six
Renzo Calloway captivated her like no one had ever done before, Sarah admitted to herself a few days later. That was the last thing she expected to happen while she was in Golden Grove. And something to be avoided at all costs. The guy was a trained detective. A cop. He was probably running a background check on her right now, and yet...
He seemed utterly sincere. Was he? Or was he just well-practiced on how to get people to let their guard down?
Well, it wouldn’t work with her, she decided as she disconnected from a conference call she’d had to take. She’d come to Golden Grove with one objective: to fill the empty hole the adoption had created. There would be fallout for the Calloways. She didn’t want to cause sorrow, but the blame didn’t lay on her.
The girls were at preschool. Renzo was running errands, then would pick them up when their classes let out. Her mother had popped out to get a hair trim, leaving Sarah ninety minutes before anyone would return. So when the side door opened, she crossed the kitchen quickly to see who was coming in. In Seattle, people didn’t just walk into houses. The opposite was true here.
A woman came in. A woman who seemed somewhat familiar. She looked at Sarah with that same look of surprise she’d seen on others’ faces when they noted her resemblance to Jenn. “You’re Sarah?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Sarah Brown.”
The woman moved forward. “I’m Valerie. Kyle’s wife. I wanted to meet you while it was quiet. That doesn’t happen often with three kids running around.”
An awkward silence ensued. Valerie had way more right to be here than Sarah did, and yet the woman hesitated, as if waiting for an invite. Finally Sarah asked, “Do you want coffee? Or tea?”
“No. I was looking for Kyle but he’s not in the barn, and I realized that the girls would be at preschool—”
“And you wanted to meet the person who showed up out of the blue to stake a claim,” Sarah guessed.
To her surprise, Valerie shook her head. “Not at all. Well, I did want to meet you, but who wouldn’t pursue something like this, in this day and age? What kind of person wouldn’t want to follow through and find out about their history? And the girls?” she asked rhetorically. “I can’t imagine it.”
Sarah sat down. So did Valerie. Then Valerie slipped off her coat, placing it on the chair behind her. Friend? Or foe?
Sarah had no way of knowing, so she stayed neutral. “There are always choices. But when I realized that Jenn and I had never even been told of the other’s existence, I went looking for her online. And that’s how I found out that my only sister had died and left three little girls. That made it a no-brainer,” she stressed. “I’m determined to make this as right as I possibly can. I couldn’t pretend that it was just bad circumstances because it wasn’t. It was deliberate and misleading to everyone concerned. My parents would have gratefully taken both of us. But they were never given the chance.”
“There will be heartache, Sarah,” Valerie said frankly. “Kyle’s parents didn’t just love Jenn, they were her godparents. They were best friends with her mother and father, and they take the girls to see their grandfather regularly. Not as often now because his condition is deteriorating, but they’ve always wanted them to have a sense of family.”
“I’m their family, too,” Sarah replied. “Yes, it’ll be hard on everyone. I know that,” she went on, “but the girls deserve to have their biological family as part of their lives. Now that we know about one another. Do you have kids, Valerie?”
It was the wrong question.
She knew it the minute the words came out of her mouth, but there was no way to snatch them back.
Valerie’s face went flat, and there was no denying the bleak look in her pretty brown eyes. “No.” She seemed about to say more, then didn’t.
A tear trickled down her left cheek. Then her right. She clapped a hand to her face as if to stifle them, but the tears kept coming. Sarah stood, crossed the room and brought back a box of tissues. She set the box in front of Valerie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry or be insensitive.”
Valerie grabbed a clutch of tissues and mopped her face. Then she blew her nose and shook her head. She stood. “You weren’t. I’m just on edge these days. It’ll pass.” Tears bubbled up once more. “It always does.” She grabbed her jacket and hurried out the door. A few seconds later, a car engine started up and Valerie drove away, toward their ranch-style house just up the road. And as Valerie’s car turned into the driveway, Sarah suddenly realized why she looked familiar. She’d seen her a few months ago at her friend Alvira’s fertility clinic in Seattle. She’d been meeting Alvira for a quick supper and Valerie had been hurrying out, distraught.
Of course she hadn’t asked Alvira about it. Not her patient, not her business, but she’d been dealing with anguished parents for nearly ten years, and she recognized the abject sorrow on Valerie’s face then—and now.
And that was just one more thing she could do nothing about as she sought to fix the unfixable.
She hadn’t thought she could feel worse about her decision to seek custody of the girls, but now—in light of all this family was going through—she did. And maybe that was the biggest surprise of all.
Renzo pulled into the driveway with the girls a little later. They ran into the house, waving construction paper turkeys and bird feathers, and by the time they’d organized their projects, had supper and gotten the girls washed and into bed, Sarah had newfound respect for all parents.
She came downstairs after one last round of good-night kisses and leaned against the counter. “If this were a commercial, the mom and dad would be cozied up by the fire, watching a movie and sharing a quiet moment. In reality—” she blew a lock of hair out of her face purposely “—any reasonable adult would totally crash at this point.”
“Except a doctor on call doesn’t always get that option, do they?”
Renzo posed a serious question. It deserved a serious answer. “No, which means I’ll need to have a nanny on call when the girls are with me,” she replied. “Or a live-in one, because you’re right. My time isn’t always my own.”
“Or find a cute husband,” Lindsay offered with a grin on her face. “Second choice gets my vote.”
“I expect there are numerous prospects for either position,” Renzo joked, but Sarah didn’t miss the hint of seriousness behind his question. Was he wondering if she was dating someone?
“And I think we should talk. All of us.” He motioned to her mother as he took a seat. “Some time when we’re not exhausted. There’s got to be a way we can share custody, Sarah. Because I think we should try to avoid breaking the girls’ hearts.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You weren’t the one affected by this whole thing,” she replied.
He’d said they should talk when they weren’t so tired. He was right, so she didn’t take a seat now. The problems facing his family weighed heavily on her tonight, making it the worst possible time. She needed more than emotion to make decisions concerning the girls. She needed confirmation of her rights and legal standing as their biological aunt, despite their mother’s wishes to have the Calloways raise the girls. And yet...
She moved to the door. “Mom. You ready to go?”
“Looking forward to a good night’s sleep and back at it in the morning,” Lindsay said cheerfully. She deliberately ignore
d the tension. She turned to Renzo and gave him a quick hug. “The girls are remarkable. You already know that.”
He acknowledged that with a smile. “They’re something, all right.”
“You’ve done a great job. You and your family,” Lindsay persisted. “I can’t tell you enough how grateful I am for all you’ve done. You’re amazing.”
“It wasn’t a job,” he replied softly. “It’s an absolute privilege.” He shifted his attention to Sarah, behind her. “I’ve witnessed a lot of rough family stuff over the years. My work puts me in the thick of it, so I know it takes more than DNA to build a family. That doesn’t mean I’m minimizing your rights, Sarah.” He drew his brows together. “It just means that I’d like a peaceful resolution to this because it doesn’t just mean a great deal to me, but to the folks I love.”
She didn’t respond. She turned and left, but as she climbed into her car, she had no choice but to face him as he stood in the doorway. He seemed oblivious to the nighttime cold, the chill wind. He stood, tall and strong, a perfect sentinel, standing guard, and as she reached to push the ignition button, she wondered... What would it be like to have her own personal hero standing by her side?
Weariness was affecting her judgment, a common malady. No doubt he’d return to normal human status when she saw him in the morning, but as she drove away, she couldn’t erase that image from her mind.
Worse? She didn’t want to.
* * *
Renzo pounded fence stakes into the ground a week later as he prepared to encircle the harvested cornfield for late fall grazing. It was a job that went quicker with two, but Kyle had disappeared and Sarah and her mom had taken the girls for new sneakers, although from the texts she’d sent him, it seemed more of an all-out shopping spree.
Finding Her Christmas Family Page 6