Harlequin Special Edition November 2014 - Box Set 1 of 2: A Weaver Christmas GiftThe Soldier's Holiday HomecomingSanta's Playbook

by Allison Leigh

  What would he do if he didn’t have Hollins-Winword? If all he really did was keep the systems for the public face of Cee-Vid running merrily along?

  There was nothing else in his life.

  Yeah, he had his sisters. His parents, Daniel and Maggie. He had nieces and nephews and cousins and extended family galore.

  But he couldn’t make a child of his own.

  He’d had to accept that failure a decade ago when the girl he’d loved tossed him out like yesterday’s trash after learning he’d never be able to put the babies she wanted in her belly.

  He’d been only twenty-one.

  He was long over Caitlyn now. He even recognized the fact that he’d escaped what would have been a disastrous marriage.

  But nothing else had changed.

  He was still sterile.

  He couldn’t be the man—the husband—that Jane needed.

  Which left him with only Hollins-Winword.

  What would he do if he lost that, too?

  * * *

  “Vivian,” Hayley said to the diminutive white-haired woman, “these are my friends, Jane Cohen and Samantha Dawson.”

  Hayley’s grandmother beamed at them, placed her narrow hand in Jane’s and shook it with surprising firmness. Then she did the same with Sam. “At least some people have been welcoming me to Wyoming.”

  Hayley made a face as she grabbed two unused folding chairs from the table next to theirs and brought them to the other side of the crowded banquet table where Jane and Sam were already sitting with a few others from Colbys. “Daddy and Uncle David will come around,” she told Vivian. “Just have patience.”

  Vivian’s lined face creased even more as she sat in one of the chairs. Her eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black, but they sparkled with wry humor. “I’m eighty-six years old, dear. I don’t necessarily have the luxury of patience.”

  It was the day after Halloween and Jane was meeting up with her girlfriends at the high school gym for the town’s Harvest Festival. Half the space was given over to carnival games for children. The other half was taken up by displays of baked goods and potluck dishes.

  Looking around her with unabashed curiosity, Vivian patted her stylishly coiffed hair with a hand heavily weighted by diamonds. “It’s taken me much too long to come to Wyoming. It’s a great deal more civilized than I pictured.”

  “But a long way from Pittsburgh,” Jane commented.

  Vivian’s eyebrows lifted. “Have you been there?”

  She shook her head. “Never been farther east than Chicago.”

  “Well, it was home,” Vivian said. “It’s where my sons were all born.” Her lips thinned a little as her gaze scanned the people milling around the gym. “Though they all defected to head west.”

  “Vivian,” Hayley’s voice was soft. But it held a gentle warning.

  Jane and Hayley hadn’t had a chance to privately discuss anything that had occurred in the past several days. But from Hayley’s tone, Jane was guessing that her friend and her grandmother had had a few discussions of their own.

  Vivian exhaled and twisted the enormous ring on her wedding finger. “I know.” Her gaze took in Jane and Sam once more. “So does this Harvest Festival have such a thing as cocktails?”

  “Afraid you’ll have to wait until later,” Jane said wryly. “Strictly a nonalcoholic event. But there’s punch, iced tea and a pretty good lemonade. And the food—” She gestured at the lines queuing up around the offerings. “You can see nobody’s sitting around on their thumbs waiting.”

  “Hayley, dear, get me a lemonade,” Vivian said in what Jane hoped was an unconsciously superior tone, and her friend dutifully set off. “My granddaughter tells me you’re a police officer, Samantha? And, Jane, you own a bar and grill?”

  Sam nodded. She was never much of a conversationalist in social situations.

  “Sam’s the only female deputy sheriff we’ve got here in Weaver,” Jane added.

  “Really.” Vivian gave Sam an approving look. “Good for you, dear. In my day women usually only worked until they found themselves a husband.” She pressed her palm to the front of her pink nubby silk jacket. “Or in my case, husbands.”

  “Not all at the same time,” Hayley interjected on a laugh as she set a plastic cup filled with lemonade on the table in front of her grandmother and sat down.

  Vivian laughed, too. “Good heavens, no. I tried to leave the scandals in the family to others, though my first husband, Hayley’s grandfather, seemed to want to thwart my effort at every turn. Four,” she said abruptly. “Four husbands. One after the other.” Her gaze drifted a little. “I buried them all, sadly. Punishment for my misdeeds, I’m sure.” She refocused her attention on Jane and Sam. “Are you girls single, like Hayley? No husbands yet?”

  Jane buried her nose in her iced tea, leaving Sam to answer. Since Casey had left town, the thought of husbands had become alarmingly unappealing.

  “By the time I was your age,” Vivian reminisced, “I had three sons already in elementary school.”

  Jane glanced at Hayley. She’d heard her friend speak of only her dad and one uncle.

  “Thatcher was the oldest,” Hayley provided. “Then Uncle David.”

  “Then Hayley’s father, Carter, was the youngest.” Vivian looked sad. “Thatcher died in a skiing accident when he was a young man. I thought he was destined to be a musician. The finest. My own father was a violin maker and Thatcher’s father played beautifully—that’s how we met. But all Thatcher wanted was adventure.” Then with an obvious effort, her expression perked up, and she picked up her plastic cup, which looked rather incongruous in her heavily ringed fingers. “To family,” she said, determinedly cheerful. “Ones lost and ones rediscovered.”

  “To family,” they all murmured, and touched their cups together.

  Jane hoped her face didn’t show just how hollow the words made her feel.

  Aside from Julia off in Montana, Jane had no family.

  Considering the state of things with the only man she seemed to want, she feared she never would.

  “So—” Vivian set her cup down and closed her hand around Hayley’s “—tell me about Weaver.” The older woman’s gaze roved around. She was clearly not ashamed of being caught people-watching. “Who’s who and all of that?”

  Jane was guessing Vivian’s suit was Chanel. That, along with her flashing jewels, made her stick out like a sore thumb among the sea of people dressed in blue jeans, flannel shirts and cowboy hats. But if she liked gossip, she’d fit right in.

  “That’s the sheriff over there,” Hayley was saying, nodding toward the tall dark-haired man studying the selection of pies being judged for the bake-off. “Max Scalise.”

  “Handsome,” Vivian murmured. “Married?”

  “Yes,” Hayley drawled, “and too young for Husband Number Five anyway.”

  Vivian chuckled. “I’m done with marriage, dear,” she assured them. “The years I got to have with Arthur, my last husband,” she said, looking at Sam and Jane, “were more perfect than any woman deserved. Particularly me. He was a good, good man. I’m not on a quest to try and replicate what can’t be replicated.” She gave Hayley a look. “I do, however, want to right some old wrongs, an effort your father and uncle seem determined to thwart.”

  “Give them time.”

  From the corner of her eye, Jane saw Casey’s parents, Maggie and Daniel, enter the gym. She sat forward, propping her elbows on the table. As far as she knew, Casey was still out of town, but that didn’t stop her nerves from ratcheting up several notches. “How long were you and Arthur married, Mrs. Templeton?” She thought it strange that the woman had had three husbands after Hayley’s grandfather but still used her first husband’s name.

  “Ten years. Just ten years.” She let go of Hay
ley’s hand and fiddled with her rings. “The punishment of a foolish old woman. I could have had a lot longer with him if not for my own pride.” She leaned closer. “Arthur was a retired history teacher,” she confided, as if it were something secretive. “Not a professor, mind you. He taught children. In public school.”

  Sam stirred. “There are worse things.”

  “Of course there are, dear.” Vivian sat back again. “But old habits died hard. He came from a different class. I used to think things like that mattered. But Arthur changed all that.”

  Jane realized she was watching the door for Casey and looked away. “How did the two of you meet?”

  “Gardening. Arthur had a prize collection of roses.”

  “So does my grandmother,” Hayley added. “She has a rose garden you wouldn’t believe back in Pittsburgh. She’s been showing me photographs.”

  “Sawyer—that’s Hayley’s grandfather—he planted the roses himself,” Vivian said. “They’re still beautiful all these years later.” Her gaze drifted past Jane and Sam again. “He was always a nurturing soul,” she murmured. “Who’s that?”

  Jane glanced over her shoulder and her stomach dropped away as her gaze collided with Casey’s.

  She’d thought he’d looked terrible the week before, but he looked even worse now.

  Not that Vivian seemed to see anything amiss. Nor did Hayley or Sam, it seemed.

  Maybe she was the only one to recognize the way the lines arrowing out from his eyes were deeper, the way the set of his lips was thinner. Grimmer.

  He’d entered along with his grandparents, Squire and Gloria Clay, and a bunch of other relatives. Everyone headed en masse toward several tables on the other side of the room.

  Everyone except Casey.

  He was headed her way.

  “That’s Casey Clay,” she heard Hayley tell Vivian as he approached. “He’s Jane’s beau, though they both deny it.”

  Jane sent her friend a look that Hayley ignored.

  “Good heavens, not the young one,” Vivian said impatiently. “The white-haired one. With the steely face and the walking stick.”

  “You mean Mr. Clay? Squire Clay,” Sam provided. “The Clays own one of the largest cattle operations in the state. The Double-C. He’s married, too,” she added humorously.

  Jane was barely listening to their exchange. She pushed out of her chair and muttered an excuse that she needed the restroom before Casey reached their table.

  Then, feeling like the biggest coward on the planet, she hustled her butt in the opposite direction.

  But she felt him on her heels even before she pushed through the double swinging doors that led from the gymnasium, and as soon as she was in the mercifully empty corridor on the other side, she halted, rounding on him. “What do you want?”

  He stopped short, too, his eyes narrowing. “Why’d you run?”

  If he could ignore her question, she could ignore his. “Guess your trip didn’t take as long as you expected. You look like you haven’t slept since you left in the first place. What were you doing, anyway? Taking care of some vitally important Cee-Vid disaster at one of the other sites?”

  His lips tightened. “You sell booze and food. I’m pretty sure that means you’re not against entertainment. So what do you have against Cee-Vid? People get a lot of entertainment from the games they produce.”

  “They produce.” She crossed her arms.

  “What?”

  “They produce,” she repeated. “They, they, they! Shouldn’t you be saying we? You spend all of your time devoted to that company, but you don’t even claim a bit of ownership over what Cee-Vid does.”

  He stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.

  Which she was fairly certain she had done a year ago, when they’d kissed the first time.

  “What the hell are you going on about?”

  She yanked on the collar of her turtleneck, which had been perfectly comfortable before he’d arrived but now seemed to be strangling her. She’d never expected him to be at the Harvest Festival, or she would have begged off when Hayley and Sam suggested going. “I don’t know,” she snapped. “You’re making me crazy.”

  “Well, that makes us even,” he returned, not sounding any happier about the situation. He pulled a folded envelope out of his back pocket and handed it to her.

  She took it cautiously, thinking too easily about the note he’d left her in Denver. The note she still hadn’t thrown away. “What’s this?”

  “Registration for your pool tournament.”

  Of course. There was no accounting for the disappointment that settled like a stone inside her stomach. It wasn’t as if she expected anything else from him. She unfolded the envelope and looked inside, seeing the registration form and his personal check. “Personal delivery wasn’t necessary, you know.”

  “I didn’t have a postage stamp,” he said flatly. “If you didn’t insist on living in the dark ages, you’d have it so people could register online. I could have set it all up for you in five minutes.”

  “I like tradition,” she returned. “Remember?”

  “Speaking of. Where’s Arlo?”

  “He’s coming later,” she lied. She had no idea what Arlo’s plans were, though she had no intention of telling Casey that. Even though Arlo had been as bored with the uptight picnic she’d accompanied him to as she had been, they hadn’t gone out again since.

  His lips tightened. “It’s going well, then. This ‘get a husband, get a baby’ plan of yours.”

  Her chest ached. “Let’s just say I’m not taking my birth control pills anymore.” She wanted to rescind the words the second they escaped, but they were already out there. Seeming to echo around the tiled corridor.

  A curtain came down in his gray eyes, making them more unreadable than ever, and the silence between them tightened unbearably, broken only by a sudden burst of laughter from the other side of the swinging doors.

  “I guess congratulations are in order,” he said then. His tanned face looked unnaturally pale. “What’re you sending out first? The wedding invitations or the birth announcements?”

  She swallowed. Her mouth felt arid and she rocked uncomfortably on her heels. “Neither. Yet,” she hedged, wondering when she’d become such a liar. Wondering if the trait had lurked inside her all of her life, or if it had bloomed only as a result of protecting herself against what she couldn’t have.

  Him.

  “But I’m...hopeful.” Which was the biggest lie of all.

  Because where she and Casey Clay were concerned, there was no hope.

  In her head, she’d known it all along and it was long past time she convinced her heart of it, too.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Merilee, have you seen the list of the table monitors?”

  Her assistant manager was setting up on the sidewalk outside Colbys where the pool tournament entrants would begin checking in later that day. She squinted against the cold December sunlight as she looked at Jane. “Last I saw, it was on the desk in your office.” In one hand, she held a bundle of artificial garland, and in the other, a large plastic bag filled with round Christmas-tree ornaments. “Do you want me to hang more of this stuff, or get started on the tree decorations?”

  Jane had hired a group from the high school to hang the deep green garland that festooned the front of her building, and Merilee had already strung smaller additional strands in the windows, around the doors and from the registration table. Similar holiday decor graced nearly every building up and down Main. The park across the street on the corner had set up dozens and dozens of Christmas trees in anticipation of the community tree lighting the following day and everything around town was spit-shined and bright in preparation.

  She realized Merilee was still waiting for an answer. “
Get started on the trees,” she said as she pulled open the door to go inside. “Let me know if you run out of bulbs. I bought extra.”

  She’d rearranged everything in the bar to accommodate some of the additional pool tables she’d brought in to handle the load of the tournament. Since it still hadn’t snowed yet, she’d decided to use the parking lot between Colbys and the dance studio for the rest of the tables. The extra tables were set up beneath a tent and cordoned off from the street by a row of narrow Douglas firs that would soon be decked out with Merilee’s ornaments.

  Jane had more than a hundred players coming in for the tournament that would start that afternoon and, for the first time ever, would spill over to the next day. She’d promised Weaver’s overly cautious council that she would be finished well before the town’s Advent season officially kicked off with the tree-lighting celebration, and she wanted everything to go well. If it didn’t, she figured there’d be pressure from the council to drop ideas of a repeat next year.

  She had no intention of letting that happen, though. She’d planned too hard and too long. Her storeroom shelves were fully stocked. Both the grill and the bar had an extra contingent of servers scheduled to be on hand. Everything was set and ready to go. Not only would the winners of the tournament go home with their pocketbooks loaded, the charities in Weaver would benefit, and Colbys would rake in a huge profit on increased food and drink sales.

  It was a win-win situation all the way around.

  But she’d never felt less like celebrating.

  She found the list of table monitors she’d been looking for right where Merilee said it was.

  In Jane’s office. On her desk.

  Sitting in plain sight, where she ought to have seen it if she’d only been able to concentrate.

  Disgusted with herself, she sat down at her desk in front of the fancy new computer she’d purchased. It possessed every bell and whistle that Casey had ever insisted she needed.

  She’d hired a guy from the store in Gillette where she’d purchased it to come and set it up for her. Unfortunately, the thing was so different from her old computer that aside from turning it on, she hardly knew how to operate it.