At the girl’s silence, Claire looked over, her heart turning over at her expression. She laid a hand on the slender shoulder, and the teen sucked in a breath.
“It’s so weird, how it just...hits. Like totally out of nowhere.”
“I know, honey. Believe me.”
Juliette nodded, then said on a sigh, “Anyway...for the past couple of years, PopPop’s been getting the turkey already cooked from ShopRite, and Dad and I would make a few sides, but...it wasn’t the same. Now, though, with Kelly and everything—she has her own catering business, she’s, like, the most amazing cook ever—it already feels so much better. Different, sure. But at least not like everyone’s faking it.... Hey, Kelly!” she said when they reached the kitchen, where a very pretty redhead was taking rolls out of the oven. “This is Miss Jacobs!”
Anyone else in the midst of the last-minute holiday-meal insanity would have been at her wit’s end. At least Claire certainly would have been. But although her curls—nearly as wild as Claire’s—were clearly nya-nya-nya-ing the black satin headband ostensibly keeping them in place, the woman’s smile was warm.
“Welcome to the land of the loonies,” Kelly said with a laugh. In the center of the island proudly gleamed a golden brown turkey the size of a small planet. “I assume I don’t have to call you Miss Jacobs?”
“Oh, God, no. Claire is fine.”
“Ooh, pretty name. Jules, sweetie? Check the broccoli, make sure it’s just tender before you drain it. And the sweet-potato casserole should be about ready to come out of the other oven.”
“On it!”
“Need any help?”
“Nope,” Kelly said, her emerald-green Shaker sweater molded to a pooched-out tummy. “The kid and I, we’ve got this planned out to the second. But if you want to pitch in for cleanup...?”
“That I can do.”
“Great. Then why don’t you go watch the game? Since it’s at least a half hour before dinner...”
Because Claire hadn’t already seen more football in the past week than she’d seen in the ten years prior. But since she’d clearly only get in the way in the kitchen, she followed the shouting and laughter to the back porch overlooking a large, generously planted yard, bordered with forty-foot pines glittering in the sun. In one corner stood a weathered play set—three swings, a slide, a small fort—currently commandeered by Bella and a smaller girl, her light brown curls barely visible beneath a bright pink pom-pommed knit hat. Between the set and the deck, in still-green grass dotted with the occasional red leaf, the game was in full swing, Ethan “coaching” one team while an equally tall, darker-haired man headed up another.
Wrapping up in a throw left to languish on the porch railing, Claire settled into a sunlight-drenched rocker to watch the game. Or rather, to watch Ethan from a safe distance, where she could relish the attraction for its own sake without worrying about What It All Meant. She thought of poor Juliette, in the throes of unrequited puppy love for Scott Jenkins—yes, she’d noticed the girl’s longing glances at rehearsals—and sent up a short prayer of thanks that her own teenage years were long gone, when all too often she’d felt downright possessed by things she didn’t even fully understand. She wouldn’t want to feel that out of control again for anything.
“So you’re here,” she heard a few feet away, yanking her out of her thoughts. Claire looked up to see the Colonel standing by the steps, his hands in his corduroy pants’ pockets. The dogs followed him, collapsing by his feet with matching doggy groans.
“Wouldn’t’ve missed it,” Claire said, and the older man smiled, his blue eyes sparkling underneath close-cropped hair she now realized was more white than silver.
“How come you’re not out there with everyone else?”
“Heh. I might be at the place where I’ll actually watch football. But play it? No way.”
The Colonel chuckled. Even so, in the daylight—and his own house—his bearing was far more daunting than it had been the other night. She thought of her own dad, who’d been smaller, thinner, bookish rather than athletic. But behind his wire-rimmed glasses, there’d always been so much love in those warm brown eyes. Same as there’d been in her mother’s. And at that moment, she missed them so much she could barely breathe.
“I hope that doesn’t mean I forfeit my place at the dinner table,” she said, to tease herself out of her maudlin mood as much as anything.
“Oh, I suppose not,” the Colonel said. “Since you’re already here.”
Snuggling more deeply into the throw, Claire smiled. The smaller of the dogs roused himself to come over, his entire back end wriggling as he laid his jowly chin on her knee. Claire scratched the top of his wrinkly head, and the beast shut his eyes in obvious bliss. “This is a lovely house.”
“Thanks. It’s been good to us all these years. Time to let it go, though.”
“Oh? Too bad.”
The older man shrugged. “Don’t need a place this big anymore. Five bedrooms...” His head slowly wagging, he turned to lean against a post, his arms crossed. “So Julie tells me this is your first year at Hoover?”
“It is.”
“You like it?”
“I do. Not that there aren’t...challenges,” she said with another smile, petting the dog some more when he nosed her hand. “And I’m still feeling my way with the kids, finding that balance between not being a stick-in-the-mud but not being a pushover, either. All in all, though, it’s a pretty good gig.”
The Colonel looked out over the yard. “Ethan said you came back here to help your mother when she got sick.”
“Yeah. She’s been gone about a year now.”
That cool blue gaze met hers again. “And you’re still here.”
“I am. At least until—”
“Something better comes along?”
Claire smiled. “Until being here no longer feels like a good fit.”
Ethan’s father paused, then said, “After more years of base housing than I care to remember, I don’t think it ever even occurred to Jeannie and me that we’d end up right back where we both grew up. But then a position opened up at McGuire Air Force Base, and Jeannie found this house, and...” He smiled. “So you never know what life’s got in store.”
“No,” Claire said quietly. “You sure don’t. If it’s one thing life isn’t, it’s static.”
The Colonel’s lips tilted in a half smile before he resumed watching the game. “God knows, we didn’t expect so many of the kids to hang around, set down their own roots here. So I guess it’s not such a bad place to live....” Since he seemed to be talking to himself more than to her, Claire didn’t answer. Then he asked, “You get introduced to everyone?”
“Not yet, no. I met Kelly, though, in the kitchen.”
“Then let’s see if I can remember all the names,” the Colonel said as he lowered himself into the rocker next to hers, crossing his arms over a heavy brown cardigan Claire guessed had some serious years on it. “You know Ethan’s brood, so I won’t bother with them. But the other coach? That’s Matt, our next oldest. He’s married to Kelly. Kid in the glasses is her son by her first marriage, Cooper. And the cutie on the swing’s his sister, Aislin, better known as Linnie. Now, over there...” He leaned closer, pointing. “That’s Tyler, our youngest son—”
“The one who looks like trouble waiting for a place to happen?”
The Colonel chuckled. “Got that one pegged, all right. He’s gonna marry Laurel—she had a baby not all that long ago, the father... Well, we don’t talk about him. Anyway...the skinny little blond thing is Abby, Jeannie’s and my youngest, who’s living proof that God has a sense of humor. We’d been married more than twenty years, no kids of our own, and then boom. Here comes Abby.” He glanced over, humor dancing in his eyes. “Your head spinning yet?”
“Ever so slightly. How on eart
h do you keep track of everyone? Did you, when you cared for all those fosters?”
“You learn to go with the flow, I guess. What you said about life not being static? Same goes for family. Even with ‘normal’ families, whatever that means these days, the dynamic is always in a state of flux. People are added and subtracted, babies are born and old people pass away.” He got quiet. “Sometimes, not so old. But it’s like Jeannie’s rosebushes over there.” He waved toward a couple dozen lifeless-looking bushes, barren except for the occasional fat, rust-colored rose hip. “Come spring, there’s always new flowers to replace the old ones from the year before.”
Hard to believe that this sentimental old man was the rod-up-his-rear disciplinarian Ethan had made him out to be. Although given what it must have been like with all those kids in the house, without at least some semblance of order things could have easily degenerated into anarchy. A mind-set that, from what she’d observed both with his kids and his players, had clearly rubbed off on Ethan. At least to some degree.
Turning this thought over in her head, Claire said, “Wasn’t like that with my family, though. Me and my parents—that was it, basically.”
“No other relatives? Grandparents?”
She shook her head. “They were both only children, too. And older. And their parents...” Her mouth tightened. “Dad was Jewish, Mom Italian. Catholic. Not even an issue for most people anymore, but it was for my grandparents. I did see them occasionally, but only at their houses, with that parent. So holidays were...very subdued.”
“That’s one thing they definitely were not around here. Or any other day, for that matter,” Preston said with a soft chuckle. “I assumed, as I got older, I’d welcome the peace. I was wrong. The noise, the barely controlled chaos... I miss it. I really do.”
Having nothing to say to that, Claire watched Ethan huddle with his “team,” thinking how hard the day—or at least this part of it—had to be on him. Especially after what Juliette had said about her mother keeping the holiday tradition alive after Ethan’s mother’s passing. And yet, there he was, doing the brave-faced thing for his kids, the rest of his family...
Her heart ached.
Then he straightened from the huddle and backed away, shouting as he pumped his fist, like she’d seen him do on the field. Except now she noticed a limp she hadn’t before. “Am I imagining things, or does Ethan’s leg seem to be bothering him?”
A moment passed before the Colonel said, “It’s his knee. He blew it out when he was over in Afghanistan. A month from coming home, too.”
“Oh, no... I didn’t know.”
“Few people do. Doesn’t stop him from functioning normally—for the most part, anyway—but it did put the kibosh on his playing professionally.”
Claire looked at the older man’s profile. “He was that good?”
“Better,” he said after a moment. “Don’t tell him I said anything, he hates talking about it. Doesn’t want anybody to feel sorry for him—”
The screen door banged open, followed by Juliette tramping out onto the porch long enough to yell that dinner was ready. After some grumbling from down in the yard, everyone trooped back to the house. Claire stood so Ethan’s father could formally introduce her to everyone, and she sent up yet another prayer of gratitude that her socially awkward days were long behind her. That she had absolutely nothing to fear.
Until Ethan’s gaze snagged in hers, and...
Crap.
* * *
Seeing Claire and his father chatting away like they were old friends... It’d blown Ethan’s concentration to hell and back. Because the man who’d raised him might be of few words—or at least, he used to be—but those words tended to be cut-to-the-quick honest. Subtle had never been the Colonel’s style. Since it clearly wasn’t Claire’s either, heaven only knew how that conversation had gone.
What bothered him even more, however, although he couldn’t have said why, was how easily Claire fit in with the family, how quickly she caught on to the inside jokes flying fast and furious around the fully extended mahogany table. Merri had gotten on fine with his brothers and sisters, of course—and they, her—but he’d always felt like he’d needed to shield her from the full force of their exuberance.
Not Claire, though, who handily gave as good as she got, laughing and joking with the whole clan as if they’d all known each other for years. What was up with that?
Ethan hauled the platter with the turkey carcass into the kitchen, where the women were busy cleaning and divvying leftovers into a thousand plastic containers and gabbing a mile a minute. He’d only meant to dump the pulverized bird on the island, then haul his carcass to anyplace he didn’t have to see Claire, who was at the sink rinsing dishes and handing them to Tyler’s fiancée, Laurel, to put in the dishwasher. Because she was making him uncomfortable in ways he didn’t even want to think about, was why.
Except then he noticed Kelly bouncing a wailing Jonathon, Laurel’s ten-week-old, who wasn’t in the least bit interested in being jostled out of his bad mood...which in turn brought back memories from when Ethan’s own kids were infants, miserable for reasons known only to themselves....
“I’ve got this,” Ethan said, plucking the kid from his startled sister-in-law’s arms before booking it out of there, to somewhere, anywhere, where the women weren’t. The family room was a no-go, however, since the space was crowded with guys—and his youngest sister Abby—cheering on the Eagles. Although at his soon-to-be stepson’s cries, Tyler surged to his feet.
“You need me to take him?”
His youngest brother’s concerned expression made Ethan’s chest swell—who would have guessed that Tyler, the world’s most dedicated bachelor, would hitch himself to a single mom with a newborn?
“No, we’re good,” Ethan said, tucking the baby against his chest as he also rejected the living room, filled with loud little boys playing video games. And the younger girls had vanished upstairs to play dress up with all the stuff Jeanne Noble had collected over the years for her little girls. Even the ones who’d only been passing through—for a few days, a few weeks, a couple of years—finding with the Nobles a haven from turbulence or uncertainty.
Some haven it was now, Ethan thought, pissed with himself for reacting to Claire like this. All the women who’d come on to him in the past three years—even the nice ones, the pretty ones, the reasonably normal ones—their attentions had slid right off, like water from an oiled deck. Then along comes this chick who wasn’t even trying...
He didn’t get it, he really didn’t.
Finally, Ethan landed in the year-round sunroom off the dining room. The sun had long since gone to bed, but enough light filtered in from outside to keep the room from being completely dark. Settling with the baby in a cushioned wicker rocker, he began singing some silly little song that’d always soothed his own kids when they were fussy. Not that his singing voice was any great shakes, but if the kids hadn’t cared, neither had he.
Jonny’s wails gradually lost steam before the exhausted little guy finally passed out, slumped against Ethan’s chest, and Ethan melded with the rocker as the infant did with him. He might have drifted off, too, except movement out of the corner of his eye made him start to attention. For a moment he assumed it was Laurel, come to collect her son, only to realize the shadowy figure was too short to be his future sister-in-law.
And her soft chuckle too raspy.
“The cute, it burns,” she said.
“You can see us?”
“Heck, yeah.”
He tried to sit up straighter, but nothing’s heavier than a sleeping baby. “You’re still here.”
A beat or two preceded, “Got a problem with that?”
Ethan felt his cheeks tingle. “I was more thinking that you might. We’re a pretty unruly bunch.”
He heard her laugh. �
�I can handle unruly a little while longer, I think. Also, I’m too full to walk home.”
“You walked?”
“Five blocks. Go, me.” She paused, then said, “Want company?” and Ethan heard himself say, “Sure,” and then she was perched on the edge of the chair nearest him, her hands curled around the edges of the striped cushion, her attention fixed on the baby. The weak light glanced off her curls, the side of her face. Through the leftover scent of the meal and burning logs, he caught a whiff of her perfume, something musky that tugged at a vulnerability he was too damned tired to argue with. Then he heard another gentle laugh.
“Omigosh—he’s snoring?”
“They do that,” he said, mentally shaking off an errant thought or six as he lowered his chin to smile at the baby. “One of the reasons Merri and I never coslept with the kids—they all made too much noise.”
Claire tucked her hair behind her ear. In the nanosecond before it bounced back, he caught a glimpse of a tiny diamond stud, twinkling dully in the weak light. Her other earrings, they changed. But not that pair, nestled in her ears’ upper curves—
“Your family’s great.”
“If borderline certifiable.”
“That’s what makes them great. I haven’t laughed that much in a long, long time. Or felt...”
“What?”
“Good,” she said, even though something told him that’s not what she’d been about to say. “Like being in a living Normal Rockwell painting.”
Ethan grunted. “We’re hardly that.”
“More than I ever had, that’s for sure. It’s a nice change.” Another pause preceded, “You know, it occurs to me I’ve never held an infant.”
“Seriously?”
“Nope. Babysat a few times as a teenager, but no actual babies.”
“Wanna hold this one? I’m sure Laurel won’t mind—”
“No, no... That’s okay. Wouldn’t want to disturb him, he looks so peaceful.” She smiled again. “So do you.”
Harlequin Special Edition November 2014 - Box Set 1 of 2: A Weaver Christmas GiftThe Soldier's Holiday HomecomingSanta's Playbook Page 50