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

by Allison Leigh

  “Do not know the meaning of inside voices and are overly fond of body noises and have more energy than the sun. And yet, I survived.”

  Juliette softly snorted. “You sure?”

  Leaning against the doorjamb, Claire crossed her arms. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “By choice?”

  She chuckled. “I’m here because your dad was obviously in a bind and I was only too glad to help. Especially since...since I’m guessing it takes a lot for him to ask for help.”

  “Boy, you got that right,” Juliette muttered, and Claire smiled.

  “Although he did tell me to call his dad if I got in over my head. And I’ll admit there were a few times, especially early on, when I was tempted. Except then... I don’t know. I got in the groove, I guess.” She leaned forward and whispered, “And don’t tell Finn, but he makes awesome fart noises.”

  Juliette giggled, then said, “Um, those probably weren’t only noises.”

  Claire thought of the boys’ roars of laughter after one particularly musical episode and grinned. “I was being...discreet. But what can I say? I like them. The boys, I mean. Not the noises.” She paused. “I really like all of you.”

  The girl watched her for a second, then shuffled over to give Claire a hug, letting the comforter whoosh to the floor behind her. After a startled moment, Claire hugged her back, her eyes burning for the girl’s loss. For everyone’s.

  “Sorry,” Juliette mumbled, breaking away to wipe her eyes.

  “No, it’s okay—”

  “Hey—could we make cookies later?”

  Awkward moment over. Got it. “We?”

  Juliette laughed. “Okay, me.”

  “Fine by me, but are you sure you’re up to it?”

  “Mom always said cookies make everything better.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Claire said, then went downstairs, where the little one was stirring as well, yawning and hugging the...thing. And looking so blamed cute Claire could hardly catch her breath.

  “Hey, pumpkin,” she said, turning on a couple of lights in the darkening room. “Feeling better?”

  Bella shrugged, swiped a shredded tissue across her red nose, then frowned at Claire. “That’s what Daddy calls me.”

  Claire held out the trash can for the used tissue, handed over a clean one. “That’s probably where I got it from, then—”

  “Gotta pee,” the child mumbled, then scrambled off the sofa and toddled off to the powder room. A minute later she toddled back, which was when Claire realized she was still in her pajamas, too. And barefoot.

  “Need your slippers?” she asked, even as she thought, screw it about the pj’s. Kid was six. And Claire sincerely doubted the queen was going to pop in.

  Bella looked down at her feet, as though surprised to discover they were bare, then ran—good sign, Claire decided—upstairs, a minute later returning with puppies on her feet. By this time Claire had turned on several more lights and was in the kitchen, desperately trying to channel her inner domestic goddess, from whom she had not heard in years. If ever.

  “Very cute,” she said, nodding at the puppy slippers.

  “Thank you.” Bella climbed on a kitchen chair, tucking the slippers under her butt so she could sit on her knees, from which The Thing regally surveyed the goings on. “But they squish my toes. Could I have some more juice, please? Grape this time. If it’s no bother.”

  Claire bit back her laugh. “Coming right up.”

  The kid chugged it all down, then released a very satisfied, and ridiculously adorable, sigh. And a burp. Then she said, “Thank you for taking such good care of me today,” and Claire flushed to the roots of her hair.

  “You’re very welcome, sweetie.” The microwave dinged.

  “Whatcha making?”

  “Tea. For your sister. Who, by the way, said she wanted to bake cookies after her shower.”

  Bella lit up. Then sneezed. “Christmas coo—” she sneezed again “—kies?” Claire nudged the box of tissues on the breakfast bar toward the child, who grunted a little trying to free one from its prison. “Like in shapes and stuff?” She blew her nose. After a fashion. “With lots of colors and sprinkles and those little red things?”

  “Um...I have no idea.... Where are you going?” she asked when the little girl climbed down and marched out of the room, her companion clutched under her armpit.

  She stopped in front of the dark, bare, definitely lonely looking evergreen standing in the corner. The boys had said they’d bought it the night before, but by the time Ethan had set it up it’d been too late to trim it. “The tree looks sad.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Leaving the tea to steep, Claire joined Bella, crossing her arms. “Sad, and naked, and cold.”

  “Yeah,” Bella said with a sharp nod. “It needs...” She waved her hand. “Lights. And stuff.”

  “Magic,” Claire said.

  “Yeah. Magic.”

  Claire looked down at her little charge. “I suppose we could, you know, decorate it. If you know where the ornaments are.”

  “Maybe in the garage? Jules knows. But...” More brow puckering. “But we always do that with Daddy.”

  “Well...” Claire squatted beside Bella to wrap an arm around her waist, resisting the urge to kiss the creamy little cheek. “We could either wait for Daddy, or we could all do it tonight after dinner, so it’s all finished when he gets home.” Claire thought of how tired Ethan sounded, how he’d had to cram this trip—and the emotional junk attendant thereto—into a life already full to the brim. “He might like that.”

  “I don’t know...”

  “How’s about I ask him? Make sure it’s okay?”

  After a moment, Bella nodded. So Claire dug her phone out of her pocket and sent Ethan a short text: Bella wants to trim the tree tonight. OK by you?

  Ten seconds later her phone dinged. God, yes.

  Laughing, she started to pocket the phone when it dinged again. And bless you. For everything.

  And heaven help her, she could feel Ethan’s smile, that half-tilt of his lips that, until this very moment, Claire hadn’t realized turned her inside out. Not this much, anyway. Longing shimmered through her, a tingling warmth that, under other, child-free, circumstances, might have provoked an actual gulp—

  “Was that Daddy?”

  Claire looked into Bella’s sweet, impish face and felt another kind of tingling...another kind of longing. One she now realized she’d been denying for years, refusing to fall prey to the Self-Pity Monster she’d seen gobble up way too many other unmarried women over thirty.

  “It was,” she said over the monster’s munching. “And he said it’s fine with him if we want to decorate the tree before he gets home.”

  “Cool,” Bella said, bobbing her head. Then she suddenly wriggled around to frown into Claire’s eyes. “You know, I think I like you.”

  Claire nearly choked on another swallowed laugh, as Juliette appeared in a clean set of pajamas, her damp hair in a million ringlets around her shoulders. A child after Claire’s own heart. Or hair, in any case. “I like you, too, baby,” she said, touching her forehead to Bella’s. Then she turned to Juliette, on her way to the kitchen. “Your dad gave us the go-ahead to trim the tree. Bella says you know where the decorations are.”

  “In the closet under the stairs,” Juliette said from kitchen. “We can get them out after dinner.”

  Succumbing to the irresistible pull of sweet little girl in her arms, Claire gave the top of Bella’s head a quick kiss, then pushed herself to her feet to join her sister, stirring raw sugar into her tea.

  “Jules? Something wrong?”

  She shook her head, then twisted up her mouth. “The tree was Mom’s thing,” she said in a hushed voice. So Bella wouldn’t hear, Cla
ire presumed. Not that she could, since she was now playing tug-of-war with the dog and one of his toys. Between the growling and giggling, they were good. “Dad did all the decorating outside, Mom was in charge of inside the house—”

  “Oh, sweetie, if you think I’m overstepping—”

  “No! No, not all. In fact...” She pressed her lips together, her eyes glittering when she looked at Claire again. “Dad’s tried so hard, you know? To keep things the same, making sure we still did all the stuff we used to with Mom. And maybe the others didn’t notice, because they’re younger, but I did, how much it was killing him. Mom... She got as excited as a little kid about Christmas. And the tree was her favorite thing....”

  Juliette swiped at a tear trickling down her cheek, and Claire’s throat got tight. “So if I can’t help thinking about Mom when we pull out her favorite ornaments, hang ’em on the tree.... I can only imagine how Dad feels.” She gave Claire a watery smile. “Even though he acts all goofy and stuff so supposedly we won’t notice.”

  Her own eyes burning, Claire leaned across the breakfast bar to wrap her hand around the girl’s, giving her a smile. “Goofy? Your dad?”

  “Amazing, but true. The only thing he won’t do...”

  When the teen stopped, Claire gave her hand a squeeze. “What?”

  “Mom loved music. All kinds—classical, show music, rock, everything. And she listened to it all the time. There’s a ton of her CDs still in her office, Dad never got rid of them...but he never plays them, either.”

  “Maybe he’s not a music person?”

  Juliette shook her head. “He’d play it plenty when Mom wasn’t around. But since she died he won’t listen to music at all. Any music. Isn’t that sad?”

  Squeezing Juliette’s hand again, Claire went around to pull the pizzas out of the freezer, her own memories pinching her heart. “Sounds familiar. Both my parents adored opera, but after my father died my mother said it hurt too much to hear it, because she associated it so strongly with him. So I don’t think what your dad’s feeling is all that unusual.”

  Juliette straddled one of the chairs at the kitchen table, her hair tumbling over her shoulders. “So your mom never listened to opera again?”

  “I think she tried to once or twice. But after that... No. Not really.”

  A huge sigh pushed from the girl’s lungs. “It’s like...they’re broken.” Her eyes widened. “Is that what death does? Breaks people?”

  “It can,” Claire said honestly. “If they let it. If you let it. Do you feel broken?”

  After a moment, Juliette wagged her head. “Changed, maybe. And still sad. But not like I’ll never feel whole again.”

  “Then I think you’re good.” They heard more giggling, then barking, as Bella and Barney raced up the stairs. Claire smiled. “To be honest, after my father died, I sometimes got the feeling Mom was only biding her time until she could join him. And that is sad. On the other hand, there’s my landlord—he and his partner had worked and lived together for more than fifty years until Thomas died last year. But even though you can still hear the affection in Virgil’s voice when he talks about him, he says he’s got a list as long as his arm of things he still wants to do. That why should his journey come to a halt because Thomas is continuing his somewhere else?”

  Juliette’s brow crunched for a moment before she slowly nodded. “I like that.”

  Claire smiled. “Me, too.” The pizzas set on two cookie sheets, she slid them into the oven. “Some people give up, some go on. Just depends.”

  “Which do you think my dad is?”

  The oven door closed, Claire turned. “You know him a lot better than I do. What do you think?”

  Another frown preceded, “Hard to tell. Somewhere in the middle, maybe?”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Because he’s doing what’s right for him. And he’s obviously doing right by you guys, far as I can tell. Or am I off base about that?”

  The corners of the girl’s mouth curved up. “No. You’re not. He’s a great dad. Even if he won’t let me date until I’m sixteen.”

  “Which, actually, is part of what makes him a great dad, no?”

  Juliette rolled her eyes right as the twins exploded through the back door into the mudroom, both talking a mile a minute as they shucked off their wet clothes and—Claire saw—dumped them in heaps on the tiled floor.

  “Hey,” she said, doing the turn-right-back-around thing with her index finger when they came galumphing into the kitchen. “Ain’t nobody here gonna clean up after you, so hang up your stuff. Got it?”

  Julie and the twins exchanged a three-way glance.

  “What?” Claire said, which got a trio of shrugs.

  “Nothin’,” Finn said, a moment before he and Harry trooped back to the mudroom to scoop their crap off the floor and sling it over the many hooks provided for exactly that purpose. But Claire caught the grins, oh, yes, she did.

  And damned if she didn’t feel...triumphant.

  Chapter Ten

  Snow smothered the town like a thick down comforter, pale gold in the early-morning sun. Ethan parked the Explorer in the drive, then stealthily let himself inside, grabbing the excited dog before he could start barking.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m back,” he whispered, muffling his own chuckles as Barney slathered Ethan’s whiskery face in sloppy kisses. Except for the steady ticking of the grandmother clock in the crook of the stairs and the overcaffeinated beating of his own heart, silence cushioned the still-cold house. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of sunlight bouncing off the decorated tree in the living room’s bay window. Still holding the dog, Ethan came closer, his lips pressed together to stifle a laugh. Judging from the helter-skelter placement of the ornaments—not to the mention that most of them were crowded on the lower branches—he guessed that Claire had let the kids trim the tree without her interference. That, or tree trimming was not one of her talents....

  Speaking of whom... He glanced at the sofa to see some rumpled blankets, one of Jules’s pillows, but no Claire. Not that he’d blame her for eventually choosing his bed over the sucky couch—and from those nights when he’d had a cold and didn’t want to disturb Merri, he knew the pathetically thin pullout mattress wasn’t any better—but now he had an image of Claire in his bed, her curls all tangled, making his sheets smell like her...

  Man, those five-hour energy drinks were wicked.

  He finally set down the dog and shrugged off his topcoat, wanting nothing more than to get out of this suit and into his jeans and a sweatshirt. But that meant going to his room. Maybe if he was really quiet...

  The dog practically tripping him, Ethan crept up the stairs and past the boys’ room—both kids were sprawled across their beds at crazy angles, no covers, all appendages accounted for—then Juliette’s closed door, before reaching the master bedroom. Where the door stood wide-open. Cautiously, he peeked into...an empty room. Bed still made, no girl stuff strewn about—

  Ethan’s chin jerked down when he felt a tug on his pants leg—Barney, clamped on and determined that Ethan follow him. For a moment he freaked—wasn’t that what dogs did when somebody was in trouble?—until he realized if that’d been the case the dog would’ve gone ballistic the moment Ethan walked through the door. “What is it, boy?”

  The dog immediately let go and pranced the few feet to Bella’s room, where he sat and—Ethan could have sworn—cocked his head toward the door.

  Obediently he looked inside...and dissolved. Because there they were, his baby girl snuggled against Claire’s chest, Bella’s poufy, pastel quilt loosely drawn over the pair of them. A half dozen storybooks lay scattered on the quilt, the floor; on the nightstand, the bedside lamp—a teddy bear in a tutu that Merri had gotten her when she turned three—still glowed.

  As did the pair of them, Bella�
�s silky blond strands entwined with Claire’s curls, Claire’s left arm cradling his baby’s shoulder as they breathed in sync.

  He couldn’t move. Hell, he could barely breathe. The sweetness punched his barely healed heart, making his eyes burn, even as guilt slammed through him at what he’d been imagining before, even if only briefly. Before he could duck away, though, Claire stirred, her eyes drifting open. She started, her hand going to her mouth to block her gasp. Then she smiled, a sleepy, beautiful smile that delivered a second punch far worse than the first.

  “Busted,” she said soundlessly, then inched away from the sleeping little girl, clumsily extracting herself from the quilt to get to her feet. She was wearing jeans, he saw, along with a soft-looking sweatshirt the color of raspberry ice cream. Her curls slithered over her shoulders when she quickly bent to grab those god-awful rubber shoes of hers, then silently crossed the floral rug and through the door to Ethan, now standing in the hall.

  “She woke in the middle of the night,” she whispered. “So I thought reading a few books would ease her back to sleep. Guess it worked for both of us.” She blinked up at him. “When did you get in?”

  “Five minutes ago,” he said, trying not to notice her flushed cheeks, her wild hair. The lingering scent of perfume on her sleep-warmed skin. Really trying not to notice the effect all of it was having on him. Never mind that guilt was still all up in his face like some smart-assed street kid, going, Yo, remember me?

  Remember your wife?

  Except yearning’s whisper was far more importunate. And dangerous.

  “The snow had stopped,” he said, forcing himself not to look away, to face this thing down and prove his dominion over it, “but everything was so backed up I wouldn’t have been able to get out until later this morning. So I rented a car. Got the last one on the lot.”

  Wide-eyed, Claire folded her arms over her stomach. “You drove all night? In the snow?”

  Ethan smiled. “It was clear by then. And I-76 was good.” He curled his palm around the back of his stiff neck as his gaze landed once more on his sleeping daughter. “It was making me crazy, being away. Being stuck. I had to get back, one way or the other. Would’ve been here sooner, but had to drop the car off at the airport, pick mine up—”