He looked around at the reasonably snug cabin and nodded. “Now, if the elf went looking for Santa when he didn’t return, we’ll all make it through the night.”
Liza put a hand to her mouth in sudden horror. She’d been so involved in their efforts to get back to Rockbury that she’d forgotten what her faulty directions meant to Santa Stan.
“Oh, my God!” she said. “What if they don’t find him?”
“They will. And he was pretty well bundled up.” He pointed her to the fire. “Sit down and try to get warm. As soon as it’s daylight, we’ll head off in the other direction. We should make Rockbury in no time.”
Her concerns for the alcoholic Santa were suddenly crowded out by how Sherrie and Bill and the boys would worry when she and Jeff didn’t return tonight. And Whittier would be on the verge of apoplexy at the thought that his Christmas special wouldn’t be made after all.
“Liza, I know what you’re afraid of.” Jeff pushed her onto the bench he’d placed before the fire, then got down on one knee on the floor and held his bare hands out to the flames.
Liza’s battered instincts told her that a new hook was about to form in her already barbed ball of lies. “What?” she asked.
“You’re afraid that when we don’t come home tonight, Bill will think you stayed with me to get back at him for what I saw, and that it’ll destroy whatever chance you might have had to pull your marriage back together.”
She shook her head, parting her lips to protest that that wasn’t at all what worried her, but he pushed himself to his feet and sat beside her. The intensity of his expression robbed her of speech.
“Don’t worry. The damaged runner on the sleigh and the condition of Santa Stan will prove that it was an accident.” He smiled thinly, grimly. “And if Bill’s been married to you for twelve years, he has to know what a poor sense of direction you have. Convincing him that you got us lost should be a cinch.”
She was desperate with the need to tell him the truth, but the words were lodged in her throat and refused to be spoken.
He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. “I know,” he said gently, his lips at her ear. “If he loves you, he’ll listen.”
Her high, shrill scream surprised her as much as it surprised him. She pushed her way out of his arms and got to her feet.
“Liza,” he said calmly, standing with her. “Take it easy. It’s going to be…”
She spun around to face him, yanking her hand out of his grasp, and found herself half-blinded by the side of her hood. She swiped it off her head with an angry gesture.
Then, remembering a little belatedly that this was all her fault and not his, she forced herself to take a breath. But it didn’t seem to calm her. Nothing, she thought fatally, could calm her now.
“Jeff, I have to tell you something,” she blurted out, pointing him back to the bench. “Sit down.”
“Liza…” he began.
“Jeff, please!” she said too loudly.
He frowned at her worriedly, but he sat.
“I…”
He waited, the picture of tolerance in the shadowy room. That seemed to further entangle the words she struggled so hard to say.
“I’m not…” A sob rose in her throat, but she swallowed it and made herself speak the truth. “I’m not married to Bill McBride. I never have been.”
For a moment he did not react. Then he shifted on the bench as he seemed to try to make sense of her statement.
“You’re not married to Bill,” he repeated, as though he had to hear it a second time.
“That’s right,” she confirmed.
“The children…” he began, still seeming more confused than angry.
“Are Sherrie’s.”
“Sherrie’s.”
She couldn’t blame him for needing to hear everything twice. “Yes. She’s divorced from their father. She…she’s the one who loves Bill and should be married to him.”
Jeff held her gaze, confusion now beginning to lose ground to anger, though his voice remained quiet. “Then why the charade?”
She pulled her coat tightly around her and held it there by folding her arms over it. She was cold, but the feeling was coming from inside her, not from the drafty cabin.
“It’s very complicated,” she said.
“I’m reasonably intelligent,” he countered stiffly.
She put a hand to her eyes as she thought back over how it had all begun and realized how completely ridiculous it would sound to someone else, particularly someone who’d been unfairly used by her ploy.
She told him how she’d gotten the job with Wonder Woman Magazine in the first place.
“I couldn’t find a straight reporting position anywhere,” she explained, trying to make her desperation at that time clear without sounding self-pitying. “I’d been out of work for four months and my savings were gone. So I heard the magazine was looking for a country columnist, and I applied. The managing editor was a friend of mine from my weekly newspaper days right out of college, and she knew I had no cooking or homemaking skills and that faking it would be harder than I thought. But she respected me as a writer, and when I got the idea that Sherrie could collaborate with me from Connecticut, she went for it. Whittier had been on her for weeks to hire someone.”
Jeff stared at her, then stood and took several steps away from her, stopping at the edge of the shadows to look back at her in obvious puzzlement. “Okay, maybe I’m not as intelligent as I thought. How did that result in a phony husband and children?”
Liza spread her arms helplessly. “I don’t know, I guess I just…really got into it. Bill’s been the kids’ pediatrician for years, and I think he’s secretly loved Sherrie all that time. When Tom left her for a woman he worked with, Bill saw his chance and took it. He found every pretext in the world to get Sherrie to come to his home, including hosting the boys’ birthday parties for her because she didn’t have the room in her duplex. I came to one of them and fell in love with the house.” She waved a hand in the general direction of Rockbury. “The house where you’re staying is Bill’s house.”
Jeff pointed in the opposite direction. “It’s that way.”
“Does it matter?” she demanded impatiently. “I’m trying to tell a story here.”
“It. seems to matter,” he replied quietly. “You seem to do the same with right and wrong as you do with east and west. You get them confused.”
“It wasn’t deliberate,” she said in self-defense. “It just sort of happened. I created a country persona for myself using Bill’s house as my…base camp. I imagined all I’d do if I lived there, and fortunately Sherrie, who’s always been a Suzy Homemaker type, was able to make me sound credible. Tom had just left her and cleaned out their savings, and I shared with her, so it worked out for both of us.”
“That still doesn’t explain Bill and the kids.”
She smiled grimly. “Sherrie and I have always been a good team. And we wrote the hell out of that column. Readers wrote me wanting to know more, hungry for the details of my life because they related to the warm and cozy world I’d created in the Connecticut countryside. Obviously I couldn’t tell them I was writing it from my high-rise in Manhattan, so I assumed Sherrie’s life—only a more perfect version of it. What it would be like if she was married to Bill.”
He walked the perimeter of the cabin, cloaked by the shadows. She turned toward him, following his movements with her eyes. “It worked beautifully. We were asked to do a local cable show last Christmas and filmed it in a studio I had a friend set up for me. Whittier was in Europe at the time, and only Edie and the crew she hired knew that it wasn’t really my home. I brought Sherrie in as my assistant, she got everything ready beforehand, and we pulled it off. That was the show you saw.”
He paced across the back of the cabin. She followed the sound of his footsteps. “That show did so well that when Whittier was approached with using me for a national network show that would be shot at my home and include my hu
sband and my children, he took the deal without bothering to ask me, certain I’d be thrilled at the prospect of national exposure.”
“And you were,” he guessed, “so you pulled together a cast of characters to deceive your viewing public?”
She swallowed hurt feelings, certain he had every cause to presume that was true. “No. But the deal was done, and telling the truth would have meant Edie’s job and Sherrie’s share of my job. Also, Sherrie’s half of the money offered me for the show would enable her to buy the inn where she works as chef. She would love that independence. Tom’s long gone and hasn’t sent her a dime.”
He came to the edge of the shadows, his dark overcoat blending into the darkness, only his face set in angry lines emerging like some moral judge.
“So your motives were noble,” he said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not entirely,” she admitted. “I did it also because I saw the interview with you on television, and…when you said that my face had brought you home…” She had to swallow before she added, “I fell in love with you.”
Chapter Nine
Jeff stepped fully out of the shadows, his expression openly skeptical. “And to show your love you invited me to your home and proceeded to lie to me on every possible level? I don’t think so.”
Liza sank wearily onto the floor in front of the fire, pulling off her shoes and holding her stockinged feet toward the flames. “Well,” she said, feeling everything she’d hoped for for herself and Sherrie dissolve into nothingness, “I can’t control what you think. You have to believe what you want to believe.”
She heard him walk up behind her, but she didn’t turn or look up.
“You expect me to believe,” he asked, “that you felt something for a face you saw for sixty seconds on television?”
She stared into the flames. “Isn’t that what you did? But with you, my face only made you risk your life. In my case, I risked my feelings, my heart.”
He was silent for a moment, then she heard him sit on the bench. “Very poetic, but I don’t buy it. I think you invited me onto your show because it would mean more viewers and ultimately more money.”
“Whittier invited you onto the show before he even told me,” she corrected flatly. “All I was offered was a flat sum that would have been the same whether or not you appeared.”
“Well, I’m sure your agent has you well protected.”
“I don’t have an agent,” she denied with a sigh. “I’m just a columnist. Though probably not for much longer. I imagine you’ll be leaving before the show?”
Escape had been Jeff’s first instinct. And why not, he asked himself. He was good at it.
But he was getting tired of running away from people who held him hostage for their own purposes. With the Fatwa Jihad, he and Father Chabot had been political pawns in a mad and hopeless game. He’d had no choice but to run.
But he’d be damned if he was going to be chased away this time by a woman in a gingham apron—one who’d tortured him with her warmth and kindness and let him believe she belonged to another man.
He would make her pay for turning the Christmas he’d fought his way home to into some surreal Halloween.
He considered his options.
When he didn’t answer, she turned that sweet face up to him, her eyes sad and weary, her hair tumbled.
He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. That brought them face-to-face.
“Maybe we can cut our own deal over this,” he suggested, ignoring the conscience that tried to interfere with his revenge.
She looked into his eyes, suspicious of his intentions. “What are the terms?”
“I’ll stay and do the show,” he bargained, holding her gaze, “and I won’t tell Whittier that the whole setup is phony—that his prize columnist is a little liar with delusions of country grandeur.”
She sat up stiffly now, her entire body turned in his direction, every muscle in her taut with tension. Her voice was high. “If?”
He made himself say it without passion. With the neutrality of points bargained over a boardroom table.
“If you’ll make love with me.”
She looked suddenly the way he’d felt a little while ago when she’d told him she wasn’t really married to Bill—as though some primitive priest had hold of her heart and was trying to rip it from her.
“Make love with you,” she repeated. He remembered that he’d had to repeat everything she’d told him as though it couldn’t possibly be real unless he heard himself say the words.
“Yes,” he said.
“Here?” she asked. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she sniffed and tossed her head and the tears didn’t fall. “In these romantic surroundings?”
His pulse quickened and grew erratic, torn between guilt and desire.
“Has to be before the show,” he replied. “In the morning we’re heading for home—well, Bill’s home, anyway—and the TV crew’s supposed to be there. And in the evening is the show. Tonight’s the only time we have.”
She stared at him, a million things in those tearfilled velvet eyes he found difficult to look at. Pain, disappointment, disillusionment—acceptance.
She stood and began to unbutton her coat.
Instead of exhilaration, he felt anger. He didn’t understand it and told himself it didn’t matter.
The coat unbuttoned, she slipped out of it, then spread it open on the floor as though she intended them to lie on it. She began to work on the shirt buttons down the front of her silky green top.
“I guess,” she said with a quick, lifeless smile in his direction, “I should think of this as a way of finding out if you’re really worth everything I risked to get to know you.”
He watched her eyes as she worked on the last button, certain she was manipulating him, that she had no intention of going through with it.
“And you’d have judged my worthiness,” he asked, “on my sexual prowess?”
“It’s all I have to go on,” she said, pulling the shirt off, revealing small but perfect breasts cupped in scraps of black lace. “The you I thought I’d gotten to know was about as real as my family.” She spread her arms out gracefully in a sort of “this is me” gesture. “Now that we’ve tricked each other, I guess this is all we have.”
She slipped her fingers into the waistband of the pants that matched her top and he leapt up to stop her, angry with himself that he couldn’t go through with it, furious that, after almost three months in captivity being tied up and fed like an animal, he was still soft enough to succumb to tears in a woman’s eyes.
“All right, you’ve made your point,” he said, snatching up her shirt and putting it roughly on her. He yanked his own coat off and dropped it on her shoulders. “Lie down on your coat and go to sleep.”
Liza complied, because she didn’t know what else to do. She was exhausted and filled with despair as she watched him put more wood on the fire. Everything they’d shared in the past two days had convinced her that he wouldn’t be able to carry out the deal. She felt fortunate and grateful that her instincts had been correct. And more determined than ever that Jeffrey James wasn’t getting away from her.
With the fire set to burn for several hours, he stepped over her feet and she heard him sit down on the bench again.
She sat up and held his coat out to him. “If you aren’t coming to bed,” she said, “you’ll need this.”
“‘Coming to bed?’“ he repeated dryly. “Liza, we’re not Darby and Joan in New Haven. You’re a liar, I’m the jerk who fell for you, and we’re stuck in a cabin in the woods in ten-degree weather. Don’t try to get domestic on me. You can’t do it, remember?”
“Even a domestic incompetent knows that body heat will keep us warm. But if you don’t want to be near me, at least take your coat back.”
He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles, folded his arms and stared moodily into the fire. “Please just lie down and go to sleep.”
&nb
sp; “Not unless you join me or take your coat back.”
His eyes swung from the fire to her, not one muscle in his body moving. “Liza, I have spent two interminable days in your company, tortured by sweet longings and hot desire because I believed you were married. Believe me when I tell you that I can’t be trusted to hold you and do nothing about that—particularly now that I know you’re single.”
“Then all you felt for me was physical?”
“I thought we just established that that wasn’t true? No, I’m keeping my distance for fear of murdering you before you become a national success. Since I’ve just regained my freedom, that wouldn’t be wise. Satisfying, but not wise.”
Liza leaned back into the lining of her coat, Jeff’s coat slung over her. Her feet were frozen.
“Fine, then. Stay there,” she said, tears burning her eyes and clogging her throat. These two days had been the most wonderful and the absolute worst fortysome hours of her life. “Murder isn’t a very pleasant Christmas thought, anyway. You’re the only man I know who can claim to love a woman, take her on a romantic sleigh ride in the snow and discover she’s available, then threaten to murder her.”
“You have an interesting concept of romantic,” he disputed. “Our Santa was drunk, our sleigh crashed and you turn out to be available but nuts.”
Liza wept silently into her coat, wondering if she was doomed to perdition for ruining Christmas for everyone and for destroying what had to have been a God-given chance to share her life with Jeff James.
Hopefully, since Jeff had seen Bill and Sherrie kissing, they at least had resolved their problems. Even though Sherrie wouldn’t be able to buy the inn herself, Bill might be willing to finance her.
Mr. Whittier would be disappointed about the sudden disappearance of his ratings-making guest, but he had many connections and opportunities, and he would recover.
She was the one whose future looked bleak. She’d lost everything. The career, the opportunity and the man.
Christmas In The Country Page 12