She got no further. The woman squealed, Jeff got to his feet with a wide smile, opened his arms, and the woman ran into them. She flung her fox-trimmed arms around him and planted a kiss on his lips that had the other three men staring at Jeff in wistful jealousy. The black leather pump on her left foot rose with the graceful little backward kick of her leg as the kiss went on and on.
They finally drew apart and the woman’s voice, low and husky, said heavily, “Jeffrey. Darling.”
“Sylvia.” His voice was lost in her fox collar as she brought him close to her again.
Chapter Eleven
Liza stood by, smiling, while Jeff introduced Sylvia to the group. But her mouth ached from the effort and her heart ached with the memory of Jeff’s obvious delight at Sylvia’s arrival, and Sylvia’s clear adoration of him. Liza wouldn’t even allow herself to think about the kiss.
“I apologize for intruding upon your Christmas celebration,” Sylvia said with a smile for every male face at the table. She wasn’t manipulative, Liza noted fairly, just the kind of woman who found men endlessly interesting, and knew precisely how to capture their interest.
She pushed Jeff into his chair, shed her coat with a graceful toss of her shoulders and settled herself in his lap. “Jeff and I were together for a year before he went to Lebanon.” She spoke to the assembled group but her eyes kept returning to Jeff’s gaze. A pleat of regret appeared between her beautifully arched eyebrows. “Then we quarreled, I thought loving someone else would be easier than loving Jeff and…” She smiled wistfully. “But love is never easy, I guess. Then Jeff’s escape was all over the news and I had to see for myself that he was all right.”
“Where’s…What was his name?” Jeff asked.
“Bobby Hickock.” She shrugged. “Still in Dallas, I expect. What I’m more interested in is…where are we?”
Chris cleared his throat to claim their attention. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that this would make a good interview to put in toward the end of the show. It’s a great romantic element, you know? The hero’s former love hears about his plight and rushes home to find him and spend Christmas with him. You two have a problem with sitting in front of the Christmas tree and telling your story?”
“That’d be perfect!” Whittier said with a thump of his fist on the table. The crockery shook and he put both hands down to stop it. “That’s the kind of thing that drives the viewers wild!”
Jeff turned to Liza.
Now she let herself remember the kiss he and Sylvia had shared and made an instant decision. This day was about scores of people putting in very expensive time to produce a television special that would make Whittier happy, boost Edie’s career, provide Sherrie with the capital to buy the inn and give Liza the national exposure any popular columnist would be thrilled to get.
It was about professionalism, not pipe dreams.
“That’d be a lovely touch,” she said, not sure where the words or the cheerful tone came from. She felt like the bottom of a swamp. “You go ahead and do that. You’ll have to excuse me, though. Sherrie and I have a million things to get ready.”
“Sure.” Chris accepted that with unflattering ease, then talked over a few details with Whittier as they all headed for the living room.
Jeff stopped in the doorway to give Liza one dark, lingering look.
She met it with a blank smile and a shooing motion of both hands. “Go,” she said. “It’s a wonderful idea. Really.”
To everyone else it sounded as though she meant the segment was a wonderful idea, when in truth she was telling him not to worry about what had passed between them. It had been the result of the schmaltzy emotion of Christmastime and two people who’d found each other on television and discovered that in person, other people and things had claim on their lives.
“What do you mean it’s a wonderful idea?” Sherrie asked under her breath, dragging her into a corner of the kitchen where they couldn’t be seen from the living room. “You love him, remember?”
“Well, he seems to love her,” she said, trying to free herself from her sister’s grip. Sherrie held on.
“He barely got a word in!”
“Yes, he did,” Liza disputed. “He said ‘Sylvia.’ With real feeling.”
“That was shock.”
“It was passion.”
“You’re an idiot.” A technician walked into the kitchen in search of a glass of water, and Sherrie handed him a stack of paper cups and a pitcher of water filled with lemon slices. “I second-guessed you,” she said with a smile. “Please don’t electrocute anyone.”
The young man grinned. “There’s always someone taking the fun out of everything.”
The moment he was gone, Sherrie narrowed her gaze on Liza again. “He kept looking at you, waiting for you to say something.”
“Yes.” Liza closed her eyes. “And what would that be? No, you can’t have him, he’s mine? I’m really married to Bill McBride, but I’d like to keep Jeff James on the side, so keep your mitts off him?”
Sherrie put a hand to her forehead. Liza remembered that impatient gesture from many times in their childhood when she’d driven her big sister to the edge. “I’m sure if your heart had been in it, you could have come up with something. You’ve extricated yourself and the rest of us from a few sticky situations over the last few days. You’re just jealous, so you’re retreating rather than putting up a fight.”
Liza glowered at her. “I’m putting up a fight for my job and your inn! Would you please give me something to do,” she added in a whisper, “so that I look like I know what I’m writing about?”
When Chris returned to the kitchen twenty minutes later, Liza was at the kitchen table shelling chestnuts with a hammer.
“Amazing,” he observed, watching her swing the hammer and not only crack the shell but pulverize the nut as well. “You’d think with the new kitchen technology someone would come up with a better way to shell nuts.”
Sherrie came to stand over her, wiping her hands on a towel. “She prefers old-fashioned methods. Less…bruising to the nut.” Then she noticed the state of the chestnut Liza had just cracked and added with a diplomatic smile, “Well, usually. Sometimes she just puts too much enthusiasm into things.”
“If you can spare her,” Chris said, “I’ll put another camera on following Bill and Liza and the children around for an hour or so. Then I promise I won’t get in your way again until we’re on.”
Sherrie took the hammer from Liza. “Yes, you may have her. And I’d like to say that you don’t have to bring her back, but unfortunately, she’s the star of everything around here.”
Betsy sat contentedly in Liza’s arms and Travis and Davey flanked Bill as the camera filmed them in front of the classic home.
“Welcome to the McBride home,” Liza said, slipping easily into her public persona. She wondered about the comfort she found in speaking to the camera when she’d done it only once before, on the cable show, which had had a much smaller audience.
Then she realized that today, anyway, its appeal was that she didn’t have to be herself. She wasn’t the woman everyone was annoyed with because she’d completely upset their lives. She wasn’t the woman with the dream snapped in two by the arrival of the woman Jeff had always talked about with affection and respect. She wasn’t the woman who would have to explain to Whittier after the holidays that she wasn’t sure she could do this anymore.
At this moment she was who she claimed to be— Liza De Lane, expert on everything festive and domestic.
She tucked her arm in Bill’s. “I’m Liza De Lane, and this is my husband, Bill McBride. He’s a pediatrician, which comes in very handy with three accident-prone children.” She pointed to Travis. “This is Travis, a ten-year-old baseball star with an interest in space and girls.”
“Yuk!” Travis declared, sticking out his tongue. Sherrie would have been horrified to see that, but the audience, Liza knew, would love it.
“Davey is eight,” Liza went
on, “is a very good student and is probably the reason AOL is having trouble servicing their other Internet clients.”
Davey waved shyly at the camera.
“And this is Betsy. She just had her first birthday. Wave to our friends, Betsy.”
To Liza’s amazement, Betsy waved.
The camera crew followed Liza and Bill and the children around while Liza talked about the house, about the flowers that were visible in the spring, and about the deck Bill planned to build next summer. Then she handed Betsy to Bill.
“But we know that what you’ve really come by for,” she said, connecting to the public somewhere out there, who weren’t even in front of their televisions yet but with whom she’d established a rapport in her columns, “is to see how my sister and assistant, Sherrie Blake, and I have decorated the house, and to see what we’ve fixed for dinner.”
She leaned intimately close to the camera and made a beckoning gesture. “So, come in and spend Christmas Eve with us. We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Excellent!” Chris praised. “All right. Now let’s do the step-by-step on that craft angel Whittier keeps talking about.”
As the camera crew went back into the house, Liza smiled at Bill, kissed the baby’s cheek and thanked the boys.
“You guys are being the best family a woman could hope for. Do you mind checking with Sherrie to see if she needs your help with anything while I film the craft segment? Then I’ll be her slave for the rest of the day and you guys will be free to do whatever you want until we have to get ready to go on the air.”
The boys ran off. Bill lingered to give her a supportive hug. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about Sylvia What’s-her-name.”
“You saw that kiss,” she said. “The conclusion jumped at me.”
“But the two of you—”
“Met by seeing each other on television,” she said, “and since we’ve met I’ve lied to him, shocked him, gotten him lost and almost frozen. I imagine he’s probably very grateful to have a sane woman back in his life. Gotta go, Bill.” She blew him a kiss. “Thanks again. See you later this afternoon.”
The angel segment was intended to follow Liza’s live tour of the house and several quick hints for decorating. It was intended to allow a little breathing space in the live presentation.
Liza and Sherrie had created the angel together several months earlier, and the response from Liza’s readers had been so enormous that Sherrie had drafted a pattern. The Wonder Woman support staff had sent out thousands.
It involved a small drawstring bag filled with fragrant herbs that served as the body of the angel. A wooden ball painted with features was glued inside the ruffled collar created by the drawstring, then topped with hair made from yarn, cotton, or angel hair. The wings were made of raffia.
“If your angel is going to sit on a tabletop,” Liza explained to the camera, holding up an angel, “simply tie the raffia in a bow, attach the wings to the back of the angel’s gown with a couple of stitches or hot glue and add a little sand with your herbs for weight, or place a weight in the base before you add the herbs.”
She put that angel down and held up another prepared for the Christmas tree. “If you’d like to attach your angel to the tree or to a swag, loop a gold cord around the knot on the bow of her wings before attaching them. Or a hanger made of fishing line will make her look as though she’s really flying.”
Liza looped the fishing line on her finger and held up the angel. Then she invited the camera down to the surface of her table where she’d spread out an array of decorations for the angel’s gown.
“To make your angel extraspecial, decorate her with tiny buttons, pearls, sequins, lace, baby ribbon, tiny silk flowers, or miniature charms. Or you can make her a country-style angel by giving her a sprig of mountain laurel to hold, a tiny mushroom robin, or a dried nutmeg seed.
“However you decorate her, she’ll be special because you made her with your own heart and hands. And if you give her away, she’ll spread your Christmas magic.
“We’ll be right back after this station break to take you into the kitchen and show you what’s cooking. And we’ve invited a very special guest to share Christmas Eve dinner with us.” Liza swallowed around the lump in her throat as she read the words leading into the station break. They’d been written days ago, but now they had an impact on her she hadn’t imagined then. “I’m sure you’ve heard on the news that Jeffrey James, the engineer from Boston who was captured by the Fatwa Jihad while working in Beirut, escaped a week ago with Père Etienne Chabot of the D’Arc Fathers. Father Chabot is home in Paris recovering from a gunshot wound sustained during their escape, and Father Chabot credits Jeffrey James with saving his life. Stay tuned and hear how he planned the escape, carried it out, then kept the injured priest alive for six long days while on the run, inching his way toward the American embassy in Damascus. Stay with us.”
“Again, excellent! Thanks, guys.” Chris waved off the camera crew and put a hand on Liza’s shoulder. “You’re a real natural at this,” he said. “I’d have guessed you’ve had a lot more on-air experience than one cable show. You’d better clear the decks and make some time, because after tonight you’re going to be in demand.”
Liza smiled and hoped he was right. After tonight she was going to need things to occupy her time. Jeff was going home with Sylvia, and Whittier was probably going to go ballistic when he learned that his country columnist’s assistant was going to marry said columnist’s husband. Explaining would undoubtedly result in a lot of free time.
As Chris left to check on other aspects of the preparations, Liza cleared off all the angel materials into a box, then went to check on Sherrie’s progress at the other end of the kitchen.
Sherrie rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, a cutting board covered with sliced butternut squash on the counter in front of her.
“How’s it going?” Liza asked.
“Um…okay,” Sherrie said. She pointed to a jar of cloves and a bowl of apricots. “If you want to peel and halve the apricots, we can get the ham ready to go in the oven. Did you get something to eat?”
Liza took a fruit and handed one to Sherrie. “This’ll keep us going. Shall I get Dora in to help?”
“No, she’s keeping Betsy out of harm’s way. It’s just me and you.”
“Okay. I’m up for it. This is our flambé dish, right? Flaming squash flan, or something?”
“Boozy Butternut Flan,” Sherrie corrected with a worried glance at her. “If you’re going to talk about this stuff in front of millions of people, you should know what it’s called. Where’s Whittier?”
Liza hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Last I saw, he was overseeing the interview with Jeff and Sylvia.”
“Is that still going on?”
“No, it’s over.” The reply was made in a deep male voice.
Liza’s arm was taken in a biting grip and she was turned to face Jeff. Anger simmered in him, firming the lines of his jaw, darkening his eyes. He turned to Sherrie and said politely, “Excuse us. I’m going to borrow her for a minute.”
“Jeff, Sherrie and I have a million details…” Liza began to protest, but Sherrie said airily, “Sure. She tends to get in my way, anyway.”
“Oh, really. Well, maybe you’d like to…” Liza stopped because Sherrie was measuring brown sugar into a pan and not listening, and Jeff had already dragged her toward the door.
She glared up at him as he took her coat off a peg and handed it to her.
“Look, if Whittier sees you with your hands on me,” she began to warn him, “he’ll—”
“Whittier’s being filmed even as we speak,” he said stiffly, “telling the story of how Wonder Woman Magazine owns the genius of the country’s cozy-living guru.” Then he opened the back door and pushed her out into the cold. “I saw Chris Page with his hands on you,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her with him as he headed off across the backyard and toward the stone wall. “You didn’t s
eem to be concerned with what Whittier would think about that.”
She stopped to look up at him in exasperation. “Chris Page did not—”
“Oh, be quiet,” he said, tugging her along with him. “I didn’t come out here to talk about him, anyway.”
Liza had no choice but to hurry along with him, snow crunching under their feet as he continued the forced march.
He stopped at the wall and turned to face her.
“This is not a convenient time for me, Jeff,” she said, hiding her heartbreak under a guise of boredom. She drew her hands up into the sleeves of her coat. “What is your problem, and what do you expect me to do about it hours before my first national television show?”
“I don’t give a rip if it’s convenient or not, Liza,” he returned with a mildness she knew better than to trust. Every other signal from his body suggested trouble. “You messed with my life at a time that was very inconvenient for me, but that didn’t seem to bother you.”
“I didn’t mess with your life,” she corrected. “Mr. Whittier did.”
“Whittier didn’t look at me with big brown eyes, turn me in the wrong direction and totally destroy what was left of my libido after almost three months of captivity.”
She refused to take the blame when he was going to walk away from this with a beautiful, talented woman on his arm and she was going home to an empty Manhattan apartment.
“My parents were responsible for the color of my eyes, and probably also for my poor sense of direction. And I’m not responsible for your libido now, am I?”
She expected an angry reaction, but he remained stonily calm, his features hardening but every muscle in his body still.
“So, you’re telling me I’m free to go?”
She widened her eyes at him innocently. “I have no hold on you.”
“Bull,” he replied succinctly. “I was a prisoner for almost three months. I know what it feels like.”
Christmas In The Country Page 15