Kristin Hardy

by Her Christmas Surprise (lit)

  Lex frowned. “Just how many cats do you have?” he asked.

  “Seven,” Darlene said with a fond smile. “And one husband. Dick, look who’s here.”

  Dick, almost as wide as Darlene, was a computer programmer. Lex wasn’t sure he’d ever heard the man utter more than a single sentence at a time. “Merry Christmas,” Dick mumbled, and immediately got up and left the room.

  “I didn’t mean to drive him away.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s got a regular Monday-night online chat with his Linux-developers group. So what did you bring me?” She looked bright-eyed at his package with its poor excuse of a wrapping job.

  “Just a little something I thought you might get a kick out of.”

  She tore in with enthusiasm, popping the ribbon and ripping away the paper and the padding to reveal his gift. And stared.

  It was a photo of the bakery, taken from the street so that you could see the display window with its pyramids of meringues and croissant and cupcakes. Townspeople gossiped at the tables and in the back, Darlene held court at the counter, putting a cruller in a bag, her mouth curved with a smile so wide you could hear the laughter.

  “Oh, Lex,” she breathed, blinking quickly.

  “I printed it on linen paper so that it has the sepia look. You’ll maybe want a different frame but I thought you could put it up in the bakery somewhere.”

  “I love it.” She gave him a fierce hug and turned back to the picture. “And everybody’s in it. Look, Reverend Richards and Tanya and Harry Lonnroth and—”

  And Keely. Shining blond hair, laughing eyes, mischief in the very set of her shoulders as she reached for the bag of crullers. He’d seen her in the picture as soon as he looked at the negatives. At first, he’d been tempted to choose another shot but this was the one that most truly captured Darlene and the bakery. And in the end, it was the one he went with.

  “Takes a pretty photograph, doesn’t she?” Darlene asked. “At least she used to. I don’t know how they’d come out today. She’s kind of got that walking-zombie look these days.” She glanced up at him. “Kind of like you. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing’s going on. We’re just not having any luck finding the proof we need.”

  “Not a good thing. Then again, I suppose if you find it, you’re just going to be off, so maybe that’s not such a good thing, either.”

  “We had this conversation last Sunday,” he said.

  “And I seem to recall telling you it was kind of nice having you around. Back when you and Keely were walking around looking ready to tap-dance on the moon.”

  “Sticking around isn’t what I do,” he said.

  Or was it? Connections. They’d formed all around him when he hadn’t been paying attention. His mother, Flaherty, Darlene. Keely. They weren’t supposed to matter to him. He was supposed to be able to go and not look back, go and not worry about anyone else.

  But why had he sent a postcard to Darlene from every place he’d gone? You can tell yourself that you cruise through life without connections all you want. You’re lying to yourself. He heard Keely’s voice. And he remembered the shadows in her eyes as she’d walked away.

  “Freedom can be its own kind of trap,” Darlene said gently.

  And he stared down at the laughing Keely in the photo and wondered what the hell he was doing. “Maybe,” he said slowly, and rose. “But it’s what I know.”

  Darlene shook her head. “Why won’t you—” Her sentence ended in a squeak as the room went dark. “Dick!” she yelled. “Did you throw the breaker again?”

  There was some thumping and bumping and then Dick appeared, flashlight in hand. “No, I wasn’t doing anything. I think the power’s out, look.” He went to the window where the streetlights were dark. “I was just down in a chat room and boom, the room was dark except for my laptop screen. Power’s up somewhere, though. The town WiFi’s still going.”

  Olivia, thought Lex. “I’d better get going,” he said, with a sneaky relief. “My mom’s at home alone and I want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Well, be careful. The roads are already messy enough without live power lines in the street. Get home safely, that’s what’s important.” She leaned in to kiss his cheek. “Thank you for my gift.”

  “My pleasure. Merry Christmas,” he said.

  The scent of pine, a crackling fire, gifts under the tree, Nat King Cole on the stereo singing Christmas carols. It should have been a perfect Christmas Eve, a magical one with snowflakes drifting down outside the window.

  To Keely, it simply meant that she’d almost made it through another day.

  She sat curled in an armchair, trying to read, but the conversation with Darlene kept coming back to her. Staying in Chilton. Starting her own business. Two days before when Darlene had first suggested it, it had seemed ludicrous. A year ago, a month ago, even, it would have been unthinkable. Now?

  Now it was what she wanted, she realized abruptly. Oh, not staying in her parents’ house, not working full time at the flower shop, but if she were to get her own place, start her own business? She could build a life she could love.

  And as she opened her mouth to tell them, the lights went out.

  The silence was complete, the tree was dark. The light from the fire kept the room from being completely black. After the first heart-stopping instants, Keely’s eyes began to adjust so that she could see the windows.

  “I’ll get the flashlight,” Carter said, standing up after it was clear that the power wasn’t coming back anytime soon.

  Jeannie moved over to the mantel to light the candles that stood there. “Decorative, as well as functional,” she said.

  “And these are ugly but functional,” Carter said, walking in with a trio of giant flashlights. “Everybody gets one.”

  The novelty of the power outage faded quickly. With the music and twinkling lights gone, the festivity bled away and the shadows gathered around her, the emotional ones.

  To hold them at bay, she rose and went back to the guest room for her iPod. There had to be something, some way for her to keep it together. Dance music, something with a beat.

  She sank back into the armchair. Ok Go, she decided, fast, catchy and clever. When she tried to roll down the menu to the album title, though, she slipped past it.

  “You know, just once you’d think I could work this thing right,” she said.

  “What, dear?” Jeannie asked.

  “My iPod.”

  “I’m going to have a drink, assuming I can find the bar in the dark,” her father said. “Either of you want one?”

  “A Bailey’s, please,” Jeannie said.

  “Keely?”

  Glancing up, she passed the name of the band again. “Um, sure. That would be good.” Shaking her head, she rolled back up the menu, paying attention and taking care to get it right.

  The Ok Go weren’t on it.

  Frowning, she ran up the menu. Nope, definitely not there. And as she looked, she realized that they weren’t the only ones. There was another band missing, and another and another. And another. It was an iPod she had in her hand, all right.

  It just wasn’t hers.

  Bradley’s she assumed, it had to be Bradley’s. So maybe he’d gotten one on his own and just hadn’t told her. He always had liked blue. And if he’d planned from the beginning to leave it at the safe house, it didn’t matter if the two looked alike.

  Still, there had to be something on the player that she could stand listening to. Forget artists, she’d just go to search by genre so that she could avoid the one labeled insipid Top 40 pop.

  One of the ways she and Bradley were different—the many ways, she now knew—was in music. She preferred quirky and alternative, he went for Ashlee Simpson and Britney Spears. Of course, maybe he’d liked the singers better than the music. That should have tipped her off right there.

  Interesting that the betrayal no longer had the power to hurt her. The a
che she felt for Lex left no room for it.

  It took only that to remind her, only that to bring it back. And tonight, of all nights, there were no distractions. No power, no games to play, no movies or television to watch. Just music, a book by flashlight and the slow, measured tick of the clock as the time crawled by.

  She just missed him. She missed the person she could talk with, who understood what she meant without her having to explain it, the man who could make her laugh helplessly and who could moments later have her crying out in ecstasy. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t be there for her, it didn’t matter that his life was elsewhere, she wanted him, just wanted him. For an instant, the memory of being in his arms was so vivid that loss took her breath away.

  She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her hand and fought back the grief. He was doing something different, he was going somewhere else. They weren’t right for each other, pure and simple. However much she felt down to her DNA that they belonged together, it wasn’t going to work and she had to accept that and move on.

  “You okay?”

  She glanced up to see a highball glass with her family’s traditional Christmas drink and dredged up a smile. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “My pleasure, pumpkin.” He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

  She went back to the iPod and blinked when the wrong menu came up. She’d clicked on the wrong line again, she realized, choosing Extras rather than Genres. She moved to jump up the menu tree but stopped. On the list under Extras was an entry called Notes. Curious, she clicked on it and saw a handful of entries: BRD MTG, TREE, PW, VPW.

  PW.

  Password? Heart thumping a little faster, Keely clicked on that filename and the entry came up, two lines.

  User: BAlexander

  Pass: All In

  The hair prickled on the back of her neck as she ran back up a level. VPW.

  VoIP password, it had to be.

  She was up off the chair before she even thought about it, heart pounding.

  “Keely, where are you going?” her mother said, startled.

  “To use the comp—” She stopped. The power was out. That meant neither of her parents’ computers would work. She needed a laptop. Now. She wasn’t going to wait, she wasn’t about to wait, not with the key possibly here in her hands.

  After all, what else did she have to do?

  “Can I use the car?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Where are you going at this hour? The power’s out over half of town.”

  “I’ll take a flashlight. There’s something I have to check,” she said in a rush. “I’ll be back.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Olivia sat at the desk in Pierce’s office. A Mozart concerto played over the sound system, a cup of tea sat at her elbow. Calming. The backup generators had kicked on a few seconds after the power had gone out. The house was dimmer than usual, though. With Lex out and Corinne gone for the holiday, it felt cavernous and empty.

  And it made her uneasy. Having the doorbell ring a few minutes after the lights went out shouldn’t have made her jump like it did, though. She’d merely been surprised; she’d been even more surprised when she’d opened the door to discover Keely Stafford waiting there. And she as was nice as could be. Lex would have been proud of how nicely she let Keely in to go through God only knew what in Pierce’s office.

  Olivia certainly wasn’t about to ask. She was still smarting from Lex’s chiding the previous week. It wasn’t easy to have your child go toe to toe with you.

  It was even less easy when that child was right.

  She tried to concentrate on the copy of the Alexander Technologies Annual Report that sat before her. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it right, and that meant following the company all the way back to when Pierce first took over.

  From the hallway came the sound of the front door opening. Olivia stood with relief. She was serious about her new venture but she was human. It was Christmas Eve and she would far and away rather be relaxing with her son.

  “Trey, I’m in here. Did you run into traff—”

  She stopped dead. Relaxing with her son. It was her son who stood before her, but not Trey. It was Bradley, looking puffy faced and pale. Next to him, stocky and stolid, stood a man she didn’t recognize.

  “Bradley,” she whispered, and stepped forward to envelope him in a hug. He moved away from her a little bit, though, so that she just stood before him, staring in confusion. “You’re back. We’ve been so worried.”

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” she said faintly, staring at him.

  “This is—”

  “No introductions,” the man ordered, a whisper of foreign lands in his words. He had the implacable face of a bully, someone comfortable using force and size to intimidate.

  “I can’t stay long. I’m sure you understand,” Bradley said to her.

  “What have you done? They’ve been saying things about you, terrible things. Did you really take all of that money? Why did you run away?”

  “Lot of questions, Mom.” A faint smile curved his lips and suddenly she knew.

  It was all true.

  “Turn yourself in,” she said urgently. “We can get you good lawyers, the best—”

  “You’ve got to know I can’t do that.” He put his arm around her shoulders and steered her into the living room. “Now, you go sit—”

  “She comes with us,” the man interrupted.

  Bradley’s head snapped around toward him. “All right.”

  It made her skin crawl to walk down to the office with them, to wait in the doorway trying to stand as far as possible from the stolid man. While Bradley went inside. And then she heard Bradley curse.

  “Where is it?” he demanded, looking up from where he’d spilled out the contents of the bowl all over the desk.

  “What?” Olivia asked.

  “You know what. The key.”

  She blinked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Who’s been here?”

  “Bradley, it doesn’t matter. You need to turn yourself in. You need to let us help you.”

  “Then help me,” he snapped. “Who’s been in here?”

  “Trey,” she said helplessly. “Keely. Corinne, to clean. But—”

  “We need no key,” said the companion. “We go.”

  “Can you pick—”

  “We go,” he said again.

  Bradley nodded sharply and strode out of the office.

  “Where are you going?” she said, hurrying after them. “This isn’t going to help you. You’ve got to give yourself up. We can get a team of good lawyers, make a deal.”

  He turned to her at the door. “I can’t make a deal, Mom. It’s too late.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve got to go.” He kissed her forehead. “Merry Christmas.”

  She’d done smarter things than carting off to the safe house on her own, Keely acknowledged, peering out at the rising road. In daylight, with a four-wheel drive, the road had been challenge enough. At night, with fresh snow, the sedan she’d borrowed from her parents barely managed to get up the slope. Why hadn’t she waited for Lex?

  Because she didn’t think she could bear to see him again.

  She’d crossed her fingers as she’d driven up to Olivia’s house, and breathed a sigh of relief when she’d found him gone. It was the work of a minute to grab the key. With luck, she’d be in, find the files, and get out without running into him. She could send the data to Stockton, solve her and Olivia’s problems and go on with her life.

  It all sounded so tidy when she thought of it that way.

  Too bad it wasn’t.

  Her windshield wipers slapped back and forth, rubbing away the fresh flakes of snow. At the edges of her windshield, a little layer of slush had begun accumulating. A white Christmas, she thought. It had always portended good things.

  But that had be
en before.

  Lex walked through the door to the house, his mood scarcely any better. The roads had been worse than Darlene’s predictions. Downed power lines had blocked intersections with emergency vehicles. A BMW had gone through a signal knocked out by the power failure and smacked into a Volvo, spreading bits of both vehicles everywhere. The fifteen minute drive from Darlene’s had somehow more than doubled.