A Weaver Christmas Gift

by ALLISON LEIGH,

He finally moved, pinching the bridge of his nose. The shaky strains of “O Holy Night” were coming from the park now. The sound of a car engine starting up in the distance was followed by a few more. It was dark. Cold. Now that the trees had been lit, it was no surprise the exodus had begun.

  “There are lots of ways to make a family, Casey. You ought to know that better than anyone.” Among his own extended family there had been foster children and adoptions and who knew what else. “If you don’t want me, just admit it.” Her eyes were tight with tears she wouldn’t let fall. “But don’t use your sperm count, or lack thereof, as an excuse. It’s not sterility that’ll make you less of a man to me. It’s not being honest with me that’ll do that.”

  “It’s not just sex,” he said flatly. “You know it’s not just sex.”

  She exhaled slowly. Shakily. She knew him too well, though, to let relief fool her. “There’s still a but in there, isn’t there, Casey.” It wasn’t a question and the expression on his face gave her the answer.

  She blinked hard and looked across the street at Colbys. The windows were dark, but the parking lot lights were shining down on the tent still set up there, and in the yellow gleam she could see a few snowflakes finally starting to fall. “You’re more hung up on getting someone pregnant than I ever was on wanting to get pregnant,” she said quietly. “Maybe that’s your reason for throwing all of your devotion into Cee-Vid. I don’t know. I just know that I love you, Casey. I have for a long while now. If you loved me, too—” she moistened her lips and sniffed hard “—if you trusted me, we could have figured out a solution together.”

  But he remained stoically silent. And it was obvious that no matter how hard she wished or how fervently she prayed for him to tell her that he did love her, trust her, it was not going to happen. And she took her cue from him.

  She turned.

  And walked away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hayley stared at Jane with shock. “Sell Colbys?”

  It was Sunday afternoon and they were sitting inside her friend’s living room. “I can’t stay in Weaver, Hayley. Everything has to change or I’m going to be in exactly this same situation ten years from now. Loving a man who doesn’t love me back.”

  “Casey didn’t say he didn’t love you.”

  “He didn’t say anything.” She’d told Hayley most everything that had happened the night before, but even with her closest friend, she wouldn’t betray Casey’s confidence about his sterility. She exhaled and picked up the box she’d carried in with her when she’d arrived. It contained his violin. “Do you think your grandmother would have some idea how to get this fixed?” She made a face. “Without anyone but us knowing about it?”

  “You don’t play the violin.”

  “It’s Casey’s.”

  Hayley absorbed that without comment. “I don’t know,” she finally said, and rose from the armchair where she’d been sitting. “Let me get her and we’ll find out.” She headed down the hall. “Grandmother? Can you come here for a minute?”

  Vivian appeared, looking chicly turned out as usual in an expensive twinset and slacks. She was carrying two photograph albums. “Look, darling. I’ve finished the albums for your father and David.” She patted the top of them with her slightly gnarled hand. “They hardly seem like good Christmas gifts,” she said. “I could afford to give them—”

  “The albums are perfect, Grandmother,” Hayley interrupted. Jane could see they’d had the conversation more than once. “The fact that you kept all those old photographs will help show Daddy and Uncle David that you cared even when they thought you didn’t.” She took the albums and set them on a side table and gestured toward Jane. “We need your advice about a violin.”

  “Oh?” Looking pleased, the woman settled on the couch beside Jane and the box. Seeing the state of the violin, though, she frowned and set her reading glasses on her nose before carefully taking the instrument out of the box, tsking under her breath. “Who did such a thing?”

  “It was an accident,” Jane said quickly. “It belongs to a, uh, a—”

  “Friend,” Hayley supplied.

  The word left a bitter taste in Jane’s mouth. But she nodded.

  Vivian turned it around to see the tiny markings on the back of it. “Do you know how valuable this is?”

  “Probably not as much as it would be if it weren’t broken,” Jane murmured. “I know it’s old, though. It belonged to my...to Casey’s grandmother.”

  “Good Lord,” Vivian said, sitting abruptly straighter as she studied the violin more closely. “Casey Clay,” she said. “His grandmother was Sarah?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” It didn’t seem odd that Vivian knew the detail. She’d been staying with Hayley for well over a month. “He hopes to repair it without upsetting anyone over the fact it was damaged.”

  “I imagine so,” Vivian said. She sighed a little. “A person’s sins coming to light is never easy.”

  Jane met Hayley’s gaze at that. Her friend just subtly lifted her fingers as if to say Who knows? before focusing on her grandmother again. “So do you think it can be? Repaired, that is?”

  “Oh, heavens, yes.” Vivian’s tone turned confident. “My father’s shop is still in business.” Her lips quirked. “Run, of course, by someone else since he’s long gone. George is a distant cousin but he’s kept the art in the business alive. We’ll send it to him and he’ll have it in perfect order again in a matter of days.”

  “That’s it?”

  Vivian stood and smiled at Jane. “That’s it,” she said. “Leave it here and I’ll get it sent off tomorrow.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Mrs. Templeton. Thank you.”

  “It’s the least I can do after all these years,” she said as she headed out of the room.

  Jane looked at Hayley and raised her eyebrows. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked under her breath.

  “I have no idea,” Hayley murmured. She moved the violin and box out of the way and sat next to Jane. “I’m not entirely sure she’s not having some cognitive issues. She talks a lot about people and places of which, obviously, I have no knowledge. But then she’ll say something like that and I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Have you just asked her?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Hayley nodded. “And she usually tells me how little she appreciates it. She told me the other day that just because she’s old doesn’t mean she’s lost her marbles. She may be living with me and we’re starting to get to know each other, but she’s often very cryptic.”

  “Has she seen your dad and uncle yet?”

  She shook her head. “They’re still standing firm, refusing to see her. I’ve invited everyone over for Christmas Eve, though, and my mother promises me that she’ll get Daddy here one way or the other.” Her lips twitched with a hint of humor. “Nothing like family drama. Just wish it weren’t my family.”

  “Guess that’s one reason not to have a family at all,” Jane said blackly.

  Hayley made a sympathetic sound. “You really don’t feel like you want to stay in Weaver after what’s happened with Casey? I don’t want to lose one of my two best friends.”

  “Would you want to stay?”

  Hayley sighed. “As a therapist, I should say that every situation can be dealt with. But as your friend? I’ve never been in love before. Not really. So who am I to talk?”

  Jane brushed her hands down the front of her jeans and stood. “Love is overrated anyway.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  She sighed and reached for her coat, which was draped over the arm of the couch. “No. I don’t.” No more than she’d meant it when she’d told Casey that passion was overrated. “But it would sure hurt a lot less if I did.”

  “You heading over to Colbys?”

  “Go
tta keep it in business if I’m going to put a for-sale sign on it.”

  Hayley made a face and hugged her. “Just promise not to do anything rash.”

  “I blew that opportunity three months ago when I told Casey I wanted to have a baby.”

  “And despite everything, you still want to get the violin fixed for him.”

  “Evidently, I can’t do anything else for him,” she said, and headed out the door.

  The snow that had begun falling the night before had continued nonstop.

  Hayley’s front yard was covered in several inches of fluffy white, as were the streets and every other surface. Even the tracks left by Jane’s truck tires in Hayley’s driveway had nearly filled again during the time she’d been there.

  She backed out and headed toward downtown, slowing to a crawl when she reached the corner of Casey’s street. It would be so easy to turn. But why?

  She wouldn’t accomplish anything in driving by his house except cause herself more pain.

  She passed the corner and kept going, telling herself it was good practice for the future.

  Maybe one day she’d even manage it without tears running down her face.

  * * *

  “I walked away from your mother once,” Casey’s father said. He was standing in the front hallway of Casey’s house, eyeing the duffel bag lying on the floor. “Hardest thing I ever did.”

  “She was also married to someone else at the time.” Casey knew the story of his mother and her first husband, who’d been the Double-C ranch’s foreman at one time before he’d embezzled a small fortune and run out on all of them, including Maggie and a newborn J.D. “Not the same thing.”

  “Not the same reason,” his dad corrected him, “but walking away is walking away. And it took us too many years in between to get back where we both belonged. Here. Together.”

  “If I don’t leave Weaver, Jane will.”

  “Yeah. That sounds familiar, too.” Daniel scrubbed his hand down his face. “Look, son. I don’t know the situation between you and Tris that’s got you both wound so tight. Once I got out of Hollins-Winword, I was out for good and had no desire to look back. But I do know that the agency, for all the good it sometimes accomplishes, isn’t a replacement for the things that matter. I’ve seen you and Jane together. Now that you’ve finally stopped this bull crap about hiding your relationship, I know how you feel about her. Stay and fight to make things work!”

  Casey jammed a coat on top of the rest of the things he’d tossed inside the duffel. “And in a year or two years or even three, when she can’t hide her disappointment anymore about having babies, what do I do then?”

  “You face it together. That’s what marriage is, Case. It’s sticking together. Good days. Bad days. Hell, even the occasional indifferent one. You stick. You remember what the commitment was and you remember what drew you together in the first place. Because it doesn’t go away. It just grows and gets deeper if you let it, until you can’t imagine a life without that person being by your side.”

  “You never had to deal with being infertile,” Casey said flatly.

  “Seems to me you haven’t been dealing with it either,” his father fired back. “You learned about all this more than ten years ago and the first we hear about it is this afternoon during Sunday dinner at J.D.’s place when you finally saw fit to mention it!”

  “I should have just left and kept it to myself,” Casey muttered. But he hadn’t, and his dad had been hot on his trail, trying to stop him.

  “And leave your mother’s heart broken.” Daniel slapped the brim of his cowboy hat against his thigh, looking furious. “Of all of our children, you were always the one who felt someone else’s pain the most. Even more than the girls. And this is what you’re going to become? A man who runs away from the one he wants most?” He shoved his boot against the duffel. “You’re a better man than that, Casey.”

  His father’s censure was almost welcome. At least the abrasiveness of it wore down the edges of everything else that felt jagged and sharp inside him. He yanked the zipper closed on the bag, grabbed the straps and stood. “Obviously not.” He started for the door but his cell phone rang before he got there.

  He almost didn’t look. But old habits died too hard and he was glancing at the display before he knew it. It was Seth Banyon, who was sitting in for Casey at Hollins-Winword during his suspension. Only the fact that it was Seth and not another member of the Clay family had him answering it. “Yeah.”

  “We found him.” Seth’s voice was terse. “McGregor. Sitting in a jail cell in some Podunk down in rural Mississippi. Using one of his known aliases. That’s what popped for us. Tristan’s on his way down there.”

  “He give you the okay to call me?”

  “No. I figure asking forgiveness afterward is easier than getting permission beforehand.” Seth rattled off a series of numbers and letters that Casey knew was the first-level access code to Control, which had been changed the second he’d been suspended. “Got that? I’m not repeating it.”

  “I got it.” He ended the call and slid the phone into his pocket. He just wasn’t sure what he wanted to do about it. Confirmation that McGregor was alive was only the tip of the iceberg where the agent was concerned. They still didn’t know if, how or why he’d been involved in his partners’ deaths.

  He looked at his dad. “She also doesn’t know what I really do at Cee-Vid. She doesn’t know about Hollins-Winword. She’ll think it’s one more thing I’ve kept from her.”

  “And she’ll be right,” Daniel agreed, pulling open the door and walking out onto the porch. “You’ve got a hell of a mess on your hands, son. Stick around and clean it up. It’ll be worth the effort if you do.” He jammed his hat back on his head. “And if you don’t, I’m afraid it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your days. But whatever you do, you keep in touch with your mama. I’m not too old I won’t come and find you and skin you myself if you don’t. She’s all torn up thinking how you’d been sick off in college all those years ago and never knowing about it. You’re not going to make it worse. You got me?”

  Feeling about as low as a snake and knowing his dad was more than capable of following up on his threat, Casey nodded. “I got you.”

  His dad’s gray gaze pierced him. Then his tight expression finally eased. A little. He nodded once, turned on his boot heel and stomped down the steps, leaving footprints in the snow as he crossed to his truck.

  Casey waited until his dad had driven away before finally moving. He locked and closed his front door and tossed the duffel in the passenger seat of his truck and started up the engine. He was glad McGregor was alive. But he couldn’t think past Jane.

  He didn’t know where he was heading when he pulled out onto the street. He just drove.

  And when he finally ended up in the circular gravel drive fronting the massive “big house” where Squire had raised Casey’s dad and uncles, he exhaled, got out of the truck, walked around to the back of the house and went in through the mudroom.

  Squire and Gloria now shared the big house with Matthew, who ran the cattle operation, and his wife, Jaimie. But Casey’s grandparents were alone at the round oak table in the kitchen when he entered. Squire was drinking coffee, eschewing as he almost always did, the use of the cup itself, instead drinking from the edge of a nearly flat saucer balanced on his fingertips. Gloria was working the Sunday crossword from the newspaper. And neither one of them looked overly surprised to see him, despite the fact that they’d both been at J.D.’s place when he’d told ’em all he was leaving town.

  Squire just shoved out a chair with his boot in silent invitation.

  Casey didn’t feel like sitting.

  “I broke the violin,” he said without preamble.

  Cleanup had to start somewhere.

  Gloria slowly raised her head, her
graying auburn hair catching the light. He felt her gaze shift from him to Squire, then back again. Then she rose. “I think I’ll leave you two to talk,” she said. When she passed him, she patted Casey’s cheek as if he were two instead of thirty-two.

  The silence in the kitchen after she left was thick.

  “It wasn’t intentional,” Casey finally added. “Well, it was, but not because I wanted to break it.”

  Squire sipped the rest of the coffee out of the saucer. He’d drunk it that way ever since Casey could remember, claiming it cooled faster than in a mug; as anxious as he was to get caffeine into his blood, he wasn’t anxious to burn the hell outta the inside of his mouth. When the saucer was empty, his grandfather set it down and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re gonna give me a crick in my neck if I gotta keep looking up at you, boy.”

  Casey still had no desire to sit, but he did. “It happened a few months ago. I should have told you before.”

  Squire pursed his lips but said nothing, which had the back of Casey’s neck prickling. Because his grandfather had never been one to mince words.

  “I’m sorry,” Casey added doggedly. “Disown me. Curse me. Do whatever, because I know I deserve it.”

  “Clays don’t disown,” Squire said. “It was the other side, Sarah’s family, who liked to do that sort of thing. Her mama was disowned for having Sarah out of wedlock and they never wanted to make up for it even when they had the chance.” He curled his fingers and knocked his knuckles softly against the table. “You had that instrument since you were a pup. You think I didn’t know it might get banged up a time or two?”

  “It’s worse than banged up. You’re supposed to be tearing me into strips by now.”

  “Thirty, forty years ago, I would’ve. Sentimental value or not, it’s just a thing, Casey. Sarah certainly understood that when she was alive. And now that I’m old as Methuselah, I understand it, too. If it can be fixed, fix it. Pass it on to the next generation someday. If it can’t, then it can’t.”

  “When did you start getting mellow, old man?” Casey’s uncle Matthew had come in through the mudroom and had obviously overheard. He was holding a squirming Labrador pup in his arms.