Snowbound Weekend & Gambler's Love

by Amii Lorin

  "You have a job?" Vichy blinked in sudden attention and surprise, believing, since Brad, that all gamblers worked at nothing but the odds.

  "Well, of course I have a job!" Now it was Ben who stared in surprise. "I… ah…" His eyes took on a gleam of amusement. "I deal within the realm of probability, so to speak. Did you think I existed on a private income or something?"

  "No, well, er," Vichy stammered. "I don't know what I thought." She knew exactly what she'd thought; she just was not about to reveal assumptions to him now. And, anyway, he certainly had been unencumbered by employment all the past week.

  "Uh-huh." He gave a slight shake of his head as if clearing it. "I assure you I do work." His tone scolded. "At any rate, I'll be involved in a new project starting Monday morning and that, combined with all the holiday plans Chad's made, which he filled me in on Thanksgiving, my time's going to be pretty limited as far as getting away before Christmas." He paused to nip at her lobe. "Sunday will be our last day together until after Christmas. Stay with me."

  "But, Ben, I told my family I'd be home by noon," Vichy explained. "Besides, I really would prefer not to drive home at night."

  "All right, I can understand that," he conceded. "But you could stay until early afternoon. If you waited to leave until after we've had lunch together, you'd still be home before it got dark. It shouldn't take you more than three hours at the outside to drive to Lancaster."

  As he had interspersed the request in between light kisses, dropped at random over her face and around her lips, Vichy, her senses going haywire, gave in. Early Sunday morning Ben made love to her so fiercely it bordered on violent. Murmuring huskily words she could barely hear, but really didn't have to, caressing her in a manner that brought her to the edge of exquisite pain, he defined, in action, the word ecstasy for her.

  For all they tried to hold on to the hours Sunday morning, lunchtime came and passed, and the moment arrived when she could not put off her departure any longer. Ben carried her valises to the hotel entrance and relinquished them to an employee before turning to her to grasp her hands.

  "You'll be here the day after Christmas?" His voice had a harsh, strained sound.

  "Yes," Vichy whispered, feeling strained to the limit herself.

  "So will I," he promised. Bending his head, he kissed her very gently on the lips, then, releasing her hands, he stepped back. "Merry Christmas, Vichy. I'll see you in four weeks."

  "Yes," Vichy said again. Then throwing caution to the wind, she stepped to him, placed her parted lips against his muscle-knotted hard jaw, and whispered, "Merry Christmas to you and Chad, Ben," and, turning away quickly, hurried to her car.

  It didn't strike her until she was an hour out of Atlantic City that she had completely forgotten to ask him what kind of job he had.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  All the way home Vichy had to fight the desire to turn around and go back to Ben. But she knew she would not turn around. She also knew it would be pointless if she did, for Ben had told her he would be leaving himself as soon as he packed his things and paid his bill. Nonetheless, the urge persisted.

  The day had started out crisp and clear, but by lunch-time wisps of smoky gray clouds had moved in to dot the expanse of blue sky. The farther west Vichy drove, the more overcast it became.

  She was less than five miles from home when it started to rain. At that point she ceased berating herself for not giving in to Ben's plea that she stay with him for the entire day. She didn't particularly enjoy driving at night when she had any real distance to cover, and she particularly disliked driving in the rain.

  Vichy allowed herself a long sigh of relief when she turned into the private lane that led to her parents' home. As she had a few weeks previously, Bette came out to the car to greet her.

  "Hi," she called, skipping down the porch's three steps. "You're just in time for supper. How did the engagement go?"

  "Very well, actually," Vichy smiled. "Better than I expected."

  Opening the hatchback, she removed her cases before adding, "The back-up group was first rate"—her smile spread into a grin—"it made me sound good."

  "Baloney," Bette snorted, grasping one of the cases. "You always did sound good to me."

  "Yes, but you're just a wee bit biased," Vichy laughed as they stepped under the protection of the covered porch.

  "That does not preclude my being objective," Bette retorted, holding the door open for Vichy to enter first.

  "Perish the thought that a college junior would be anything but objective," Vichy teased.

  They were laughing companionably when their father came out of the kitchen.

  "What is this?" he asked the room at large, "the giggle hour?" When the only reaction he received were two wide smiles, he grinned in return. "Hearing you two laughing together again sounds good," he admitted, taking Vichy into his arms. "Welcome home, honey." He greeted her warmly, when at last he released his tight hold. "How did it go?" He echoed Bette's question.

  "A piece of cake," Vichy laughed with the realization she'd receive the same query from her mother. "I'll tell you all about it during supper." Except for a few details, she qualified mentally, which I intend to hug to myself.

  As Vichy had expected, the first words out of her mother's mouth were, "Did everything go all right?"

  As they consumed the usual Sunday night fare of homemade soup and sandwiches, Vichy outlined her week for them, then, as none of them had been to Atlantic City since the advent of the casino hotels, she culled forth as many details as she could remember about the hotels she'd seen.

  Over coffee and her mother's out-of-this-world, wet-bottom shoe-fly pie, her mother shot a frowning glance at the window, now streaming with water from the rain that had become a downpour.

  "I hope this rainstorm isn't the frontrunner of a cold spell," she observed worriedly. "I was keeping my fingers crossed for the mild weather to hold through next weekend."

  "Why?" Vichy asked idly. "What's happening next weekend?"

  "Josh and his family are coming down for the day next Sunday," her mother explained. "He's going to help Dad put up the outside Christmas lights."

  "Won't that be fun?" Bette cried, her eyes fairly twinkling. "A whole day of rotten Robert."

  "Now, Bette, stop it," her mother scolded, fighting a smile. "Your nephew is not rotten. He's just—well—more boy then most."

  Her mother's description of her grandson sent a memory whispering through Vichy's mind.

  She always claimed I suffered more bruises, sprains, and broken bones then any six other boys.

  Had Ben, she wondered dreamily, been the same as rotten Robert at the age of five? Vichy had to repress a soft trill of laughter. It was darn near impossible to imagine the austere-faced Ben as a holy terror of a little boy. But, on the other hand, Vichy mused on, he had displayed a devilish facet of his character more then a few times since Thanksgiving night.

  "Are you falling asleep at the switch, Vich?"

  Bette's quip corralled her wandering attention and, blinking away the memories, Vichy smiled in apology.

  "Sorry." Her glance encompassed the three others at the table. "I'm a little tired. As soon as I've helped with the cleaning up, I think I'll go up to bed."

  "You don't have to help. I, being the absolute sweetheart that I am, will do the cleaning up," Bette offered magnanimously. "You can go up to bed now, if you like," she went on. "I will even lug one of your valises up for you."

  "Oh, Bette, you are just too good to be true," Vichy praised straight-faced. "The only possible reward must be canonization."

  "I've thought the same myself," her mother concurred, getting into the act. "Many, many times."

  "Good Lord," Luke groaned. "Spare me a house of flighty females." He fixed a blue-eyed stare on first his wife and then Vichy. "Two of which are old enough to know better." Shaking his shock of white hair sadly, he headed for the living room, mumbling, "I guess the only escape around here is the Sunday paper."


  Vichy, Johanna, and Bette exchanged glances, then collapsed into a fit of laughter, like three teenagers.

  After she finished unpacking her suitcase, Vichy slid between the covers on her single canopied bed, and lay staring up at the frilly "roof," as she'd called it when she was a little girl, missing Ben more than she would have believed possible.

  What was he doing now, this minute? she wondered longingly. And, belatedly, where exactly was he doing it? She had never gotten around to asking him where his home was. His casually mentioned "central New Jersey" had been less then concise. But, come to that, she had never corrected the erroneous information she'd given him either. As far as Ben knew, she made her home in California. He didn't even have her parents' phone number!

  Talk about ships passing in the night! Vichy sighed aloud. It certainly didn't bode too well for any kind of lasting relationship.

  Nevertheless, whether wisely or unwisely, Vichy harbored the hope of a lasting relationship in her heart.

  The day after Christmas. The words, like a silent prayer, skipped in and out of Vichy's mind. Her last thought before falling asleep was that not since she was a little girl had she wished for Christmas to hurry up and come.

  Vichy had been sure the days would pass with grinding slowness but, thanks to her mother, they did not.

  With no place to go and nothing to do, Vichy dressed in jeans and a rather shapeless baseball jersey Monday morning. When she walked into the kitchen, she was glad she had. Her mother, dressed in slacks and an old flannel shirt of her father's, sleeves rolled to the elbow, was standing on a ladder, cleaning the paneling.

  The kitchen looked like it had been struck by a mini-tornado. The windows looked naked without their curtains. The chairs had been pushed into one corner, and the clock and other decorations that had hung on the wall now littered the table. Stunned by the upheaval, Vichy asked the obvious.

  "Mother, what are you doing?"

  "Dancing," Johanna returned placidly.

  Vichy grinned appreciatively. At sixty her mother's sense of humor was every bit as keen as it had been at thirty. Johanna's eyes twinkled as she returned Vichy's grin.

  "There's juice in the fridge, raisin bread in the bread drawer, and coffee in the pot. Help yourself." With that she turned back to the wall.

  After clearing and wiping a corner of the table and retrieving a chair, Vichy dropped two slices of raisin bread into the toaster and poured herself a small glass of juice. Standing at the refrigerator, she sipped the juice and frowned worriedly at her mother's back. "You shouldn't be up there," she advised.

  "It's the only way I can reach the top," Johanna retorted dryly, then, turning to face her daughter, chided gently, "I'm not decrepit, you know."

  "I know," Vichy shook her head in wonder. "You can work rings around most people half your age, but it makes me nervous to see you up there." She smiled coaxingly. "Why don't you come down and have a cup of coffee with me? Then, after I've eaten, I'll do the paneling."

  Vichy and Johanna spent that entire week housecleaning. From the kitchen they proceeded to the dining room, and from there the rest of the house, up to and including the third floor. By Saturday morning Vichy's respect for her mother had grown to near awe. Seldom-used muscles Vichy hadn't even known she possessed complained achingly from abuse, while her mother, who had not only kept pace with Vichy, but had blazed the way, bustled around getting breakfast as if she'd never heard the word house-cleaning.

  "You look like you've had a hectic week of debauchery," Bette, who had escaped the week's arduous labor by hiding out at school, teased when Vichy entered the kitchen. "Mom would make a great field marshal, wouldn't she?"

  "A little hard work never hurt anyone," Johanna said blandly from the stove, where she was frying scrapple for breakfast. "You can set the table, young lady," she told Bette, then, "Vichy, go to the door and give your father a yell. He's out in the barn."

  Feeling as though she should tiptoe over the tile floor so as not to mar its freshly waxed beauty, Vichy did as she was told, fully enjoying the sensation of time having slipped back to when she was a young girl.

  Sunday dawned bright, clear, and mild. At mid-morning the quiet serenity of the house was shattered by the arrival of Josh, his wife Caroline, and rotten Robert.

  As she clasped the five-year-old's body to her in a brief, welcoming hug, Vichy assured herself Robert was not rotten, simply more curious than most.

  By late afternoon her own assurances had been sorely tested. Robert had managed to get into just about everything, keeping not only his mother but Vichy and Johanna running after him. Bette, having gone out with a friend after dinner, had once again escaped.

  As soon as it was dark enough for the lights to be turned on, they all trooped outside to admire Luke and Josh's decorative handiwork. And, as if on cue, they all sighed appreciatively at the magical quality the strings of staggered red and white lightbulbs gave to the house.

  "I can't believe there are less than three weeks left till Christmas," Caroline groaned as they drifted back into the house. "I have so much to do yet to get ready for it, and I know the weeks are going to fly by too quickly."

  For you maybe, Vichy replied silently. But, for me, the weeks will seem to drag by. Suddenly afraid her yearning to see Ben, be with him, would overwhelm her if she didn't do something, Vichy hung her sweater in the living room closet, then hurried into the kitchen to begin preparing supper.

  "Seeing the house lit up gave me an idea," Josh said over his hot roast beef sandwich during supper. "After we've finished eating, why don't we all drive to the Christmas Village in Bernville? Robert would love it."

  Robert would not be the only one, Vichy thought in amusement. Unlike many men, Josh did not suffer through the frantic preparations for the holidays. He loved every minute of it, and his enthusiasm was contagious.

  "That sounds like fun." Luke agreed at once, thereby revealing from whence came Josh's love for the trappings of the season. "I'll even let Vichy drive," he added teasingly.

  "You're much too good to me," Vichy responded to his teasing dryly. "But, you're right, it does sound like fun. It must be at least fifteen years since I was up there."

  "You're in for a pleasant surprise," Bette, having arrived home just in time to sit down for supper, joined in.

  "I was up last year with a couple of the kids and it's really been enlarged. The night we were there there were at least twenty tour buses parked in the lot."

  Bette's assertion was proved when Vichy, Bette in the bucket seat beside her, her parents in the back, followed Josh's station wagon up to the crest of a small hill on the country road from where they got their first glimpse of the brightly lit tourist attraction.

  It was not a real village, but a miniature one, with small houses and pathways all gaily decorated and illuminated, all of it on the private property of a farmer who began it as a hobby and wound up with an attraction that drew crowds of people every year.

  Strolling the arrow-marked lanes, smiling at Robert's delight in the life-size cutouts of cartoon and Disney characters, Vichy suddenly ached to be walking, arm-in-arm— in exactly the same way Josh and Caroline were—with Ben, both of them smiling as Chad eagerly ran to view each new sight.

  Which was pretty silly, she admitted ruefully, considering she'd never even seen as much as a picture of Ben's son. Nevertheless, the ache persisted the entire length of time required to see everything.

  Vichy was ready for a hot cup of coffee when, cold and rosy-cheeked, they entered the building with a lunch counter. The room was crowded with tourists, and as she waited her turn at the counter, Vichy glanced at the clock on the wall in disbelief. They had been strolling around for nearly two hours! No wonder Robert had coaxed to be picked up and carried. And now she could appreciate Caroline's forethought in putting Robert's pajamas on him under his snowsuit. With approximately an hour's drive home, Robert would be ready to be tucked into bed if he fell asleep on the way home, which, from the look
of his droopy-lidded eyes, he would.

  After giving and receiving good-bye hugs and kisses in the parking lot, they went their separate ways. By the time Vichy pulled into her parents' driveway, she was wishing she had on her nightwear.

  The hours of the second week were every bit as full as the first week had been. With the housecleaning out of the way, Johanna declared her intention of getting down to the serious business of baking Christmas cookies.

  For the better part of that week Vichy and Johanna kept busy sifting, mixing, rolling, or dropping by spoonfuls. Luke contributed by shelling nuts, chopping candied fruits, and kibitzing.

  The centerpiece of fall foliage and the delicate lace tablecloth were removed from the dining room table to be replaced by a worn but clean plain cotton cloth in preparation to receive the mounds of cookies as they came from the oven.

  By Thursday, the square, solid table had been covered then cleared many times of its light burden of crisp cutout cookies, buttery melt-in-the-mouth sandtarts, chocolatey-rich Toll House, fruit-and nut-filled Michigan rocks, and many others in all shapes and sizes.

  Vichy had not helped with the Christmas baking since the winter she was nineteen, and she loved every minute of it.

  By the time Bette came home from the college she attended in Reading, every room in the house was redolent with the baking odors. The minute she walked into the house, Bette put into words what Vichy was feeling.

  "Mmmmmmm, it smells Christmasy in here. Makes me feel like a little girl again, all excited, and wishing for the days to fly by."

  Of course, Vichy's Christmas wishing had nothing to do with visions of sugar plums, or elaborately wrapped packages. Her visions revolved around a tall, lean form, a pair of strong enfolding arms, and a well-shaped mouth that could drive all other visions from her mind.

  Friday evening she sat at the kitchen table with her mother, boxes of Christmas cards between them. While her mother signed the cards, and Vichy addressed the envelopes, Johanna filled her in on what had been happening in their many friends' lives since Vichy had been home last.