Sugar Pine Trail--A Small-Town Holiday Romance

by RaeAnne Thayne

She was so ridiculously crazy about him.

  “I’ll bring in some water for you. You rest now.”

  He smoothed that stubborn lock of hair away again, and she couldn’t resist leaning into his hand as more tears swelled. “You’re a lovely man, Jamie Caine.”

  He gave a sharp bark of laughter. “I do believe you’re the first woman who has ever called me that.”

  Oh, she highly doubted that. “You are. And you’re so cute, too.”

  She didn’t realize she had said that part aloud until he gave a strangled cough. “Um. Thanks. Close your eyes and rest now. Everything will be fine with the boys, I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was so very tired, and the bed felt incredible. She wanted to sleep for days.

  Her last thought before she fell asleep was shock all over again. Had she really kissed Jamie Caine, that gorgeous, sweet man who treated her with such kindness it brought her to tears? Or had she dreamed that, too?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHE WAS ALREADY asleep by the time Jamie eased out of the room and closed the door softly behind him.

  Poor thing. He hated being sick, especially when he had people counting on him. He couldn’t make her feel better, but at least he could take the worry of caring for Davy and Clinton from her shoulders.

  He found the boys on the floor of the living room petting two of the cats while the other cat watched them from the sofa Julia had recently vacated.

  Clint and Davy both looked up, wearing matching expressions of concern. “Is Julia gonna die?” Davy asked, fear in his eyes.

  These boys had too much experience with death and loss for such young ages.

  “No! Of course not,” he said firmly. “She has the flu. That’s all. It’s very contagious, though, so you two need to wash your hands a lot, and don’t touch your nose or mouth.”

  “Hear that?” Clint said, eyeing his brother with a teasing look. “Don’t pick your boogers and eat them anymore. Jamie said not to.”

  Davy thrust his jaw out. “Shut up! I never did that in my life. You’re the booger head.”

  “Better than being a booger mouth.”

  They went on trading insults a few moments longer. He well remembered many similar conversations among his own brothers when they were this age—and how those conversations inevitably devolved into physical retaliations.

  It was probably better to head things off before they reached that point.

  “What do you guys feel like for dinner? How about pizza? I know an excellent place in town that delivers.”

  That plan was met with an enthusiastic response that didn’t surprise him in the least. Pizza. The great peacemaker. Since his cell battery was nearly dead, he picked up Julia’s landline and dialed Serrano’s.

  Barbara herself answered, and when he identified himself, her voice sharpened with suspicion.

  “Jamie Caine. What are you doing, calling me from Julia’s house?”

  “Um. I live here.”

  “You live upstairs, yet according to my caller ID, you’re calling from her phone number.”

  He wanted to ask what business it was of hers, but things didn’t work like that in Haven Point. Right. She was good friends with Julia through the Haven Point Helping Hands. He should have remembered that. Women in this town tended to stick together.

  In Haven Point, like his hometown of Hope’s Crossing, people watched out for each other. That’s what he was doing, Jamie reminded himself. He had absolutely no reason to feel guilty.

  “Julia is feeling a little under the weather, so I offered to help out with the boys who are staying with her to give her a break.”

  In an instant, Barbara’s suspicion shifted to concern. His head spun a little with how rapidly her tone changed. “Oh, no! Is she okay? What can I do?”

  “For now, pizza for the boys should cover it. She seems to feel pretty rotten, but I’m sure with a little rest she’ll be back to herself in no time.”

  “Oh, the poor dear. And aren’t you the sweetest thing, to step up and help in her moment of need?”

  “I’m not doing much. Just helping Davy and Clint with homework and feeding them. Can we get a large pepperoni?”

  “You got it. And you’re in luck. Today’s soup of the day is chicken noodle. I’ll send a big, healthy portion for Julia. You make sure she eats it, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered meekly. What else could he say?

  “I’m serious. Homemade chicken noodle soup is documented to cut the duration of any sickness. It’s better than going to a doctor.”

  “I’ve heard,” Jamie said. Pop was a big cheerleader for soup in all times of crisis. Barbara reminded him a little of his father, which was more than a little frightening.

  “How long on the pies? I’ve got a couple of starving dudes who are about to start gnawing the original woodwork here.”

  She laughed. “Twenty minutes. I’ll put a rush on it for you.”

  “Thanks.” He hung up and turned to the boys. “Okay, guys. What’s the homework situation?”

  “We don’t have any,” Clint said promptly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Jamie narrowed his gaze and studied them closely. Clint looked back at him guilelessly, but Davy pressed his lips together tightly and looked down at the floor, a clear indication that some level of deception was going on here.

  “Truth time. I have to be able to trust my copilots are one hundred percent honest with me. I’ll ask one more time. What’s the homework situation?”

  They looked at him, then each other. “It’s only Friday,” Clint said. “We have all weekend.”

  “Why don’t we get it out of the way, then you won’t have to wait until the last minute.”

  Clint gave a heavy sigh. “I have to finish my math, and Davy is supposed to read aloud for twenty minutes every night.”

  “Perfect, since that’s how long the pizza will take. I’ll read with him, you work on your math and by the time we finish, dinner should be here.”

  “When we’re done, can we go get a Christmas tree?” Clint asked. “Julia said we could cut one down last night, then she didn’t feel good enough, so we had to go to bed early.”

  He had noticed the house seemed singularly devoid of Christmas decorations, unlike most of the others in town. “That might be something she wants to do herself,” he said warily.

  “Please?” Davy begged. “We really want to have a Christmas tree. We didn’t have a very good one last year.”

  “Our mom was kind of sad last Christmas, plus we had just moved here and didn’t have much money,” Clint said. “We bought a little one and hung some ornaments we made, but Davy and me kind of wanted a big one this year. We thought maybe if we had a bigger tree, and we wished hard enough, Santa might bring our mom back for Christmas. That’s okay, though. We don’t really need one.”

  He spoke in such a matter-of-fact way, Jamie felt his heart squeeze. Either this kid was a master manipulator, or he really didn’t realize how sad his situation was from the outside. Jamie had a feeling it was the latter.

  These boys had been through so much. He wanted to give them whatever they wanted, but he knew it wasn’t that simple.

  “Not tonight,” he said. “But tomorrow is Saturday, and I don’t have to fly anywhere. If Julia’s still feeling under the weather in the morning, we’ll talk to her about picking one out. If she’s okay with it, I’ll take you then. Deal?”

  The boys’ faces both lit up. “Yay!” Davy exclaimed. “We’re gonna have a Christmas tree tomorrow!”

  “That’s a maybe, remember? For now, our first order of business is homework. Let’s see if we can get it done before the pizza arrives.”

  The boys hurr
ied off to find their work, and Jamie collapsed into a kitchen chair, hoping he hadn’t just made a huge mistake.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS LATER, he closed the door to the boys’ bedroom, headed back into the living room and eased into the big formal wing-back chair that was surprisingly comfortable.

  He couldn’t remember when he had been so exhausted. If one of his brothers happened to stop by right now, he could easily think Jamie had been in a brawl. His shirt had a big pizza stain courtesy of Davy, his jeans were soaked from cleaning up the bathroom after them and his hair was a mess from Davy tugging on it while Jamie gave him a horsey ride into bed.

  This child-caring gig was harder than he ever imagined. He’d hung out with his nieces and nephews plenty of times, but only when their parents were around to supervise. It was an entirely different undertaking when he was the one in charge.

  The boys had fun, though. That was the important thing. He smiled as he recalled the grand, elaborate paper airplanes they had folded after the homework and pizza had both been tackled, then their fierce competition to see whose could fly farthest off the landing into the foyer.

  He had figured out a few things that worked with them. Both boys loved to be helpful, he discovered, so he had used that shamelessly. They had fought each other to see who could pick up more toys from the living room, who could wash more dishes, who could be the first in and out of the shower.

  They were good boys. Davy had a really funny sense of humor and found humor in even the silliest things, and he found it so sweet to watch Clint watch out for his younger brother.

  When he thought of what they had survived, he wanted to punch something. Where the hell was their mother? It would break their hearts to find out she was dead of an overdose somewhere—or, worse, that she had taken her own life.

  When he had seen them on Thanksgiving, both boys seemed to have a few reservations about staying with Julia. After a week, they seemed to have settled into a comfortable routine, and Davy had been quick to correct anything Jamie did that might veer away from that.

  They were also obviously worried about her health. Several times, he’d had to dissuade them from going in to check on her—though he had let them peek in before they went to bed, and they seemed content to find her sleeping soundly.

  He had done his good deed for the day. Now he could head up to his apartment and go to sleep with a clear conscience.

  One of the snooty cats—Empress, he thought, though it was tough to tell her from Tabitha—suddenly jumped on to a side table, but she must have misjudged her landing because she knocked several books on to the floor.

  He glanced toward Julia’s room, hoping the clatter didn’t awaken her, but her door remained closed and he could hear no sign of movement behind it.

  After the boys worked so hard to pick up their mess, he couldn’t leave a pile of books scattered on the floor. Not to mention, it would probably severely offend Julia’s librarian sensibilities.

  He reached to pick them up and realized a piece of paper had fallen from one of them, a new age feel-good kind of book about filling wells—which always seemed kind of a dumb phrase to him. Wells were supposed to automatically replenish, weren’t they? The whole point of having a well was the ability to take stuff out of it without having to worry about refilling it, otherwise it would be Filling the Reservoir.

  He picked up the paper and recognized Julia’s handwriting from a shopping list he’d seen on the refrigerator, though it looked a little less elegant here, as if she’d scrawled the words in a hurry.

  He was about to put it away when the words “Have an orgasm with someone else” jumped out at him.

  Why, Julia Winston. You naughty thing.

  He grinned a little as he smoothed the list out. How could he resist reading further after that tantalizing snippet? Across the top he read, “This year I want to...”

  Ah. It was a bucket list of sorts. What kind of things—besides orgasms—did his quiet librarian landlady dream about?

  The orgasm was the last thing on the list. Personally, he would have ranked it way at the top, but that was him.

  He scanned the rest of the list: Fly in an airplane. Learn to ski. Try escargot. Drive new car on the freeway. Kiss someone special under the mistletoe. Get a puppy. Make a difference in someone’s life.

  As far as wish lists go, hers was quite simple. In fact, with a little effort, she could accomplish all those items before the new year. Wasn’t she already making a difference in someone’s life, by helping Davy and Clinton?

  An idea whispered into his mind, simple but compelling.

  He could help her with the rest—except the orgasm part. He would be wise not to let his imagination travel too far in that particular direction.

  He could certainly take her on an airplane, though—who better to do that than him? He suddenly didn’t want to let any other pilot have that particular privilege.

  And he couldn’t think of a better place to teach her to ski than the Silver Strike ski resort, which just happened to be in his family’s backyard in Colorado.

  The more he thought about the idea, the more he liked it. Julia was a sweet, caring woman. She was stretching way out of her comfort zone to take in Davy and Clinton.

  When had Jamie ever done the same for anyone?

  He wanted to help her tick off her wish list, wanted it more than he might have believed possible ten minutes earlier.

  What about his vow to keep his distance from a soft, sweet, vulnerable woman like Julia? That nagging internal voice made him pause.

  A week ago, after that unexpectedly wild kiss, he had decided playing it safe and staying away from her would be his best option. Now he wasn’t so certain. Those boys had just about broken his heart earlier, talking about how the year before had been such a tough Christmas.

  Maybe Make a Difference in Someone’s Life needed to be at the top of his own particular bucket list. He could do both things at the same time—help Julia tick items off her list while also helping her provide a memorable Christmas to two boys who didn’t know what that meant.

  Excitement sizzled through him. This would be perfect. He couldn’t wait to see those beautiful eyes light up with exhilaration on the ski slope and with delight at butter-drenched escargot.

  He couldn’t let her know he’d seen the list. With the last bit of battery on his phone, he snapped a quick picture of it, then slipped the paper where he had found it, inside the book at the bottom of the stack.

  He decided to check on her one more time. With slow care, he opened her door. She had rolled over onto her side, and in a pale slice of moonlight he could see her profile, the lovely high cheekbones and delicious mouth.

  He felt a strange ache in his chest, a softness he didn’t want to examine too closely.

  She murmured something that sounded like “peppermint,” but he couldn’t be sure. He closed the door and returned to the living room.

  He stood there for a long moment, conflicted. He didn’t feel right about leaving her alone with the boys, when she felt so lousy. What if she needed help in the night, and the boys didn’t hear her cry out? Or what if one of them had a bad dream and needed her?

  Better safe than sorry. He would just stay here, he decided.

  He retrieved a soft throw from one of the other chairs, rounded up a couple of pillows and adjusted them to his liking, then undid the top button on his jeans.

  After he stretched out on the sofa, Audrey Hepburn jumped on top of him. He rearranged her on the back of the sofa, then settled in.

  He’d slept in far worse places than Julia Winston’s fancy Victorian sofa, he thought, then fell asleep while the cats snored softly and the graceful old house creaked and settled around them.

  * * *

  OKAY, APPARENTLY SHE hadn’t died in the night.


  Julia opened her bleary eyes to see dappled sunlight glinting through the lace curtains of her bedroom.

  Work. She needed to call in sick to work. She felt a quick burst of panic, wondering what time it was and how she had slept through her alarm, then she remembered it was Saturday, and she wasn’t scheduled to work. She had arranged her schedule around the boys’ school day until after Christmas, which was one of the perks of being the head librarian.

  The boys!

  She finally glanced at her alarm clock, and that panic returned in full force. Oh, no. It was 10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. Surely the boys had been up for hours—and she had left them completely unsupervised.

  Give her the foster parent of the year award.

  Why hadn’t she set an alarm?

  Come to think of it, she couldn’t really remember going to bed. The events of the day before were a bit hazy. She had a vague recollection of Jamie being there and a strange feeling of comfort when he insisted on taking over, but that must have been impossible. Why would he? Anyway, he was out of town, wasn’t he? His apartment had been empty all week.

  She had to get up. She had to check on the boys. She forced herself to sit up, pushing the covers away. The room only spun a little, which she considered a good sign.

  Though she felt as weak and wrung out as a soggy paper towel, she threw her robe on, shoved her feet into slippers and moved as quickly as she dared toward the door, expecting to find total pandemonium.

  When she opened it, she had to blink several times, disoriented as the unmistakable scent of bacon and maple syrupy pancakes drifted to her.

  What on earth? Had Clint cooked breakfast for him and Davy? Oh, dear! Had he used the stove all by himself? That was completely against the rules.

  Her head spun with images of all the disasters that could befall two young boys alone in a kitchen. With her heart in her throat, she ignored her wobbly knees and made her way to the kitchen as quickly as she could manage.

  In the doorway, she stopped, arrested by the scene in front of her.

  Jamie, Clint and Davy sat at the kitchen table eating pancakes and chatting about superhero movies.