Healed Under the Mistletoe

by Amalie Berlin

  “If you don’t mind.” He squeezed her. “After I pack my bag.”

  And he needed an excuse for the time it would take to get a gift for her before tomorrow.

  * * *

  Belle had never been to the Catskills, but Lyons had made it inevitable that she would fall asleep by making sure she hadn’t slept much last night.

  He’d been different since they’d visited the hospital. Even when they’d gone to bed, he’d been different. More deliberate and present, full of deep, meaningful gazes and whispered words.

  It felt so much like love, she’d given in to it. There was nothing to be done but accept that if she’d wanted to avoid loving again, she should’ve done things differently from the outset. Once you loved someone, and once they loved you—she was almost certain he did—there was no considering turning that love away.

  Even if she thought she should for his own good, it was too late. Even if she left, even if she took that misery and ran, she’d still love him. Working that out, he would still be in danger, if she was as cursed as that small, superstitious voice in her head liked to tell her.

  “He said it was a cabin,” she said as the massive cabin-like mansion came into view. “I don’t think this is it.”

  “This is it,” Lyons countered, sounding certain.

  “That’s got to be a bed and breakfast, or maybe a hunting lodge for the Rockefellers.”

  “This is it,” he reiterated, nodding to one side of the equally insanely big barn, where garages had been installed, and where Wolfe was currently walking out of the nearest bay.

  He waved, then gestured toward the cabin. If it could be called a cabin.

  Angel came out to meet them, and the four of them unloaded the car, each grabbing some of the few bags and gifts they’d brought.

  The door opened directly into a massive room, with towering ceilings, open timber-frame construction, and second-, possibly third-floor areas wrapping around three sides.

  In the center of the room sat a Christmas tree—massive, fresh and which Angel had obviously been decorating. “We came up yesterday to try and get it all sorted out before you guys got here, but we got distracted.”

  The hesitation and shyness of her confession had Belle’s cheeks burning in sympathy. “Well, I love to decorate a tree. Let’s do this.”

  Lyons and Wolfe clanged into the main room, then headed up one set of stairs to the right side of the balcony.

  “There are a bunch of rooms up there. If they pick one you don’t like, pick another. In fact, you could probably sleep in a different room every night if you wanted.”

  The way Angel said it gave a good hint at her still acclimating to this lifestyle. All Belle had experienced of it before was Lyons’s fancy car, and the knowledge that he had an apartment on Park, which she hadn’t yet visited. “Where does Wolfe live?”

  “We live together.”

  “But where? On Park too?”

  “Tribeca.” Angel helped her out of her coat, and then tossed another log onto the fire. “In an old converted church. You should come for dinner. Lyons has said he’ll come after Christmas.”

  Just then, Lyons and Wolfe appeared on the stairs and, although Lyons smiled at her, Wolfe was the one calling to Angel. “We’re going to go for a quick ride.”

  “Okay,” Angel called back and picked up a box of ornaments to hand to Belle. “Horses,” Angel explained, since the men were gone. “Wolfe wants to talk to him about some things.”

  * * *

  Lyons followed Wolfe into the barn. The two aspects of this holiday he’d managed to build excitement for was spending time with Belle and riding the horses he’d been promised.

  The idea of spending time with his brother, while something he wanted to improve on, he still didn’t know how to do it, and that carried tension down his spine, future disappointment on the horizon that would be his doing. But the fresh scent of sweet hay and the line of sleek noses and intelligent eyes popping over the horse stalls at the sound of their approach helped ease that.

  “I have an ulterior motive for asking you to go for a ride,” Wolfe announced as they entered the other side of the barn, wrecking the harmonious mood adjustment horses always brought him.

  “I thought you might.” Lyons took a deep breath, closed the door and approached the nearest stall, offering his hand to the horse to scent as he settled in for the rough conversation he felt coming. “About Angel?”

  “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you call her by name.”

  “Belle is insistent,” Lyons said, stroking the pretty bay roan, forehead to muzzle.

  Wolfe’s dramatically wide smile was made for smacking, but Lyons resisted. “Tell me what you wanted to tell.”

  “I asked her to marry me,” Wolfe responded, his smile gone when Lyons glanced back.

  “I know.” Lyons wasn’t sure when he’d figured it out—Angel didn’t wear a ring—but probably about the time she’d moved in. “When?”

  “This summer,” Wolfe answered in as few words as possible, which didn’t exactly invite conversation, which was on par for the way they usually communicated. Something about the way he stood, hands shoved into pockets, shoulders up around his ears, said there was more to it.

  “Congratulations,” Lyons said by rote, and even kind of meant it. It wasn’t so much that he was suddenly pro-marriage, but he’d recently come to understand how it was to find someone who made life easier. At least for now.

  “I hope it’s a marriage completely unlike our parents’,” he added, and sincerely meant that one.

  Those words made Wolfe flinch, his expression turning sheepish as he pulled his hands free and scrubbed both over his face. “About them...”

  It was Lyons’s turn to flinch. “Tell me you didn’t call them.”

  “I didn’t call them,” Wolfe repeated, then screwed it all up by adding, “but I’m going to.”

  This was what came from Lyons holding his gullible little brother at arm’s length, him making terrible mistakes. No more. If Wolfe ever needed to hear it straight, it was now. “Why the devil would you want to do that?”

  “Because she should know what she’s getting into, marrying me. She knows you, she likes you, despite the fact that you’ve turned into someone who growls and shouts at everyone. For perfectly good reasons, I know that, but she needs to see the slow-motion horror show they are before she’s tied to them too.”

  Lyons heard the complaint about himself in there but pushed past it for the important parts: the horror show and how Angel would react to them when Lyons was bad enough.

  The investigator he’d hired to find out about Angel when Wolfe had admitted dating her flashed back to his mind.

  “What about her family?”

  “We’ll go see them too, though in a controlled environment. She doesn’t want them to know where she lives.”

  No doubt.

  “So, what is it you want from me? Permission? Because you’re a grown man. I can’t protect you from life anymore. Or them.”

  “I’m not asking you to protect me. I’m telling you that I’m going to see them, and I wanted to know if you wanted them to come here, or if you’d rather we go there.”

  “Go there,” Lyons said without hesitation, although he felt his blood pressure rising. “Don’t bring them into your life. If you feel you must introduce them, don’t let them into your home. God, Wolfe. Don’t let them into your life. If you don’t let them into your life, they shouldn’t matter to her, if she—”

  “They don’t matter to her,” Wolfe said, cutting in. “What matters to her is her own family, which have held her down her whole life, and you don’t even know the half of that. We have their reputations transferred to us, I know, but their reputations were that of being immoral, and scandal-ridden, and if you dug into her background, you know who her
people are. You warned me who they are, like you don’t remember us undeservedly carrying the taint they’d built.”

  “I’m warning you fresh because you don’t know who our parents are. Not really. You don’t know the lengths they went to in order to get back at one another. You don’t know because I shielded you from it.” Lyons heard his voice bouncing off the walls, and the horses began making noise in their stalls, agitated, upset.

  Wolfe joined him looking toward the animals and lowered his voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying that so long as I did her dirty work, she did not ask you.”

  “Mother?”

  Lyons nodded once.

  “What dirty work?”

  He sucked in a breath and began to pace, because in that second, with the jumble of thoughts in his head, he needed to move.

  He wanted to go back to Belle, and let her make him feel good again, and then he remembered that same feeling with his mother. She paid attention only when he did what she demanded, and that attention was worth more than the pain he went through to do whatever...usually to their father.

  “Lyons.”

  “I dropped off letters to the papers, which she’d written to stack the deck. It didn’t matter if he was in the wrong or she was, she always went for the underhanded play, and usually I was her mule,” Lyons said, starting small.

  “So, she called the media down on us?”

  Lyons nodded.

  “What else?”

  “I got pictures of Father with his mistresses. Once I got way more intimate photos than I should’ve ever gotten. The next time, when I refused, she sent you away to school as my punishment.”

  Wolfe’s mouth fell open. “When I was little?”

  Lyons nodded. It was only for half a year that time, but it was motivating. “After that, I did get pictures of him with his mistresses going or coming from a room alone. But she brought you home. You were a pawn, you were miserable. You called me all the time, crying to come home.”

  Wolfe nodded again, but he was now pacing. And suddenly paced right on out of the barn. Lyons hadn’t even gotten to the moral: people were users. They treated you the way that benefited them.

  Even Belle. He excused it because he wanted her, and he sympathized, but she’d given gifts to him because she was trying to survive Christmas alone. He got that, but she’d had a motive.

  And he had a motive for being with her: she made him feel better. He wasn’t sure it was about attraction, or that she gave him the opportunity to protect her as he’d failed to do with Eleni. They had broken hearts tying them together and might have nothing else in common if they didn’t have trauma, and need, and sex to bind them.

  He stayed with the horses, letting Wolfe muddle through it on his own.

  He needed a ride. It had been far too long, and it always cleared his head.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THEY’D HUNG THE ornaments on the tree and were working on fashioning a bow out of an oversized roll of sheer, glittery ribbon when Wolfe returned from the barn alone.

  Both Angel and Belle turned to see him enter, and although it looked as if he’d intended to keep plowing through, he paused and said, “Lyons decided to go for a ride.”

  “I thought you were going to ride too,” Angel said, and Wolfe didn’t answer audibly, but the one arm flying into the air and his headshake said enough.

  He and Lyons didn’t want to ride together, for reasons. And since Wolfe had wanted to talk to Lyons about something, the reasons might be legit, not just Lyons having a moment.

  He disappeared down a downstairs hallway.

  “I’m going to go see what happened.” Angel looked at the ribbon and ornaments they’d been decorating with. “Do you need help? If you need help, just give me a few minutes.”

  “I can make the bow. Don’t worry.” She waited for Angel to be out of the room and abandoned the ribbon to look out of the massive front windows. The barn and paddock were in easy view, and she didn’t see Lyons.

  Maybe she should go check.

  Or she could call him. Or text.

  Goodness, he’d been in such a good mood yesterday. Sure, he’d been different after his visit to the hospital, but she still hoped it’d all shake out. That he’d find his new normal, embrace the way he felt now and become again the old Lyons she’d met yesterday.

  Not comforted.

  Was this a Christmas thing?

  Oh, hell, it was Christmas Eve, and she’d known that all day but still hadn’t put it together with what he was feeling. She’d just been worried about them, about how much longer there would be a them. If he’d want her when he found his new normal.

  She hadn’t even realized, let alone asked, how he was doing on the actual anniversary of the shooting. God, she sucked.

  She should’ve declined Angel’s invitation and stayed home with him, which had been what Lyons had wanted. He’d only come north with her because she wanted him to spend time with his brother. To make her happy, and now they were fighting.

  It only took a moment to retrieve her coat, but no sooner had she opened the door than he rode out of the barn and into the paddock. She dithered. He liked horses, maybe a ride would help.

  She shed her coat again to give him time. What was she going to do, chase his horse and yell so he heard her?

  If he didn’t come back soon, she’d check on him. It was almost dark. He couldn’t be out there too long.

  Or if Angel came back, looking worried or with bad news, she’d reevaluate.

  Finish the bow, keep busy, that was how life worked for her.

  She had it made and was fluffing the loops to the fullest when Angel returned.

  “I don’t think either of us can reach the top of the tree without climbing on something.” Her southern accent was stronger, and her eyes pink when Belle looked at her.

  “Did they have a doozy?”

  Angel shook her head. “Must’ve. He won’t say. He talks to me about everything now, but he said he needs some time with it, whatever that means.”

  Belle fell back on her usual coping mechanisms. Helping others helped her. “How about we have some tea, wait for them to calm down and talk about the wedding?”

  Angel hadn’t yet mentioned it, but Belle had seen the gorgeous diamond glittering on her finger first thing.

  She followed Belle’s gaze to her hand, and her expression softened. “We decided it was time to wear it since he was going to tell Lyons today.”

  Was that what had sparked the fight?

  She wouldn’t ask. Angel didn’t need to hear that kind of negativity.

  Belle rounded the leather ottoman she’d been using as a seat to keep from glittering up the cloth furniture, dropped the bow and went to hug her. “It’s beautiful. You’ll be a gorgeous bride, and in fifty years this’ll just be a funny story that only got funny in hindsight. Now, let’s have tea, and you can tell me your wedding ideas until the boys return to their senses.”

  She faked chipper pretty well, because it helped her to take care of other people. If she didn’t have that, even if she was using Angel, she would sit, and her thoughts would spiral, and everything would feel so much worse. At least this way, she might be able to help Angel feel better and that helped her too.

  * * *

  Tea and wedding talk was a good idea, but nearly impossible to pull off. Every word dripped with effort, and quickly rolled around to Lyons and Wolfe again.

  If Belle couldn’t talk to Noelle, she needed to find someone she could talk to. The time she’d spent with Lyons had proven that to her. And if it hadn’t, seeing him reunited with his old friends from work would’ve. Life was scary—people could be killed or die from disease without warning—but it wasn’t worth the effort alone. It wasn’t up to her to decide for others if she was worth the risk of being
around, it was on her to make herself worth the risk. Do the most good she could.

  “We went to his old hospital in Ramapo,” Belle said during a pause. “He was a completely different person.”

  Angel angled her chair toward Belle. “Wolfe said that after the shooting he changed. Drastically.”

  Which still fell short of explaining the difference she’d seen.

  “He smiled, without me saying something silly to him. He smiles for me sometimes, but they’re prompted by something. But there? It was probably easier.” Her throat closed and the burning in her eyes made her take a moment. “It’s what I think it must have been like for someone to meet my sister and then meet me. We looked exactly alike but had completely different personalities.”

  “Had?” Angel’s question came softly, and Belle remembered telling Angel she sent photos to her sister, and that pit in her stomach churned again.

  “Noelle...”

  Died.

  Noelle died.

  Noelle passed away.

  All the ways she could say it, but her mouth still refused the words. Instead, she said, “MRSA, last year. I haven’t quite figured out how to accept it. I’m trying.”

  Angel’s eyes grew damp, mirroring her own, and she nodded rather than saying words. A show of support she was thankful for, acknowledged and felt without deepening the pain, but it still took her a moment to get back to words.

  “At Ramapo, it was like discovering he was a twin, except for when he looked at me. When he looked at me, I still saw him. I can’t explain.”

  “I think I understand.” Angel refilled the teacups, not forcing the words, letting them dribble out as they came. “But this was part of why you started giving him the gifts, right? You wanted to change him?”

  Angel’s wording stopped her, forced her to consider her gifting goals.

  She hadn’t known that Lyons would become entirely different, but yes, she’d hoped that he’d become happier and that, by extension, would change him or his behavior. Make him into who he was supposed to be, or who he’d been before whatever had happened to him—she hadn’t known at the time what had happened or how drastic.