Matt looked at his name on the envelope and instantly recognized the handwriting as Karen’s. His heart skipped a beat, and he raised his eyes to his sister’s, not sure what to think.
“How’d you get this?”
“Karen mailed a gift to me and to Mom and Dad. It was in the same package.”
“I…see.” His hand closed tightly over the envelope.
“There’s something else,” Lanni said, her gaze avoiding his.
“Yes?” He was eager to escape to his room and read what Karen had written.
“Our wedding…”
“What about it?”
“Would you mind very much if Karen served as my maid of honor?”
Matt stared at his sister, not understanding. “You want her in your wedding party?”
“Yes,” she said, then quickly added, “But only if you don’t object. I wouldn’t want it to be uncomfortable for you, Matt. You’re my brother, after all, and she was your wife—but she’s still my friend.”
“Why should I care?” he mumbled. “It’s your wedding.” With that, he left the room.
Once he was inside his old bedroom, Matt threw himself on the bed and tore open the envelope. A single sheet of paper fell from the card. Heart pounding, he unfolded it and read:
Merry Christmas, Matt.
It didn’t seem right to mail gifts to Lanni and your parents and send you nothing. But at the same time, it’s a bit awkward to buy my ex-husband a Christmas gift.
I hope this card finds you well.
Sincerely,
Karen
Sincerely. She’d actually signed the note sincerely. As if it was some kind of business letter or he was merely a casual acquaintance. He picked up the Christmas card he’d discarded earlier and found she’d written nothing but her name.
Still, sending a Christmas card was more than he’d done for her. He supposed he’d have to add that to his long list of failures and regrets.
Chapter
8
Mitch woke early Christmas morning.
Not wanting to wake Chrissie, he moved silently into the living room, where the miniature lights on the tree glittered like frosted stars. He smiled at their decorations—paper chains, strung popcorn and handmade ornaments.
He rearranged the gifts under the tree. He’d placed them there the night before, after Chrissie had gone to bed. He knew she didn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore, but it was fun for both of them to keep up the pretense.
The largest present wasn’t from him but Bethany. A Barbie thingamajig. Town house or some such nonsense. Only it wasn’t nonsense to Chrissie; the kid took her Barbie seriously. She’d be thrilled with this. He knew Chrissie would be happily absorbed with her gifts all morning, and then later, in the afternoon, they were going to Bethany’s place for a turkey dinner with all the fixings.
Bethany.
He needed these quiet early-morning moments to clear his thoughts and make sense of his feelings.
It had happened.
Despite his resistance, his best efforts to prevent it, despite his vows to the contrary, despite the full force of his determination, he’d gone and fallen in love with Bethany Ross.
He didn’t want to love Bethany, and in the same breath, he found himself humbled that this remarkable woman had entered his life. Especially after Lori. Especially now.
Mitch paced the living room, too restless to sit. Admitting that he cared deeply for Bethany required some sort of decision. A man didn’t come to this kind of realization without defining a course of action.
He knew he had nothing to offer her. While it was true that he made enough money to support a family, his financial status wasn’t impressive. Somehow he doubted this would matter to Bethany, but still…
He was dismally aware, too, that he came to her with deep emotional scars and a needy child in tow. The mere thought of loving again, of trusting again, terrified him. It made him break out in a cold sweat. On top of everything else was the paralyzing fear that he’d fail Bethany the way he had Lori.
Then again, he reminded himself, he had options. He could do what he’d done since September—deny his feelings. Ignore what his heart was telling him.
He might’ve continued that way for months, possibly years, if it wasn’t for one thing.
Chrissie.
From the moment his daughter had met Bethany, she’d set her sights on turning the teacher into her mother and his wife. Watching the two of them together had touched him from the very first. In ways he’d never fully understand, Bethany ministered to his daughter’s need for a mother in the same way she satisfied his own long-repressed desire for a companion. A wife…
As the weeks progressed, Chrissie had started looking to Bethany for guidance more and more often. There wasn’t anything Chrissie wouldn’t do to be with her—including feign flu symptoms.
What confounded him was the fact that Bethany seemed to share his feelings. He felt her love as powerfully as those brief moments of sunlight every day, brightening the world in the darkness of an Arctic winter.
Admitting his love for Bethany—to her and to himself—wasn’t a simple thing. Love rarely was, he suspected. If he told her how he felt about her, he’d also have to tell her about his past.
Love implied trust. And he’d need to trust her with the painful details of his marriage. With that came the tremendous risk of her rejection. He wouldn’t blame her if she did turn away. If the situation were reversed, he didn’t know how he’d react. He was laying an enormous burden on her.
Telling her all this wasn’t something he could do on the spur of the moment. Timing was critical. He’d have to wait for the right day, the right mood.
Not this morning, he decided. Not on Christmas. He refused to spoil the day’s celebration with the ugliness of his past. No need to darken the holiday with a litany of his failures as a husband.
“Daddy?” Chrissie stood just inside the living room doorway yawning. She wore her pretty new flannel pajamas—the one gift he’d allowed her to open Christmas Eve.
“Merry Christmas, pumpkin,” he said, opening his arms to her. “It looks like Santa made it to Hard Luck, after all.”
Chrissie leapt into his embrace and he folded his arms around her, slowly closing his eyes. His daughter was the most precious gift he’d ever been given. And now, finding Bethany…His heart was full.
“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” Ben teased, placing his hands on the bulge of his stomach and sighing heavily. He eased his chair away from the kitchen table. “If anyone else finds out what a good cook you are, Bethany, I’ll be out of business before I know it.”
Bethany smiled, delighted with his praise. “I don’t think you need to worry. Those pies of yours were fabulous, especially the mincemeat. I’d like to get your recipe.”
Ben grinned. “Sure. No problem. It’s one I came up with myself—I like to try new things when I cook. How about you? Have you always been this good in the kitchen?”
It was another trait she shared with her birth father, but once again this wasn’t something she could mention.
She nodded. “While other little girls were playing with dolls and makeup, I was using my Betty Crocker Baking Center to concoct all kinds of cookies and cakes.”
“Well, all that practice sure paid off,” Mitch said.
Bethany blushed a little at the compliments. She’d done her best to put on a spread worthy of their praise. The meal had taken weeks of careful planning; she’d had to special-order some of the ingredients, and her mother had mailed her the spices. A lot of the dishes she’d made were traditional family recipes. Mashed sweet potatoes with dried apricots and lots of butter. Sage dressing, of course, and another rice-and-raisin dressing that had been a favorite of hers, one her grandmother made every year.
“You miss your family, don’t you?” Mitch asked as he helped her clear the table.
“Everyone does at Christmas, don’t you think?” This first year so far away
from her parents and two younger brothers had been more difficult than she’d expected; this morning had been particularly wrenching. She knew they missed her, too. Bethany had spoken to her family in California at least once a day for the past week. She didn’t care how high her phone bill ran.
“I must’ve chatted to Mom three times this morning alone,” she told Mitch. “It’s funny. For years I’ve helped her with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, but when it came to doing it on my own, I had a dozen questions.”
“You need me to do anything?” Ben asked, getting up from the table. He carried his plate to the sink. “I’ve done plenty of dishes in my time. I wouldn’t mind lending a hand, especially after a meal like that. Seems to me that those who cook shouldn’t have to wash dishes.”
“Normally I’d agree with you, but not today. You’re my guest.”
“But…”
“I should think you’d know better than to argue with a woman,” Mitch chided.
Laughing, Bethany shooed Ben out of the kitchen.
“We were going to continue our game of Monopoly, remember?” Chrissie reminded him eagerly. “You said you wanted a chance to win some of your money back.”
“Go play,” Bethany said with a laugh. “I’ll rope Mitch here into helping.”
“You’re sure?” Ben asked.
“Very sure,” she told him, glancing over at Mitch with a smile.
Mitch mumbled something she couldn’t hear. She looked at him curiously as she reached for a bowl. “What did you say?”
His eyes held hers. “I said a man could get lost in one of your smiles and never find his way home.”
Bethany paused, the bowl of leftover mashed potatoes in her hands. “Why, Mitch, what a romantic thing to say.”
His face tightened, as though her comment had embarrassed him. “It must be the season,” he said gruffly. He turned away from her and started to fill the sink with hot, sudsy water.
Bethany smiled to herself. It was rare to see Mitch Harris flustered. She fingered the polished five-dollar gold coin he’d had made into a pendant and placed on a fine gold chain. The coin had been minted the year of her birth, and he’d had it mounted in a gold bezel. The necklace was beautiful in its simplicity. The minute she fastened it around her neck, Bethany knew this was a piece of jewelry she’d wear every day for the rest of her life.
She felt that her gift for Mitch paled in comparison. Mitch was an avid Tom Clancy fan, and through a friend who managed a bookstore in San Francisco, she’d been able to get him an autographed copy of Clancy’s latest hardcover.
When Mitch had opened the package and read the inscription, he’d looked up at her as though she’d handed him the stone tablets direct from Mount Sinai.
Chrissie had been excited about her Barbie town house, too.
The one who’d surprised her most, however, was Ben. He’d arrived for dinner with not one pie but four—all of them baked fresh that morning. In addition to the pies, he’d brusquely handed her an oblong box. Bethany got a kick out of the way he’d wrapped it. He’d used three times the amount of paper necessary and enough tape to supply the U.S. Army for a year.
Inside the box was a piece of scrimshaw made from a walrus tusk. The scene on the polished piece of ivory was of wild geese in flight over a marsh. Mountains rose in the distance against a sunlit sky.
Ben had dismissed his gift as nothing more than a trinket, but Bethany knew from her brief stay in Fairbanks how expensive such pieces of artwork had become. She tried to thank him, but it was clear her words only embarrassed him.
“I would’ve thought you’d want to fly home for Christmas,” Mitch said, rolling up his sleeves before dipping his hands in the dishwater.
“I seriously considered it.” Bethany wasn’t going to minimize the difficulty of her decision to remain in Hard Luck. “But it’s a long way to travel for so short a time. I’ll probably stay in Alaska during spring break, as well. After all, my commitment here is only for the school year.”
“You’re going home to California in June, then?”
“Are you asking me if I plan to return to Hard Luck for another school year?”
“Yes,” he said, his back to her.
Something in the carefully nonchalant way he’d asked told her that the answer was important to him.
“I don’t know,” she said as straightforwardly as she could. “It depends on whether I’m offered a contract.”
“And if you are?”
“I…don’t know yet.” She loved Alaska and her students. Most of all, she loved Mitch and Chrissie. Ben, too. But there were other factors. Several of them had to do with Ben—should she tell him he was her biological father, and what would his reaction be if she did? More and more, she felt inclined to confront him with the truth.
“Well, I hope you come back” was all the response Mitch gave her. The deliberate lack of emotion in his voice was clearly meant to suggest that they’d been talking about something of little importance.
Why, for heaven’s sake, couldn’t the man just say what he wanted to say?
Hands on her hips, Bethany glared at him. Mitch happened to turn around for another stack of dirty dishes; he saw her and did a double take. “What?” he demanded.
“All you can say is ‘Well, I hope you come back,’” she mimicked. “I’m spilling my heart out here and that’s all the reaction I get from you?”
He gave her a blank look.
“The answer is I’m willing to consider another year’s contract, and you can bet it isn’t because of the tropical climate in Hard Luck.”
Mitch grinned exuberantly. “The benefits are good.”
“But not great.”
“The money’s fabulous.”
“Oh, please,” she muttered, rolling her eyes. She took an exaggerated breath. “My, my, I wonder what the appeal could be.”
Mitch looked at her in sudden and complete seriousness. “I was hoping you’d say it was me.”
She regarded him with an equally somber look. “I do enjoy the way you kiss, Mitch Harris.”
The first sign of amusement touched his lips. He lifted his soapy arms from the water and stretched them toward her. “Maybe what you need to convince you is a small demonstration of my enjoyable kisses.”
A second later Bethany was in his arms. The water seeped through her blouse, but she couldn’t have cared less. What did matter was sharing this important day with the people she loved. And those who loved her.
John Henderson wanted to do the right thing by Sally. He loved her—more than he’d thought possible. Proof of that was his willingness to delay asking her to marry him. He was determined to wait until he’d talked to her father.
He’d been carrying the engagement ring with him for weeks now. Every once in a while he’d draw it out and rub the gold band between his index finger and thumb. He figured that his patience—difficult though he found it to be patient—was a measure of his love for Sally. Still, he cursed himself a dozen times a day for listening to Duke.
John told himself that the other pilot didn’t know any more about love than he did. But it wasn’t true; Duke had given him good, sensible advice. John desperately wanted everything to be right between Sally and him, especially after her recent heartbreak.
It would’ve been selfish to rush her into an engagement and then a wedding without first knowing that she shared his feelings—and was sure of her own. He had to be certain she wasn’t marrying him on the rebound. Duke was right about her family, too. Her parents were traditional, old-fashioned, even, and it was important to meet them, give them a chance to know him. Important—but the waiting had become harder with every week that passed.
Now he was ready to make his move. And ask his questions…
Naturally, John would rather have delayed this initial awkwardness. No man likes to be scrutinized by strangers, especially when he’s about to ask these very people for permission to marry the most precious, beautiful woman God ever made. Thei
r daughter.
If he were Sally’s father, John thought, he wouldn’t blame the man for booting him out of the house. He hoped, however, that it wouldn’t come to that.
He’d bought a new suit for the occasion. It wasn’t a waste of money, he’d decided, seeing he’d probably need it for the wedding and all. If Sally agreed to marry him, and he hoped and prayed she would.
Sally’s true feelings for him seemed to be the only real question. They’d been seeing each other on a regular basis, but John had noticed certain things about her that left him wondering. Her eyes didn’t light up when she saw him, the way they had in the beginning. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was avoiding him lately.
Mariah Douglas had recently moved into the house with her, and Sally seemed almost relieved to have an excuse not to invite him over so often. Of course, he’d been busy at Midnight Sons, with the holiday rush and all.
Other signs baffled him, as well. These puzzling changes in Sally’s behavior had started after he’d spent the night with her. It wasn’t like they’d planned to make love; it had just happened.
John regretted not waiting to initiate their lovemaking until after the wedding. He’d known for a long time how he felt about Sally. Immediately following their one night together, he’d gone out and bought the engagement ring, but then Duke had talked him out of proposing until he could meet her family.
It might not be such a good idea to show up unannounced on Christmas Day, but John didn’t have a lot of spare time. Midnight Sons was shorthanded in the wintertime as it was. The holidays had offered him the opportunity to make the trip. That was why he was here in British Columbia, in a small town with an Indian name he couldn’t pronounce, dropping in on Sally’s family un-invited and clutching a somewhat travel-worn bouquet of roses.
John checked the address on the back of the Christmas card envelope and walked up to the white house with the dark green shutters and the large fir wreath on the door. He pressed the doorbell, swallowed nervously and waited.
Midnight Sons Volume 2 Page 12