Shane got down on one knee, the hammer that was hanging from his tool belt hitting the tiled floor with a thud. He gave the boy his complete attention.
One arm around the boy’s waist, Shane pulled Ricky to him as he held one edge of the drawing with the other. “You drew this?” he asked with the appropriate amount of wonder in his voice.
Pleased at the reaction he was receiving, Ricky grinned. “Yes, I did.”
“Cool. That’s a really fine family portrait,” Shane said. Releasing Ricky but still holding the drawing with one hand, he pointed with the other hand to what had previously been identified as a bird. “That angel your dad?”
Cris exchanged looks with Stevi, who watched from a distance. The latter shrugged in confusion, as clueless as Cris about how Shane could identify what still appeared to be an oversize bird. Cris couldn’t help wondering if perhaps Shane had somehow overheard the end of the conversation about the drawing. Shane’s startling interpretative ability seemed too much of a coincidence otherwise.
“Yes!” Ricky cried out, glancing over his shoulder at his mother. The glance all but shouted, See?
“You can tell it’s an angel?” Cris asked, gazing at the general contractor pointedly to see if he was pulling her leg.
“Sure,” Shane replied, the complete picture of innocence.
“Why didn’t you think it was a bird?” she asked suspiciously.
He regarded her as if the answer was obvious. “Because it’s a family portrait and Ricky doesn’t have a pet bird.”
Cris laughed as she shook her head. “You’re good,” she told him, impressed. “You make it sound so simple.”
The smile on his handsome, tanned face was utterly and frustratingly enigmatic. “Some things just are. Right, Rick?”
In response to hearing the adult version of his name, Ricky puffed up his small chest and beamed at this newest man in his life.
“Right,” he echoed with confidence. “Mama’s gonna make me lunch. You wanna have some, too?” Ricky asked, slipping his hand into Shane’s as if the man’s affirmative answer was already a foregone conclusion.
“Okay,” Shane readily agreed. He jerked a thumb toward where he’d parked his vehicle. “I was just going to take break and get my lunch out of the truck. Give me a few minutes and I’ll join you, Rick,” he said, pulling his hand out of the boy’s grip.
Cris stared at him. “You’re brown-bagging it?” she asked, incredulously.
Granted the addition and the renovations had been going on for more than a week now, but to be honest, she hadn’t been all that aware where Shane and the men he sometimes had working for him took their meals. She’d assumed he was out in the dining area.
“Yeah,” he answered. “It saves time if I don’t have to drive over to one of those fast-food places. This way, I get done faster and I can spend the rest of the time working on the addition.”
A lot had been going on at the inn of late, what with Alex and Wyatt’s wedding swiftly approaching and Ricky beginning kindergarten, not to mention a mini-convention of historical writers coming to the inn to hold this year’s annual meeting. Consequently, Cris had been exceedingly busy, aware only that Shane had been in and out of the inn several times to take measurements and render estimates after being apprised of what their father and Alex wanted done.
She realized now that he’d only really been on the job a few days.
She had to focus, Cris upbraided herself. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to get done all the things done she needed to.
No time like the present, she decided.
“Saves more time if you just tell me what you’d like to eat and I make it for you,” she said with an easy smile.
A smile he found more than captivating.
He always had.
Even so, or perhaps because it was so, he shook his head, brushing off her generous suggestion. “No, that’s okay. You’re busy.”
She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. “And you’re not?”
He wasn’t clear on what one thing had to do with the other. After all, this wasn’t a competition where the loser would wait on the winner. “Well, yeah, I am, but—”
“No buts,” she informed him. “You’re coming with us to the kitchen.”
“Yeah!” Ricky added his minuscule weight to the argument.
Then, to ensure that Shane would indeed comply with his and his mother’s wishes, Ricky once again slipped his small hand into the contractor’s callused one. Holding on with all his might, Ricky gave Shane’s hand as hard a tug as he could manage.
“Wow.” Shane lunged just enough to make it seem he’d been thrown off balance by the boy. “You sure are strong.” He pretended to eye the boy suspiciously. “You work out?”
Ricky giggled and shook his head, obviously pleased with the evaluation. “No. I’m strong ’cause Mama feeds me good.”
“I bet she does,” Shane agreed, glancing in Cris’s direction, a trace of his admiration showing through. “But just so you get it right the next time, what you should say is Mama feeds me well,” Shane explained, gently correcting the little boy’s grammar.
Her momentary connection with Shane’s intense dark blue eyes instantly quickened Cris’s pulse at the same time that his thoughtful method of correcting her son’s grammar gladdened her heart. She was always partial to people who were nice to Ricky.
“She feeds you good, too?” Ricky asked, surprised.
Cris did her best to stifle the laugh that rose to her lips, but Shane, she noticed, didn’t attempt to hide his reaction.
Instead, he laughed. “You’re going to be a challenge, I can see. Tell you what, maybe after I knock off for the day, you and I can find some time for a little grammar lesson.”
Excitement all but radiating from him, Ricky asked as he continued to tug the man to the kitchen, “Who are you gonna knock off?”
“No, not who,” Shane corrected. “What.”
That threw Ricky back into confusion. “You’re gonna knock off a what?” he asked, his thin, wheat-colored eyebrows knotting; he was clearly perplexed.
Shane laughed, charmed and delighted. “You are definitely going to be a challenge,” he told the boy as they crossed the kitchen threshold. “But it’ll give me a chance to practice my skills.”
“Practice what skills?” Cris inquired as she crossed to the refrigerator with the picture Ricky had drawn.
“Teaching skills,” Shane replied. When she looked at him quizzically, he explained, “I’ve got a teaching degree, and I majored in English.”
“I didn’t know that.” Something didn’t make sense. “So why aren’t you teaching?”
That was easy enough to explain. “Jobs aren’t exactly plentiful these days, even for teachers. And there’s no reason for you to know that I got a degree in teaching. You and I kind of lost touch after high school,” he reminded her.
They had at that. By then, she’d been going with Mike, and Shane had just been the older brother of one of her girlfriends, a guy she’d dated a couple of times before Mike had come into her life and swept her off her feet.
Seeing Shane again after all this time, she fleetingly wondered how things would have turned out if he had swept her off her feet instead. Burying the question that could never really be answered, Cris forced a smile to her lips as she opened the refrigerator and cheerfully asked, “Okay, men, what’ll it be?”
CHAPTER THREE
RICKY SCRAMBLED UP onto one of the stools that stood against the long stainless-steel service table where Cris did most of her food preparations. Rather than sit, he knelt on the stool so that he appeared bigger to his new friend, who took the stool next to his.
“You know what I like, Mama,” Ricky piped up in response to her question.
Like everyone else i
n the family, she indulged her son, but not when it came to his nutrition. “Yes, I do, and you know what I say to that.”
“What?” Shane asked, the exchange arousing his curiosity. He glanced from Cris to her son. “What is it you like, Rick?”
“Hot dogs!” the boy declared, his high-pitched voice all but vibrating with enthusiasm. Cris had a strong feeling that if she allowed it, the boy would eat hot dogs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “I love ’em best of all!”
“I like them myself,” Shane told Ricky, getting a big grin from the boy and a reproving glare from his somewhat frustrated mother. “But you know,” he continued without missing a beat, taking his cue from the expression on Cris’s face, “they’re really not very good for your insides. That’s why they should only be eaten on very, very special occasions. Right, Rick?”
The boy appeared torn between siding with his newfound friend, whom he wanted to impress, and campaigning for his beloved meal of choice. When Shane continued eyeing him as if waiting for backup from an equal, Ricky finally capitulated, shrugging his small, thin shoulders as he did so.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You know what else I like, Ricky?” Shane asked the boy.
There was a wary look in the child’s eyes as he inquired, “What?”
Shane leaned in closer and ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. “Vegetables.”
Ricky appeared horrified at the mere thought. “Oh, yuck.” The response rose to his lips automatically.
Shane pretended to consider what he’d said. “Well, maybe they don’t taste quite as good as hot dogs,” he allowed, “but they do taste pretty good. I like them mashed in with potatoes, or fried with a little oil and bread crumbs. And not only do they taste good,” he continued, focusing exclusively on Ricky rather than on his mother, “but they help make your insides healthy and they make you strong. Pretty cool, huh?”
Ricky regarded him with eyes beyond huge. “They really make you strong?”
“They really make you strong,” Shane echoed. He gazed at Ricky solemnly and drew his thumb across his chest in the form of an X. “Cross my heart,” he told the boy.
Ricky shifted on the stool, planting his seat on the plastic cushion, and looked up at his mother. “Can we have that, Mama? Can we have vegeta-bib-bles with mashed potatoes and bread crumbs?”
“No,” Shane said, laughing and jumping in to correct him, “it’s either with mashed potatoes or fried with bread crumbs.” It occurred to him that maybe he had overstepped his boundaries. Turning to Cris, Shane tendered a veiled apology. “I didn’t mean to put you out.”
“You didn’t,” she assured him quickly. “Trust me, any suggestion that’ll get this one—” she nodded at Ricky “—to eat his vegetables is greatly appreciated. Any particular vegetable I should be using?”
Shane thought only a moment, remembering the combination his mother used to make to get his elder brother and him to eat their vegetables. “Well, how about spinach? That goes pretty well with mashed potatoes.”
“Spinach?” Ricky cried, clutching his throat and pretending to fall over, poisoned, while emitting a rasping noise that, Shane assumed, was supposed to be a death rattle.
Shane laughed at the impromptu performance. “Oh, most definitely spinach,” he told Ricky with certainty. “That makes you really strong. You ever hear of Popeye the Sailor?”
“Uh-uh,” Ricky said, shaking his head so hard that if he’d been a cartoon character, his head would have gone spinning off.
The boy’s answer didn’t surprise Shane. He was convinced that kids today were missing out on a very special collection of imaginative cartoons from a classic era.
“No?” he said, pretending to question. “Well, have I got a treat for you. Why don’t I tell you all about him while your mom makes us lunch?”
She had to hand it to Shane. He was handling her son like a pro. She caught herself wondering if Shane had gotten married. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but then a lot of men didn’t. And he seemed like such a natural with kids it was difficult for her to imagine that he’d gotten that way without having one of his own to practice on.
The thought of Shane having a family made her happy for him, but at the same time, it came with an accompanying sense of...well, sadness, for lack of a better word.
“Anything else you two men would like to go with those vegetables?” Cris asked, doing her very best not to laugh.
Shane shrugged casually. “Anything you’ve got will be fine.”
“Yeah, fine, Mama,” Ricky said, emulating Shane.
“How about fried chicken?” she suggested.
Rather than agree, Shane first looked at the boy to have him weigh in. “What do you say—you up for that, Rick?”
This time, Ricky bobbed his head with the same enthusiasm he’d displayed when asking for hot dogs.
“Fried chicken it is,” Shane told Cris, placing their “order.”
“One last question,” Cris promised. “Light meat or dark?” The question was for Shane, since she already knew which her son preferred.
“I’m a leg man myself,” Shane said with a hint of a smile that made Cris think perhaps the information applied to more than chickens.
“Me, too, Mama,” Ricky piped up right after Shane. “I’m a leg man, too.”
Cris banked the urge to hug Ricky to her and laugh. She knew that would only embarrass him before his new hero. But resisting the desire wasn’t easy.
“Two orders of fried chicken drumsticks coming up,” Cris told Shane and her son.
Ricky turned his attention back to Shane. “Who’s this sailor guy you said eats spinach?” he prodded. His expression clearly indicated he thought that anyone willing to eat the weed was less than a hero type, as well as somewhat weird.
With a smile, Shane proceeded to tell the little boy a story the way he recalled it from watching Saturday-television when he was about Ricky’s age.
As she listened to Shane, Cris concluded that the man was as wrapped up in the story as the boy was.
* * *
HE HAD A gift, Cris thought.
She’d gone to work the moment Shane had pulled his stool closer to Ricky’s and started telling the boy an elaborate story complete with a villain, a fair damsel in distress and the green seaweedlike vegetable that turned a somewhat aging sailor into almost a superhero with inflated forearms. Spinach gave the sailor, Popeye, the ability to pummel his enemy into the ground while rescuing a damsel only the one-eyed hero could love.
Cris caught herself listening to the details on more than one occasion as she prepared their lunches. It got to the point that she had to order herself to concentrate so as to block out Shane’s storytelling.
She noticed that Shane timed his story to finish almost at the exact same moment that she announced, “Lunch is ready.”
She placed both plates on the shiny stainless-steel counter, then slid one in front of Shane and the other in front of her son.
Ricky gazed at the vegetable combination a little uneasily, then raised his eyes to see what his newly discovered idol would do.
When Shane dug in, Ricky obviously felt compelled to follow suit, which he did, albeit reluctantly and in what seemed like slow motion. The first bite he took of the mashed potatoes and spinach combination produced a surprised expression on his small, angular face. His eyes looked ready to pop out. “Hey, this is good,” he told Shane.
Which was exactly the way Shane had reacted the first time he’d taken a bite. Ricky, Shane decided, reminded him somewhat of himself.
“Told you,” Shane said to the boy with a wide, satisfied smile.
Through hooded eyes, Cris watched in amazement as her son ate the spinach and potatoes she’d made for him. She expected him to leave at least half on his plate, but he ate un
til it was all gone. Not a moment’s hesitation, not a myriad of sour faces above his plate and certainly no begging or bargaining the way there usually was when Ricky faced something he would as soon walk away from than eat.
Ricky cleared his plate just as his hero did, then, still emulating Shane, pushed the plate back and patted his stomach.
“That was very good,” Shane told Cris.
“Yeah, very good,” Ricky echoed gleefully, emitting a huge, satisfied sigh the way Shane had half a minute ago.
“Well, I’ve got to be getting back to the job before your sister starts thinking she’s hired a freeloader.”
“What’s a freeloader?” Ricky wanted to know, looking from Shane to his mother for an answer.
“Something Mr. McCallister is definitely not,” Cris assured her son with certainty. The man more than earned his pay—in all departments. Her eyes met Shane’s and she murmured, “Thank you.”
The corners of his mouth curved ever so slightly as Shane said, “There’s no need to thank me.”
And with that, he left the kitchen.
Two sets of eyes watched him until he’d completely disappeared from view.
* * *
“THAT WAS NOTHING short of a miracle. I just wanted you to know that,” Cris said later on that day. Taking a break from her kitchen duties, she’d sought Shane out and found him exactly where he was supposed to be—hip deep in renovations. He was standing with his back toward her, intent on what he was doing on the workbench.
Coming up behind Shane, she was careful not to startle him. She didn’t want to be responsible for him making any unintentional cuts in either his project or himself.
Shane was running a power sander over the plank he intended to use for a new floorboard to match the ones throughout the inn, and he had on a mask to cut down on inhaling the dust.
Cris patiently waited until he’d stopped running the sander before she spoke again, knowing she’d either have to shout to be heard or get in his way so he could see her. Just waiting him out was simpler.
[Ladera by the Sea 01] - A Wedding for Christmas Page 3