by Lilian Darcy
Before Daniel went next door to the church itself, she had time to tell him, “The mailroom picked up another letter on Friday, by the way.”
“You didn’t tell me!”
“I didn’t want to ruin your weekend.” Keeping him from running his company properly was one thing, but keeping him from his kids was worse.
“Neither did the police, apparently,” he answered. “They didn’t tell me, either.”
“My request. It’s okay. I’ve brought a photocopy.”
She handed it to him and he read in a rapid mutter, “‘Be warned! Your personal bank account and credit card details have been accessed via the internet. The Van Shuyler Corporation’s accounts are next. Cover Deveson’s debts voluntarily or watch the decision get taken out of your hands.’” He looked up. “More specific than the other letters.”
“Seems like it’s an empty threat, though. My accountant ran some checks, along with a police expert, and neither of them could find any evidence that anyone has accessed my personal accounts or the company’s.”
“If that information was what they got from your file drawer—”
“They could have used it weeks ago,” she agreed. “But I don’t keep financial information there.”
“What do you keep there? You told me nothing was missing.”
“Most of it’s personal. Old diaries and letters and photos. Lecture notes from college that I should probably throw out.”
“Our guy was probably pretty disappointed, then.”
“Unless he wanted to read the extremely bad poems I wrote when I was fourteen, or find out the names of the boys I had crushes on.”
“Yeah.” Daniel frowned, and Lauren could see the wheels turning in his mind. Then his tone changed. “Speaking of boys and crushes, let’s stop that, guys.”
He swooped down to floor level and separated Corey and Jesse, who had started throwing blocks at each other. They were still laughing about it, but their aim was getting harder and better, and one of them would score a direct hit soon.
“You guys have fun,” he told them. He was still crouched down at their level, and the fabric of his casual dark gray pants stretched tight across his thighs. “Daddy will be back in a bit, okay?”
“Daddy go church?” Jesse asked.
“That’s right, buddy.”
“I come, too?”
“Not today. Lauren’s going to play with you.”
“Lauren read story?”
“Yes.” He disengaged himself from two pairs of clinging arms, smiled at Lauren and left the nursery.
Lauren knelt awkwardly on a cushion on the floor and each little boy brought her a book, as did another girl named Emily who was around three years old. All three of them tried to sit on her lap, which was difficult as there wasn’t even room for one child there right now. Her baby was due in less than four weeks. Eventually, she managed to get them seated beside her, with the little girl, Emily, perched on a chair just behind.
It felt right. Inside Lauren, the baby was kicking uncomfortably. Daniel’s boys only wanted stories about trucks, which didn’t please Emily at all. She wanted to hear about Christmas, and said so about sixteen times. No one sat still, and someone had got something sticky all over Lauren’s stretch maternity leggings. It wasn’t the soft-focus scene of peace and love that it was supposed to be, but it felt right all the same.
Eventually, Emily went to play with another little girl around her own age, and Lauren was left with Corey and Jesse, who decided to treat her like a piece of gym equipment. They were so delightful that she just had to scoop both of them into her arms for a hug and a kiss—she could love these kids so easily!—and that was when Daniel appeared in the doorway, because the church service was over.
For some reason, she felt as if she’d been caught out, and her laugh was self-conscious. “They’ve given me quite a workout.” She still had her arms around Corey and her chin was resting lightly against his curly head.
“You don’t have to permit it,” Daniel said.
“Oh, but I like it. It’s…good for me, or something.”
Why was he watching her so intently?
As soon as she framed the question in her mind, he gave a token smile and turned away, stepping aside to let some other parents pass.
“Party time!” said one mother.
Some of the bigger children echoed the words. “Party time! Yeah!”
Daniel’s boys immediately jumped up and said, “Yeah!” too, catching the mood of excitement from the other children, although they didn’t really understand what it was about.
Lauren wasn’t sure what she should do. Bill was still waiting outside to shadow her home. He would watch her place while she packed an overnight bag, and then he’d shadow her to her father’s luxurious weekend home near Princeton, where they were spending a quiet Christmas together.
When is our Christmas ever anything but quiet?
It was a disloyal, unfair thought, but it hovered persistently in the back of her mind all the same. Eileen Harrap was joining them for Christmas lunch, but then she had her sister to go to in the evening. Lauren’s sister, Stephanie, couldn’t make it from Europe this year, although she was coming two weeks later for Lauren’s baby shower. No other celebrations were planned, no other guests were invited.
Wasn’t it a little sad that a kid’s church party was the best prospect she had for Christmas color and laughter and life? She wasn’t even a parent yet. There was no role for her here.
“I should probably go,” she said halfheartedly aloud, to no one in particular.
Daniel heard. He had just come up to her to confirm her plans for the next few days. But he caught the reluctance in her tone at once.
“Don’t you want to?” he asked.
She had a tight, sad look around her eyes. He fought his need to respond to it. Protecting her professionally was one thing, starting to care about how she felt was very different. It scared him and he didn’t want it.
Once again, she flushed. “Oh, you know, I was wondering if I should get in some practice at this stuff.”
“I think on-the-job training is the only kind that really counts in the parenthood business, but please stay. You’re more than welcome.”
“I could help.”
“That’s always good,” he agreed.
She nodded and went to ask congregation dynamo Dorothy Minter what she could do. Dorothy pointed her toward the kitchen, where people were bringing out covered dishes of food. Daniel watched her all the way, swinging Corey into his arms and propping his little diaper-padded bottom on hip and forearm. Corey began to play with his ear.
As always, Lauren looked beautiful. Her hair, the color of polished rosewood, was coiled and clipped on the top of her head, and her dark Christmas green leggings-and-top outfit draped softly over her pretty figure. Her legs were still great, and you still wouldn’t have known she was pregnant if you only saw her from behind.
Desire stirred inside him like a lion waking from sleep. He’d spent the past three weeks pushing it down, squashing it, stomping on it, the way he’d have squashed a garden bug that was eating his plants. Sometimes he kidded himself that the effort had paid off.
Yes, definitely. He hardly thought about that last kiss anymore. Hardly ever let his fantasies gallop ahead to the point they could have taken it to that night if they’d wanted. She was an assignment and nothing more. He could reel off the names of her most frequent contacts. He could list the restaurants she liked and the stores she shopped at. He knew the outward details of her life, and that was all he cared about.
Wrong! He knew so much more than that, and the more he knew, the more she drew his reluctant curiosity. She was such a mix of qualities. Just when he thought he understood her, she surprised him yet again.
She was courageous and matter-of-fact about the threat to her safety, yet timid and uncertain about her future role as a mom. She was efficient and in control in her professional life, but apparently at sea a
bout her personal future. She could laugh at his teasing humor one minute, and seconds later he’d see tears glistening in her eyes. She was so poised in the way she skimmed through the room with plates of Christmas cookies and finger sandwiches, yet she flushed and stumbled over her words as soon as someone asked her about the baby.
She must have felt him watching her, because her gaze met his across half a room then flinched away again.
Damn it, she scared him, and he didn’t know why.
Or maybe he did. Didn’t he know that look she’d just given him? Becky used to look at him that same way, years ago, when she was just his office manager and there was nothing personal between them at all.
Oh, mercy, how he’d hated that look! There had always been something so watchful and hungry about it. He hated it when a woman made a man feel like her prey in some primal hunt. The look had disappeared from Becky’s face for a while after his father’s death, to be replaced by a tenderness he’d responded to. He’d radically revised his assessment of Becky at that time. She’d changed. Or he had. Or maybe he’d only just begun to see the real woman beneath the unsubtle façade that so frequently irritated him.
And so he’d married her and they’d been bad for each other from day one. As soon as she was sure of him, she had begun to criticize him in front of his friends. She had become consumed by strange health fads and expensive personal growth seminars. And of course he was at fault, too. They were classic male faults like not being at home enough and not thinking to appreciate out loud the special little touches she made to meals or decor. He regretted it, but it was too late now. The look had come back to Becky’s face. Hungry and watchful, but possessive and hostile, too, as time went by.
What does Lauren want from me?
More than she was getting. A woman didn’t look at a man like that when she already had what she wanted from him, or when she didn’t want anything at all. So what was it? She seemed as determined to reject their chemistry as he was. He was protecting her safety as well as he knew how, to the extent that she herself had agreed to. So what did she want?
Forget about it, he decided. Keep to the boundaries. Remind her that the boundaries are there. That’s all you have to do.
“Corey, can I keep my ear, please?” he told the toddler in his arms. “It’s a part of my body, and it doesn’t want to come off.”
Jesse was pulling at his free hand. “Corations. See corations.”
“You want to see the decorations?”
“Come, too.”
“Yeah, I’ll come, too.”
They made a tour of the Nativity scene and the Christmas tree. Then it was time to eat, and he let the boys choose what they wanted. They got cake smeared on their faces from ear to ear. When the party food was cleared away, it was time for carol singing, and then Santa came.
Major disaster. The boys were terrified. Wouldn’t go near the guy. Dorothy Minter stepped in and tried to encourage them. She wouldn’t believe Daniel when he said it wasn’t a big deal, next year would do.
“Oh, but you must get a photo!”
“Let’s not make them cry, Mrs. Minter. That’ll just scare the other little ones.”
“But I’m sure if we just distracted them.”
He had to invent an urgent diaper crisis to put her off. When he finally made his escape toward the bathroom, with a kicking child tucked under each arm, he wasn’t prepared to find Lauren watching him again.
With that look on her face.
“Maybe you should go,” he told her, his cool distance very deliberate, but far more blatant and unsubtle than he’d intended. “Or Bill will be late getting home to his family.”
He was rewarded with just what he’d wanted. She recoiled. Her face fell. She began to apologize.
Cutting her off, telling her it was fine and Bill would handle it, he wished her a merry Christmas. Daniel knew he had just condemned himself to spending the entire holiday feeling like a total heel. He hated to hurt her like that, but it was best for both of them in the long run, he was certain. He had nothing to offer her—not friendship, not wisdom, not any kind of involvement—and he wanted to signal the fact loud and clear.
Chapter 7
“Eileen, you have surpassed yourself this year,” Lauren’s father said, gazing at the wall-mounted singing plastic fish he had just received as a Christmas gift.
“Well, you know you are the world’s hardest man to shop for,” she answered, unrepentant. “I’m not even going to try anymore. You are getting novelty gifts from me from now on.”
Dad laughed comfortably, then said, as if it was a chore, “Well, I suppose we should eat. The caterers have left everything in the kitchen in warming trays, we just have to dish it up.”
Sixteen years ago, Christmas hadn’t been like this. Lauren’s mother had made a big fuss over the holiday season, and if she didn’t have enough family available to eat the huge Christmas dinner she’d prepared each year, she invited friends. The following year, she had been gravely ill and she’d died on December 28, when Lauren was just fifteen years old. The Van Shuyler family Christmases had been quiet ever since.
Lauren understood the reasons for it perfectly, which was why she’d never resisted her father’s we’d-better-go-through-the-motions attitude. This year, however, a slow-burning fire of rebellion was building inside her and she was determined that next Christmas things would be different.
She would have a child then. A child who would be crawling or even toddling, captivated by colors and lights, constantly putting things in its mouth. She was determined her baby wasn’t going to experience Christmas as a tepid, adult-orientated celebration.
Her baby was going to experience Christmas the way Jesse and Corey Lachlan did, with a church party and a drive around the suburbs to look at Christmas lights, a huge, fragrant and brightly decorated tree brushing the ceiling with its topmost branch, a lavish meal, a big gathering of people and a visit from Santa Claus.
Yes, just like Corey and Jesse, only maybe without the yells of terror when the man in the big red suit appeared. Lauren smiled at the memory of their forthright words. “Don’t want to see Santa! Don’t want to see Santa!”
Then she felt a twist of pain inside her as she relived Daniel’s cool suggestion to her just a minute later. She hadn’t expected him to push her away like that. She’d thought they were getting on pretty well. They were staying within the boundaries they’d both set. She’d even have said that they were building an unlikely kind of friendship.
But the coldness in his face as he’d spoken to her had looked so deliberate, and she couldn’t think of anything she’d said or done to earn it. He was the one who’d first suggested she attend his church. All she’d done was to linger at a kids’ Christmas party at which she didn’t really belong. She’d watched Daniel’s relaxed interaction with his kids, immersed in her usual wistful fear that she wouldn’t be nearly as good at the parenthood thing as he was, and as she wanted to be. That was all.
At least she didn’t have to see him for a couple of days, she thought as she sat down to lunch with Dad and Eileen.
Wrong!
This consolation prize of a fact was shattered just one hour later, after they’d eaten, by the sound of the phone. Her father picked it up, made some terse responses then told Lauren, “That was someone from Metropay Parking.” She recognized the name of the pay-parking concession that operated the parking garage next to Van Shuyler corporate headquarters. “Someone has spraypainted graffiti all over the wall of your spot.”
“The one where my car was parked when its tires were slashed? I haven’t used it since.”
“Evidently the guy doesn’t know that.” Her father picked up the phone again.
“You’re going to call the police?”
“No, I’m going to call Daniel. I’ve had enough of this. The police aren’t putting any manpower on it. Daniel can come right over here and we can talk.”
“Dad, you can’t! It’s Christmas!”
She came forward and put her arms around him. “Remember, Dad,” she said softly. “Remember the knee-deep piles of wrapping paper, and the little cousins with flushed cheeks and sticky lips? Remember the smells of all the food, not trucked in by a caterer, but things Mom had cooked herself? Remember the trivia games Uncle Pete used to make up to entertain the adults, and the Balloon Olympics he organized in the basement for the kids?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I do.” His voice was thick.
“We never made the effort to get together with Mom’s family when Uncle Pete moved to Chicago the year after Mom died, but you know what? Somewhere out there, there are people who still do that stuff at Christmas, and I know Daniel is one of them. You cannot ask him to come here for a business meeting today!”
For quite some time, Dad didn’t reply. Lauren felt his cheek scrape awkwardly against her hair and felt the familiar scent of his shaving cream.
Then at last there came a scratchy, “Point taken. We’ll have a child here next Christmas. We’ll do it differently. Will you at least let me call him?”
“Will you be able to forget about the whole thing if I don’t?”
“No. You know I won’t. You’re too important to me, Lauren, and I’m sick over this new thing.”
“Then call. Make it quick. What did the graffiti say, anyway?”
“The Metropay guy wouldn’t repeat it. Apparently, it was pretty obscene.” He picked up the phone, keyed in Daniel’s number and reported what had happened.
For a minute or two after this he was silent, apart from the odd monosyllable, until Lauren suddenly heard, “Bring the boys as well. No, you’re more than welcome. There are some toys I can hunt up from the basement, and it’d be great to get a taste of kids around the place again. Thanks, Daniel, I’ll see you in an hour or so.”