Christmas on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)

by Anna DeStefano

  Together they were lightness to balance shadow, courage to champion vulnerability, hope to overcome loss and grief. He was real and damaged yet somehow the perfect prince she’d once longed for when, as a lost child, she’d thought of another life—any other life but her own. He was clutching her closer, as fiercely as she was clinging to him, and he was promising to never let go.

  “Pete…” Her fingers dug into his shoulders. Her arms slid around his back and down to his waist, holding him, pressing her body to his. “Pete…”

  She couldn’t tell him how empty she felt or how much the last few hours had filled her up, only to hollow her out as she left the Perry house with him and Polly, so unsure of whether she’d be able to deal with the awareness shining in Pete’s eyes and his touch and his smile. Now here they were, losing control together, trembling together, wanting together. He was right there with her, lost with her, needing her.

  “Would you…?” He scooped her up, cradling her in his arms. His breathing deepened as he carried her into the hallway. He hesitated. “My room…I want to take you there, but—”

  She placed a finger over his lips, charmed by his insecurity. She kissed him, trying to tell him it wouldn’t matter to her—making love with this amazing man in the same room, the same bed, that he’d shared with his beloved wife. It would be one of the sweetest memories of her life to know she’d been that important to him, that special.

  “Is it too soon?” she asked. “We can wait. I’ll still—”

  He kissed her instead of allowing her to say that she’d still want him in the morning or a dozen, a hundred mornings from now, even if he needed to stop this tonight.

  “I’m not letting you get away from me,” he said. “It’s just—”

  “Emma. Would she mind?”

  “I think she’s cheering somewhere right now.” He headed toward the closed double doors at the other end of the hall. “You’ve brought so much back into our lives, Mallory, mine and Polly’s. Emma would want to thank you.”

  Transferring her weight to one arm, the impressive muscles in his forearm bulging while not even straining, he opened the doors and carried her into the master suite. The walls around them were a serene blue. There were dashes of sunny yellow and hints of red everywhere, in the comfortably upholstered chairs and bedspread and pictures. Portraits of Polly covered every available surface, from birth to the age she was now, smiling and loving life in solo shots and grouped ones with Pete and the beautiful brunette who’d helped him create and raise such a wonderful little girl.

  It felt as if Mallory were looking straight into the heart of the man who was setting her on her feet. She was seeing all over again what a parent could truly be when he made his world about loving his family. She turned in his arms and caught him staring at a picture of Polly and Emma blowing bubbles through daisy-shaped wands.

  His sadness was palpable, but when he looked down at Mallory and hugged her closer, his arms linking around her, he was smiling again. Some of the worry tying knots in her diaphragm began to untangle itself.

  “Second thoughts?” she asked.

  He shook his head and let her go long enough to close the doors behind them. Then, his hands on her waist, he began backing her toward the bed, a mischievous light glinting in his eyes. “Finally having you here is the best Christmas present I could have gotten. Do I get to open my present early?”

  Finally…

  He’d wanted this as long as she had. She was something special to him, a present he’d been hoping for. He watched her, unblinking, as the back of her knees met the mattress and he gently lowered her, his hand cupping her head before it touched the bedding, as if she were his dream come true.

  “Well, that depends.” She reached for his sweater, preparing to pull it over his head in a race to see who got to unwrap their present first.

  “On what?” The hem of her own Rudolph-emblazoned sweater was in his grip. He gazed down at it and chuckled, waiting for her answer.

  “Have you been a good boy, Pete Lombard?” She raised an eyebrow, trying desperately to keep herself grounded to them and only this moment instead of letting her thoughts stray to all the things that might go wrong tomorrow. “Are you planning to be a good boy tonight, so Santa will keep you on his list?

  Pete grinned. He pulled her top off and pinned her arms with it, raising them over her head so he could stare his fill at the way her breasts were spilling over the edges of the silk-and-lace bra she’d worn tonight, just in case this fantasy became a reality.

  “Absolutely not.” He kissed her chin, her neck, then down her chest. “This is the only list I care about—all the parts of you I’ve been dying to love. You’re mine tonight, Mallory. All mine.”

  Mine…

  Hours later, curled up against Pete’s warm, sleeping form, her head on his chest and her lower body sprawled across his, Mallory couldn’t keep his words from echoing through her mind.

  All the parts of you I’ve been dying to love…

  Her hand smoothed up and down his arm. None of what had happened that night felt real yet. But this moment of peaceful perfection was all her fantasies come true. Compared to this, real, whatever that turned out to be, was highly overrated.

  Her gaze traveled about the room. This was Pete’s life, not hers. Yet at that moment she couldn’t get her head around belonging anywhere else but there, with his arms wrapped around her and Polly sleeping peacefully down the hall.

  “Don’t stop,” he murmured.

  A quick glance told her that his eyes were still closed. But a contented smile was creeping across his face.

  “Rubbing my arm,” he explained. “It feels good. Don’t stop.”

  It did feel good. Mallory relished the tactile sensation of brushing her fingertips across his skin. His hand came up to tangle in her hair, his fingers massaging the pressure points at the base of her skull.

  “You doing okay?” he asked. “You’re awfully quiet. A man learns that a quiet woman is usually up to no good.”

  She tugged at the patch of hair curling on his chest.

  “Ouch!” His eyes jerked open to find her smiling as she propped her chin on his arm. “I rest my case.”

  “A woman learns never to back down from a challenge,” she warned. “Not if she’s going to keep a man on his toes.”

  He drew her closer until their faces were inches apart. “Something tells me that running circles around men has never been your problem.”

  “No.” She kissed him, then snuggled back down, her lips brushing across his neck. “My problem has been hightailing it in the opposite direction just when I have a man exactly where I want him.”

  Pete lay quietly instead of launching into the fresh batch of questions she was certain her admission had inspired.

  “It’s amazing, what you did tonight for Sam and Brian,” he finally said. “I haven’t seen her extend herself that much since Emma and I first moved here. Sam loves her boys and her husband, and you can see her wanting to get her life back on track. But she’s been so—”

  “Broken…” Mallory trailed her fingers down his chest, then back up, the motion soothing her. “But she’s a fighter. It’s amazing she’s managed as well as she has. Has she been formally evaluated and diagnosed with anything she can have treated?”

  “PTSD. Brian and I talked about it once when she was having a particularly hard time one Labor Day. She’s not seeing a doctor anymore. She refuses to take her meds more often than she’s on them. The panic and anxiety aren’t as bad when she’s at home with her family and can spend most of her time working in her gardens. But the depression flares up pretty often, and then everything goes off the rails. It’s starting to take a toll on the boys, how isolated she keeps herself. It really took a lot for her to invite Polly inside the other night so you and I could talk, then to host the party and to sit there talking with you and Julia. You’re making quite an impact on her life.”

  “Your daughter’s doing most of the work.�
�� Mallory kissed his chest, shrugging off his praise. “I think she understands.”

  “About what happened to Sam?”

  “About how it feels to be so lost and afraid that you don’t think you’ll ever find your way back again. She wanted to take the party up to Sam tonight so she could enjoy it and still be alone. What seven-year-old understands human nature that well? She’s amazing.”

  His heart began beating faster beneath her ear. “You mean like Polly understands you?”

  Mallory shrugged.

  “Like she wants you to have the same magical Christmas you’re helping make come true for her?” he pressed.

  “You don’t have to—”

  He sat up, bringing Mallory along with an unrelenting grip until she was straddling his lap, the covers falling away, leaving them skin to skin. She was instantly swept into the perfect feel of it, unable to look away from the awareness spreading across Pete’s face as his hands brushed up her back and then around to cup breasts. She shivered at the depth of sensation he was igniting in both of them.

  She was reminded all over again that the powerful man in her arms didn’t know how to lose once he’d set his mind to something.

  “I know I don’t have to do anything,” he said. “And if it were anything but a privilege and an honor to help my daughter make one of your dreams come true, I assure you, you wouldn’t be here right now. But you are. And I am. And it’ll make Polly and me happy to make you happy. So relax about your Christmas.” He kissed her, his tongue swirling with hers in just the right way to numb her through and through, then set a fire along the same path of nerves until her hips were rocking against his. “We’ve got you covered.”

  Smiling, twisting her lower body against him until he groaned, she pushed at his shoulders. They fell back into the pillows. Her hands went searching and found him.

  “Who’s covering whom?” she asked, loving how he seemed to enjoy it each time she challenged him.

  Smiling, he rolled them over, settling between her raised thighs.

  “You tell me.”

  “Like I said.” She laughed softly. She groaned as he sank into her. “Right where I want you.”

  He drew her nipple into his mouth. “There’s no running now, Mallory Phillips. I’ll catch you if you try. I’ll always catch you.”

  “Promise?” she said on a hiccupping breath, tears flooding her eyes. She turned her head, not wanting him to see.

  “I’m one of Chandlerville’s finest, ma’am.” His hands slid beneath her hips and tilted her closer. “I live to serve.”

  Laughing again, the desperate weight that had been dragging at her releasing, she was nearly lost in his rhythm when the phone rang.

  Only it wasn’t his phone, she realized. It was her cell.

  “Oh my God.” Pushing against Pete until he eased away, she scrambled naked across the bed, shivering already from losing the warmth they’d created. “I have to get that.”

  No one who had her mobile number would be calling this time of night on a Saturday if it weren’t an emergency. And the only emergency she could imagine would be happening was—

  “You think it’s your mother?” Pete asked, aware of her growing desperation for news that someone might have spotted the woman from last weekend.

  Mallory pushed out of bed, snatched up her jeans, and dug in her pockets for the phone that thankfully hadn’t yet gone to voice mail.

  “I don’t know,” she said as he wrapped her in the quilt from the foot of the bed. “Finally!” She thumbed the button on the phone to answer it. Her hands shaking, she brought it to her ear. “Hello?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  That it will never come again

  Is what makes life so sweet…

  Pete caught his daughter’s reflection in his Jeep’s rearview mirror. Polly had barely woken when he’d scooped her from bed and bundled her into her coat, Disney nightgown and slippers and all. At the last minute he’d draped her in Mallory’s purple-plaid bathrobe from the other night.

  He glanced at the woman sitting tense beside him in the passenger seat as he drove them down the deserted stretch of I-85 South that was the quickest way into midtown at three in the morning. There wasn’t another car in sight traveling in either direction. Not that Mallory would have noticed if they’d been stuck in rush-hour gridlock.

  He’d expected pushback when he’d offered to take her to midtown’s Open Arms Shelter after someone there had called about her mother. Instead, she’d merely nodded, sitting huddled in a quilt at the foot of his bed, her expressive features suddenly blank. He’d thought for a moment that he’d have to help her dress as well, but she’d rallied after he’d thrown back on his clothes from the party and was heading down the hall to take care of Polly.

  When he’d returned, his daughter in his arms, Mallory was sitting in the same place, her clothes on, her cell phone still in her hand.

  “They’d said they’d call if it looked as if she was going to leave. But it’s so cold outside…The weatherman said it might snow.” Panicked, she’d flipped her phone from one hand to the other and gotten to her feet. “You don’t think she’d really head back outside on a night like this, do you?”

  Not knowing without agitating her more how to say that he had no idea, he’d pulled her to his side with his free hand and steered her downstairs and out to the Jeep, carefully strapping her in the same as he had Polly.

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said now, wishing he were still holding her.

  It hurt, not being able to feel her next to him. They seemed a million miles away now from the intimacy they’d forged earlier.

  “Is this a good thing for you?” he asked, worried. “If you’re not ready to talk with her, I could…”

  “I can do this,” she insisted, her tone clipped and impatient and simmering with an anger he knew wasn’t directed at him. So much was pressing down on her, and she was still trying to shoulder most of it on her own.

  “Of course you can. But you don’t have to do it tonight if you’re not ready. And you don’t have to do it alone.”

  Only by the second she was morphing back into the stranger who’d moved onto Mimosa Lane. Mallory’s complicated feelings about her mother were full of rage and need and love and betrayal and the most desperate kind of hope. Pete knew a lot about that kind of confusion—he’d been going through it himself since losing Emma. But Mallory had been dealing with her loss alone her entire life. Even after her grandmother took her back. She clearly expected this night to be no different.

  What they’d shared over the last few weeks and at the Perrys’ party and then in Pete’s bed should be making all the difference in the world. But would she let it? Would she let him in, all of him, and open up whatever parts of herself she was still holding too closely for him to know? Those dark places were taking over again—the ones feeding her need for unlocked doors and unobstructed windows and megawatt Christmas lights and a tree just for herself, all while she couldn’t abide the personal relationships that would have enriched her life even more.

  As his Jeep ate up the remaining miles between them and what he expected would be a heartbreaking reunion, he could feel Mallory’s past stealing her away from him and Polly all over again.

  “I’m proud of you.” He squeezed her hand. “I can’t imagine how hard this is going to be. Whatever happens, I’ll be right beside you the entire time.”

  She didn’t glare at him the way he’d half expected her to, or tell him to mind his own business. Instead, all the energy seemed to drain from her body. She slumped in the bucket seat, still staring out the window. She squeezed his fingers back. She seemed absolutely crushed, this woman who’d fought so tirelessly for his daughter and his family and everyone else she’d made it her job to help.

  He’d seen it before. He’d seen that same giving up consume his wife’s spirit once Emma had accepted that she was beaten and there was no use wasting another moment resisting the inevitable.


  “I’ll be right here,” he insisted, the same as he’d promised Emma on that awful night when they’d faced reality and the end that was coming. A lump rose in his throat, so big he was choking on the rage and denial he’d be damned if he’d throw at Mallory when she needed him to be strong for her the way no one else in her life ever had been. “I won’t leave you for a second.”

  She was there in front of the shabby tree where the shelter volunteer who’d called Mallory had said he’d spotted the old woman.

  She was sitting on a worn-out couch, her filthy orange coat still on, her gray hair dirty and matted around her face, plastic shopping bags clutched in her lap and around her diminutive body. She’d lost weight, and the years of drinking and living on the street hadn’t been kind to her skin—wrinkles had formed trenches and crevices, branding the delicate areas around her eyes and nose and mouth. She looked as if she were in her sixties instead of her early thirties. But there was no doubt about it this time.

  Mallory was certain she was looking at her mother.

  She’d stood motionless on the other side of the room watching the woman for what seemed like an eternity. It felt like a dream as well as a nightmare. Everything she’d imagined for more than fifteen years might happen in this moment seemed to be drowning her, and she couldn’t pull back. She couldn’t step forward. She couldn’t think.

  She’d had a week to imagine how she’d handle this—how she’d bring back the doll and the bags of flotsam that her mother had left behind, how she’d use them to hopefully create a connection of some kind. How she’d try to reach her mama on a personal level, getting her to recognize Mallory enough, and want her enough, to not disappear again.