THE MAVERICK'S CHRISTMAS BABY

by Victoria Pade

  “You’re a Realtor?”

  “Actually, I build boats. I’m just taking care of this for them.”

  Her hand had disappeared in his.

  She could feel calluses at the base of his fingers. He worked with his hands. Built boats with them, he’d said. What kind, she had no idea. The white-gold Rolex on his thick wrist seemed to indicate he was successful at it, though. The words capable and accomplished quickly flashed in her mind, only to succumb to less definable impressions as she became aware of the heat of his palm, the strength in his grip and the deliberate way he held that strength in check.

  What she felt mostly, though, was a wholly unexpected sense of connection when her eyes met his.

  Everything inside her seemed to go still.

  She’d experienced that sensation only once before; the first time Curt had taken her hand. It had been a fleeting thing, little more than an odd combination of awareness and ease that had come out of nowhere, but it had dictated the direction of her life from that moment on.

  As if she’d just touched lightning, she jerked back, curling her fingers into her palm, and took a step away. The void left in her heart by the loss of her husband already felt huge. It seemed to widen further as she instinctively rejected the thought of any sort of connection to this man, imagined or otherwise. Because of what she’d learned since Curt’s death, it was entirely possible that what she’d thought she’d had with her husband—the closeness, the love, the very rightness of the life they’d shared—hadn’t existed at all.

  Having struggled with that awful possibility for over a year, she wasn’t about to trust what she’d felt now.

  Conscious of the quick pinch of Erik’s brow, totally embarrassed by her abrupt reaction, she rested her hand on her son’s shoulder. Just as she would have introduced her little guy, the big man gave the child a cautious smile and motioned her toward the building.

  “The main entrance to the living quarters is around back, but we can go through the market. Come on and I’ll show you around.”

  Whatever he thought of her reaction to him, he seemed gentleman enough to ignore it.

  She chose to ignore it, too.

  Living quarters, he’d said?

  “There isn’t a separate house here?” she asked, urging Tyler forward as the sky started to leak.

  “There’s plenty of room to build if that’s what a buyer wants to do. The parcel is a little over three acres. Living on premises has certain advantages, though.” He checked the length of his strides, allowing them to keep up. “Shortens the commute.”

  If she smiled at that, Erik couldn’t tell, not with the fall of cinnamon hair hiding her profile as she ushered the boy ahead of her.

  Mrs. Rory Linfield wasn’t at all what he had expected. But then, the new owner of the building next door to Merrick & Sullivan Yachting hadn’t given him much to go on. He wasn’t sure what the elegant and refined wife of Harry Hunt was doing with the building Harry had apparently given her as a wedding gift—other than providing Erik and his business partner an interesting diversion with her total renovation of its interior. It had been his offhand comment to Cornelia, though, about a place he’d be glad to sell if Harry was still into buying random pieces of property, that had led him to describe the property his grandparents had vacated nearly a year ago.

  The conversation had prompted a call from Cornelia yesterday. That was when she’d told him she knew of a widow in immediate need of a home and a means to produce an income.

  When she’d said widow, he’d immediately pictured someone far more mature. More his parents’ age. Fifty-something. Sixty, maybe. With graying hair. Or at least a few wrinkles. The decidedly polished, manicured and attractive auburn-haired woman skeptically eyeing the sign for Fresh Espresso and Worms as she crossed the wood-planked porch didn’t look at all like his idea of a widow, though. She looked more like pure temptation. Temptation with pale skin that fairly begged to be touched, a beautiful mouth glossed with something sheer pink and shiny, and who was easily a decade younger than his own thirty-nine years.

  He hadn’t expected the cute little kid at all.

  He opened the door, held it for them to pass, caught her soft, unexpectedly provocative scent. Following them inside, he had to admit that, mostly, he hadn’t anticipated the sucker punch to his gut when he’d looked from her very kissable mouth to the feminine caution in her big brown eyes. Or the quick caution he’d felt himself when she’d pulled back and her guarded smile had slipped into place.

  What he’d seen in those dark and lovely depths had hinted heavily of response, confusion and denial.

  A different sort of confusion clouded her expression now.

  He’d turned on the store’s fluorescent overheads when he’d first arrived. In those bright industrial lights, he watched her look from the rows of bare, utilitarian grocery shelving to the empty dairy case near the checkout counter and fix her focus on a kayak suspended from the ceiling above a wall of flotation devices. Sporting goods still filled the back shelves. After the original offer to buy the place fully stocked had fallen through, he’d donated the grocery items to a local food bank. That had been months ago.

  The little boy tugged her hand. “Why is the boat up there, Mom?”

  “For display. I think,” she replied quietly, like someone talking in a museum.

  “How come?”

  “So people will notice it.” She pointed to a horizontal rack on the back wall that held three more. Oars and water skis stood in rows on either side. “It’s easier to see than those back there.”

  With his neck craned back, his little brow pinched.

  “Are we gonna live in a store?”

  “No, sweetie. We’re just...” From the uncertainty in her expression, it seemed she wasn’t sure what they were doing at the moment. “Looking,” she concluded.

  Her glance swung up. “You said this belongs to your grandparents?”

  “They retired to San Diego,” he told her, wondering what her little boy was doing now as the child practically bent himself in half looking under a display case. There were no small children in his family. The yachting circles he worked and played in were strictly adult. Any exposure he had to little kids came with whatever family thing his business partner could talk him into attending with him. Since he managed to limit that to once every couple of years, he rarely gave kids any thought. Not anymore.

  “They’d had this business for over fifty years,” he explained, his attention already back on why the property was for sale. “It was time they retired.”

  The delicate arches of her eyebrows disappeared beneath her shiny bangs. “Fifty years?”

  “Fifty-three, actually. They’d still be running the place if Gramps hadn’t hurt his back changing one of the light fixtures.” Erik had told him he’d change the tube himself. Just as he’d helped with other repairs they’d needed over the years. But the Irish in John Sullivan tended to make him a tad impatient at times. “He can be a little stubborn.”

  “Did he fall?”

  “He just twisted wrong,” he told her, conscious of the quick concern in her eyes, “but it took a couple of months for him to be able to lift anything. Grandma picked up as much slack as she could, but those two months made them decide it was time to tackle the other half of their bucket list while they could both still get around.”

  Her uncertainty about her surroundings had yet to ease. Despite her faint smile, that hesitation marked her every step as she moved farther in, checking out the plank-board floor, the single checkout counter, the old, yellowing acoustic tiles on the ceiling. Watching her, he couldn’t help but wonder how she would do on a ladder, changing four-foot-long fluorescent tubes in a fixture fourteen feet off the floor. Or how she’d wrestle the heavy wood ladder up from the basement in the first place.

  Since
Cornelia had specifically asked if the business was one a woman could handle on her own, he’d also thought his prospective buyer would be a little sturdier.

  Rather than indulge the temptation to reassess what he could of her frame, hidden as it was by her coat, anyway, he focused on just selling the place.

  “The original building was single story,” he told her, since the structure itself appeared to have her attention. “When they decided to add sporting goods, they incorporated the living area into the store, built on in back and added the upstairs.

  “The business is seasonal,” he continued when no questions were forthcoming. “Since summer and fall recreation provided most of their profit, they always opened in April and closed the first of October. That gave them the winter for vacations and time to work on their projects.”

  It was a good, solid business. One that had allowed his grandparents to support their family—his dad, his aunts. He told her that, too, because he figured that would be important to a woman who apparently needed to support a child on her own. What he didn’t mention was that after the first sale fell through, the only other offers made had been too ridiculously low for his grandparents to even consider.

  Because there were no other reasonable offers in sight, he wasn’t about to let them pass up Cornelia’s offer to buy it—if this particular woman was interested in owning it. He hadn’t even balked at the terms of the sale that required his agreement to help get the business back up and running.

  Selling the place would rid him of the obligation to keep it up. Even more important than ending the time drain of weekly trips from Seattle to make sure nothing was leaking, broken or keeping the place from showing well was that his grandparents had been the last of his relatives in this part of the sound. Once the place was sold, he had no reason to ever come back.

  Considering all the plans he’d once had for his own life there, nearly all of which had failed rather spectacularly, that suited him just fine.

  His potential project had yet to ask a single question. He, however, had a few of his own.

  “Have you owned a business before?”

  He thought the query perfectly reasonable.

  She simply seemed to find it odd.

  “Never,” she replied, sounding as if she’d never considered running one, either. Still holding her little boy’s hand, she set her sights on the open door behind the L-shaped checkout counter. “Is that the way to the living area?”

  He told her it was, that it led into a foyer.

  Wanting a whole lot more information than she’d just given, he followed her with the child looking back at him over the shoulder of his puffy blue jacket.

  The instant he met the child’s hazel eyes, the boy ducked his head and turned away.

  With a mental shrug, Erik focused on the mom. She looked very much like the spa-and-Pilates type married to some of his high-end clients. Yet the car she drove was a total contrast—economical, practical. “Are you into outdoor sports?”

  “We have bicycles,” came her distracted reply.

  “Mountain or street?”

  “Street.”

  “For racing or touring?”

  “Just for regular riding.”

  “Do you know anything about mountain bikes?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  That she’d had to ask had him moving on. “What about hiking or camping?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Water sports? Do you windsurf, paddleboard, water ski?”

  “Not really.”

  He took that as a no. “Do you know anything about sporting goods?”

  Clearly on a mission of her own, she answered his last query with a puzzled glance and moved past the stairs, one set leading up, the other down, and into a spacious living room.

  The empty downstairs space was interrupted only by the kitchen’s long island near one end and anchored by a ceiling-high stone fireplace at the other. The bare walls all bore a pristine coat of latte-colored paint.

  It was toward the kitchen that she motioned. “Mind if I look back there?”

  Not at all pleased with her responses, he told her he didn’t and watched her head for the glass-faced cupboards.

  Her sandy-haired son darted straight to one of the large picture windows lining the opposite wall.

  “Have you ever worked retail?” he asked her.

  “Never,” she replied once more.

  “Wow, Mom. Look! It has a park!”

  Rory’s glance cut to where her little boy pressed his nose to the wide window near the fireplace. A large meadow stretched to a forest of pines. Between the dawning potential in the place and the feel of the tall, decidedly distracting male frowning at her back, she hadn’t noticed the expansive and beautiful view until just then.

  What she noticed now was her son’s grin.

  That guileless smile added another plus to her escalating but decidedly cautious interest in what surrounded her. “It sure does, sweetie. But stay with me. Okay?”

  Yanking his unzipped jacket back over the shoulder of his Spider-Man sweatshirt, he hurried to her, his little voice dropping as he glanced to the man who remained on the other side of the white oak island.

  “Does he live here?” he asked, pointing behind him.

  She curled her hand over his fingers. “It’s not polite to point,” she murmured. “And no. He lives somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  “But it’s a long way, huh?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “’Cause he said he came in a plane. It floated here.”

  From the corner of her eye, she noticed the big man’s brow lower in confusion.

  “He came by floatplane,” she clarified, easing confusion for them both. “It’s a plane that can land on water. It flies just like any other.”

  “Oh.” Tyler screwed up his nose, little wheels spinning. “Why didn’t he make him a boat?”

  He remembered what Erik had said he did for a living.

  There wasn’t much Tyler heard that he ever forgot. She’d come to regard the ability, however, as a double-edged sword. While her bright little boy absorbed information like an industrial-strength sponge, there were things she knew he’d overheard that she truly hoped he’d forgotten by now. Things certain relatives had said that had confused him at the time, hurt him and made her even more fiercely protective of him than she’d been even before he’d lost his dad.

  Since no response came from the other side of the island, she told Tyler it was possible that Mr. Sullivan did have a boat, but that it was really none of their business. Right now, they needed to look at the rest of the house.

  There were certain advantages to a five-year-old’s short attention span. Already thrilled by the “park,” Tyler promptly forgot his interest in the boat their guide did or did not have and, like her, poked his head into the pantry, the mudroom and downstairs closets.

  There was no denying his attraction to the cubbyhole he found in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Her own interest, however, she held in check. A person couldn’t be disappointed if she didn’t get her expectations up to begin with.

  The property was nothing she would have considered even a week ago. It had none of the little neighborhood atmosphere she’d looked for. None of the coziness she’d craved for herself and her son. It felt too remote. Too foreign. Too...unexpected.

  Her option was an unknown apartment in an as yet undetermined area near a job she still had to find.

  Her hopes rose anyway, her mind racing as Erik led her back down from the three bedrooms and two baths that would be more than adequate for her and her son.

  Phil had said to keep an open mind about this place.

  Despite its drawback
s, it was, indeed, full of possibilities. But it wasn’t just Tyler’s surprisingly positive reactions or the idyllic views from some of the windows that tempered her misgivings. What Phil hadn’t mentioned was that this wouldn’t just be a place to live. It would be her source of income.

  She could have her own business. Be her own boss. That meant the means to support her son would be dependent on her, not on someone else with obligations or agendas of their own. It would be up to her if she succeeded or failed. And while the thought brought as much anxiety as anticipation, mostly it brought a surprising hint of reprieve.

  She could start over here. She could finally, truly move on.

  By the time they’d worked their way back downstairs, Tyler knew which room he wanted to be his. He wasn’t quite so sure what to make of their tour guide, though. Every time he’d looked over his shoulder to see if Erik was still with them, he’d moved closer to her or tightened his grip on her hand.

  Considering the man’s easy self-assurance, it struck her as odd that he appeared equally undecided about Tyler. Because he’d yet to say a word to her son, she wasn’t sure if he simply didn’t know how to relate to small children or if he was one of those people, like her father-in-law, who felt a child was to be seen and not heard and otherwise ignored until they became of an age to engage in meaningful conversation.

  Maternal instincts on alert, the moment they reached the foyer, she asked Tyler to see if he could spot deer in the woods from the living room window. He was barely out of earshot when she felt Erik Sullivan’s disconcerting presence beside her.

  “Your son seems to like the place,” he pointed out, joining her by the mahogany newel post. “What about you? You haven’t said much.”

  Erik would admit to not being particularly adept at deciphering women, even when they did speak. No often meant yes. Don’t often mean go ahead. Nothing always meant something, though finding out what that something was could be akin to pulling an anchor out of dried cement. But this woman hadn’t given him so much as a hint about any conclusion she might have drawn.