A Proposal for Christmas: State SecretsThe Five Days of Christmas

by Linda Lael Miller

  Skyler only shrugged, but when he shifted his attention to Mary Ann and started teasing her his voice was a determinedly cheerful boom.

  Mary Ann gloried in the attention, though she pretended to be outraged, and Toby jumped and leaped in the scratchy snow trail left in the wake of the fallen tree, his cheeks pink, his china-blue eyes shining. How mercifully innocent he was just now, Holly thought, how unaware he still was of the complications that lay ahead in the process of growing up.

  They ate a sumptuous dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and country gravy, biscuits, and green beans that Mrs. Hollis had put up herself. She and Mary Ann talked so easily about farm things; the prices they could get for cream and eggs, the patterns they would use for sewing their Christmas dresses, whether to plant peas on St. Valentine’s Day or later on, in March.

  Holly listened with interest and a sort of weary nostalgia, and when the meal was over, she volunteered to do the dishes. Mrs. Hollis, having worked in the kitchen all day, was obviously tired.

  Skyler and Mr. Hollis and Toby went outside to tie the Christmas tree to the roof of Skyler’s car, and Mrs. Hollis retired to the living room to “put her feet up for a spell.” Mary Ann, her eyes looking everywhere but at Holly, stayed to help with the dishes.

  Holly felt a need to put Skyler’s friend at ease. After all, Mary Ann belonged here, fitting in better than Holly herself ever could.

  “You and Sky have been friends for a long time,” she said quietly, taking up a flour-sack dish towel when Mary Ann had elbowed her away from the sink.

  Now Mary Ann’s dark, beautiful eyes swung to Holly’s face, confused, but wary and full of challenge. “I love Skyler,” she said in a low, earnest voice.

  Holly smiled. “I know,” she answered. “Toby and I won’t be back here anymore after today.”

  There was a silence while Mary Ann absorbed that statement and dealt with it in her own way. Finally, she turned a bright smile on Holly. “It was good to meet you all the same,” she said.

  Holly laughed, and after that, the two women worked in swift accord, putting the kitchen right again in no time at all.

  7

  Toby’s eyes were round and sleepy as he looked up at Holly, and he yawned. “Let’s decorate the Christmas tree,” he suggested, valiant in the face of his fatigue.

  Holly laughed and rumpled his hair. “Tomorrow, sweetheart. After school.”

  With an acquiescent shrug, he turned and scampered up the stairs, stopping midway to look at Skyler and say, “Thanks for taking us to the country. It was real neat.”

  Skyler shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, looking ill at ease and shy. He didn’t truly belong in this house any longer, and that saddened Holly even though she knew it was for the best. “You’re welcome, kid,” he said.

  Holly suppressed a tired smile. Some things didn’t change. “Will you stay for coffee, Skyler?” she asked.

  He shook his immaculately groomed head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Toby was gone by then, busy getting ready for bed. “It’s over, isn’t it, Holly?” he added in a sad voice.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  There was a painful silence, and then Skyler sighed and shrugged his shoulders. When he met Holly’s eyes again, he was smiling with an obvious effort. “I’d better bring in the tree before I go. Where do you want it, Holly?”

  Holly gestured vaguely toward the living room, and Skyler cleared his throat as though he might say something more. Then he ran one hand through his neatly styled hair, something Holly had never seen him do, and turned away without speaking at all.

  * * *

  The tree stood in the corner of the dimly lit living room, leaning, lushly green and fragrant, into the corner. There were no decorations on its boughs just yet, and to Holly, all alone now that Toby was asleep and Skyler had gone home, it was a forlorn sight.

  She sighed, knowing that for all the exercise and fresh air of the day just ending, sleep would elude her. She turned off the living room lights and went into the kitchen, where she poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the trestle table.

  “Coffee,” she mocked herself, lifting the cup. “Just what your average insomniac needs before bed.”

  It was then that the flashing light on the answering machine caught Holly’s eye. Resigned—one couldn’t shut out the world forever—she stood up and crossed the room to her desk, pressing the button marked Play.

  The first voice on the recording was Elaine’s, saying that she had the flu and might not make it to work the next day. The second belonged to Holly’s housekeeper, promising to come in to clean on Tuesday.

  Holly frowned. This was strange. What had happened to those two brief messages from Craig? He’d said he’d called twice.

  A third voice came on, jolting her out of her reflections. David’s voice.

  “Holly, call me, will you please? My number is 555-6782. It’s important, so don’t worry about the time.”

  Holly stood frozen in that lonely kitchen, such a busy place in the daytime but so echoingly empty now. Why should she call David after the way he’d treated her? Hadn’t he made love to her and then said they’d made a mistake and left her alone with her confusion and her conscience? And then he’d come back, saying that he loved her, saying that they needed to talk—and disappeared before they could!

  Something besides the two vanished calls from Craig niggled at the back of her mind but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.

  David answered on the first ring, not with a hello but with his name. And that bothered Holly, too.

  To cover her uneasiness, she blurted out, “David, if this is a game, I don’t want to play! You said we needed to talk before, and then you just left!”

  His sigh came, a raspy sound, over the wire that linked them together so tenuously. “Something came up, Holly, and I had to leave. I’m sorry.”

  Holly sank into her desk chair, turning the telephone cord in the fingers of one hand. “Toby was very upset, David. Do you know why?”

  David hesitated and finally said, “No.”

  He was lying. Holly knew he was lying. But why? Whatever doubts she might have about David Goddard, she was absolutely certain that he would never do or say anything to put Toby in such a state. “You said you wanted to talk,” she prompted coldly.

  “I do. But not over a wire. Holly, could I come over? Please?”

  Holly sighed and glanced ruefully at the Seth Thomas clock on the kitchen mantelpiece. “It’s late, David—after eleven.”

  “Do you think you’ll sleep tonight if we don’t talk?” he asked.

  Holly felt her face flushing. “That’s all we’re going to do—provided I agree to your visit, that is. Toby’s home and—”

  “I didn’t ask you to go to bed with me, Holly,” came the patient reply. “I really do want to talk with you. In person.”

  Holly’s face grew hotter still, and she closed her eyes as memories of David’s lovemaking washed over her in a heated, crushing wave. Perhaps that was what gave her the courage to refuse—if it was courage. “We can talk tomorrow, David. I’ve had a long day, and I’m tired.”

  “Holly—”

  “Tomorrow,” she said firmly.

  “Tomorrow,” he sighed, and then the line went dead. Holly hung up the telephone, frowned at the answering machine for just a moment and then went upstairs to bed.

  Surprisingly, she slept soundly that night, without the dreams that had been troubling her so much.

  Getting Toby off to school in the morning was a madness of lost textbooks and half-eaten oatmeal, as usual. Elaine called to say that she was still sick and definitely wouldn’t be over.

  Once she was alone, Holly eyed the work waiting on her desk with trepidation. Her newspaper column was due in two days and needed to be extensively rewritten, but she couldn’t work up the self-discipline necessary to do the job.

  It was almost a relief when David knocked at the
glass panes in the kitchen door and then let himself in at Holly’s somber nod. By that time, she had lugged the huge boxes of Christmas tree decorations down from the attic and was going through the newspaper-wrapped contents in search of the red-and-green stand.

  “I’m sorry about last Saturday, Holly,” he said quietly.

  Holly’s face heated again, and then chilled. There was a guilty, reluctant look about David, as though he had something important to say, something that he dreaded saying.

  “That’s okay,” Holly lied, turning her attention back to the ornaments and the pieces of the large crèche left her by her grandmother. “Have some coffee.”

  “Where were you yesterday?” David asked, finding the cups and rattling the coffeemaker’s glass decanter against the mug when he tried to fill it.

  It gave Holly a perverse sort of pleasure to answer, “Skyler took Toby and me up to his parents’ farm to look for a Christmas tree.”

  David was silent for so long that Holly finally had to turn around and look at him. Still wearing his brown leather jacket, he was watching her with unreadable indigo eyes, leaning back against the counter as he sipped the too-hot coffee.

  “Are you in love with him, Holly?”

  Holly sighed, unwrapping one of the three wise men and turning the large porcelain figure in her hands. “No. In fact, I told Skyler last night that we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

  There was another silence, broken at long last by David’s noncommittal, “I see.”

  And suddenly Holly was furious. She whirled, the wise man still in her hands, and cried, “Dammit, David, you said you wanted to talk! It was your idea, remember?”

  A half smile curved his lips. “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Talking?”

  “No, damn you, it isn’t! We’re...we’re shadowboxing!”

  David sighed, set his steaming mug of coffee aside and shrugged out of his jacket, laying it over the back of a kitchen chair without particular concern. Holly had a feeling that he was used to expensive things, which the jacket obviously was.

  “You’re right,” he said. “We are sparring. Holly, I meant it when I told you that I love you.”

  Holly’s hands were trembling; she set down the endangered wise man. “So you did,” she finally croaked out, keeping her head averted because there were sudden, inexplicable tears in her eyes and she couldn’t bear for him to see them. “But something is terribly wrong between us, David. I know it. I sense it. You’re keeping something from me.”

  He came to her then and clasped her shoulders in his hands. His throat worked fruitlessly for a moment, as though it were difficult for him to speak. “Whatever happens, Holly, remember that I love you. When we made love the other day—”

  Holly pulled away from him, both drawn to him and frightened. “When we made love, you said it was a mistake,” she reminded him, wounded by the memory.

  The Christmas-tree stand was uncovered, and she pulled it out of the box. David took it from her hands and put it aside.

  “Look at me, Holly.”

  Holly didn’t want to obey, but she did. She had to.

  “I thought I loved Marleen,” he said slowly, his hands on Holly’s shoulders again, firm and strong. “When she left, I hurt for a long, long time. And then it got so that I didn’t feel anything, didn’t want to feel anything. I had a lot of affairs, Holly—I’m not denying that—but until I met you I didn’t think it was possible for me to really care about another woman.”

  One tear sneaked down Holly’s face and she brought one hand up between David’s arms to wipe it away. “Still something is wrong...I...”

  He bent and kissed her briefly, tenderly. “Just trust me, Holly. I know that’s a lot to ask, but I’m asking you.”

  “Something awful is going to happen!” Holly cried, frantic.

  “Maybe. Sometimes things happen that are very painful at the time, but they’re still for the best. And I’ll be on the other side, waiting for you.”

  He was being so damned cryptic! Holly wanted to pound his chest with her fists, to claw out his eyes. Unfortunately, another part of her wanted to take David by the hand and lead him upstairs to that bed where they had made such sweet love, where she had been transformed, if only temporarily, into a woman with no problems, no doubts, no pain.

  David caught her chin in his hand and lifted her face so that she had to look directly into his eyes. “I love you,” he repeated slowly. “Whatever happens, I don’t want you to forget that, Holly. Promise me that much.”

  She swallowed hard. “Tell me what you know, David. Who you are. What do you want—”

  “I want you.”

  “You are being deliberately obtuse!”

  He smiled, but it was a sad smile, and something vital lay broken in his eyes. He released Holly and took up the Christmas-tree stand, turning it slowly in his hands. “I’ll set the tree up for you, if you want.”

  Holly bit her lower lip and then nodded. It was obvious that she wasn’t going to get any more information out of David, but God help her, she didn’t want him to go. Not yet.

  “Thank you,” she managed to say.

  Setting the tree in its stand proved to be just what David and Holly needed to lighten the impossible weight of the situation. By the time Holly was finally willing to admit that the tree was as straight as it could possibly be, they were both laughing.

  While David was washing the pitch from his hands, Holly impulsively lighted a fire in the living room hearth and put on instrumental Christmas music. As if to accommodate her oddly festive mood, a soft snow began to drift past the windows.

  I’m crazy, Holly thought. I’m definitely certifiable. Half an hour ago, I was crying and now, just because David and I put up the Christmas tree, I’m lighting fires and playing music and setting the stage for something that shouldn’t happen.

  David returned, a cautious smile on his face. Without saying a word, he caught Holly’s hand in his, sat down on the couch and pulled her gently into his lap. He smelled deliciously of fresh air and pine, and his blue eyes, often so disturbing, were as warm as the snapping fire on the hearth.

  “I love you, David,” Holly blurted out without stopping to think. How could she think when he was holding her that way, his hands making tender circles on her shoulder blades?

  He laughed. “At last you admit it.”

  Holly was honestly surprised that she hadn’t said the words before. God knew, the truth of them had been as much a part of her as her breath and her heartbeat, almost from the first. “David—”

  He turned her on his lap and kissed her. “Shh. It’s Christmas.”

  Holly was gasping by the time the kiss ended. She knew that her hair was probably mussed and her cheeks flushed. “It is not Christmas—”

  David’s face was buried in her neck, his lips making tantalizing forays along its pulsing length. “Woman,” he groaned, and the word was at once a reprimand and the most flagrant praise. “You argue about everything.”

  The buttons on Holly’s blouse were opening, one by one, and his mouth was following the ever-deepening vee of bared flesh intrepidly. Heat so intense that it bordered on pain surged through Holly as he explored the rounded side of one breast and nuzzled that side of her bra down far enough to bare what he sought.

  “Ooooh,” she groaned as he took brazen nips at the aching nipple and then suckled it. And all her doubts fled before the flames of her passion and his.

  As David undressed her, never really ceasing his tender assault on her throbbing senses, all memory fled. By the time he had subjected her to the scandalously delicious release meant to prepare her for final conquering, Holly couldn’t have recited her own name.

  He did not enter her gently this time, but with a thrust that was fiercely pleasurable for Holly. Her hands moved wildly over the muscle-ridged expanse of his bare back, pleading, urging.

  There was something sweetly wicked about making love on the living room couch, and Holly’s passion was h
eightened by it, as, she sensed, was David’s.

  When the moment of scalding release came, it enfolded them both. David was kissing Holly as they moved together, and his moans of tender defeat echoed inside her mouth, mingling with her own fevered cries.

  They lay entwined for some time afterward, their breathing ragged, their hearts pounding as though to break past flesh and bone and be bonded together.

  This time, to Holly’s enormous relief, there was no talk about their lovemaking being a mistake. And this time David did not leave her.

  No, they showered together, laughing and flinging soapsuds at each other at first, later slipping into passion again. They made love a second time, their bodies still slick with water, on Holly’s bed. After that, they dressed and made a tongue-in-cheek agreement to behave themselves.

  When Toby got home from school, he found them in the living room, sorting the lights that would set the freshly cut Christmas tree aglow. His greeting to David was a whoop of delight and a hurling of his small, solid body into the man’s arms. David laughed and pretended to be falling under the weight, and Holly, watching them both, was more certain of her love for this enigmatic man than ever before.

  They worked, the three of them, until dinnertime, transforming the fragrant tree into a thing of glory. By the time the last glass ball was hung and the last strand of tinsel had been draped from just the right bough, it was dark outside.

  “You can fix dinner now, Mom!” Toby announced magnanimously, his eyes on the shimmering wonder of the Christmas tree. “Us men are starved.”

  David laughed and shook his head. “Us men,” he corrected Toby with mock sternness, “are going for take-out chicken. Your mom has done enough for one day.”

  Holly’s eyes linked with David’s and she blushed. That “enough” didn’t bear recounting. “You don’t have to go out. We’ve got lots of food in the freezer.”

  “Yuk,” Toby complained. “I’m tired of ka-bobs. I want to go with David to get chicken.”

  Both of her men stood watching her, waiting for her approval. “Okay,” she relented, smiling even though she tried to look insulted. “But you stay with David, Toby Llewellyn. Don’t go wandering off and don’t ask for two desserts. Or for pop.”