Breakfast With Santa

by Pamela Browning

  Beth grabbed her jacket from its hook by the door before she hurried out of the house. There’d be time to drop the wallet off at Tom’s house before she picked up the duffel at Leanne’s. Besides, she was eager to know if the rest of him was as interesting as his face.

  BETH, SHELTERING BEHIND one of the porch pillars from the cold wind that whipped out of the hills to the north, lifted the heavy brass knocker on Tom Collyer’s front door and let it fall. No answer, only the rattle of dry leaves around her feet. She knocked again. Still no answer. She was on the verge of giving up when Tom finally flung the door open.

  He was naked to the waist, wiping his damp face with a towel, and his eyes widened in surprise. She must have interrupted his shower. Apologizing came to mind, but she was so mesmerized by the mat of curly dark hair on his chest that she couldn’t speak.

  “Hello, come in. Shut the door behind you before the wind slams it. It’s disaster city around here,” he said, wheeling on his heel and taking off before she had even stepped inside. “A geyser erupted in the kitchen a minute before you drove up.”

  “What?” Beth said, closing the door as instructed and staring after him. His hair was thicker and darker than it had appeared in his photo, and it was wet. So was the top part of his jeans, she noted distractedly. The silver buckle on his belt was embossed with the image of a Texas longhorn. His cowboy boots were scuffed and well-worn, like those of a lot of men around Farish. They were wet, too.

  “I really have to—come in, come in—I’d really better get back to Old Faithful,” he said, continuing toward the back of the house with a loose-hipped gait that made him seem extremely limber.

  Beth noticed a narrow stream of water advancing steadily down the hall toward the rug in the living room.

  “Do you have some old rags? Towels? Anything?” she shouted.

  “In the linen closet around the corner to your right,” he called back, and then he said some words that she couldn’t hear but suspected were of the four-letter variety.

  Beth found the towels and tossed them down on the plank floor to block the water from reaching the rug, which to her practiced eye appeared to be a good Oriental. She rushed into the kitchen, where she noted immediately that there was no faucet on the kitchen sink. Water was spouting wildly all over the room; it had drenched the walls, the curtains, the wallpaper border below the ceiling. As she watched, Tom, awkward because his right arm was in the sling, threw a bedspread over the place where the faucet should have been. This stopped the geyser.

  “Can’t you turn the water off?” she asked.

  Tom shook his head. “When they built this house back in the Stone Age, they didn’t install a cutoff valve. I’d have to turn it off at the meter, and I don’t have the right tool to do it. Here, hold this bedspread in place while I get the vise grips. I can crimp the copper tubing under the sink and stop it that way.”

  When Beth attempted to move into position beside him, she inadvertently jostled his bum wrist. He winced.

  “Sorry,” Beth said. While Tom ran out to the garage, she held the bedspread, which was soaked but diverted the water into the drain. In a few moments, Tom returned with the vise grips.

  His expression was rueful. “I can’t do this with only one hand. Could you—?”

  Beth had shifted for herself ever since her husband walked out and left her in charge of a house, a yard, a car and a kid. She grabbed the vise grips and, ignoring the water sloshing around her feet, knelt and stuck her head and shoulders into the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. The vise grips eventually narrowed the soft copper supply pipe until the water flowing from the faucet slowed to a mere rivulet.

  In the sudden silence, Tom helped her up. The sling on his arm and the bandage on his wrist were soaked.

  “Well, you buy an old house, you have to live with its problems, including faucets that go haywire,” he said. “Beth, I’m sorry. You’re drenched.”

  She glanced down at her sodden jacket, her wet leggings, her soggy boots. A substantial stream of water ran between her feet on its way to the foyer.

  Beth dashed the water from her eyes and said, “I guess you’d better start building that ark after all.”

  Tom surprised her by throwing his head back and laughing, a booming laugh that echoed in the house, which she had by this time realized had very little furniture in it. She’d spotted a piano between the dining and living rooms, and beyond that another room, perhaps a den, containing a desk piled with boxes. Stairs led upward from the foyer, presumably to the bedroom area.

  With his good left hand, Tom handed her a towel. “I’m glad you can joke about this kind of thing,” he said as he picked up his shirt from the kitchen table.

  She accepted the towel gratefully and blotted at her face and hair. “Noah kidding,” she said.

  He stared.

  “Is anything wrong?” she said. “Other than the fact that I have all the appeal of a drowned rat?”

  He shook his head and smiled. It was a smile that reached all the way to his eyes, which she now perceived were a deep smoky gray and possessed of a devilish twinkle. “The thing is, I don’t meet too many women who are so quick on the uptake,” he said. “Come to think of it,” he added thoughtfully, “I don’t meet many women at all.” He continued buttoning his shirt, covering up that fascinating thatch of dark hair.

  “Well, that will change soon. After all, you’re new in Farish,” she said, deliberately keeping her tone light. She handed the towel back to him and bent down slightly to peer at her image in the black plastic door of the microwave oven. Her hair was plastered to her head. She tunneled her fingers through the wet mass and tried to fluff it up.

  “I’m not exactly new here. This is where I grew up,” he said, sounding uncomfortable about it.

  She gave her hair a few futile fluffs. “Sorry. I should have remembered. You’ve been away for a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Fifteen years,” he said. “I was sure I’d never be back.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not into small-town life. Everyone knows everything about everybody else.”

  “That can be a plus,” she said. When he didn’t reply, she returned her attention to the matter at hand. “Find me a mop and I’ll help clean up, since I don’t suppose you’d be very good at mopping with that hurt wrist. How’s it feeling, by the way?”

  “Terrible. I’m in agonizing pain. Maybe you’ll stay to help fix dinner?”

  “I can’t. I have to go over to Leanne’s to get a duffel so I can pack for Mitchell to leave on Friday, and then I have to pick him up at his friend’s house and—” Beth caught sight of the clock on the range and realized that Ryan’s mom would be expecting her at any moment. “And I’d better make a short telephone call.” She dug her cell phone out of her purse.

  Tom brought a sponge mop and bucket from the back porch while Beth punched in her friend’s phone number. “Nancy? Beth. I had to run out for a few minutes, so I’ll be a little late picking up Mitchell. No, tell him he can’t stay longer. I have to go by Leanne’s house and then I’ll be right over. Sure, I can drive the day-care carpool Monday. How about trading me for Wednesday? Okay.” She hung up and smiled at Tom’s ineffectual swiping with the mop. “Here,” she said, “you’d better let me wring that out.”

  He relinquished the mop and watched as she squeezed it into the sink.

  “You’re not doing such a bad job,” she told him as she handed the mop back. He was taller than she had remembered, at least six feet.

  “I’m better at this than at playing Santa,” he said, the faintest of smiles crossing his lips.

  “We appreciated your subbing for Eddie,” she told him.

  “Leanne has a way of getting people to agree to things they don’t want to do. You might say she evoked the Santa clause in our unwritten contract.”

  “And the Santa clause is what?” She recognized his pun but kept a straight face.

  “In return for my dear
little sister’s invaluable help in getting me settled here, I’m to fill in for Eddie with the kids now that he’s traveling more in his job.” He started mopping again.

  “You?” she said in surprise.

  “Is something wrong with that?” He eyed her humorlessly, and she regretted her outburst.

  “You don’t seem to like kids very much,” she said, wishing that they hadn’t ventured onto this conversational terrain.

  “On the contrary, I like them a lot.”

  “You do?”

  “In fact, I’m going to be working with kids. At the Holcomb Ranch.”

  Beth’s mouth rounded into an O. She’d heard about this guy around town; he was the former marine who was going to teach rodeo skills to high-risk teenagers. She’d never made the connection between the person who was hired to do that and Leanne’s brother.

  “Leanne never mentioned it,” she told him.

  “My sister, with her five kids, is more likely to discuss the cost of orthodontia than what her brother plans to do for a living. By the way, my dinner invitation is still on the table,” he said.

  She realized with amazement that he was flirting with her, and she found it unaccountably sexy. Her interest zinged up a notch, then swooped back down below normal. No way was she going to be influenced by an overemission of pheromones.

  She drew a deep breath and focused on a heap of uprooted linoleum scraps in a corner. “Tom, I—”

  “All right, so you’re going to say no. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He cocked his head. “Does that mean you will or you won’t?”

  “It means I can’t. I have a lot to do.”

  “We got off on the wrong foot the other day. I’m really a nice guy,” he said, all charm and sincerity.

  “I’m sure,” Beth said. She didn’t want to be drawn into further conversation with this man who was coming across as so appealing, so she edged around the mop and bucket, trying not to notice the way his wet jeans clung to his thighs. The fluffy white beard he’d worn as Santa hadn’t revealed the extreme sensuality of a mouth whose corners were curving upward, a sign that he knew his effect on her.

  “I’m running late,” she said.

  “You haven’t yet told me why you’re here,” he said. He spoke in a low drawl that revealed his native Texas roots.

  She felt the color rising in her cheeks. “I almost forgot—I found your wallet—rather, Mitchell did,” Beth said. She dug it out of her jacket pocket and swiped at the water on it with her other hand. “It must have fallen out of your Santa suit in my minivan.”

  “Thanks, Beth,” he said, and she could have sworn that he deliberately let his fingers brush against hers as she handed it to him. She almost let the wallet drop to the floor in her haste to get away.

  “Tell Mitch I said hi,” he said as she was on her way out the door.

  She turned to face him. “His name is Mitchell.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Good luck with your plumbing problems,” she added lamely. Then she walked quickly down the hall and out the door. Tom followed her, but she didn’t trust herself to linger. He was too charming, too sexy and far too interested to be safe.

  TOM KNEW HE SHOULD GO BACK into the kitchen and start assessing the damage brought about by the unexpected plumbing failure. Instead, he trailed Beth to the door and watched as she backed out of the driveway.

  She had made it clear that she didn’t wish to further their acquaintance. But the way she skipped down his front steps, the set of her chin as she hurried toward her car, the altogether delectable derriere, outlined by those tight leggings as she folded herself into the minivan—he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  When had she said her son was leaving? Friday? Tom consulted the calendar on the back of the pantry door as he unwrapped the wet bandage from his wrist.

  Friday was the sixteenth of December. And Beth was worried about being lonely.

  “Well, Ms. McCormick—” a devilish grin spread across his face “—you don’t have to worry about that. Not at all.”

  He waited fifteen minutes, until he was sure that Beth would have left his sister’s house before he picked up the phone. “Leanne?” he said when she answered. “Remember that housewarming party you wanted to throw for me? Well, I’ve changed my mind. Let’s have it over the holiday. Like on December sixteenth.”

  “That’s awfully close to Christmas. I’ll have a lot of other things to do, and—”

  “Leanne, you owe me.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure of that. It seems to me we’re even.”

  “I stuffed myself into a Santa suit and entertained a bunch of insufferable little kids on short notice. You promised me the moon, Leanne, and all I’m asking is that we have my house-warming party on December sixteenth.” He held his breath.

  “May I ask why that particular date?”

  He exhaled slowly. “Blond hair. Blue-green eyes.”

  There was a stunned silence on the other end of the line. “Beth? Are you talking about Beth?”

  “I’m talking about finally getting into the Christmas spirit,” he said.

  “She doesn’t go out with anyone.”

  “It’s Christmas. ’Tis the season for miracles. I’ll even put up a Christmas tree.”

  Leanne laughed. “The other miracle is that Mitchell will be out of town.”

  “Okay, so we can have the party? I don’t want anyone to bring gifts. I just want a chance to get together with our friends.”

  “You told me you didn’t intend to get involved in Farish social life.”

  “I can deal with it,” Tom said offhandedly. “Providing there are perks.” Like Beth McCormick.

  “Okay.” Leanne sighed. “I’ll do it, but reluctantly. And don’t expect Beth to be there.”

  “I’m sure you can arrange it. That’s the whole point.”

  “Tom—”

  “Sorry, I’ve got things to do.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. ’Bye, Leanne.” And he hung up before she could change her mind.

  ON THE DAY that she drove Mitchell through a drizzling rain to the outskirts of Fort Worth, where his father would meet them to drive their son back to Oklahoma, Beth remained stoic. Mitchell sat beside her in the minivan, coloring in his new Christmas coloring book. Beth kept a conversation going to distract herself from the imminent goodbye.

  “What did you ask Santa for, Mitchell, when you spoke to him at the pancake breakfast?” She and Mitchell would open presents when he returned from visiting Richie, but maybe there was some last-minute item she’d overlooked.

  Mitchell only clamped his lips and went on coloring.

  “Mitchell?”

  No answer.

  “Are you going to keep me in suspense?” They often played the game of coaxing each other to tell something, and usually, her asking this question got a chuckle out of her son, but this time he shook his head and scowled.

  “He isn’t going to bring it,” Mitchell said.

  “Bring what, honey?”

  “What I asked for.”

  “Well, he might.”

  “He seemed like a nice Santa,” Mitchell allowed, “but he said he couldn’t.”

  Maybe that was what had set Mitchell off when he’d been having his chat with Tom, aka Santa Claus.

  “I’m sure Santa does his best,” Beth ventured cautiously.

  “I wonder if his arm got better.” Mitchell put his crayon back in the box. “So he can bring a big sack of toys to everyone.”

  “It’s probably okay by now.”

  Mitchell turned the page. “What I wanted couldn’t go in a bag. I asked him for a real daddy.”

  Beth’s heart filled with dismay. “You have a daddy,” she reminded him gently. “I’m taking you to him right now.”

  “He isn’t a real one,” Mitchell said with annoyance. “He doesn’t live in our house.”

  “I’ve told you over and o
ver, Mitchell, why your father doesn’t live with us.” She’d crafted her explanation carefully, explaining that his parents had decided to live apart because they weren’t happy together, that Richie had found a new wife but still loved Mitchell very much, even as much as she, Beth, loved him. Mitchell had accepted this, she’d thought.

  “It doesn’t matter why my daddy doesn’t live with us,” Mitchell said with extreme patience. “Jeremiah’s father is there to throw baseballs with.” This was typical kid logic, which probably made perfectly good sense to him.

  “There are different kinds of dads, Mitchell. Some travel a lot in their jobs, like Jeremiah’s dad. He’s not really at their house all the time, you know. Some dads go to an office every day. Some work at home. Some take care of their children while the mommy goes to work. You just happen to have the kind of dad who lives far away. But he’s still your daddy, no matter what.”

  “He has Ava now,” Mitchell said darkly. “I bet he’s forgotten all about me.”

  “No, sweetheart, he will never forget you. You’ll find out how glad he is to see you in just—um, about an hour now.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mitchell said, sounding unconvinced as he bent over his coloring book again.

  Beth decided to drop the topic. She’d said all she had to say about it, and discussing the situation generally made her feel worse. She was determined to keep a stiff upper lip today, no matter what.

  She managed all right when she unbuckled Mitchell’s seat belt and kissed him goodbye, holding him close for one long hug. She did okay when he ran to her ex-husband’s Grand Am, which was parked opposite her minivan in the parking lot of a Denny’s Restaurant right off Interstate 35. But when Mitchell clambered awkwardly into Richie’s car, she was close to falling apart. She braced herself to speak to her ex, who slid from his seat to help Mitchell out of his bright yellow rain slicker. Tears welled in her eyes when Richie’s new wife swiveled and treated Mitchell to a big welcoming smile.