“I’m just picking up parts from a machinist. I’ll leave earlier and be at the lot about twelve-thirty.” It would take an hour to pick up the tree, an hour plus to get back. That left him plenty of time to drop off the parts at the boatworks, get home, shower, change and get to yet another client’s holiday party. At least this time he didn’t have to pick up a date. He didn’t have one.
“You don’t have to do that, Erik. You’ve done enough,” she insisted, obviously referring to the lights. “We’ll manage.”
“We? You mean you and Tyler?”
“We’re the only we here.”
“Look.” He was really getting tired of the I-don’t-want-to-be-obligated-to-you tone that had slipped into her voice, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to argue with her. “You’ve said you want this Christmas to be good for your son. I assume that means you don’t want him to have memories of his mom having a meltdown because his tree fell off the car and the car behind her hit it and turned it into kindling. Or because the thing weighs a ton and she can’t get it into the house. Or into the tree stand, for that matter. You have a tree stand, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. And I don’t have meltdowns,” she replied. “Especially in front of my son.”
“No. You probably don’t,” he conceded, not at all sure whom he was annoyed with. Her. Or himself. “You just suck it up and try to deal with everything on your own. It’s fine if you want to be independent, Rory. I’m sure you have your reasons for being that way. But this isn’t about creating an obligation, or you owing me if I help you. It’s about Tyler. All I want to do is help with the tree. For him. Okay?”
Silence.
About the time he thought she might simply hang up, she said, “Okay. For Tyler.”
“Good. I’ll be at the lot tomorrow with my truck.” With a glance at his watch, he winced. “Right now I’ve got to get to this payroll. I’ll call you when I’m on my way.”
* * *
He should probably apologize.
The thought crossed Erik’s mind every time he noticed the wary way Rory watched him the next afternoon. He just wasn’t sure exactly what he should apologize for. He hadn’t said a word to her that wasn’t absolutely true. And she’d definitely needed the help.
The rain came in fits and starts. The weather was cold, the temperature dropping, the wind blowing, and the tree Tyler had selected after carefully checking out the small forest under the huge canvas tent was not only the eight-foot maximum she’d given him, but rather wide. Even tied up to make it more manageable and tarped to keep it dry, with the heavy wind gusts, getting it to her place on the rounded roof of her car would have presented a definite challenge. So would the task of her and Tyler unloading the thing and carrying it into the store to get it into its heavy iron stand, a task that involved sawing off a couple of lower limbs and trimming the thick trunk to make it fit before tightening the screws into place.
Mother and son wrestling it into the house on their own would have presented its own set of frustrations. Especially since carrying it into the house through the store—which had been easier than putting it in the stand in the garage and carrying it through the mudroom—involved hoisting the stand end of the eighty-plus pounds of bushy branches, trunk and iron to his shoulder while she brought up the rear with the top end and Tyler ran ahead of them to open the door.
He said nothing about any of that, though. It wasn’t necessary. The process proceeded far easier with his truck and his help, and that was all he’d wanted: to make something a little easier for her and her son—and to offset his guilt over having pushed her about the store to the point where she’d given up sleep.
“Where do you want it?” he asked.
“In the corner by the fireplace. On the towel so the stand doesn’t stain the carpet.”
“Can I help?” called Tyler.
“Just stay back for a minute, sport. I’ve got it.” He told Rory, “You can let go.”
Behind him, Rory stepped back as the weight lifted from her shoulder. With a quiet whoosh of branches and the thud of heavy metal on towel-covered broadloom, the stand hit the floor and the tree popped upright.
The whole room suddenly smelled like a pine forest.
Beside her, her little boy grinned. “It’s really big, huh?”
Not just big. For the space, it was huge, definitely larger than what they would have wound up with had Erik not been with them. Fuller, anyway.
She’d realized within minutes of arriving at the tree lot that what she’d promised her son would have been a nightmare to manage on her own. On their own, they also would have wound up with something more in the five-foot range.
“Thank you,” she said to Erik’s back.
He turned, pushing his windblown hair back from his forehead.
“No problem. This is the fourth tree I’ve hauled this month.” He wanted her to know that what he’d done wasn’t a big deal. Not to him, anyway. Certainly nothing she needed to feel obligated to him for. “The one at work, a neighbor’s and one of Pax’s cousins’.”
“Do you have a tree?” Tyler wanted to know.
“I don’t usually put one up.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m not home in the evenings much this time of year and I go to my folks’ for Christmas.”
Her little boy’s brow pinched. Before he could voice whatever had him looking so concerned, Erik motioned to the single green bin sitting near the fireplace.
“You want the rest of those?” he asked her, referring to the others still stacked in the store.
She started to tell him she could bring them in herself. Thinking it wiser to accept his help than risk resurrecting the tension that had ended their phone call last night, she said, “Please,” and hurried after him to help.
Tyler wanted to help, too, so she had him carry in their new two-foot-high, red-velvet-clad Santa with its price tag still attached while they brought in the bins filled with the lights and ornaments she’d need for the tree.
The only other thing she needed, other than for the heavy caution between them to ease, was to start a fire in the fireplace to take the deepening chill off the room. While Erik went back for the last bin, she crumpled newspaper under some of the kindling she and Tyler had found by a cord of split logs in the lean-to behind the garage.
Erik had barely walked back in when he shot a narrowed glance at the parka she still wore. Tyler hadn’t taken his off yet, either.
“Did you turn off the heat?” he asked, hoping she hadn’t gone that far in her efforts to conserve.
“I turn it down when we leave, but it’s always colder when the wind blows. It just hasn’t been this windy. Or this cold. It’s freezing out there.”
The house had always been drafty. As his grandmother had done on especially cold days, Rory had closed her heavy drapes over the big expanses of glass to insulate from the chill. With the wind that blew the rain against the windows stirring the fabric, he figured he should probably check the weather stripping.
Just not now. For now, all he’d do was make sure she had enough firewood and get out of there.
“There’s plenty,” she assured him when he said he’d bring some in. “Tyler and I carried a load into the mudroom this morning.”
“Can we decorate now?” Tyler asked. “If you don’t have a tree,” he said to the man checking his watch, “you can help decorate ours. Mom said she’d show me her magic ornaments. You want to see ’em?”
“Magic ornaments?”
“Uh-huh. They’re in here.” With his arms still wrapped around the Santa, he bumped his little boot against a bin she’d brought in that morning. “She showed me a heart and a bell. I get to see the rest when we put them on the tree.”
He looked eager and hopeful and was still running on a sugar high fro
m the hot cider and big candy cane he’d been given at the tree lot.
“We’ve kept Erik long enough, honey.” She hated to burst his little bubble, but with Erik frowning at the time, it seemed apparent he was anxious to go. She felt anxious for him to go now, too. Every time she met his glance she had the uncomfortable feeling he was wondering how she would ever manage there on her own. Or thinking about how much longer the project had taken than he’d probably planned. “He said he had to leave by four,” she reminded him. “Remember?”
“But he doesn’t have his own tree, Mom. We’re s’posed to share.”
They were indeed, which left Rory at a loss for a reasonable rebuttal. She didn’t doubt her child’s disappointment. Yet that disappointment didn’t seem to be only for himself. It was as much for the man she sincerely doubted needed anything from them at all.
“I suppose I could stay a little longer,” he said to Tyler, touched by the child’s concern, ignoring her. “How much do you think we can do in thirty minutes?”
“We have to put the lights on before we can do anything,” she pointed out to them both. Thirty minutes would barely get them going.
“Then I guess that’s where we start.” He looked to where she suddenly stared back at him. “Unless you hadn’t planned on doing this right now.”
He had accomplished his mission: delivering the tree. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d even want to stick around and decorate the thing. Especially with Rory stuck somewhere between grateful for his help, not wanting to have needed it and uncomfortable with his presence. Her little boy’s excitement with the process, though, and his innocent desire to share that experience with him held far more appeal just then than heading home to get ready for yet another evening of schmoozing and champagne. Even if he didn’t leave for another half hour, he’d barely be late. He just wouldn’t stop by the boatworks.
Both males expectantly waited for her reply. That Erik seemed to want to stay caught her totally off guard. Considering how he’d practically bolted out the back door the last time he’d been there and how annoyed he’d sounded with her on the phone yesterday, she’d thought for sure that he’d be on his way as soon as he’d delivered Tyler’s tree.
Not about to deliberately disappoint her son, and determined to not upset the precarious equilibrium between her and her mentor, she lifted both hands in surrender. “If we’re doing lights, we need a chair,” was all she had to say before Tyler started pulling off his coat and Erik started heading toward the dining room table.
On his way, he pulled his cell phone from the front pocket of his jeans.
“I need to tell Pax I won’t be in today,” he told her, punching numbers. They didn’t need the parts until Monday, but his partner would be expecting him. “Just give me a minute.”
Taking her animated little boy’s jacket, she slipped off her own and headed into the mudroom to hang them up. As she passed Erik, she heard his easy “Hey, buddy” before he relayed his message, told him where he was and added that he’d see him “later at the party.”
Marveling at the man’s social life, and unsettled to find herself wondering yet again about the woman he’d taken out last week, she walked back into the kitchen moments later to see him still on the phone.
“No, I’m not ‘seriously preoccupied,’” he good-naturedly defended. “I’ve just been getting a tree into a stand. What are you talking about?
“You’re kidding,” he muttered, and headed for the dining room window.
The moment he pulled back the closed drape, she heard a soft ticking against the glass. Little was visible in the gray light beyond. Blowing rain obscured the view.
His brow furrowed. “Turn on the TV, will you?” he asked her.
“What’s going on?”
“Everything’s closing down,” was all he said before she grabbed the TV’s remote.
With Erik joining her on her left, still listening to Pax, and Tyler smashed against her right leg, hugging Santa, the three of them watched the churning weather map on the screen while the authoritative voice of the weatherman warned everyone to stay off the roads. The ticker on the bottom of the screen listed temperatures in various degrees of freezing in Seattle and surrounding areas as the voice went on about predicted accumulations of freezing rain or sleet. Another voice took over as the picture switched to a weather cam with a blurry image of a multicar pileup on I-5.
A viewer video showed the sleet-shrouded image of a ferry rocking at its landing.
“What about the Narrows Bridge?” she heard Erik ask Pax.
The furrows went deeper. “Got it. Sure. You, too, man,” he concluded, and ended his call.
Sensing the adults’ concern, Tyler pressed closer as he looked up. “Is this a bad thing, Mommy?”
It wasn’t good. “It’s okay, honey. The weather is just causing a few problems,” she explained even as more personal complications dawned.
“Nothing you need to worry about, sport.”
Peering around his mom, Tyler looked to the man smiling over at him.
“All you need to worry about is finding a place to put that big guy.” Erik nodded to the Santa that was nearly half Tyler’s size. “Then we can start on the lights.”
His concerns appeased, Tyler plopped his Santa on the floor beside him. Suggesting he put the decoration somewhere a little more out of the way, Erik turned to Rory.
“Pax said they’re closing the airport, bridges, ferries and freeways. The roads are all iced.” His partner had gone over to their client office. The one by Cornelia’s. Now he was stuck there.
Given that the bridge he himself needed to take to get back was closed and that the ferry would be down, he seemed to be stuck where he was, too.
He could usually roll with anything. He just wasn’t quite sure how the woman who’d just drawn a deep breath and turned away felt about having him there for a little longer then she’d expected. She didn’t say a word as she knelt beside one of the bins and popped off the lid to reveal dozens of neatly wrapped strings of lights.
“We’re having soup and sandwiches for dinner,” she finally said.
Lifting out two strings, she stood up, turned to face him. “Since it seems you’re here for the night, you can stay in my room.”
His left eyebrow arched.
Mirroring his expression, determined to prove she could hold her ground with him, Rory added, “I’ll sleep with Tyler.”
Chapter Seven
Rory left the door to Tyler’s room halfway open and paused at the top of the stairs. Her little boy had fallen asleep within seconds of his head hitting the pillow. No surprise considering how exciting the day had been for him and how hard he’d fought to stay awake after supper to finish the tree.
From downstairs, the television’s barely audible volume told her Erik had switched from How the Grinch Stole Christmas to the news.
She hated the ambivalence creeping back as the low tones mingled with the beat of the sleet on the roof, the muffled sound of it pinging against the upstairs windows. The thought of riding out the ice storm in a still unfamiliar house would have had her anxious on a number of levels, had it not been for Erik.
She felt safe with him there. Physically, anyway. And there wasn’t a single part of her being that didn’t want exactly what he had just helped her provide for Tyler: an afternoon and evening of moments he might always remember as special.
That, in a nutshell, was her problem. His presence provided as much comfort as it did disquiet. Tyler had turned to her every time he’d had a question about where an ornament should go, but it had been Erik’s assistance or advice he’d sought if he couldn’t get it on a branch, and his approval he’d wanted with nearly every accomplishment.
She didn’t want him being so drawn to the man.
She didn’t want to be
so drawn to him herself.
Wishing she still had her chatty little boy as a buffer, she headed down the steps, stopping when she reached the foyer.
Erik stood with his back to her, his heavy charcoal pullover stretched across his broad shoulders, his hands casually tucked into the front pockets of his jeans as he faced the talking head on the television. The size of the blaze in the fireplace indicated that he’d added another log. Strewn around him were empty bins and ornament boxes. In front of the sofa, the large, square coffee table held a red candle in a beribboned glass hurricane and the last of the crystal icicles waiting to be hung on the brightly lit tree.
As if sensing her presence, Erik turned toward her. She immediately turned her attention to cleaning up the mess.
“Is he asleep?” he asked.
“We barely got through brushing his teeth.”
“I’m surprised he made it that far.” Seeing what she was doing, and how deliberately she avoided his eyes, he picked up a bin that had held the faux evergreen boughs now draped over the stone fireplace mantel, set it in the entry and put another on the coffee table for her to fill with what she collected.
“Thanks,” she said quietly.
“Sure,” he replied, and finally found himself faced with what he’d managed to avoid the past few hours.
It had felt strange decorating her tree. Partly because he’d never helped decorate one with a small child buzzing around his knees, partly because the feel of the room with her understated touches in it was completely different from what it had been years ago. What he’d felt most, though, was the need to get past her guardedness with him. That caution still tempered her smiles, and made him more conscious of little things like how her animation had died when she’d opened a bin to see a Christmas stocking embroidered with Dad. Her wariness with him wasn’t anything overt. It wasn’t even anything someone else might notice. Probably something even he wouldn’t notice, if he hadn’t known he was responsible for it.
He never should have kissed her. The thought had crossed his mind a thousand times in the past few days, usually right behind the memory of how she’d practically melted in his arms. He’d yet to forget the sweet taste of her, the perfect way she’d fit his body. It was as if the feel of her had burned itself into his brain, leaving nerves taut, distracting him even now.
Her Holiday Prince Charming Page 12