Five Kids, One Christmas (The Brannigan Sisters)

by Ramin, Terese

  He was definitely not thrilled to find one of her more peripatetic sisters waiting to take him and the kids home, then discover a second one—Twink—at the house "doing something about dinner."

  Like Helen—or perhaps from Helen—he got the distinct impression that plots were in progress. He was pretty sure that whatever they involved, he wasn’t going to like them when they hatched. There was a lot too much innocence and Christian charity going on with Helen’s sisters to be believed.

  When he found one of them counting rooms and musing over the number of beds available, he was certain of it.

  "What’s up?" he’d asked darkly.

  "Nothing," Twink had answered guilelessly—much the way Libby had a tendency to do. Except Twink was a grown–up and Nat’s implied threats didn’t work to get her to reveal what "nothing" was.

  When Nat spoke with Twink’s husband, Rob, that man was of no more help than his wife—but for different reasons. He wasn’t, he assured Nat, positive about what the Brannigans were up to, and the parts he had an inkling of… Well, Nat would have to understand. Rob had to live with the woman, and preparing her brother–in–law for the worst was not allowed, according to his marriage vows.

  Although he did suggest that Nat really should prepare for the worst—and then pray that Rob was wrong.

  "Thanks, bro," Nat muttered moodily. He wondered what Helen had ever done to her sisters that deserved this—whatever this turned out to be—then figured it’d probably be better if he didn’t know. Ever.

  When Helen called, she sounded tired and anxious, concerned about how he viewed her desertion so soon after "well, you know." They couldn’t say much: he had kids wanting to tell her about their day, she had subordinates who weren’t happy she’d been called in to do their jobs for them. They were impatient to get rid of her, which meant they’d prefer her to get off the phone and back to work. She would, she told Nat, call him later, after his class. How late was too late?

  Whatever time she could call wouldn’t be too late, he replied. Then, afraid he’d betray himself with some emotion he wasn’t ready to feel, he handed the receiver to Jane, who was bouncing up and down in her high chair at the table, wearing a spaghetti–sauce face and insisting, "Me talk! Me talk Tern’l."

  Which she did with tremendous excitement and animation, and Helen didn’t understand a word, but that hardly mattered. It was the laughter and the tone of voice and Helen’s exclamations that counted for Jane. For Helen it was listening to her baby share the wonders of life and the revelations of preschool with her Tern’l.

  Details were merely unimportant window dressing that had nothing to do with anything. Love was all that Jane—and Helen—needed to hear.

  When Jane was finally coerced into giving up the phone, Helen spoke with Max, Libby and Cara in backward order. Max had grave questions regarding rescheduling her part of the calendar for the rest of the week and a lot of enthusiasm for a project he was working on at school but couldn’t tell her about because it was for Christmas. Libby wanted the details of Helen’s assignment and volunteered to come north and help her mother expedite the investigation. Cara was full of the field trip and how Toby had behaved and how everyone had liked her outfit and how dad had to sit in the corner and wear the dunce cap ’coz he’d been mouthy in class.

  Zach didn’t want to talk to her at all. When Nat handed him the phone, he managed a moody "Hello" and a few terse responses to the questions Helen asked, then shoved the receiver back. Nat and Helen exchanged brief goodbyes without the chance to speak their minds and hung up, not exactly the better for the contact.

  Certainly they weren’t the worse for it, either, but it did create a rather gnawing ache that felt suspiciously like loneliness and quite possibly something else mixed in for spice.

  Just randy, Nat assured himself, disgusted. It’s not like you’ve never had a wife or a lover before. She’ll be home in a few days. Get over it.

  But he couldn’t get the taste of her out of his mouth or the feel of her off his skin, or the voice, low and deep and sexy in the shower, out of his mind. And when he went upstairs to collect his briefcase and a jacket before leaving the kids with his mother—Grama Kat—and heading off to class, the scent of Helen lingering in their bedroom, in their shower, nearly drove him crazy.

  He was worthless in class, but fortunately he was the only one who noticed.

  He arrived home late to find his mother answering the phone in the hall.

  "Helen," she said briefly, and handed him the receiver as she went to get her coat.

  "Hey," Helen said in his ear, and he knew from the wash of heat, peace and energy through him that what she said wouldn’t have mattered in the least, it was as though he’d been waiting all his life solely to hear her voice.

  "Hey," he said back. "Where are you?"

  "My room." Sultry steam created a geyser of tension, simmered up through his body from his toes. "Alone."

  "I’m not. I just walked in, my mother’s still here. Give me five minutes and call me back? I want to take this upstairs."

  Helen laughed—nervously. Indecently. "Make sure Toby doesn’t let you fall on anything on the steps. I want all of you in working order."

  He was glad he couldn’t see his mother. It saved him the embarrassment of watching her understand from the heat climbing his neck where this conversation with his wife was headed. "Yeah?" The flush had nothing to do with his feeling embarrassed, everything to do with imagination, anticipation and roaring desire.

  "Yeah," Helen said. Nothing about her voice was steady.

  Good, he wasn’t the only one.

  "Five minutes," he told her, and the geyser was there, steaming through the phone wires before he hung up.

  From somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen doorway his mother cleared her throat.

  "So," she said, "you’ll need me again Wednesday night?"

  He nodded. "Appears so. Thanks, Mom, I appreciate it."

  "What about getting the kids to and from school?"

  "Couple of Helen’s sisters have kids in school over there, too." He was uncomfortable. Seemed he was often uncomfortable with his mother anymore. "They’ll help out with Jane and Max, and there’s the neighborhood car pool."

  "Did you talk to your eye doctor?"

  She was lingering, working up to whatever she wanted to say to him with small talk. Gathering information for a conclusion she seemed about to draw.

  "Yes." Another nod. He wanted to head upstairs. Get to it, Mom. "Got an appointment Friday morning at the VA in Ann Arbor. They want to take another look."

  "You going to have the surgery?"

  "I don’t know yet, Mom." He was becoming impatient. "Far as I know the prognosis hasn’t changed, so I’m going to guess no."

  "Will she take you?"

  Ah, they were at it now. She. Helen.

  "Her name’s Helen, Mom, and I imagine she will if she’s here."

  He heard the rustle of a ski parka being put on and zipped, the foot shuffle of hesitation. She was no more at ease with him than he was with her. "You’ll let your father and I know if you need us to drive you?"

  "I’ll let you know, Mom. Here." He moved toward the sound of her, Toby’s harness under his hand, dog at his knee. "Toby and I’ll watch you out to your car."

  "You don’t have to do that, Nathaniel."

  "Yes, we do." He tucked a hand beneath her elbow, urged Toby forward. "Come on, Mom. Dad’ll be worried about you."

  He got her as far as the driver’s side door of her Lexus before she finished what was on her mind.

  "Are you sure you’re all right with this… marriage? Her? You’re sure—"

  "As sure as I can be of anything, Mom. They’re Helen’s kids, too. She wants ’em as much as I do." He planted a brusque kiss on her cheek. "Go home, Mom. Stop worrying. We’re fine."

  "She’s got ambitions, Nat. The Colonel. Helen." She was imitating him. Making a point of the name.

  And the rank.

>   "She won’t quit the military for you or those children."

  Nat nodded. "I think she’d like to make general before she’s fifty. I didn’t ask her to quit and I won’t. For me or them. Especially for them. They need to see somebody with a dream reaching for it. That’s Helen."

  "If she wants to be a general, it’ll always have to come first for her, the same as it did for you when you were still in the navy."

  "Mom—"

  "I just remember reading during Desert Storm about all those military women who lost their marriages and families to their careers. It can’t be any better now and, well, I just wonder if something doesn’t have to give in these situations, if you haven’t been too hasty to accept—"

  Irritation hissed between his teeth. "Go home, Mom. If a problem develops, Helen and I will handle it the best we can."

  "Yes, but, Nat, isn’t her career the reason—"

  Through the open, back porch door he could hear the phone begin to ring.

  "—she lost her ex–husband to your Amanda—"

  He didn’t want to think about this, examine it too closely. There were a whole lot of reasons why he’d lost Amanda, and Helen had lost John—

  "—and they took custody of all the children?"

  —and a million other reasons that the children had gone with them.

  "Go home, Mom. Now."

  He would apologize for his shortness with her later, perhaps, but not tonight. Besides, the things she was saying to him about his marriage and his wife—life—were none of her damned business. Were nobody’s business but his. And Helen’s.

  The phone trilled again. His heart pumped and he turned toward the house, anxious not to miss her call.

  "Phone, Mom. I can’t talk anymore, I have to go. Drive safe. Helen’s waiting for me."

  * * *

  "Helen?"

  She shut her eyes and gladness washed through her at the sound of his baritone in her ear. "You sound like you’ve been running."

  "Damn near killed myself gettin’ here. Wait a minute, I’ve got the cordless. Let me switch phones." He was back in a moment. "How’d everything go today? How close are you on this investigation?"

  "I don’t know, Nat." She sighed, swung her legs up onto the bed in Camp Grayling’s visiting officers’ quarters, stretched her back to unkink it. "Kid’s guilty of something, but I don’t think it’s what he’s accused of. He won’t talk to me, of course, but that’ll change as we go on. Always does. Doesn’t appear as cut and dried as the general painted it, but I should be able to get home at least for the weekend."

  "Good." He hid his relief in playfulness. "I need a ride to the VA on Friday for an eye exam."

  "Oh sure." Her response was dry, derisive, mock–wounded. "Puncture my balloon. Here I thought maybe it’d be my body you’d miss and all you want are my chauffeuring skills."

  "Be nice to have the body here, too. And the hands." She heard his grin in the appreciative, under–his–breath "oh, yeah" that followed. "Don’t believe anybody’s ever scrubbed my front quite the way you and those hands of yours did this morning."

  "Nobody else better be scrubbing your front for you, period," Helen told him severely. Lord, it felt good to talk to him, hear him. His nonsense, his desire, even that undercoating of… Restraint. She shut her eyes and hoped it meant Nat didn’t care for phones instead of what it had meant when she’d started hearing the reserve in John’s voice, even while he was still telling her ‘I love you’ every time she called. "I can be real hard on trespassers."

  "Likewise," he assured her flatly. "Trespassers will be knocked senseless, trussed up and pitched into the nearest lake, if I have to drive ’em there myself."

  "Nat." She was laughing. "And here I thought you were civilized."

  "Not about this." He didn’t say not about you, but that’s what he meant. That’s what he felt, and it scared him. "Anyway," he added, looking to lighten the moment, "this sounds an awful lot like, ‘Ring, ring. Pot, this is Kettle, you’re black.’"

  She gave him mischievous. "That’s not what you said this morning."

  He snorted. "I was out of my mind this morning. And you didn’t seem to mind at all the things I was telling you this morning."

  "I was out of my mind, too. Delirious." Her voice was teasing. "You have one talented tongue, my inventive husband, anyone ever told you that? No…" She reversed course quickly. "On second thought, I don’t think I want to know and they’d better not have."

  He relaxed, chuckling. "Jealous?"

  "I don’t know." She felt and sounded tentative. "Maybe."

  He let that one go without comment. Saying anything would have given him away. Remaining silent was his only defense. He didn’t want this to end like—

  "Nat?"

  There was something in her voice: apprehension, wariness, doubt. He knew that tone. He’d sounded that way himself, once upon a time. "I’m here, Helen."

  "Are you all right with this… Today?" She swallowed. "Is there anything we need to—to discuss? I—I don’t like to sound like this—suspicious, afraid—but well, we’ve only begun a few things and my nagging insecurity makes me ask."

  "Ah, Helen." He laughed uncomfortably.

  He didn’t want to talk about this right now, but barely four and a half days ago he’d let her put her ring on his finger and promised her honesty, given her his ring with the same conditions. Yesterday they’d become lovers, and that shed a whole new light on honesty, complicated the convenient and practical vows they’d exchanged immeasurably.

  Well, they would have to talk about this sometime. Now was as bad a time as any.

  He sighed. "I was a little ticked about not knowing anything about anything until I got back to school and found your sister picking us up, but it goes with the territory, doesn’t it? Uncle Sam never did give his finest much room to maneuver in their personal lives." He shrugged. "I’ll get over it. Mostly, I was angry because I was looking forward to tonight. With you. I wanted to, um, court you a little. Maybe. Ask you for a date."

  "That’s all?" Helen asked. "You don’t need to… I don’t know… Get into it more?"

  John had needed to get into it all the time. Had analyzed her "craving," as he’d put it, to be the best she could be in the army as a need to emasculate all men by outranking them. To be powerful and less than feminine. This was not an easy place to return to so soon into her second marriage.

  Any marriage.

  "No," Nat said quietly, guessing what was on her mind. He hadn’t been able to avoid hearing what other officers—naval and otherwise—used to say about women officers who weren’t nurses in the military. It had bugged the hell out of him then. It bugged him double now, knowing that she badly needed to hear him say that any guilt she felt over her career was her own. He didn’t think she had anything to feel guilty for—no matter what John might have once told her. "I don’t. I don’t think you’re trying to geld anybody—especially me—by being who you are, and I don’t think it makes you less a woman to want to shoot for rank, either.

  "No, darlin’…" His voice was soft, caressing, tender. Passionate. "The only way you’re likely to unman me is when I want you so badly I can’t think straight. Now, for instance. I want you under me, above me, in the kitchen, in the laundry room, in a desert or in a general’s office—any damn place I can have you. You devastate me. You leave me breathless. You always have. How ’bout a date when you get home? Dinner, maybe a concert—the Chenille Sisters are supposed to be in town next week—then parking and necking anyplace you say. Just say. Please."

  Helen’s breath caught, slammed out of her with the force of his conviction. She couldn’t think. Damned man. What was he trying to do to her?

  "Dates make me nervous," she whispered. The whisper shook. Damned insane, lunatic man was going to make her cry. She didn’t cry—army brass didn’t cry. Not under any conditions she knew of. But here she was, choking, tears stuck in her throat. How had he known what she needed him to say? How could sh
e have known what his saying it would do to her? Her insides were churning. Her heart was in her brain, her soul in flames, her emotions demolished. "I can never figure out what to wear and I get all tongue tied and don’t know what to say."

  "Doesn’t matter," Nat told her lightly. With affection. "I can’t see what you’re wearing, you feel fantastic to me in nothing at all and you know you can say anything so long as you say it to me."

  That was it, the final straw. Devastated, had he said she left him? Well, she was downright shattered.

  "Damn you, Nathaniel," she said, and her voice broke.

  Helen Crockett, the lady colonel who thought up scenarios for her sisters to act in, played a meanly physical game of basketball, let him make love to her in the laundry room and who was capable of leaving hardened combat veterans quaking in their boots, was crying.

  * * *

  "Helen? Aw, Helen, don’t."

  She was crying, damn it, and he didn’t know why and he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t hold her, couldn’t do anything but sit here with the phone in his hand and make soothing noises in her ear. It wasn’t enough, damn it to hell.

  It wasn’t enough.

  So he began to talk. About anything that came into his head: the kids, Christmas, the letters to Santa Claus the kids had started writing before dinner—including the one Max had wanted to write in braille for Daddo. Plans for the holidays. He asked her what Christmas traditions she’d grown up with, and when she couldn’t respond with more than a sob and a hiccough, told her about his growing up, the customs Amanda had observed for Zach and Cara before the divorce. Asked her about Christmas stockings and how she thought they should handle things for the kids this year, make the transition for them, incorporate the traditions.

  Told her about Twink casing the house, counting beds and bedrooms. About the kids—Jane and Libby in particular—insisting they wait until Helen got home to go visit Santa at the mall. About the tags their kids had pulled off the parish Giving Tree after this morning’s all school Mass so they could each buy a present for some child needier than they. About how trying to take her place in the household wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.