He watched as Tess and the kids scooted down the street, then up the walk, the snow frosting three dark heads. Miguel clutched a small bouquet of supermarket flowers; Tess was carting something in a Target bag. At the bottom of the porch steps, she glanced up, saw him, and looked—he was guessing—ready to turn right back around.
“Let me guess. Your mother didn’t tell you we were coming.”
“Oh, no. She did—”
“How come you’re mad, Eli?”
Embarrassment slicing through him, Eli smiled for the boy, aching to brush the snow off those soft curls. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“Your constipated expression?” Tess said sweetly.
Sighing, Eli stood aside to let them in, the scent of Tess’s shampoo or skin stuff or whatever it was cutting straight through the roast turkey and woodsmoke smells saturating the house.
“Miguel!” Eli’s mother yelled over the roar of conversation and laughter. “You made it! Come see all the pies, sweetie….”
“Will I ever see him again?” Tess asked, first handing Julia, then the bag, to Eli so she could shuck off her knee-length sweater, which Granny Garrett whisked away, beatific smile affixed to her wrinkled face.
“Um…thank you!” Tess called after her, then took her daughter back, brows raised.
“Mom assigns both grandmas a task to keep them out of trouble,” he said. “GG’s is cloakroom duty.” They stood there, gazes locked for way too long, until Eli finally said, “Think we can get through this like grown-ups?”
“I’m game if you are.”
Okay. On the count of three…two…one…Smiling, he lifted the bag. “What’s in here?”
“Biscochitos. I don’t usually make them this early, but I had all the ingredients so I thought, what the heck. My grandmother’s recipe. Hard-core traditional.”
“You made these yourself?”
“With my own widdle hands, yep. Hey, they’re not for you—”
But he’d already filched one of the Mexican sugar cookies from the bag and bitten into it, savoring the spicy blend of cinnamon and anise. “God, those are good.”
And God, he loved the way her eyes lit up. “Not everybody likes them.”
“No accounting for the idiots of the world,” he said, this time getting a smile. Emboldened, he took another cookie. “I could happily live off these the rest of my life.”
“Which would be short since they’re made with lard. A health nut, Abuela Essie was not. Which might account for her checking out when I was four.” The baby propped on her hip, she snatched the bag from his hands. “Geez, leave some for everybody else. Here, keep an eye on the baby while I go see if your mom needs any help.”
With that, she plopped her mini-me into his arms and vanished into the crowd, leaving Eli frowning after her.
Missing her.
Hell.
Then he looked down into a pair of dark, guileless eyes designed to make people fall in love with her, and the baby grinned at him, yawned and snuggled into his sweatshirt with her thumb in her mouth…and Eli’s heart shuddered and sighed and just plain gave up the good fight.
Things weren’t exactly going according to plan. At all.
“Oh, no, honey—I don’t need any help, everything’s under control…”
Tess forcibly wrenched the potato masher out of Donna’s hands, then carted the Dutch oven filled with crumbling boiled potato slices over to the counter, shoving aside an untold number of dirty bowls and pans and empty cans and open sugar bags and a hundred other victims of the woman’s generous soul to set it down. In the center of the kitchen table sat a magnificently browned turkey the size of Wisconsin, surrounded by at least six pies and a dozen casseroles of green beans and stuffing and corn and what looked like at least three different sweet potato dishes.
“I can do this while you make the gravy,” she said to the obviously frazzled woman, her hair reminding Tess of the tail feathers on Micky’s paper turkeys.
“Now, honey, you’re a guest—”
“Donna? From one control freak to another—you’re never gonna win this battle. So you may as well give up now and save yourself the breath.”
After a moment, Eli’s mother laughed, then dumped a cup of flour into the turkey pan and took a whisk to it. “No matter how early a start I get, the last twenty minutes always turn me into a basket case. And I’ve never had anybody able or willing to help before—the boys are useless, the lot of ’em—so…thank you.”
Tess grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge, poured some into the potatoes. “My pleasure.”
The women worked in silence together for a few minutes, Tess mashing and Donna stirring, until Tess pronounced the fluffy, buttery potatoes done and started in on clearing some of the debris from the counter.
“Oh, no, just let that sit…it’ll all wait until after dinner—”
“Yeah, that’s the thing about dirty dishes,” Tess said, sticking a gunked-up pot under the hot running water. “They don’t escape out the back door while you’re eating. Think how much better you’re gonna feel when you come back in later and see most of this done—”
She squawked when the older woman clamped her hands around her shoulders and steered her away from the sink and back toward the living room. “You’re an angel, but I didn’t invite you here to play scullery maid. Now get your cute little self out there and mingle. Silas?” she called out when she opened the door. “You mind taking Teresa off my hands? She wandered in here and can’t seem to find her way out again.” When Eli’s grinning older brother came near, a little boy attached to each long leg, Donna said in a stage whisper, “I think she’s shy.”
Tess squawked again, but Donna had already vanished back down her rabbit hole. Then it hit Tess which brother she’d been foisted on.
“Oh, God, Silas,” she said, as Miguel appeared, commandeered both little boys and disappeared again into the crowd. “I’m so sorry—”
“S’okay, throwing women in my direction is what Mom does. At least you’re a lot prettier than most of ’em,” he said with a wink. Briefly touching her elbow, he nodded toward an old-fashioned buffet loaded with soft drinks. “Want something to drink?” He leaned over and said in a low voice, “There’s beer out in the garage, but on account of the church folk we kinda keep it under wraps.”
Tess laughed, admitting to herself that between the company, the food smells and the warmth she was feeling almost mellow. “Hit me up with the orange stuff. I haven’t had that in years.”
Silas dumped ice into a plastic cup, the drink fizzing and foaming when he poured it in. “You keepin’ your distance from my brother?” he said as she took her first sip, sending bubbles up her nose.
After coughing for several seconds, she gave him a sharp, if watery-eyed, look. “That obvious, huh?” she choked out.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Where is he anyway?” she asked, scanning the throng.
“Do you care?”
“Only because he has one of my kids.”
“Over there,” Silas said, gesturing with his can of Dr Pepper to the back corner of the room, where Eli sat on the sofa in a shadowed corner, Julia totally sacked out in his arms and his expression awestruck. Tess froze, squeezing the flimsy cup so hard the ice rattled. “As you can see,” Silas said softly, “she’s in very capable hands.”
“I don’t get it, Si. He’s obviously great with kids—”
“Crazy about ’em.”
“So why—?”
“You’d have to ask him that,” Silas said as his mother hauled in Big Bird from the kitchen, a bright smile lighting up her flushed face.
“Let’s eat!” she said, clunking the bird onto the table amid assorted “About damn time!” and “Oh, my—you outdid yourself this time, Donna!” and “What did she say?” from at least two of the old ladies.
“Is there somewhere Julia can sleep while we eat?” Tess asked, eyeing the throng swarming the table like locusts on the last ear of cor
n.
“Back bedroom. Mom keeps toddler beds and a crib in there for the grandkids. Should I save you a seat?”
“Yes, please,” she said, feeling like a salmon fighting its way upstream as she squeezed through the masses toward Eli and her sleeping child.
“Hate to disturb the two of you,” she said, bending over her baby, “but trust me, we’ll all be happier if I put her down during dinner.”
“I can—”
“You don’t know the secret move,” she said, scooping the unconscious child into her arms.
“I’ll save you a place then?”
“Not necessary, I’m sitting next to Silas,” she said, then started down the hall….
…Eli’s gaze boring into her back the whole way.
“Okay, Mr. Grumpy Gus,” Eli’s mother said when, some time later, Eli unceremoniously dumped the platter with the decimated turkey carcass on the kitchen table. “What’s up? You glowered all the way through dinner.”
“Did not,” he said, annoyed as all hell.
“Did, too. And if my guess is correct,” she said, setting a stack of dessert plates on the table, “Tess sittin’ beside Silas had something to do with that.”
“That’s nuts,” he said, and his mother laughed, and Eli ripped off the lone wing and jabbed it in his mother’s direction, only to decide he didn’t want it anyway. “Call me crazy,” he said, wiping his hands on a paper towel, “but I thought you invited Tess to fix her up with me.”
“I didn’t invite her to fix her up with anybody,” Donna said, spooning coffee into the supersize maker, also borrowed from church, adding, “And don’t you go snorting at me, young man,” when Eli snorted. “You made it perfectly clear you weren’t interested. I do listen, you know.”
Eli tried to hold in the laugh, he really did. Didn’t work.
“Lord,” Donna said, lifting her eyes to heaven, “what did I do to get such children?”
“What did we do to get such a mother?” he said, giving her a hug and grabbing the can of whipped cream, shaking it and squirting it directly into his mouth.
“Give me that, for heaven’s sake—anyway,” she said, setting the can out of his reach, “then Tess came in and started helping me in the kitchen, and Silas was just sort of there, and you wrote yourself out of the script, so I might’ve…taken advantage of the opportunity. She’s a lovely young woman, Eli,” she said when he glowered. “I’d be pleased as punch to have her in the family.”
“Doesn’t matter which brother she marries, as long as one of us does. Is that it?”
“Honey, the way she attacked these pots and pans?” she said, jamming them—now clean—back into a lower cabinet with much crashing and rattling, “I wouldn’t mind if your father married her.”
“You might have a better chance with him than either one of us.”
“That’s what worries me,” she said, straightening, face glowing and hair wild. “No, I take that back, what worries me is you sittin’ there, looking like you just drank bleach because Tess is sitting with your brother, instead of doing something about it.”
“Like what?”
“Pulling your head out of your butt would be a good place to start. And don’t you dare walk outta here without taking those dessert plates with you!”
Halfway to the door, Eli turned, grabbed the stack of plates and stormed out, practically chucking them at the buffet—now lined with pies—before continuing on outside, not even caring how cold it was.
Except Tess had beat him to it, standing on the front porch and looking up at the stars that’d come out after the piddly snow, all wrapped up in one of the half-dozen fleece throws that graced the living-room furniture.
He could feel her loneliness from ten feet away.
Or maybe that was his.
Tess had actually made it all the way through dinner before succumbing to goodwill overload, from having years of shattered dreams shoved in her face, however unwittingly. Mocked, that’s what she felt—not by anyone inside the house, certainly, but by life or fate or whatever you wanted to call it. How nice it would’ve been, she thought on a harsh sigh, to simply enjoy the evening without envy’s nasty little tentacles wrapping themselves around her neck.
The porch floorboards creaked behind her; she jerked around in time to hear a deep, annoyed, “You trying to freeze to death or what?”
She snuggled farther into the fabric’s soft, deep pile. “This thing is amazingly warm, actually.” As was Eli’s voice. And his body heat when he came closer. Drat.
“Baby still asleep?”
“Out like a light. One of your grandmothers is with her. Not the cloakroom attendant, the other one.” She smiled. “Something tells me the old girl would fend off a grizzly bear to protect the baby.”
“You’d be right. And Miguel?”
“With Silas’s boys. They adore him. And he loves having them look up to him. I haven’t seen him that happy in…a long time.” She glanced in his direction, but this far from that obnoxious porch light, the dark cloaked his features. “I had a great time tonight, too,” she said, because she really had, the nasty tentacles notwithstanding. “I’m really glad I came.”
“So I gathered.”
Tess frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“No!” Then Eli released a mighty sigh. “Except me acting like a cranky toddler.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Good—”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, realizing. “You’re not ticked because I sat next to your brother?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course not—”
“You are! I’m really good at reading body language and—”
“You’re really good at everything, aren’t you?” But before Tess could even sort out the rudeness from the obvious hurt—a hurt that she suspected went way deeper than some imagined jealousy over his brother’s being her dinner companion—Eli gave his head a hard shake, backing toward the door. “You know, I should retreat now before I make any more of an ass of myself—”
“No, don’t,” Tess said, grabbing his hand, just to keep him from leaving—God knew why—only when she let go Eli grabbed hers back, then tugged her to him, his gaze touching hers for about half a second—barely long enough for a Wha—? to skate through her brain—and lowered his mouth to hers.
She tensed, startled, then thought, What the hell? and kissed him back, no grappling involved, no body parts touching except lips, the merest suggestion of tongue, their linked hands…and Eli’s strong, rough fingers on the nape of her neck. Whee, doggie, she kissed him back, and he kissed her back more, and basically she turned into one big quivering mass of goo.
Just from his lips touching hers? Holy cow.
When it was over—much too soon—Eli chuckled again, sheepish, and Tess had to grab the railing, she was quivering so badly.
“This isn’t working, is it?” he said, and Tess barked out a laugh.
“Our staying out of each other’s way? No. Apparently not.”
“And I just made an ass of myself again, didn’t I?”
“Didn’t exactly fend you off, did I?”
“It was the moment, right?”
What is this, twenty questions? she thought, then said, lightly, “Life’s made up of moments,” before turning away from him, from the confusion and frustration in his eyes. From her own, boiling up inside her like lava. She hesitated, then said, “And I probably shouldn’t say this…but that was one of the nicer ones.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” Tess felt a wry smile stretch across her cold cheeks. There hadn’t been a whole lot of kissing that night at his place—not lips on lips, anyway—because that would’ve been too intimate. Too personal. Too real. She blew out a sigh. “But just for your information—” and to smartly tiptoe out of this minefield “—I’m not good at everything. I’m used to making all the major decisions impacting my life and my kids’, yes, but there’s a lot of stuff I totally suck at.”
He crossed his arms. “Like what?”
Her laugh came out sorta shaky. “After three years I still can’t figure out my damn cable remote. And I can’t bake a cake worth a damn. Or climb a ladder without getting dizzy. And I let your brother do my taxes because I’m petrified of making a mistake and bringing the wrath of the IRS down on my head. So, see? Not perfect.”
“You kill your own bugs?”
Another laugh bubbled out. “Actually I do the catch-and-release thing. Although there’s been this spider living up near the ceiling in my kitchen for months.” She shrugged. “Like a bug zapper without that annoying zzzzzzt every five seconds.”
Eli watched her for a moment, his mouth working, before touching her arm. “Come on, I got something to show you.”
“What? Where?” she said as he started down the steps. “Wait—I can’t just leave the kids without telling somebody where I am—”
“Meet me at the shop in five,” he said, then paused. “Although if you don’t, I’ll completely understand.”
Several beats passed as she watched him, weighing her options. Having no idea what the consequences were to any of them. What the kiss had meant, what going with him now would mean. Something told her he had no clue, either.
“I’ll be there,” she said, then hurried inside to check on her kids to make sure they were happy and safe.
Her own safety, however, was another issue entirely.
Eli had no idea what he was doing.
Yeah, like that was news, he thought as he unlocked the shop’s front door, the fluorescent lights buzzing to life when he hit the switch. Why on earth he’d kissed Tess, why he’d asked her to come here, now, since she’d see the table at the house tomorrow anyway…Definitely not the actions of a sane, rational man.
Uh, yeah. What had all that been about regaining control of his life—?
“Knock, knock.”
He turned, drinking her in. Realizing he’d lost the battle…and that surrender had never felt so good.
She’d ditched the throw and was back in her megasweater, but she crossed her arms over her ribs, shivering. “Why does it feel colder in here than outside?”
A Marriage-Minded Man Page 14