The Unexpected Holiday Gift

by Sophie Pembroke

  ‘For Mum?’ he asked with a frown.

  ‘No. For Heather.’ Clara sighed. Jacob had a feeling she was starting to regret her insistence on taking him shopping.

  ‘She’s a student,’ he pointed out. ‘She wouldn’t wear something like that.’

  ‘She graduating this summer, right? So she’ll have interviews, internships, all sorts of professional opportunities coming her way. A statement accessory like this can make any outfit look polished.’ As always, Clara had a point. He’d almost forgotten how irritating that was.

  ‘Maybe,’ he allowed. But Clara was already walking on, probably in search of an even more expensive gift for his sister. He didn’t begrudge spending the money but he was beginning to think this was some sort of game for Clara. She’d certainly never encouraged him to buy such luxurious gifts for her.

  The high-end shopping district Clara had directed the taxi to was filled with tiny boutiques, all stocking a minimum of products at maximum cost. Even the Christmas decorations strung between the shops on either side of the street, high above the heads of the passing shoppers, were discreet, refined and—Jacob was willing to bet—costly.

  ‘Is this where you usually shop for your clients?’ he asked, lengthening his stride to catch up with her as she swung into another shop.

  Clara shrugged. ‘Sometimes. It depends on the client.’

  Which told him nothing. Jacob wasn’t entirely sure why he was so interested in the day-to-day details of her job, but he suspected it had something to do with never realising she wanted one. He’d thought he’d known Clara better than anyone in the world, and that she’d known him just as well. It had been a jolt to discover there were some parts of her he’d never known at all. What if this entrepreneurial side of her was just the start?

  Of course, for all that he’d shared with Clara, there were some things he’d kept back too. He couldn’t entirely blame her for that.

  ‘This would be just right for your father.’ Jacob turned to find her holding up a beautifully wrought dark leather briefcase, with silver detailing and exquisite stitching. She was right; his father would love it. Except...

  ‘He won’t be coming in to the office much longer.’ It still caught him by surprise, almost daily. In some ways, he suspected he was in denial as much as Heather; he wanted to believe that if he could just make Christmas perfect then the rest would fall into place.

  But he couldn’t save his father’s life. Even if a part of him felt he should be able to, if he just worked long enough, tried hard enough. If he was good enough.

  Jacob knew he’d never been good enough, had known it long before his father fell sick.

  Clara dropped the briefcase back onto the shelf. ‘You’re right. Come on.’

  Even Jacob had to agree the next shop was spot on.

  ‘You want something your dad can enjoy.’ Clara opened her arms and gestured to the bottles of vintage wine lining the shelves. ‘From what I remember, this should suit him.’

  Jacob smiled, turning slowly to take in the selection. ‘Yes, I think this will do nicely.’

  One in-depth conversation with the proprietor later, and Jacob felt sure that he had the perfect gift for at least one member of his family, ready to be delivered directly to Clara’s offices in time to be shipped up to Scotland.

  ‘How are they all?’ Clara asked as she led him into a tiny arcade off the main street. The shops inside looked even more sparse and expensive. ‘Your family, I mean. The news about your dad... It must have been terrible for you all. I can’t imagine.’

  ‘It was,’ Jacob said simply. ‘It still is. Mum... She takes everything in her stride—you know her. But Heather’s still hoping for a miracle, I think.’

  Clara looked sideways at him. ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted. ‘It’s just too hard to imagine a world without him.’

  Watching as she paused by a display of necklaces, Jacob remembered the first time he’d brought Clara home to meet his family—just days after their elopement. He remembered his mother’s shock and forced cheer as she realised she’d been done out of the big wedding she’d always imagined for him.

  But, more than anything, he remembered his father’s reaction. How he’d taken him into his study and poured him a brandy in one of the last two crystal glasses handed down from James’s own great-grandfather. A sign of trust that had shocked Jacob’s hands into trembling, even as he’d reminded himself that he was grown up now. A married man.

  ‘You’ve taken on a big responsibility, son,’ James had said. ‘A wife is more than a lover, more than a friend. More even than family. She is your whole world—and you are responsible for making that world perfect.’

  He’d known instantly what his father was really saying. Don’t screw it up this time. Remember what happened last time we gave you any responsibility. You can’t take that kind of chance again.

  And he hadn’t. He’d thought that Clara—easy-going, eager to please Clara—would be safe. She was an adult, her own person, after all. Far less responsibility than a child, far harder to hurt. He’d tried to make things just right for her—with the right house, the right people, the right levels of success. But, in the end, he’d done just as his father had so obviously expected him to, that day in the study drinking brandy.

  Why else would she have left?

  ‘They must all be looking forward to this Christmas together, though?’ Clara had moved on from the necklaces, Jacob realised belatedly, and he hurried to join her on the other side of the shop.

  ‘I haven’t told them yet,’ he admitted, admiring the silver-and-gold charm bracelet draped across her fingers.

  Clara paused, her eyebrows raised ever so slightly, in that way she always had when she was giving him a chance to realise he was making a mistake. Except he was giving his family a dream Christmas. What was the mistake in that? How had he screwed up this time?

  ‘Don’t you think you’d better check with them before we go too much further?’ Clara went on, her eyebrows just a little higher.

  ‘I want it to be a surprise,’ Jacob said mulishly.

  ‘Right. Well, if that’s how you want to play it.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Fine.’ Somehow, just that one word made him utterly sure that she thought he was making a mistake. Now she had him second-guessing himself. How did she do that?

  She was almost as good at it as his father was.

  ‘So, beyond the wine we’ve already ordered, what would James’s perfect Christmas look like?’ Clara asked, and suddenly Jacob felt on surer ground again.

  ‘That’s easy,’ he said with a shrug. ‘He always says the best Christmas we ever had was the one we spent in Scotland, just the family, spending time together.’

  ‘How old were you?’ Clara asked.

  ‘Fifteen, I think.’

  ‘Okay, so what did you do that Christmas?’

  ‘Do?’ Jacob frowned, trying to remember. ‘I mean, there were presents and turkey and so on.’

  ‘Yes, but beyond that,’ Clara said with exaggerated patience. ‘Did you play games? Charades or Monopoly or something? Did you sing carols around a piano? Did you open presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning? Were there cracker hats? Did you go to church? Were there stockings? Did you stay up until midnight on Christmas Eve or get an early night? Think, Jacob.’

  ‘Cluedo,’ Jacob said finally. ‘That Christmas was the year we taught Heather to play Cluedo. Sort of.’

  Suddenly, the memory was unbearably clear. Sitting around the wooden cottage kitchen table, Heather watching from her dad’s lap, him explaining the rules as they went along. Jacob wanted to take that brief, shining moment in time and hold it close. That was what he wanted his father’s last Christmas to be—a return to the way things used to be. Before the
accident. Before everything had changed for ever.

  Clara beamed at him. ‘Wonderful! There’s a shop down here somewhere that sells high-end board games—you know, gemstone chess sets and Monopoly with gold playing pieces. I think they had a Cluedo set last time I was in... Come with me!’

  Jacob followed, wondering if the board would be made of solid gold, and whether his perfect Christmas might actually exhaust even his bank accounts.

  Maybe then it would be good enough for his father.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I KNEW THIS WAS a bad idea,’ Clara grumbled, tagging yet another email from Jacob with a ‘deal with this urgently’ flag. If five hours of Christmas shopping hadn’t convinced her that his demands were going to require going far above and beyond the usual levels of customer service, his half hourly emails since certainly had. ‘Why on earth was he sending me emails at four a.m.?’

  ‘Because he couldn’t sleep, thinking about you?’ Merry suggested.

  Clara pulled a face. Merry’s new enthusiasm for her ex-husband wasn’t encouraging either. Just because he’d sent flowers and chocolates the day after they had signed the contract. Her friend was cheaply bought, it seemed.

  ‘More likely he was still at the office and counts emailing me about Christmas as taking a break.’ She was almost certain he’d slept at his desk the night before she’d taken him shopping. It had happened often enough towards the end of their marriage that she’d begun to suspect an affair—until she’d realised he wouldn’t have time in between meetings. ‘Trust me, he’s only thinking about what we—as a company—can do for him.’ All business; that was Jacob. It always had been.

  ‘Then why send the flowers?’ Merry asked, rummaging through what was left of the box of chocolates for one she liked. ‘I mean, flowers are personal.’

  ‘Not when he had his assistant send them.’ Clara dived into the chocolates too. There was no point in letting Merry have all the soft centres just because she was still mad with the man who’d sent them.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Merry asked around a mouthful of caramel.

  Clara shrugged and picked out a strawberry and champagne truffle. Divine. ‘That’s just what he does,’ she explained. ‘Our last Christmas together, he gave me this really over-the-top diamond bracelet.’

  ‘Damn him,’ Merry said, straight-faced. ‘What kind of guy gives a girl diamonds for Christmas?’

  Clara glared at her. Merry knew better than most that she wasn’t a diamonds sort of girl. She liked her jewellery small, discreet and preferably featuring her birthstone. And, since Merry had given her a pair of tiny garnet earrings for her birthday last year, she clearly understood that better than Jacob ever had.

  ‘The diamonds weren’t the worst part.’ She could remember it so clearly, even so many years later. The weight of the heavy gold clasp and setting on her wrist, the sparkle of the stones, the awkward smile she’d tried to give. And then the moment when she’d looked back into the jewellery box it had come in. ‘I found a note, sitting next to the bracelet. It was from his assistant, saying she hoped this would do for his wife’s Christmas gift.’

  ‘He had his assistant choose your Christmas present?’ Merry asked, incredulous.

  ‘Why not?’ Clara asked. ‘That’s how he does things, after all. He’s a businessman. It’s all about delegating the unimportant tasks so he can get on with the ones that matter.’ That bracelet had been her number one reason for forcing him to go Christmas shopping with her. His father deserved that much.

  ‘So diamonds, in this instance, were a sign that you didn’t matter.’

  ‘I clearly didn’t even matter all that much to his assistant,’ Clara replied. ‘If her note was anything to go by.’

  Merry pushed the box of chocolates towards her and Clara dug out another strawberry truffle. It was strange, but the image that next came to mind wasn’t of that Christmas, no matter how dreadful she’d felt in that moment. It was of another Christmas, a few years after her mother’s remarriage, after the twins were born. Her half-siblings would have been maybe eighteen months old to Clara’s thirteen. As she’d unwrapped the one present under the tree with her name on it to find a pair of pyjamas—pink, with roses on, and two sizes too small—she’d watched as the toddlers dived into a mountain of wrapping paper, brightly coloured plastic and all-singing, all-dancing toys and tried not to feel jealous.

  Of course, even that year had been better than the following one—when her father had called to say she couldn’t come and stay for Christmas after all because his new girlfriend wanted it to be just the two of them. And both of those memories were trumped by the first Christmas after she’d left for university, when her mum and stepdad had taken the twins to Lapland for the festivities, leaving Clara behind.

  ‘You’re eighteen now! You don’t want to come on holiday with us. You should be with your boyfriend, or your friends!’

  Never mind that she hadn’t had either.

  Christmas, Clara mused, had always been a complete let-down—until the year she’d met Jacob on Christmas Eve, when she was twenty-one. They’d been married by Valentine’s Day.

  She’d thought she’d never feel unwanted again. How wrong she’d been.

  Merry’s voice broke through her thoughts and she realised she’d just eaten four chocolates in quick succession. ‘What did he say when you asked him about the bracelet?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Clara admitted. ‘I know, I know, I should have confronted him. But it was Christmas Day, his family were all there...and besides, by the time I could have got him alone to ask, he’d already gone back to work.’

  ‘Suddenly I have a better understanding of why you left this man.’ Not just once, but many times—although Clara didn’t really want to go into that sort of detail with Merry. Besides, every other time she’d left, she’d gone back, so they didn’t really count.

  ‘I left the bracelet too.’ Clara could still see it sitting there on the dressing table, a symbol of everything she didn’t want from her marriage. ‘I walked out the next day.’ And almost had a breakdown when she discovered she was pregnant two weeks later.

  ‘Is that why you left?’ Merry asked. ‘I mean, you’ve never really spoken about it. All you said was that you couldn’t be married to him any more.’

  ‘It was part of it, I suppose,’ Clara said. It was hard to put into words the loneliness, the isolation and the feeling of insignificance she’d felt pressing down on her. Jacob had so many things in his life; she was just one more. But she only had him, and the big, empty white houses he owned across the world. And when she’d thought of having more...he’d shut her down completely.

  It had reached the point where she couldn’t even bring herself to ask for what she wanted because she didn’t want to risk driving him further away. But that didn’t stop her wanting. She remembered watching mothers with their babies in prams during the long seven days that summer when she’d thought she might be pregnant. She remembered the glow that had started to fill her, slowly lighting her up from the inside with the knowledge of what her future should be.

  Until Jacob had snuffed out that light with the revulsion on his face as she’d told him she might be expecting his child. Then the realisation had come that she wasn’t—and that if Jacob had his way she never would be. ‘I have no space in my life for children, Clara. And no desire for them either.’

  And no space for her either, she’d realised as the months had trickled on. Desire... They’d still had that, right to the end. Even if it turned out that was all that they’d had.

  She hadn’t set out to become pregnant. She’d never trick someone into parenthood and wouldn’t wish being unwanted on any child. Her own experience—a mother who’d fallen pregnant at sixteen, been forced to marry the father, then had resented both her child and her husband ever since—had ensured that she unde
rstood those consequences better than most. But when she’d realised that she was... That glow had returned, brighter than ever before. And she’d known that this was her chance—maybe her only chance—to have a family of her own. One where she mattered, where she belonged—and where her child could have all the love and attention that she’d missed out on.

  Would Merry understand any of that? She’d try to, Clara knew. She was her best friend, after all. But if you hadn’t lived it, the pain and weight that grew every day from simply not mattering... It was hard to imagine.

  ‘Mostly, we wanted different things,’ she said, gathering up her paperwork. Time to move on. ‘I wanted a family—he didn’t.’ Didn’t was a bit of an understatement. Vehemently refused to even consider the idea was closer to the truth.

  ‘And now you have Ivy,’ Merry said. ‘So everything worked out in the end.’

  ‘Yes, it did.’ She wouldn’t give Ivy up for all the diamond bracelets in the world. She’d hate for Ivy to suffer the sort of rejection she had suffered—the feeling of knowing you were unwanted by your own family, the very people who were supposed to love you more than anyone in the world. She knew how that burned. She never wanted Ivy to experience that.

  But now she had to make a choice. Let Jacob into his daughter’s life—or cut him out forever. And the worst part was, it wasn’t entirely her choice to make.

  Clara sighed and picked up a stack of email printouts. It was far easier to focus on organising the perfect Christmas than to figure out how to tell her ex-husband he was a father.

  ‘Right. These are all the latest things Jacob has requested for his Christmas retreat. Think you can start working your way through them?’

  Merry looked resigned as she took the pile of paper from Clara. ‘Any chance you think he might give you another diamond bracelet this year?’

  Clara laughed in spite of herself. ‘I doubt it. Why?’