The Christmas Feast

by Peggy Webb

  Rage dried up her tears. Jerking away, she said, “Don’t I get a say?”

  For a heart-stopping instant she thought he was going to take her into his arms and kiss her.

  “No.” His voice was dark and dangerous. “Trust me, Jolie. And stop looking at me with those starry eyes. If I kiss you again I won’t be able to stop.” He grabbed a cloth and started cleaning up her mess.

  Again.

  She wanted to hit something. Preferably him.

  Chapter 12

  Lance was acutely aware of Jolie watching him. It took superhuman effort not to take her into his arms and kiss her. He longed to smooth back her sassy bangs, kiss the bruise on her forehead and say, “I’m falling in love with you, but now is neither the time nor the place.”

  But he wouldn’t do that, because he didn’t know whether there would ever be a right time for them.

  He might never be able to give Jolie a name. He might die on the job the next time out. Or the time after that.

  No, best to pretend indifference while she picked up the cookies and walked away.

  He wiped the cloth viciously across the floor. How quickly he had forgotten his resolution to avoid all repeat performances of last night’s balcony scene. She made it so easy to forget. She almost made it easy to love.

  He had too many issues and no business thinking that way. The best thing for him to do would be to leave as soon as possible.

  But he couldn’t leave before Christmas dinner. That was Jolie’s big cooking debut, and he wanted to see her succeed. He owed her that much.

  He flung the debris into the garbage can, washed his hands and then braced himself to face her. He should be able to pull it off, especially with other people in the house. He and Elizabeth had a lot of catching up to do, and he’d instinctively liked their cousin Josh.

  That Sullivan character was another matter. A man that smooth and easy with women would bear watching.

  And that’s what Lance intended to do.

  The family and their too-exuberant guest were gathered around the cookies, oohing and aahing, which meant Jolie was the center of attention. Lance was as pleased as if he were Professor Higgins watch

  ing his protégée.

  “Kat made these,” Elizabeth said.

  And then that Irish Romeo popped up and said, “Best cookies I ever ate.”

  Lance planned to be on that guy’s case like white on rice. If Michael Sullivan thought he was going to get by with anything in this family, he’d be in for a big surprise.

  It was the longest day of Jolie’s life. For starters, Lance completely ignored her. To make matters worse, the garrulous Michael Sullivan had to have a blow-by-blow account of what Elizabeth had been doing for the past ten years. Her history sounded like a profile out of America’s Outstanding Women. Then, naturally, he had to know what Jolie had been up to. She summarized her career in five words: “I’m a beautician for animals.”

  Josh rescued her. “Hey, let’s have a jam session.”

  “Grab your blues harp, Lance,” Elizabeth said. Although she looked like an unapproachable princess most of the time, she really let her hair down at the piano. She sounded like Jerry Lee Lewis in his heyday.

  Michael Sullivan fetched his guitar and joined in, then—wouldn’t you know it?—said to her, “Hey, Kat, what do you play?”

  “I keep time with my foot,” she said, and he laughed as if she rivaled the stand-up comics on Saturday Night Live.

  By the time the day was finally over, Jolie couldn’t relax. She tangled herself in the covers fifty different ways before she gave up and decided to go down to the kitchen for a big glass of milk and some cookies. Comfort food.

  It was after midnight, so she tiptoed, hoping not to wake anybody. She was still tiptoeing when she eased open the kitchen door…and there was Michael Sullivan, barefoot and shirtless in tight jeans that ought to be declared illegal on a man with a body like his. And Elizabeth, in pajamas she’d probably bought in Italy at one of those upscale boutiques catering to women who wished to drive men mad, but in an elegant way.

  They didn’t see her. How could they? They were locked together in a steamy embrace that would have been given a triple X rating at the movies.

  Trying not to breathe, Jolie eased backward. But her luck was bad. Michael saw her and discreetly stepped away. Elizabeth kept her composure, and even managed to look dignified while holding her top together.

  “I got the munchies,” Jolie said.

  “So did we,” Michael said. “These are really good cookies, Kat. And you made them, huh?”

  “Well, yeah, uh, listen, I’ll just grab a glass of milk and head on back.” Why should her sister deprive her of a midnight snack? Jolie went to the refrigerator and was extra careful not to drop the milk.

  “Nonsense,” Elizabeth said. “I was just leaving.”

  Her exit made royalty look sloppy. Jolie would have felt bad about interrupting what was obviously a hot love scene if she hadn’t seen the silent signal that passed between Michael and her sister.

  Well, didn’t that just make her day? Not that Jolie was jealous, but everything came easily for Elizabeth. Just once wouldn’t you think something would come easily for Jolie?

  She was going to get her snack and vanish into her jungle of bedcovers, but Michael straddled a bar stool, acting as if he planned to stay there all night.

  “You know, I’ve always liked your family, Kat.”

  “I’m calling myself Jolie now.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Yeah, I’m making a few changes in my life.”

  “Me, too. I’m leaving undercover and taking a desk job with the Chicago PD. It makes more sense for a man planning to settle down and raise a big family.”

  Since when? Since he’d met Elizabeth?

  “That’s nice.” Jolie forgave herself the lame response. After all, if you’ve just been caught spying—though it was all perfectly innocent—you couldn’t be expected to be witty.

  “I come from a big family, you know,” he said. “They’re all in Boston. I decided to do something different for Christmas this year.” He grinned at her. “Boy, am I glad I did.”

  “I would guess so.”

  Michael Sullivan threw back his head and laughed. “I really like you, Jolie. You’ve got your feet firmly planted and your head out of the clouds.”

  That’s when Lancelot Estes walked in. Naturally. He took one look at her in an oversize nightshirt with a big slogan on the front that said Woman with an Attitude, Don’t Stand between Me and My Chocolate. Then he glared at Michael Sullivan with his abundant chest hair and his broad grin. Lance was putting two and two together and getting midnight rendezvous in the kitchen.

  How long had he been standing there? Even if he’d overheard the entire conversation between her and Michael, he would still think they were up to hanky-panky.

  Lord, that’s all she needed: the man she practically swooned over thinking she went up in flames with him on the balcony one night, then messed around with somebody else over baked sweets the next.

  “I just came down for a snack,” Lance said. You could strike matches on his face. “Obviously, somebody else had the same idea.”

  Jolie held up her glass of milk. To prove her innocence? Because she was speechless with unrequited passion?

  Michael Sullivan never lost his cool. “You bet,” he said. “Jolie makes the best cookies in three states.” He grabbed a handful to show he meant what he said, then left her to face the music.

  Or in this case, the warrior with battle on his mind.

  “Sorry I interrupted,” Lance said.

  “You didn’t interrupt anything.”

  “With your family in the house, you’d think he’d have the decency to put on his clothes.”

  “Look, we were just—”

  “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

  Misjudged and beleaguered from all sides, Jolie couldn’t endure the world’s longest da
y anymore.

  “I certainly don’t.” She jerked up her glass of milk and marched toward the door.

  “Jolie.”

  “Go drive somebody else crazy. I’m going to bed.”

  She stormed out and didn’t look back. By the time she got to her room she wasn’t even hungry. And she was too mad to sleep. She’d probably never sleep again.

  Lance stood in the kitchen wondering just whose bed she was going to.

  Terminally charming men like Michael Sullivan shouldn’t be turned loose on the world’s unsuspecting innocents. Jolie wouldn’t know a ladies’ man if one fell out of an apple tree and hit her on the head. She wouldn’t know a con man if he wore a tattoo declaring his devious intent.

  Lance jerked a glass out of the cabinet and poured milk. What business was it of his? He had no claims on her. Other than a sweet little old lady in a nursing home, they had nothing in common.

  If you didn’t count passion with the punch of a rocket.

  “Forget it.”

  Now she had him talking to himself. That, in addition to acting like a jackass over Michael Sullivan.

  Next thing you knew he’d be calling the man out for a duel under a live oak tree.

  God, he was losing it. And Lance had one more day to get through before Christmas dinner. Plus another night.

  Tomorrow he’d go over to Pontotoc and visit Birdie. One hiding place was as good as another.

  Elephants were stampeding outside her door.

  Groaning, Jolie pulled the covers over her head and tried to go back to sleep.

  “Kat? Kat? Are you awake? Let me in.”

  Good grief, it was Elizabeth, up at the crack of… Jolie glanced at the clock. Ten?

  Throwing back the covers, she raced to open the door. Elizabeth looked like somebody who had just come from a Miss America competition, daytime-wear segment.

  Jolie glanced over to see if Lance might be coming out of or going into his bedroom, then felt both miffed and relieved not to see him.

  “I have to talk to you, Kat.”

  “Can I listen from the bed? I’m beat.”

  “Poor baby. All that cooking.”

  “Yeah, well.” Jolie got under her covers, then patted the mattress. “Sit. Tell all.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “As if last night didn’t tell all.”

  “Well, it did give me a hint or two. You like this man, don’t you?”

  “Like him?” Elizabeth pushed her beautiful hair back from her gorgeous face. “I’m falling in love with him.”

  The green-eyed monster reared its ugly head, but Jolie beat it back. She was happy for her sister. She really was.

  “From the looks of things, he loves you right back.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Why? You’re the world’s greatest catch and he’s…well, he’s a hunk.”

  “He’s sweet and funny and big-hearted and....” Elizabeth flopped back against the pillows and sighed. “Gosh, Kat, I never dreamed I’d fall for a man like him.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want a sweet, funny, big-hearted man?”

  “You know what I mean. He’s not at all my type. He’s…macho and drop-dead sexy and… My goodness, Kat, he’s the kind of man some women call a hunk.”

  “I just did.” Did that put her in the suspicious category Elizabeth called “some women”? What were her other less-than-sterling attributes? she wondered.

  “Oh, Kat.” Elizabeth raised up on her elbow to look at her sister. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m so giddy I hardly know what I’m saying.”

  Elizabeth? Giddy? Would wonders never cease?

  “That’s okay,” Jolie said. “You’re entitled.”

  “It’s not like me to go off the deep end like this. I mean…my gosh, Kat, I’ve just met him.”

  “You’ve known him for ten years.”

  “Technically. I know Josh has talked about him a lot, but I’ve only seen him a couple of times. Why didn’t I fall for him then?”

  Elizabeth rolled up on her elbow once more, and if Jolie had seen a real doubt in her face, she’d have tried to talk her big sister out of the notion that she loved an almost-stranger. What she saw was radiance and a clear certainty that, for some reason, made Jolie want to cry.

  “Of course, it’s much too soon, but after all, I’m thirty-five years old!”

  “This is not about age, is it?”

  “No. Lord, no. I’m just saying that if I don’t have sense enough to make smart decisions by now, I never will.”

  “Nobody would ever call you anything but smart.” Jolie grinned at her. “Except Michael, and he calls you Lizzie.”

  Elizabeth made a face of mock horror, then grinned. “Music to my ears. Irish music.”

  Chapter 13

  By the time Jolie and her sister got downstairs it was eleven o’clock. Aunt Kitty and Josh were in the library playing checkers, and Michael was thumbing through one of Lucy’s romance novels while he waited for Elizabeth. Lance was nowhere in sight.

  “Good morning, dears.” Aunt Kitty got up from her board game to hug Jolie and Elizabeth. Patting Jolie’s face, she said, “You look tired.”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “Any reason?”

  She wasn’t about to go into reasons. Instead she said, “Oh, my gosh, look at the time. I’ve got to get to the airport to pick up Mother, Ben and Aunt Dolly.”

  “Michael and I are going to do that,” Elizabeth said, then swished out of the house with her besotted Irishman.

  Why couldn’t Lance look at Jolie like that? Shoot, why couldn’t he even stick around to look at her, period?

  She slumped into a wing chair and watched while Josh and Aunt Kitty finished their game.

  “Here, Kat,” Aunt Kitty said. “Take my place. I’m going out to the garden. I think some sprigs of rosemary would smell nice in here.”

  Jolie’s heart wasn’t into checkers, and Josh knew it.

  “Looking for somebody, Kat?”

  She didn’t even consider trying to fool Josh. As a minister, he was in the business of seeing through facades to his parishioners’ innermost souls.

  “Yes. Have you seen Lance?”

  “Had breakfast with him. Early. He left right after that to go to Pontotoc.”

  There was only one place he could be: Hanging Grapes Haven. Jolie forgot their misunderstanding and her anger. She forgot everything except Lance’s extraordinary kindness to a dear old woman who had no family.

  “Josh, if you were getting a present for somebody you really liked, but the other person didn’t like you back in the same way, what would you get?”

  “It’s according to the purpose of your gift.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to give Lance a gift because you don’t want him to feel left out at Christmas, or do you want something more personal?”

  “Personal, definitely. But not socks or gloves. That’s so overdone.”

  “I’ll help you.” Josh put the board game away. “Let’s go shopping, Kat.”

  Lance played his harmonica for Birdie, helped her select a dress to wear to Christmas dinner the next evening, and helped her name her baby birds, the new glass ornaments he’d brought her. Then she produced Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring from the nursing home library, and he read to her until the sound of the supper cart outside her door signaled approaching darkness.

  He kissed her goodbye, then watched as she stood at the window, waving. It struck him that a woman interested in Rachel Carson’s outcry against chemicals that silenced birdsong might have been an ornithologist or, at the very least, a member of the Audubon Society.

  On the way back to Shady Grove he stopped to get a gas refill and directions to the nearest big town. He wanted to buy Italian wine for the Christmas dinner, and he wanted to buy a gift for Jolie.

  Why not? For the last several days she’d been a lovely hostess to him.

  Who are you kidding?
/>   Okay, she’d been more. She was more, but that didn’t mean he had to buy a diamond.

  He found the wine in Tupelo, and also a large sprawling mall. Naturally, the first store was a jeweler’s. A square-cut sapphire-and-diamond ring shouted Jolie, but he moved on to an office supply store, with only one backward glance. After he left there, a window display at a lingerie boutique snared him. Imagining Jolie’s face on all the mannequins, he got trapped by his own libido and had to stand in front of the naughty confections a good while before he could move on.

  Resolved to look the other way the next time he saw women’s lingerie, he hurried along the crowded corridors filled with last-minute shoppers until he saw a store that suited him. It sold videos and DVDs…and in the window was a cardboard cutout of Jimmy Stewart.

  Even with expanded holiday shopping hours, it was almost closing time when Lance went inside. In order to get what he wanted he’d have to do some fast shopping.

  And some fast talking.

  Jolie thought her mother, Aunt Dolly and Ben would never go to bed. Josh, an early-to-bed, early-to-rise man, had bid them good-night an hour earlier, and Aunt Kitty had gone to bed at eight-thirty.

  With Dolly’s frequent corrections and additions, and Ben’s smiling indulgence, Lucy told Jolie every last detail of everything they’d done in California. Not that Jolie didn’t want to hear. She just wished Elizabeth had been there to deflect some of the attention. She and Michael had vanished shortly after dinner, destination unknown.

  And where in the world was Lance?

  She glanced at the clock. Ten minutes after eleven. Did the nursing home allow you to stay that long?

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “I can take a hint.”

  “What hint?”

  “Clock watching is a sure sign of boredom. We’ve bored you to death.”

  “Speak for yourself, Lucille Coltrane,” Aunt Dolly said. “I never bore anybody. I’d be out of a job if I did.”