* * *
“I LIKED THE Sugarbear Fairies the best!” Abby announced happily as she hopped out of the taxi, still talking about the show they’d seen well over two hours ago. Gabe was beginning to wonder when she’d ever stop talking about it. “But you know what, Gabe?”
He handed the driver a bill to cover the fare and waved away the change, then caught hold of the pink parka hood. “What, Abby?”
“I liked the ice-skaters the best of all!”
“I remember you said that.” At least a hundred times, if his excellent memory served.
“I liked the camels. Those were real camels, weren’t they, Gabe?” Andy cleared the cab in a two-fisted jump onto the curb. “And real sheeps and a real donkey!”
“Sheep.” Katherine climbed out after him, accepting the brief assistance of Gabe’s gloved hand, reaching protectively for Andy almost in the same instant. Gabe caught her gaze and held it for a moment in which every impatient thought that had flitted through his brain in the past hours vanished into the sweetness of her appreciative smile. For no good reason he could name, he felt as if he’d saved her from a burning building. If he thought it would result in another smile like that one, he’d gladly sit through the Rockettes’ show every day for a month. Well, maybe not gladly, but he’d do it.
Abby began to tug on his hand. “Come on, Gabe, let’s go check on The Real Cat Matilda.”
Andy whirled out of Katherine’s grasp and into Gabe’s as the four of them skirted the pedestrian traffic to reach the front door of the co-op. “Are you cooking dinner for us tonight, too, Gabe?”
“Didn’t we just eat dinner at that weird restaurant you recommended?”
“Oh, yeah. Jekyll and Hyde.” Andy’s memory caught up to his overstimulated enthusiasm. “I didn’t forget. I was just trickin’ ya. Jekyll and Hyde was way cool. I can’t wait to tell Tyler I got to go there. Didn’t I tell ya it was a cool place?”
“I remember you said that.” He smiled at Raymond, who was holding the door for them. “Evening, Raymond.”
“Got a delivery for you,” Raymond said. “Arrived just after you’d left for the show this afternoon.”
“A delivery?” Gabe guided first one twin, then the other, through the doorway after Katherine. “Why would I get a delivery here?”
“Louisa brought it by.” Raymond walked around them and stepped behind the doorman’s station. He bent down, then straightened again as he passed a narrow leather strap around the counter. “Congratulations—it’s a Schnauzer. His name’s Champion Crystal Blue Persuasion, and Louisa says he’s yours on approval until Tuesday.”
Gabe followed the leash until he was face to bearded muzzle with a hefty salt-and-pepper dog of medium height, who was sitting obediently behind the station, his ears pointed, his bushy eyebrows angled over dark, intelligent eyes. “Hello.” Gabe scratched the ears, and the eyes drooped in ecstasy. “Now, what does Louisa think I’m going to do with you?”
“Whatta ya got?” Andy barelled up behind him and bumped against his shoulder. “It’s a dog,” the boy whispered in awe. “It’s a real dog.”
Braids bouncing, Abby came over to investigate. “A dog,” she said happily. “Does he belong to us?”
“I guess he does...at least until Tuesday.”
“Us?” Katherine’s voice came over the desk, all but thumping him between the shoulder blades. “Oh, no. He may belong to you, Gabe, but he definitely does not belong to us.”
“Well, he doesn’t belong here with me, that’s for sure.” Raymond pulled a duffel bag out from under the credenza and hefted it into Gabe’s arms. “This belongs to the champ, here. Food, vitamins, shampoo, clothes, the works. Louisa said it was all in there, even a toothbrush.”
“Clothes?” Abby echoed with interest. “A toothbrush?”
“Hello,” Andy crooned, as he knelt in front of the dog. “Hello, doggy.”
Katherine leaned further over the counter. “He comes with his own toothbrush?”
“What’s his name?” Andy patted the dog with both hands and then kissed him on the mouth.
“Andy, don’t kiss the—” Katherine began.
“His name?” Gabe repeated, his gaze intercepting Katherine’s protest and diverting it to him in a look of wary comprehension. “His name is Crystal Blue Persuasion, but since crystal is glass and glass sparkles, well...for short, we just call him—”
“Sparky!” Andy supplied, throwing his arms around the schnauzer’s neck.
Gabe felt like the man of the hour as he watched the bonding of boy and dog. The feeling dwindled to man of the minute, however, when he met Katherine’s furious gaze. He offered his best what-else-could-I-say? shrug, and received her reply in an I’ll-murder-you-for-this glare. Maybe, he thought, it would have been better to call the dog Champ.
* * *
EVERY LIGHT IN the house was on when Gabe walked in. He found Gun in the kitchen, making a salad. “Hello, Junior. Want something to eat?”
“No, thanks.” Gabe turned one of the ladder-back chairs around and straddled it. “I ate at a restaurant where the main source of ambience comes from trying to scare the stuffing out of the customers.”
“Not your usual choice of eatery,” Gun commented.
“It came highly recommended,” he said wryly.
Gun chopped some cauliflower and tossed it in the bowl. “You’re home kinda early.”
“Have to get an early start tomorrow.” Gabe feigned interest in the salad bowl, avoiding the real reason he was home, doing his best to block out the memory of Katherine’s don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-butt goodbye. “If Louisa found a pilot willing to fly to the North Pole, that is.”
“What do you mean, if?” Gun leveled a slice of red pepper at Gabe. “If that woman can find a furball in Tiffany’s and a canine in Cartier’s, she can sure find a pilot.”
“I wondered where she had to go to find such expensive animals.” Gabe set his chin on his hands and watched Gun peel a tomato. “I guess you know all about the cat, the dog, and how mad Katherine is.”
“Don’t look so glum,” Gun advised. “It’s Christmas. Seeing Santa’s workshop tomorrow will perk her right up. Parents always enjoy seeing their kids have fun.”
“I’m counting on that, but I’m beginning to think it would have been a whole lot easier to have just asked her out to dinner and a show.”
“So why haven’t you?” Gun asked. “Not that it’s any of my business, of course, but who are you courting? Her or her kids?”
“She’s a package deal, Dad. A three-in-one special.” Gabe offered the theory he’d formulated during his walk home. “I can’t decide whether she’s protecting the twins or herself, but there are moments—a lot of them—when I’m afraid Abby and Andy are the only reason I get to spend any time with her, at all.”
“And you want to spend time with her?”
“Oh, yeah,” Gabe said, positive of that, if nothing else. “I’ve only known her a couple of days, but somehow, I believe I could spend the rest of my life just watching her move. I think I could get lost for weeks in her smile. And when she laughs...” He broke off self-consciously. “Well, you get the picture.”
“No wonder she’s not so anxious to be alone with you. If I thought you felt that way about me, I’d be scared to death.”
“You can relax, because I don’t feel that way about you. But I do feel that way about Katherine. It scares me out of my wits, but from the moment I looked up and saw her standing in my office doorway, I’ve felt as though I were hurtling toward her like some out-of-control comet.”
Gun put down his knife and looked Gabe straight in the eyes. “I knew two minutes after I met your mother that she was the only woman I would ever want to wake up to. I might have known sooner, but I was wearing sunglasses the first time I saw
her.” He leaned forward, assuming his good-advice posture. “I’m going to break my standing rule of parenting, Junior, and give you some good advice. There’s not a woman out there who wants to be a three-for-one deal, no matter what she says. Make up your mind what it is you’re attracted to, because unless it’s just her—the very essence of who she is—then you should walk away now, and I mean this minute.”
Gabe frowned, then pushed up from the chair and scooted it under the table. “I was sort of hoping you’d tell me that if I took a couple of aspirin and went to bed, I wouldn’t feel like a comet in the morning.”
Gun picked up his knife. “Always happy to cement the father-son bond by telling you things you don’t want to know. Speaking of not wanting to know, what did you do with the animals?”
“Left them with the kids, of course. She’s mad, but she’s not crazy. The combined forces of the police and fire departments couldn’t have pried one furry paw out of that apartment tonight.”
Gun whittled a carrot into a dozen slivers. “You should have cleared it with her before you went giving pets to the kids.”
“I didn’t originally intend to give them the pets. I just thought the twins would play with them for a while and then I’d send the animals back.”
Gun popped the remaining matchstick of carrot into his mouth and chewed, giving Gabe one of his I-raised-a-moron looks. “These kids have got your number, Junior. I’m telling you, you better be real sure you want the whole package before you go getting involved with this woman.”
“You just told me not to think of her as a package, Dad.”
“Well, what do I know? When I met your mother, you weren’t part of the deal.”
“Would it have made a difference to you, if I had been?”
“Nope. You might have made things a little inconvenient, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Your mother could have come with a dozen kids and it wouldn’t have made a string bean’s worth of difference to me.”
“A dozen kids would have been more than a little inconvenient, though, wouldn’t they, Dad?”
Gun grinned as he reached for a stalk of celery. “Well, you know how I love a challenge. Next time, though, ask the mother before you go giving the kids presents. It’ll make your life a lot simpler.”
“I certainly wish you’d told me that this morning.”
“How was I to know you’d pull such a harebrained stunt?”
“You seem to know everything else.”
“Not before it happens, I don’t.” Gun tossed in the chopped celery. “I sure as heck don’t know what you’re going to do with a dog and cat while we’re gone tomorrow.”
“We?”
“You asked Louisa to find a pilot, and she got you the best. But I warn you, I don’t work cheap.”
Gabe was pleased, despite his best efforts not to show it. “Are you sure you can fit a trip to the North Pole in between stakeouts?”
“McClellan’s been calling the office again. This way it’ll be the truth when you tell him I’ve been out of the city. He doesn’t need to know it was only for the weekend.”
Gabe walked to the doorway and paused. “Do you think Louisa would keep the animals while we’re gone?”
Gun was still laughing when Gabe reached the stairs and headed up to bed.
* * *
KATHERINE AWOKE THE next morning with a warm, fuzzy feeling. Two of them, to be exact. One at her feet and one at her neck. From the snuffling intermittent snores rising from the foot of the bed and the steady purring hum near her ear, she named the feelings Sparky and The Real Cat Matilda, come to join her slumbers sometime during the night. Being well acquainted with the rambunctious sleep patterns of her children, she couldn’t blame the animals. On the occasions when the twins crept into her bed in the night, she was forced to creep out and catch the sandman as best she could on the sofa. She moved her foot beneath the sheet and the sounds of sleep stopped, as each of the warm spots beside her stirred, sensing, perhaps, that she was awake and that it was their role as companions to join her in that state, as well.
Yawning, Katherine looked at the ceiling and thought how nice it would be to snooze for another half hour...except that there was a copious energy tickling her foggy, precaffeine brain. Get up, it said. Gabe will be here soon. Get up. Get up. Get up.
The North Pole, she thought. She was going to the North Pole. How had Gabe come up with such a ridiculous destination? Not that she believed for a second that he meant to fly them all to the northernmost tip of the earth. She had intended to talk to Abby and Andy about that very thing last night. But the dog had had to be walked and the cat had had to be tended, and the twins had been just like any other child with a new pet...too excited to talk about anything else. When they bounded out of bed this morning—which probably would happen any minute now—it would be pointless to try to tell them that today’s trip basically involved a town that merely capitalized on its name and the Santa mythology.
At this point, she doubted anything she said would make any difference. They’d had more excitement in the past couple of days than in their entire first seven years, and probably more than they’d have in the next seven. Gabe was throwing pleasure at them as if it were confetti, and they were grabbing greedy handfuls of it.
Well, he’d created their ridiculously high expectations, and when the disappointment came, whatever it turned out to be, he’d just have to deal with it.
Right, she thought as the kitten nuzzled her ear. As if he’d dealt with the aftermath of a single issue so far. For a while after he left last night, she’d considered the possibility that he was skipping the drink-dinner-theater path and taking the see-how-great-I-am-with-kids approach to winning her heart. She knew women who fell for that, had even dated one man who tried it. The jerk had come right out and told her he wouldn’t have been so nice to her kids if he knew she wasn’t going to get involved.
But if that had been Gabe’s idea to begin with, he was certainly going overboard with it. He came, he saw, he provided. If Andy had an imaginary dog, then Gabe would make it real. If Abby believed her stuffed lion was a kitten in disguise, so it was. If the twins wanted to find Santa Claus, then Gabe would find him and, if a satisfactory Santa couldn’t be found in New York City, then there was nothing for it but to fly Abby and Andy to the North Pole and look for him there. Katherine was beginning to think that if the twins expressed a desire to visit the man in the moon, Gabe would pick up the phone and call NASA.
She worried that this wasn’t good for them. She knew it wasn’t good for her. What was more attractive than a man who just happened to be crazy about her kids? But how could she trust him with their hearts, as well as hers? Maybe if she and Gabe had dated first, before this crazy Santa search began, she wouldn’t feel so threatened. But he had stepped right out of her fantasies into Abby’s and Andy’s reality, and she didn’t know how to stop the momentum of his mad plunge into her life and the lives of her children. She didn’t know enough about the laws of physics to stick out a metaphorical foot and trip him. And the truth was, she wanted him to be real.
Katherine sighed and stretched, dislodging the kitten, who roused and began exercising its claws in a pleasant, scratchy massage of her shoulder. Really, it was amazing how much the kitten looked like Abby’s stuffed lion. And that spot on her paw...well, it did look a little like a grape-juice stain.
Sparky shook himself, the tags on his collar tinkling like an alarm clock. He looked at her expectantly and—she couldn’t help it—she laughed. There, in her bed, with a dog she was going to have to take outside for a walk, and a kitten she was beginning to imagine was a toy come to life, she laughed. Gabe had a lot to answer for. But she was going to spend the day with him on a North Pole trip she never would have planned herself, with children whose eyes lately held a happiness she hadn’t known they’d missed. Much as she wan
ted to deny it, she knew that Gabe—in his well-meaning, mule-headed manner—had made her world a better place to wake up in.
Now, if only she could keep her world safe...keep herself from falling in love with him, one heart at a time.
CHAPTER TEN
FOR A SMALL plane, the Cessna wasn’t nerve-jangling noisy. At least, it hadn’t been before Andy and Abby got in it. Gun had obtained fifteen minutes of wide-eyed quiet by instructing them to listen for big bangs, rattles, or the sound of something falling off during take-off. But once they were airborne, all bets were off.
“Will all the reindeer be there?”
“Do you think we might see a polar bear?”
“I want to see a walrus.”
“Santa doesn’t have a walrus, dummy.”
“He could have one if he wanted. Santa could have a walrus, couldn’t he, Gabe?”
“When will we get there? I see something red. I bet that’s Rudolph’s nose! Is that his nose, Gabe?”
“I can see Santa’s whole workshop from my window.”
“No, you can’t. You’re just saying that ’cause you can’t see Rudolph’s nose.”
“I can too see it. I can see everything from my window. All the reindeer and everything. Can’t I, Gabe?”
From her position in the copilot’s seat, Katherine looked over her shoulder and smiled serenely at the magpies. From his position in the center of the bench seat and between the magpies, Gabe noticed that she didn’t include him in that affectionate look. When her gaze did settle on his for a moment, he offered her his brightest boy-am-I-having-fun grin. She touched her ear, indicating that she couldn’t hear—although he hadn’t tried to say anything to her. Then she turned around and said something to Gun, who laughed and made a comment that in turn caused her to laugh and say something else in response.
In the back seat, Gabe told himself he couldn’t be—was not, in fact—jealous because Gun was enjoying a conversation with Katherine while he, Gabe, was playing satellite dish to the twins’ transmission of jabber. No, indeed, he was not feeling impatient or frustrated or any other remotely negative emotion. He’d planned this trip for the twins’ enjoyment and he’d be positive if it killed him...or left him deaf, which seemed much more likely at the moment.
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