Their Unexpected Christmas Gift (The Stone Gap Inn Book 3)

by Shirley Jump

  “You’re not late. You’re coming home at the same time you’ve come home every day.” He flicked out his wrist. “Just after seven.”

  She ignored the sarcasm in his tone. “Where’s Ellie?”

  “Asleep already.”

  “Already? Isn’t that really early for her?”

  “I’m surprised you know her bedtime.” He sat back in the chair. The hallway clock ticked away the seconds.

  Vivian scowled. “It’s not like I haven’t been here. Well, except for last night, but I had all this work to do—”

  “What’s the real story, Vivian?” Last night, when he’d confronted her and told her she was running away, she’d insisted he was wrong—just before she got in her car and, he presumed, went back to her Durham apartment for the night. He’d stayed up, staring at the ceiling above his bed, wondering why he had proposed this crazy idea of the two of them moving in together, and becoming a temporary family until Sammie returned. A few days at most, and then he had been sure Vivian’s sister would show up. She’d left her baby behind, after all; surely she wouldn’t do that on a permanent basis? But as day after day went by and Vivian’s calls to Sammie went unanswered, Nick began to doubt the wisdom of agreeing to this arrangement. He’d had a different vision in his head than what it had become, that was for sure.

  “Because you have avoided taking care of your niece since I met you,” he said. “I offered to help you out, not become Mr. Mom. She’s a great kid, really cute, and she’s grown on me, but Ellie is not my daughter.”

  “She’s not mine, either.”

  He got to his feet and crossed to Vivian. He paused a beat, holding her gaze before he spoke. “Well, she should be someone’s, don’t you think? She deserves a regular family.”

  “And why do you think I can offer that? I have no idea what a regular family is like.” Vivian spun away and avoided Nick’s gaze, just like she’d avoided this discussion for days. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “Not tonight.” He got up and waved toward the seat across from him. “Tonight, we need to talk about this situation because it’s got to change.”

  Vivian hesitated a moment longer, then dropped into her seat and took a sip of water from the glass on the table. “I can’t believe Sammie left her daughter behind. I thought she loved Ellie.”

  “She does, if you ask me. ‘Please take care of Ellie as well as you took care of me. I know she’ll have a good home with you.’” He sat down, then slid the note that had been in the basket that first day across the table to Vivian. “Maybe Sammie left her with you because she loved her daughter, and because she remembered how you protected her when she was little, and thought you would make a better mom than the state, or some other stranger.”

  “I’m no good at it. I’ve seen how Ellie looks at you, and how she falls asleep just like that for you.” Vivian snapped her fingers. “Every time I try to pick her up or change her diaper or feed her, she cries and tries to get away. She hates me.”

  “You need to try more. Babies need consistency—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Parenting Tips, for all your advice, but I don’t need you to lecture me on raising my niece.”

  Her defensiveness was all barbs, a porcupine striking first to avoid an attack, but when she spoke, her eyes watered and her lips trembled, and he realized the capable, strong and smart Vivian was feeling completely unwanted and incompetent. Maybe it was all compounded by the fact that the world expected women to automatically know what to do with babies. Or maybe she truly was overwhelmed by the whole thing. He understood that—those first few hours with Ellie, he’d been convinced he was going to break her or something—but that didn’t mean he was going to give Vivian a pass.

  But it did mean he wasn’t going to beat her up for struggling. If there was one thing that Nick understood, it was feeling like you were never going to measure up to some impossible standard.

  He removed the foil covering the chicken parmigiana he’d made for dinner, then dished up a breaded cutlet and some sauce onto Vivian’s plate. He topped it with freshly shredded Parmesan cheese. The time it took him to do that eased the tension in the room and gave Vivian a moment to collect herself. “So you mean to tell me that you can take on a multimillion-dollar company in court, but you’re going to be bested by a kid who can’t even hold a spoon?”

  The joke eased the stress on Vivian’s features, and she shot him a relieved smile. “Well, that’s different. Clients don’t need bottles, and multimillion-dollar companies don’t need me to change their diapers.” She settled her napkin in her lap. “In court, I know what I’m doing. When it comes to Ellie...I don’t.”

  “Well, here’s an idea,” he said conversationally and easy as he dished up his own plate. “Why don’t you take tomorrow off? Completely off. No work, no office, no phone calls. You can spend the time with Ellie—”

  Vivian paused, her fork halfway to her mouth. “Alone?”

  “Not completely. You’ll have me, sort of. I have to go back to work tomorrow, but you and Ellie can come with me to the inn. You’ll be in charge when I’m in the kitchen. That way you’re not completely on your own, and I’m not missing that little munchkin, which I have to admit I never thought I’d say. Anyway, how’s that sound?” He’d already talked to Della and Mavis, who hadn’t hesitated to agree that he could bring Ellie to the inn. Both of them, he suspected, wanted to gush over and spoil the blue-eyed little girl. Nick couldn’t blame them. Ellie was pretty cute. If he ever had kids of his own—

  Well, that wasn’t going to happen. But if he had, he would want one who looked like Ellie.

  “Wait, you have to go back to work tomorrow?” Vivian said. “I thought we had until Friday.”

  “Today is Thursday. And in five short hours, it will be Friday.”

  She did the math, then shook her head. “Wow. The week flew by faster than I thought. I can’t take the day off. We’re in the middle of trial prep. If you’re going back to work, then I’ll have to find a nanny. I can’t—”

  “Try bonding with your niece?” He leaned closer. “She’s your flesh and blood, not mine. And you act like she’s got the plague.”

  “She’s just not comfortable with me.”

  “You haven’t given her much of a chance to learn to be. She needs a parent, Vivian. She needs someone who’s going to plug in and be there for her for eighteen years, if necessary. That person isn’t me. I’m a stopgap, not a father.”

  “I have work to do.” She started to get to her feet.

  He put a hand over hers and stopped her. He barely knew Vivian and Ellie, but he was damned if he’d let one more kid grow up with distant parents. Maybe all Vivian needed was a nudge in the right direction—and a jump into the deep end of parenting, like he’d had. “I can tell you firsthand that workaholic parents make for some pretty lonely kids who spend their birthdays alone, open Christmas presents alone, and spend all the time in between wondering what they did wrong to make their parents avoid them.”

  She bit her lip and sank back into the seat. “I get that. My mother was a ‘holic’ too. Just not a working one.”

  “Then don’t do that to Ellie.” Or to me, he wanted to add. But he’d already decided after last night that their relationship would be strictly about the baby. Nothing more. If anything proved Vivian’s priorities, it was her going back to Durham last night. “Before Ellie got left on the kitchen table, I couldn’t tell you the right end of a diaper or how to buckle a car seat. But I learned because that kid needed someone to.”

  “You’re a natural, though.” She waved at the dinner, then the decorations in the living room. “You’re so domestic and homey, Nick, and I say that with envy. I wish I could be that way, but I’m just not. At all. My apartment was decorated by a woman I hired at the furniture store. And it shows. The entire space has this impersonal showroom feel to it, which is partly my fault becaus
e I’m barely there. I don’t even own Christmas decorations or travel knickknacks or a set of dishes I inherited from my grandmother.” She gestured at the plates and silverware on the table. “The only thing I can cook is spaghetti, and even then I overcook the pasta more often than not. I’m good at one thing, being a lawyer. I can’t offer something to Ellie that I don’t even understand myself, so how can I be her family when I don’t have that foundation of a family, of a home? It’s like I’ve lived on a different planet all my life, and now you’re asking me to live on Earth. I’m no good at being a mother or being a housekeeper or even a—” her voice softened to a whisper “—good sister.”

  “You blame yourself for Sammie taking off.”

  It wasn’t a question because he already knew the answer. He’d seen that guilt in Vivian’s eyes from the second she realized Ellie had been left behind on purpose. “It’s not your fault, Viv. Your sister made her own choices.”

  “And almost all of them have been bad, for years now, no matter what I did to try to help her sort herself out. I tried, Nick, I tried so hard to steer her onto the right path. But she dropped out of high school and ran off, and even after I set her up with a tutor to help her get her GED, she took off the day before the test. If she had passed that test, there was a place at a community college waiting for her, a college I would have paid for. I tried to give her a path to a life that was different than the one we grew up with. I swore to her, Nick, that I’d make sure our lives would be different. And now...”

  “Your lives are different.”

  Vivian scoffed. “How? Ellie is living with strangers. Sammie is God knows where, doing God knows what, because she’s not answering her phone, and all I can do is pray she isn’t in jail or wrapped around a tree somewhere. I’m trying to juggle all of it, without anyone getting hurt in the process.” She shook her head. “I failed her, Nick. I failed the one person I swore I wouldn’t.”

  “You haven’t failed anyone, Vivian.” But she looked away and wouldn’t meet his gaze, hearing the words but refusing to believe them.

  Nick toyed with his fork, his gaze on the pale yellow tablecloth that had covered Ida Mae’s dining room table for as long as he could remember. There were a few stains on it, from a splash of red wine, a dollop of spaghetti sauce, and the time that Nick had finger painted with a can of oil paint he found in the garage. Unlike the tablecloths at the Mausoleum, which were pressed and pristine, this one had memories imprinted in every crease. Ida Mae had been as proud of this blemished tablecloth as his mother was of the fourteenth century vase she bought at a Christie’s auction. Ida Mae saw the wrinkles and marks as evidence that “the tablecloth had lived a good life,” as she used to say.

  And it had. Nick hadn’t been here nearly enough, but as he looked down at the tablecloth and recalled the memories that included it, he realized he wanted to live a good life, too. He wanted to have the messes and the wear and tear and the memories. If he ever got married, he didn’t want to spend more time in the office than he did with his family. Ida Mae had set an example that Nick intended to follow.

  Even if it meant dealing with his father in person, as she had requested. Knowing his grandmother, she’d had a good reason behind the ask.

  “My father would tell you I’m a failure too,” he said. “In fact, he told me that of all his sons, he especially hoped I’d never have children because I was such a disappointment to him. He told me I would ruin the family name by breeding more laziness into the world.”

  Vivian gasped. “Your father said that to you? Why on earth?”

  “Because I dropped out of law school. To him, that was an unforgivable failure. But I was on thin ice with him even before then—for most of my life, really. I’ve never been the super successful one, and my mother and my professors, would tell you that I’m a slow and stubborn learner, especially compared to my brothers, and especially when I’m studying something I don’t like. I have to agree.”

  Vivian frowned. “I can understand what it means to pick things up slowly, but what do you mean you were a stubborn learner? Isn’t stubborn a good thing when you’re learning—to have that determination to stick with it?”

  Nick chuckled. “For some people, maybe. But that’s not how my stubbornness played out. In culinary school, one of the basic tests is to make a French omelet. They’re different from regular omelets, softer in the middle, with a fluffy texture. They’re one of those dishes that you can’t walk away from, not for a second. It takes constant movement and attention and perfect timing to make a good French omelet.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever had one. You’ll have to make me one sometime.”

  That implied they’d have breakfast together. Something he had to admit that despite all his internal protests against involvement with Vivian, he would like very, very much, after a leisurely evening in bed. Because as much as he kept trying to resist this woman, the cold, hard-nosed, driven lawyer Vivian, another part of him kept falling for the barefoot, messy hair vulnerable Vivian from the other night. “I’d love to.”

  A flush filled her cheeks, then she dropped her gaze to her plate and took a bite. A moment extended between them before he cleared his throat and erased it. “Anyway, I didn’t want to do it the same way the head chef did. I made up my own method. And time and time again, my omelet was subpar. The middle would be overcooked or the bottom too crispy. But I was sure I could come up with a better way, and prove my professor, and decades of other chefs, wrong.”

  “And did you?”

  He scoffed. “Nope. But that didn’t mean I gave up right away. I stubbornly persisted for way too long. Once I caved and began making an omelet the way I was taught to, though, mine turned out to be the best in the class. I had to fail before I could figure out how to be successful. I’ve done that all my life.”

  “That’s just so...brave.” She sipped her water. “I’ve never been that way. I’ve always taken the path of least resistance.”

  “I would say the opposite, Vivian. The childhood you went through—that’s not something most kids survive, never mind thrive under. You went on to law school, and built a successful career. That’s bravery. That’s strength.”

  She lowered her gaze and focused on cutting a piece of chicken. “On paper, yes, but in my personal life...not so much.”

  “I think you are a very harsh self-critic.” He covered her hand with his, and for a second, her blue eyes met his, and that barefoot, midnight Vivian flickered in her gaze, then disappeared just as quickly. She pulled her hand out of his and went back to her dinner.

  “How did you end up in culinary school?”

  A deft change of subject. He should be grateful. Hadn’t he just resolved five minutes ago to be baby-business-only with Vivian? “The university where I went to law school also offered a culinary arts program. I went down to the dean’s office and switched programs. One good thing about your father not paying attention to you is that it took him two semesters to realize what had happened.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Cut me off financially. One hundred percent.” He shrugged, as if the moment hadn’t stung. “I started working after classes as a dishwasher and a busboy, and then I took out a loan for the rest to finish getting my degree. But the payments were too much for me to handle on a sous chef’s salary, so I went to work for my brother in IT security. It was a job I hated every single minute I was there, but I got used to the steady paycheck and kept making excuses not to walk away. The truth was, I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. My brothers are both megastars. Grady makes millions running his own company, and Carson just got promoted to VP. They were both at the top of their classes in school, and even though they didn’t become lawyers, they have impressive business cards, you know? Me, I’m a law school dropout and now a chef at a tiny B and B in North Carolina. In many people’s eyes, I’m a failure. But at least I’m a happy failure,
and if you ask me, that’s success.”

  She shook her head and laughed. “I’ve never heard success described as happy failure.”

  It wouldn’t have been the way he would have described himself or his life just a few short days ago. But something about being around Ellie had restored his belief in himself. Maybe it was the whole new life thing, or maybe it was just realizing that he didn’t have to be perfect, not with his omelets or his diapering skills, to bring the people around him joy. “You asked me that first day if I was happy.”

  “I remember. You said ‘I think.’”

  “At the time, I was still moping about the ex-girlfriend, and bah humbugging my way through the Christmas season. I’d been a hermit since I moved to Stone Gap, only coming out of my room to cook meals for the guests, and usually eating alone. Then you and Ellie dropped into my life—literally—and reminded me of what did make me happy.”

  “What is that?” Her eyes held a genuine question, as if she hoped he’d give her the answers she’d climbed the mountain to find.

  “Family.” He smoothed a hand across the tablecloth, erasing a wrinkle. When he lifted his hand, the wrinkle reappeared, as stubborn as the stains and history etched in every inch of Ida Mae’s home. “This house and my grandmother were an incredibly important part of my family. My brothers and I would come here and be totally different people than we were in the Mausoleum. I think I’d forgotten all that until now.

  “I came to Stone Gap a month ago, bitter and disillusioned. Which is pretty much how my life went when I lived with my parents. But here, in this town, at the inn with Della and Mavis, and in this house with that kid I swore I wouldn’t even like, and the Christmas decorations on the table and you, I have to say I’ve got a family, sort of, and I like it.”

  The lightness disappeared from her features. Her blue eyes clouded, and a wall seemed to fill the space between them. Vivian pushed her plate away and got to her feet. “Family is the one thing I can’t give you, Nick. So stop trying to make that happen.”