i 7d341843b82569de Read online

  “I meant in here,” Sarah said, patting at her chest. “Like, how am I s’pposed to know you’re the right one for me to live with?”

  Whoo-boy. She’d asked the one question C.J. didn’t have an answer for. He was still searching for that answer in his own life. And hoping like hell he’d find the instincts to be a good dad really, really fast, because he seemed to be lacking those particular characteristics. He wanted to, Lord knew he wanted to, but he wondered whether he even had the ability to be a decent parent. If he could someday finesse a situation—heck, a ponytail—as easily as Jessica did.

  “Well, Sarah, that’s the kind of thing you sort of figure out after a while. You get to know me, and I get to know you, and we see if we’re a good fit and—”

  “And what if we’re not?” Her blue eyes, sharp on his, the child gone from her voice, as if talking about her future had aged her ten years. But then her lower lip trembled and he realized that she was still very much a scared six-year-old.

  And he was still very much a clueless new parent. “Then we’ll keep working on it.”

  “Do I have to move?”

  He had known this question was going to come up sooner or later. He’d hoped it would be later, when he’d had more time to prepare Sarah and could find an easy way to break the news of a transcontinental life upheaval. “Yes. I live in California. That’s where my job is. And after Christmas, you’ll go back there with me.”

  She shook her head, hard and fast. “I don’t wanna.”

  “You’ll like California,” he said. “It’s sunny all the time. There’s a beach not too far from where I live and palm trees and all kinds of things they don’t have here in Riverbend.”

  She toyed with her straw, bopping at the ice cubes in her glass, watching them slip up and down in the water. “I wanna stay with LuAnn.”

  He sighed. “You can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the judge said—”

  “I don’t care about the stupid judge.”

  “You have to, Sarah. He makes the rules.”

  “LuAnn loves me. LuAnn has a room for me. LuAnn makes me pancakes.”

  “I have a room,” C.J. said. “And I know how to make pancakes.”

  Sarah stared at him, waiting. Then her eyes began to well up, and he knew what he had left off.

  That he loved her.

  Aw, hell. He barely knew her. He wanted to love her, he really did, but—

  But love and C. J. Hamilton had never been a very good fit. He wondered if something was wrong with him. How could a man sit across from his own flesh and blood and not immediately leap to “I love you?”

  “I want LuAnn,” Sarah repeated, her voice softer, the tears now puddles in her eyes, and C.J. reached across the table for her hand, but she had already withdrawn, pulling into her little six-year-old frame, away from him.

  Away from the hurt. He knew that feeling. Knew that look. And especially knew that reflex. His heart constricted, and he vowed to redouble his efforts, to find a way to connect, not just because Sarah needed it—

  But because he did, too.

  “Sarah—” His cell phone rang, the vibration so startling he jumped back and instinctively reached for the silver Motorola, and the words he should have said got caught in his throat. Too late.

  Damn it. When would this get easier?

  “Yeah,” C.J. barked into the phone.

  “Christopher? Don’t hang up. Just give me one minute. Please.”

  C.J. closed his eyes for a second, then drew in a sharp breath, steeling himself for the female voice he had never expected to hear again, especially not given how badly the last conversation had gone, when she’d invited him for some birthday party or something like that, and he’d considered going—until he’d heard the voice in the background that had made it clear C.J.’s attendance wasn’t a big priority. “Paula, I—”

  “It’s Christmas and he’s asking for you, really asking for you, Christopher. He needs you.”

  Across from him, Sarah was ordering pancakes. C.J. held up two fingers, telling the waitress to bring him the same. If only it were that easy to deal with the expectations waiting on the other end of the phone line. C.J. ran a hand through his hair. “He’s never needed me before. What makes today any different?”

  A state away, in a house large enough for a dozen people that now only held two, Paula Hamilton, John Hamilton’s third wife, let out a long, sad sigh. “He’s dying. This is your last chance. You can’t leave things undone between the two of you.”

  Dying.

  The word slammed into C.J. like a right hook from a welter-weight. John Hamilton had always seemed immortal, living his life hard, at top speed, like the cars he bought, the women he’d chosen before Paula had come along. Apparently all of that fast-track living had finally caught up with him.

  But the thought of his father actually dying—C.J. rocked back against the vinyl of the booth, warring between decades of bitterness and shock, and a wave of impending loss. “My father ignored me for the past twenty years, Paula. Hell, all my life.”

  “And he’ll have to live with that.” Ice clinked in a glass as Paula took a drink. For Paula to be indulging before her morning coffee, things did, indeed, have to be very bad. C.J. didn’t know the third Mrs. Hamilton that well, but had talked with her a few times and knew she wasn’t one to reach for a bottle without provocation. “Will you think about it, please? Make this Christmas special for him. For me. And for you.”

  “I’m already doing that, Paula. But not with him.” Then he hung up the phone and returned his attention to the only relationship in his life that mattered right now—

  And given the look on Sarah’s face and the way she was ignoring him, one he wasn’t doing such a good job of building.

  C.J.’s truck let out a groan under the extra weight, but it stopped in front of Jessica’s store without losing a single branch. Jessica met them outside, nearly as anxious as Sarah to get the pine inside and set up. As soon as the engine was off, Sarah unbuckled and scrambled out of her seat, then danced her way inside the store, happily holding the door as C.J. carried the bundled pine into the toy shop.

  He set it in the tree stand that Mindy had placed in the corner. “We even dug out the ornaments and the tinsel,” she had told Jessica with a conspiratorial smile when Jessica returned earlier.

  “Wasn’t it busy here while I was gone?” She’d glanced around at the crowded shop, the registers making a continual music of sales.

  “Extremely. But we managed to find a minute or two to unearth the box of decorations.” Mindy grinned. “Now get to decorating.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. Mindy couldn’t be any less obvious if she was a red flashing light in a snowbank. “Soon as you get back to work.”

  Mindy had just laughed and returned to the register, humming along with the store’s Christmas music as she went.

  Within minutes C.J. had the tree perfectly centered and trimmed to exactly the right height to fit the star and still leave a little ceiling clearance. “You act like you’ve done this before,” Jessica said.

  “When you work in Hollywood, you work on whatever they tell you. I’ve done set decorating, costumes, the whole nine yards.”

  “But you’ve set up your own tree, too, right?”

  He glanced at Sarah, who was mulling over the box of ornaments, taking the decision of which one to hang first very seriously. “I have more than the color of my eyes in common with my daughter.” Then he crossed to the box marked Lights and got out the string of multicolored twinklers, instead of elaborating.

  She wondered about that, about why he, too, hadn’t decorated a tree before, but decided not to ask. Because asking meant getting involved. Connecting. And she wasn’t doing that, not with him or anyone, especially not this week.

  And yet a part of her wanted to get very involved with C. J. Hamilton. To dream of a future that once again had a man in it, a partner.

  A family of h
er own.

  She shook off the feeling. She’d made her choices, and at thirty-seven, it was too late to go back and undo them. Either way, C.J. had made it clear he was going back to California. And that would only leave her alone again because her life was here, in Riverbend.

  And right now, her biggest mission was decorating the tree in her store. Not thinking about what-ifs with a man like C.J.

  “I can do that,” Jessica said, reaching for the lights.

  He held them out of her reach, mocking offense. “What, you think I can’t handle this jumble of wires? Who put these back in the box, anyway? A troop of monkeys?”

  She laughed. “That would be me, because I’m always in a rush after Christmas to get the tree taken down. The lights get kind of…well, thrown in there.”

  “You, the woman who takes her holiday so seriously, treats her lights like,” he held up the tangled, twisted mess, “this? If I didn’t know better, I’d think two cats went to war in this box.”

  Two of Jessica’s regular customers—women who lived just down the street from her—walked by, their arms loaded with toys, and gave Jessica a friendly hello. She returned the greeting, then pivoted back to C.J. “The end of the year is busy for me. Inventory, taxes, closing out the books…And, I have to admit, taking down the lights is not as much as fun as putting them up.”

  He grinned, then began searching the jumble of green and rainbow bulbs, looking for the plug end. He found it finally and inserted it into the wall, rewarded with a burst of multicolored light along the string. “I believe I have found your one flaw, Jessica Patterson.”

  “One?” She laughed, but inside, a part of her went warm and soft at the way he said her name. No, not just said it, caressed it with his voice. “I have plenty, believe me.”

  “Can I hang this one?” Sarah inserted herself between them and thrust up a silver angel. “It’s so pretty.”

  “Sure. But after we get the lights on,” Jessica replied. “We have to do the lights first, then string the beads, then—”

  C.J. put a hand on Jessica’s shoulder. “Let her put the ornament up.”

  “But if she does that first, then we try to hang the lights, the lights get tangled in the ornaments and—”

  C.J.’s hand again. “It’s just a tree, Jessica, not a science project.”

  “I have a certain way I like to do…” Her voice trailed off when she noticed Sarah, standing beside the tree, the ornament dangling from her tiny fingers, her pixie face full of disappointment. “I suppose there’s more than one way to decorate a tree.”

  C.J. gave her a smile. One that seemed to take over his entire face, reaching into his blue eyes, lighting them brighter than the lights in his hands. “Definitely more than one.”

  For a smile like that, she’d have listed a thousand ways.

  Whoa.

  “Let me, ah, get those lights,” Jessica said, taking the string from him, trying more to restring her thoughts back into a semblance of sense.

  Customers weaved in and out behind them, shopping the varied displays, looking at the games, the stuffed animals, the connecting block sets, but Jessica barely noticed them. It seemed all that existed was this little world of the three of them—and this tree.

  She pulled on the green string, intending to untangle the lights and get busy with the job at hand. Not the man before her. Regardless of where her thoughts might have gone last night, or how many times she had mentally replayed their kiss.

  “Wait,” C.J. said. “I think I still have—”

  “Your—”

  “My—”

  And somehow they collided, his fingers caught in the jumble of wires, combined with her overzealous untangling, and then they were together, his chest bumping against hers, sending off internal sparks, before they each backed up in a rush. “Sorry,” C.J. said.

  “My fault,” Jessica said, her heart thudding, her pulse thunder in her ears. “Maybe we should, ah, skip the lights altogether.”

  He grinned. “Or buy all new untangled ones.”

  Yeah.

  Or…keep working on these ones. And try that again.

  “Do you like it?” Sarah tugged on Jessica’s shirt sleeve. “I made it all pretty. Look!”

  A distraction. Well timed and much needed, because Jessica kept getting mixed up in wanting C.J. instead of everything else she was supposed to be focused on.

  Like the Christmas tree and staying uninvolved in his holiday—and his life.

  The tree. Attention on the tree, Jessica. Not the man standing in front of it.

  A three-and-a-half-foot-high perimeter of sparkling ornaments ringed the pine, all placed exactly at Sarah’s eye level. It wasn’t the perfectly decorated tree Jessica created every year, but it had its own flavor, a child’s flavor, and it reminded Jessica of another tree, a long-ago tree, from a Christmas years and years in the past.

  Jessica put a hand to her mouth, not wanting the girl to see her caught up in a memory. “Oh, Sarah. It’s wonderful. Absolutely beautiful.”

  And it was, in its own special, unique way. It no longer mattered if the lights had been strung first or the beads were hung. This was, after all, Sarah’s first tree, and it was, in her words, boo-ti-ful.

  Just as Jessica’s first real tree had been.

  Christmas music played on the store stereo, creating a soft undertow of holiday spirit, wrapping the tree and all of them in a little magical bubble.

  The little girl beamed. “Thank you. Now can we do the star?”

  “Absolutely.” Jessica dug in the box, came up with the gold topper, handed it to her helper. She hummed a stanza of the song, a burst of Christmas spirit soaring through her heart.

  “It’s too high. I need a boost,” Sarah said, and before Jessica could stop her, the little girl was clambering into Jessica’s arms, as easily as a kitten.

  Jessica blinked, but took the girl’s weight—she had no choice, really—and hoisted her toward the ceiling. C.J. came up behind them, his hand covering his daughter’s. The two of them held the delicate star together, reaching as one for the very tip-top. “Let’s finish off this tree,” he said.

  Jessica’s gaze met C.J.’s over Sarah’s blond curls, and for just a second the magic seemed to leap between the two of them, too. That same enchanted feeling from the night before, with the falling snow, the dark, quiet truck’s interior and his kiss—

  “Look everyone! See how pretty it is?” Sarah exclaimed.

  Jessica pulled her attention away from C.J. “You did it just right, Sarah.” She resisted the urge to straighten the slightly askew planetary alignment of the star. It was pretty—and exactly the way a six-year-old would hang it.

  And that was just fine.

  Jessica caught the picture the three of them made, and for a moment she could pretend this was her family—the family that could have been, had she chosen to have children with Dennis. Sarah’s blond curls, the color so like Jessica’s own. Six years old.

  The age Jessica’s own child would have been, if fate had had another destiny in mind for the Pattersons. Jessica closed her eyes, inhaled the sweet scent of Sarah’s skin and let regret wash over her. For the choices she couldn’t undo.

  But, oh, if she could go back and choose a different road and have a child like this, a child of her own—

  Jessica lowered Sarah to the floor and backed away from C.J. “I, ah, think our tree is all done. How about some hot cocoa?”

  “What about the teen-sel?” Sarah asked. C.J. quirked a brow. “Teen-sel?”

  “Yeah, this,” Sarah said, digging in the box, and yanking out a container of tinsel so fast and hard the lid opened up, strewing tinsel on the floor, the tree and all over a nearby display of building blocks.

  “Oh, no!” Jessica reached for the box, but it was far too late. She’d be vacuuming up this bunch of Christmas spirit for weeks.

  Sarah hung her head. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to get the teen-sel on the tree.”

  “It’s
okay.” Jessica bent and started picking the tinsel off the toys, trying not to grumble about the slippery silver pieces that had wedged between the boxes of blocks. “Really, it’s okay.” She reassured the girl until Sarah’s frown lifted.

  “Look at it this way,” C.J. said, coming up beside her to help, while Sarah dashed around to get the most wayward pieces. “It’s like insta-store decorating.”

  “Remind me of that when I have to do insta-un-store decorating on December twenty-sixth.”