A Christmas Affair (4 page)

Catching the sound of Lyfe’s chuckle, Tess finally turned her bored gaze in his and his brother’s direction. She immediately lit up.

“Well, well. If it ain’t the Alton boys.” Tess’s beautiful smile grew bigger as she pushed away from the counter and strutted her way toward them. “Good Lord. All these chocolate muscles up in here. A sister might pass out.”

Hennessey laughed, mainly because Tess was as big a flirt as he was. “Don’t worry. If you faint, know that I got you.”

Lyfe rolled his eyes. He was going to have to take another look at his brother’s birth certificate and doublecheck that his middle name wasn’t “Corny.”

When she drew closer, her eyes widened. “Oh, my
God … is that … Lyfe Alton? What on earth are you doing back in town?”

“Hello, Tess,” he said, tilting his head. “I’m on a little sabbatical from my architecture firm, so I came down to spend a couple of months with the folks.”

“Sabbatical, huh? Tired of living in the big city and thinking about coming back home?”

He shrugged to avoid answering.

Tess’s eyes roamed over him. He felt naked. He wondered if he should grab something to cover his private parts just in case she could see through his clothes.

“You know I never told you, but I used to have the biggest crush on you back in the day.”

“Is that right?” he said, straight-faced. The fact that Tess looked so much like her sister was beginning to make his chest hurt.

“Uh, huh.” Tess nodded. “But you were so stuck on Corona Mae that I don’t think you ever noticed any other girl in town.”

“He sure in the hell didn’t,” Hennessey said.

Lyfe gave his brother a hard glare that served as a final warning.

“What?” Hennessey asked, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s the truth.”

Only Tess picked up on his discomfort. “So where is the rest of the litter?” she asked. “Everybody knows that the Alton six-pack travels together.”

Lyfe shook his head as he looked her over again. “Like everything else, times change.”

Tess settled her hands on her hips as she tossed him a flirtatious wink. “Indeed.” She started to say something more when her gaze suddenly cut toward the suspended television set. “Is that—”

“Yep,” Hennessey said. “Looks like your older sister is still doing big things up in New York.”

“Parker, can you turn this up?”

“You got it!” Parker said, hitting the volume on the remote until people outside were likely able to hear the television set.

Lyfe groaned. But instead of leaving, like he should’ve done, his attention returned to the screen. Why not? He was a glutton for punishment, wasn’t he?

“Tess, honey. What the hell is taking you so long in here?” Rufus Banks thundered and then added to his old friend, “Yo, Parker, what’s up?”

“Nothing much. Just running your tickets through the machine here.”

Lyfe stiffened. He couldn’t help it. Things between him and Mr. Banks had never healed since the night he’d walked in on him and his daughter naked in their living room. Bullets flying at you in the middle of a snowstorm generally tended to have a lasting negative effect on a person.

The men’s gazes crashed.

“What the hell are you doing back here?” Rufus barked.

“You’ll never believe who’s on television, Daddy,” Tess said, interrupting a potential war.

Rufus grudgingly shifted his attention away from Lyfe and followed her finger that was pointing to the television. A millisecond later, a genuine smile carved its way into the center of his gray beard while he, too, strolled over to stand beneath the screen. “Well, look at Corona Mae all gussied up. What’s going on?”

Hennessey shrugged. “It appears you’re finally about to get yourself a son-in-law.”

“Say what?” Rufus squinted up at the screen.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Tess said, folding her arms beneath her small breasts. “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

Rufus’s eyes bugged out. “What? That white boy right there?”

Lyfe gave him a lopsided smile. “Well, look at it this way. It’s not me.”

The men’s gazes locked again and another layer of tension was added between them. When Lyfe was younger, the look Rufus Banks was giving him would’ve been enough for him to trip over himself and scramble home. But fourteen years later, Lyfe was an intimidating man himself.

“Come on, Hennessey. Let’s get out of here.”

T
he minute their wedding announcement segment ended on the entertainment channel, Corona powered off the television then jumped out of bed and raced toward the bathroom. “Oh, God. I think that I’m going to be sick.”

“Hey!” Rowan said from his side of the bed, as he lowered the script that he was reading. “I thought it was a very nice interview.”

Corona ignored him and dropped onto her knees next to the toilet bowl and waited for her dinner to make an encore appearance. But instead her stomach bent and turned like it was playing its own private game of Twister.

“Are you all right in there?”

She gagged and coughed but still nothing came up. “Yeah.” She sniffed and hung her head low so that her voice echoed in the porcelain chamber. “I’m fine.” In
her mind, she replayed the syrupy sweet interview and felt another violent jerk in the center of her stomach.

What if my family saw it?

“You’re worried about your family,” Rowan said.

Corona jerked her head up to see her freshly minted fiancé leaning against the bathroom doorframe. He looked so studious in his wire-rimmed frames, and a hunk of his black hair flopped over his left eye. Then again, the man really didn’t have a bad angle on him.

“And don’t bother lying to me,” Rowan warned before she could think of a good lie. “I can tell that you’re worried about them learning about our engagement in the media before we get a chance to tell them in person.”

“Well—”

“Then let’s just fly down there and tell them. Get it out of the way. I don’t understand what the big deal is,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m starting to feel like the black sheep or something.”

Corona stretched up a single brow.

Rowan coughed and cleared his throat. “Okay. Bad choice of words.”

“You think?” Corona dragged herself off the floor and then quickly rummaged through her medicine cabinet for her beloved bottle of Excedrin.

“Okay. Then let’s just call them.”

“We will,” she said.

“When?”

“Soon.” It was all that she could offer.

Rowan’s steady gaze trapped her. “Is it because I’m white?”

“What? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Come on. You can tell me. I’m a big boy.”

“No.” She grabbed a Dixie cup and quickly filled it
with water so she could down her precious two pills. “It’s not that.”

“But it’s something … right?”

Cornered, Corona prolonged swallowing her pills by holding them and the water in her cheeks longer than necessary.

When she didn’t respond, Rowan tossed up his hands. “Fine. Fine. I can take a hint. Believe it or not, I don’t need a brick building to fall on my head, you know. You don’t want to tell your parents right now. I’ll step back and respect that—but we’re going to have to tell them sooner or later.”

Corona sucked in a deep breath, but she didn’t answer him.

“All right. You know what? I’m going to head back to my place to study this script,” he said, turning around. “We begin shooting soon and I need to concentrate.”

Finally swallowing her pills, Corona followed him. “Whoa. Wait, Rowan. You don’t have to do that.”

“Actually, I do.” He completed his march over to the bed and started shoving his things into the leather duffle bag that he usually brought when there was a possibility of him being able to stay the night.

Corona sighed at having made a complete mess of this night. But, then again, didn’t this just fit the MO of how she generally screwed things up when it came to relationships? “Rowan—”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, blazing toward her and stopping briefly to peck a light kiss against the top of her head. That was definitely a sign that she’d screwed this evening up.

“Row—” She reached to stop him, but he was already
halfway to the bedroom door and she was left grasping at air. “All right. Goodnight then.”

“‘Night.” He slipped out of the door and left her to listen to his heavy footsteps as they rushed down the staircase.

In the back of Corona’s mind, she had the fleeting desire to chase after him. But if she succeeded in doing that, what was she going to give as a better explanation as to why she wasn’t ready to introduce him to her family?

No, she wasn’t the only transplant from Georgia roaming the streets of Manhattan. But she was pretty sure that the other movers and shakers in the concrete jungle didn’t have fathers that proudly proclaimed winning the top prize in the Southern Select Show Pig Championship or chased the boyfriends they didn’t like with a shotgun and forced them to marry their daughters.

Call it a hunch.

Oh, she loved her parents. Really. She did.

She just loved them more when they remained in Thomason, Georgia. What was it they said?
Absence makes the heart grow fonder?
That was certainly the case with her and her family.

Hell, she’d forgotten to ask Rowan about her diaries—or accuse him of finding and reading them.

Riiiiiinnnng!

Corona jumped and then jerked her head toward the phone on the nightstand next to the bed. “Rowan.” Maybe he wasn’t so mad at her after all. A side of her lips quirked up. He might even be standing outside the building, wanting to say how much he hated how things had ended on a weird note between them tonight. After
all, Rowan was a strong advocate of not going to bed angry.

The weight of the world lifted off her shoulders. She raced over to the phone and snatched it up with her apology cresting her lips before she even got the receiver to her ear. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Well, it’s about time you admitted it!”

Her face twisted. “Who is this?”

“Damn. You don’t even recognize the voice of your little sister anymore?”

Corona slammed her eyes closed and groaned. “Tess.”

“Wow. What a way to make a girl feel special,
Chloe,
” her sister sniped. “What a ridiculous name. I’m calling you Corona. You were named after our grandmother, and you should be proud of that.”

“I am proud, it’s just … “

“Country. And country doesn’t work in the big city.”

“Can we please not argue about this?”

“Fine. I called to ask why I had to find out about your getting married to Mr. Action-Pack on that little thingy we call down here ‘the boob tube.’”

Corona’s heart sank. “You saw that?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. I watched it standing in the middle of Parker’s Gas Station with Daddy and … Lyfe Alton.”

“What?”
Corona blinked and felt like she was being swept back into a time machine. What were the chances of Lyfe popping up on the same day that she had just been reading in her diary about their first time together?”

“Shocking, isn’t it?”

“To say the least,” Corona agreed. Her brain started
churning out so many questions that she didn’t know which one to ask first. “What … why … how?”

“Exactly what I asked,” Tess said, picking up on her sister’s shorthand.

“Well, what did he say?”

“Not much. Really. Only that he was in town on sabbatical.”

Chloe nearly swallowed her tongue.

“Just imagine if you’d just come home for the holidays like I begged you. Who knows, maybe you two would’ve run into each other.”

She swallowed. “Like that would have been a good thing.” Still, she couldn’t stop herself from imagining what such a chance encounter would’ve been like.
Awkward. Painful. Explosive.

“How long is he in town for?” Chloe asked, trying to sound casual.

“Don’t know. Didn’t ask.”

“
You
didn’t ask?” she said, shocked.

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Because I’ve never known you to miss an opportunity to get all up in someone else’s business,” Chloe answered honestly. “Never.”

“Well, we all were a little distracted with you and Rowan James trying to inhale each other’s faces on national television. Really. Next time, try just getting a room.”

“Ohmigod. Lyfe saw that?”

Tess clucked. “With you being in the industry, I figured that you knew how cameras worked. They broadcast to millions of people—even to ones who are just standing in a gas station.”

Corona felt like she might need to make another run to the bathroom.

“When exactly were you planning to tell us that you’re marrying a white boy?”

“Don’t say it like that. What difference does it make what color he is?”

“I don’t care what color he is, but people like a heads-up.”

“I know. I know. I’ll call them.”

“Uh-huh. Right,” Tess challenged. “Looks to me like you were planning to avoid the issue by doing what you always do, run away.”

“Not funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“That’s not fair,” Chloe argued.

“But it is true.”

Silence.

“See? You may be good at running your little business up there.”

“Little?”

“But when it comes to family issues, you race out of the kitchen before the stove gets too hot. Talk to Daddy. It is waaaay past time for you two to settle y’all’s issues.”

“I know. I know.” And she did know. Things had never been the same between them since she had left Georgia the way she did. “I’ll talk to him. I promise.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Tess pressed.

“Okay. Is there another reason you called—other than to make me feel like crap?”

“Nope. I just wanted to check that off my to-do list.”

“Great. Fine. Consider it done.” She was tempted to slam the phone down, but she still had more questions
about Lyfe that kept her from introducing Tess to Mr. Dial Tone.

“So. There’s nothing else you want to ask me?” Tess said, sounding like she knew exactly why her sister hadn’t slammed the phone down.

Silence.