A Christmas to Remember (22 page)

When the waitress came for their order, she gave the two males a look and said, “Aw, sweet,” before sneaking a wink in Ilena’s direction. “Beef stew with cornbread?”

Ilena nodded, and Jared took his gaze from John long enough to say, “Make that two.” After the waitress left and there were only the sounds of John’s sucking between them, Jared quietly asked, “Would you do it again if you knew how it would turn out?”

“Do what?”

“Marry a soldier. Get pregnant when he’s going off to war.”

Under the table, she touched her ring finger, bare for a long time. She’d slipped off the band a few months after Juan’s funeral, strung it on a chain, and worn it close to her heart another few months. Now it rested in her treasure box with other important mementoes of her life.

“He wasn’t a soldier when he asked me to marry him, but I knew he would become one, and that couldn’t have stopped me. Some things are too right to say no. As for John…” She smiled at her son, still milking the nearly empty bottle while his eyes slowly fluttered shut. “My boy was a happy surprise. I guess our good-bye sex was too much for the birth control to do its job.”

Was that a little bit of a blush darkening his cheeks? Aw, she adored a man who could still blush at the mention of sex. “So what about you, Jared? You want kids?”

Kids? Jared thought three was a good number.
It’s a start,
she said before casually dropping the words
six, seven, or more.
She asked if he’d been married. He told her more about his parents—Dr. Dad and Dr. Mom, she called them—and his siblings. She told a few stories about her grandfather the deputy sheriff arresting his father the moonshiner. The things she said were important, even the unimportant ones, and the sound of her voice lulled him into a comfort he hadn’t felt in… well, ever that he could recall, helped along by the solid weight of the baby sleeping in his arms.

Jared hated for dinner to end, certain that when they walked out of the restaurant, the slap of cold weather would chase away the coziness, the comfort, the intense satisfaction that seeped through him.

It didn’t.

They returned to the office, and while John slept, they decorated the tree. The ornaments were nothing like the Lladró pieces that nestled in precisely determined placements on the Connors tree, but the finished project had a homey warmth about it that made the Connors tree sterile in comparison. It was the kind of tree toddlers could gather around without fear, the kind that could survive a pet.

A family kind of tree.

After he placed a delicate angel on top—blond hair, fair skin, blue eyes; coincidence?—he stepped back to study it. Ilena turned off the overhead lights and joined him. She smelled of baby and vanilla and Christmas and something light and flowery that made him think of warm weather, sunny skies, and long, sultry nights, and heat radiated from her slender body. Even without a smile, contentment enveloped her. She’d gone through hell, but she’d come out the other side with hope and a deep appreciation for life. It was a very appealing part of her.

Then he breathed deeply again and corrected himself: every part of her was appealing.

“You did good for your first time.” She tilted her head to smile up at him, but her smile slowly faded, and instead she studied him a long moment. He wondered what she saw, what emotion was in his eyes and face, if she knew he wanted to pull her closer, if she could tell he suddenly wanted to kiss her, right this minute, and maybe not stop.

She raised one impossibly delicate hand, cupping her palm to his cheek, sending heat flooding through him, then pivoted toward him, lifting onto her toes and touching her mouth to his.

Oh, yeah, she knew.

He slid his hands over her shoulders, the curve of her breasts, her narrow waist, and the flare of her hip, lifted her against him, held her so they touched everywhere from head to toe, and he pushed his tongue into her mouth. In response she gave him a faint nip, swallowed a laugh, then sighed as he stroked her tongue with his, as his fingers slid beneath her sweater to caress the skin above the waistband of her jeans. Soft. She was soft. Delicate. Womanly. So powerfully appealing.

Although her touch was light as a feather, he felt the instant her fingers made contact, even through his shirt. It was the blast of heat that sent a shiver through him, the zing of awareness, the intense greed that flared inside him. More. He wanted more.

But he didn’t get more. With another languid sigh, Ilena pulled away, sinking from the tiptoe position, resting her forehead against his chest for a moment. His pulse was pounding in his ears; he wasn’t sure but thought he heard her murmur something before she backed away.
Wow.

One surprise kiss, a couple of moments, one erection… yeah,
wow.

“Let’s store all the ornament packages in the tree box,” she said, turning away to scoop up empty cartons.

He thought about catching her arm, pulling her back and kissing her again, but all he did was retrieve the big box and move it closer. They worked in silence by the light of six hundred multi-colored bulbs. When they finished, he expected her to grab John and leave, but she sat on the sofa beside him, resting one hand on his chair, patting the empty cushion to her right in wordless invitation. The leather made a quiet
whoosh
when he sat down.

“You’re the first man I’ve kissed since Juan.”

She didn’t need to tell him that. He’d known. “You’re the first woman I’ve kissed since—”

Though he stopped short, she finished for him. “Since you left New York?” With a grin, she bumped her shoulder against his.

“Longer than that.” Long enough that he’d have to think to remember that last kiss. But Ilena was the first woman who really meant something. The first woman who tempted him to think long-term—five, ten, twenty years down the line. The first woman who felt impossibly right, though, for the life his parents had planned for him, he couldn’t imagine anyone more totally wrong.

“It was nice,” she said, and never had the word
nice
sounded so big and special. “I’d like to do it again. But right now I need to get my boy home and bathed and in bed. We’re going to Tulsa tomorrow to shop and have lunch with Juan’s family.”

Some emotion settled low in his gut, something he wouldn’t name, but he didn’t like the discomfort. She’d told him she was close to Juan’s family. Of course she visited them. Of course she made certain they got to see his baby regularly. And of course there were photos of him, conversations about him, memories and love they’d shared for him. He’d been her husband. Jared wouldn’t expect anything else.

But that something in his gut thought it might be easier to get involved with a woman whose contact with her husband’s family had ended when the marriage had.

How selfish did that make him?

He turned on the main lights. She switched off the tree lights. He pushed the box down the hall and into an exam room. She dressed for the cold and picked up John. He put on his own coat and gloves and followed her outside. The air was frigid enough to turn their breath to frost the instant it left their bodies, and when the quilt slipped from John’s face, he opened his eyes and fixed his cranky expression on Jared while Ilena buckled him into his car seat.

When she straightened, job done, he touched one finger lightly to John’s cheek. “See you later, buddy.” Then, to Ilena, he said, “Thank you for the help.”

“Thanks for letting us help. I love decorating. And thanks for dinner.” She closed the door before starting around to the driver’s side. “Hey, you want to have a home-cooked meal Sunday? Cooking after church is a tradition even if my boy is more interested in chewing on his fingers than food. Want to join us?”

Sunday dinner. It sounded like everything his family had never been. Who was he to tinker with tradition? Besides, it seemed only fair, if she was spending tomorrow with Juan’s family, that they would spend the next day together. “I’d be happy to.”

“Good.” Her smile broadened, and she repeated the word as if it needed a little emphasis. “Good. I’ll see you at one Sunday.”

* * *

A Sunday dinner that didn’t end until a follow-up late-evening supper. A Monday meeting of the Prairie Elf Fundation. Tuesday lunch since Ilena’s evening plans with the Tuesday Night Margarita Club took precedence over everything except John. Now it was Wednesday afternoon, and Ilena and Jared had both taken off early for a driving tour of Tallgrass’s better neighborhoods.

You’re having a romance!
Jessy had exclaimed over dinner last night.

I certainly hope so,
Ilena responded. If all this time together, talking nonstop or not at all, and all these kisses and incredibly special moments just being together didn’t add up to a romance, she didn’t know what did.

She still thought of Juan a hundred times a day. She still said
I love you
to him in her heart every night. She still felt his loss deeply, but she felt new possibilities, too. And a few times, when John did something cute or something funny happened, her first thought was
I can’t wait to tell Jared
instead of Juan. She could feel guilty and sad about it, but Juan understood. She knew he was up there in heaven cheering her on.

“Okay, we’ve seen the rich parts of town and the cookie-cutter subdivisions,” she said as he stopped at the gates of the newest such collection. “I can show you the historic areas, or you could always buy land and build your own place.”

“What about condos?”

She blinked, images of sleek, glass-and-steel, high-tech high-rises filling her mind, places far too modern and upscale for Tallgrass. “We’ve got lots of apartments, but I don’t know of any condos.”

“Except when I was home with my family, I’ve always lived in condos.” His smile was thin, his gaze distant. Thinking of the life he’d left behind? Maybe missing it a little? “Show me the old stuff.”

His parents’ house in Boston was old. So was the one in Nantucket. And the one in Maine. One couple, four children, three homes, all within a few hours of each other.
Rich people,
her father would say and shake his head.
They’re different.

But differences could be overcome. She’d always believed that. Look at her and Juan. And she still believed it. Look at her and Jared. She really wanted there to be a
her and Jared.

Pushing down the niggling in her stomach, she directed him to the oldest neighborhood in Tallgrass. The stately houses rose two or three stories, built of sandstone or brick, homes to the bankers, oilmen, and the most successful of the early merchants. The structures were probably simple compared to the places Jared had called home, but she loved them with their big porches and expansive lawns, wrought-iron fences, and especially the sense that they would be there forever.

Low dark clouds obscured the sun before it had set, dropping the temperature sharply. Snug in the luxury car with its heated leather seats, Ilena shouldn’t have noticed, but a little chill had settled over her, forcing a falsely cheerful tone to her voice. “See anything you like?”

He glanced over. “You.” Then he dragged his hand through his hair. “Maybe I’ll stay at the B&B a while longer.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said. Not one she would choose for herself. Room service and housekeeping were great, but she loved having a place of her own. Her room in her parents’ farmhouse, the tiny cheap apartment she and Juan had shared when they first married, the standard quarters they’d occupied in Tallgrass, and her current house all had one thing in common: they were
home.
It was more than a place; it was a state of mind. Roots. Stability. But roots didn’t just anchor people. They tied some people down and made them feel trapped, stuck in a place they didn’t want to stay.

Jared had never said he wanted to stay in Tallgrass.

She didn’t want to think about living anywhere else, so she wouldn’t. Simple, huh?

He slowed for a stop sign before looking her way. “What now?”

“How about dinner at my house, then we go back out to look at the Christmas lights? One of the churches on the west side of town does an incredible display.” It grew by ten thousand lights a year, they boasted, and she envisioned taking John there when he was ten for a display that could be seen from space.

He echoed her earlier words with a grin that chased away every last bit of the chill inside her. “Sounds like a plan.”

On Saturday morning, when Jared followed Ilena and John into the high school cafeteria, he realized immediately what Joanie had meant at the elf meeting when she called it wrapping day. The tables that normally held raucous kids were filled with a few thousand miles’ worth of gift wrap and tape, and mountains of gifts were stacked in a long row at one end. “Wow. Haven’t you people heard of gift bags? They’re way easier.”

“Oh, yeah, and can’t you just see the joy in the kids’ eyes as they tear into a gift bag to see what Santa brought them?” She rolled her own eyes, looking adorably elfin in her amusement. “Haven’t you ever ripped open wrapping paper with sheer delight, Jared?”

“I’ve never done anything with sheer delight,” he said, tossing his coat on a chair, then helping her out of hers, revealing her tight jeans and equally snug sweater. “But I’d like to rip the wrapping off of you. That would qualify.”

Giving him a sly look, she nudged her body against his. “You show how good you are with your hands today, and I’ll show you how good I am with mine tonight.” Then she surprised him by blushing, her cheeks almost matching the red of her sweater. Snatching John out of his seat, she scurried off to say hello to some of the volunteers, giving him a look over her shoulder that was both shy and seductive. The combination could kill him.

Forcing in a breath, he turned his attention to the gifts again. They filled pallets and boxes and spilled out of sacks: toys, books, clothing, plenty of stuffed animals and warm coats. “That’s a lot of gifts.”

“And only about half of our wish list.” Joanie stopped on her way past. “There are a lot of families in need.”

“Will you get enough?”

“We trust that we will. We’ve never had to turn anyone away empty-handed yet.”

We, we, we.
Would he ever feel that much a part of the fundation, or the town, or anything? Given his reluctance to look for a house…

It had been his suggestion to check out the various neighborhoods on Wednesday, to get an idea of where he might live the next few years. But when it had come to actually considering a particular house or even a certain area, he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t picture himself in any of those houses, in any of those neighborhoods. It seemed too… permanent.

“People are as generous as they can afford to be at the holidays,” Joanie went on. “We don’t worry until the last twenty-four hours.”

Jared admired her spirit as she walked away. If he were in charge, he would be panicked enough to start calling his parents, his siblings, and their famously successful surgeon friends to badger donations.

His cell beeped in his pocket. It could have been Morse code for
speak of the devil.
He considered silencing it, then looked at Ilena and thought what she would say about that. Pulling it out and heading for the exit instead, he greeted his mother with as much cheer as he could fake.

“Are you still in Smallgrass, or have you come to your senses?”

Dr. Mom isn’t big on hellos, is she?
Ilena’s voice laughed in his head, the delicate tinkling-chime sound, and his nerves eased a bit. “I’m still here.”

“Are you bored yet?”

“How could I be bored? I’ve just opened my own practice. I’m seeing patients. I don’t have to take call, I haven’t had a single emergency, and I’m not answering to anyone but myself.”
Mental apologies to Joanie, whose managerial style included ordering him about at work.

“Diagnosing strep, checking boo-boos, giving inoculations. How could you be anything but bored? Don’t you miss civilization?”

He opened his mouth to say,
No, of course not,
but the words didn’t come. Sure, the pace was slower; he’d expected that. New doctor in town, building a practice from scratch, during the holidays, no less. People had to know he was there before they could bring their kids to him. And he’d had more patients this week than last. When flu season really hit, he’d have plenty more.

But he was bored sometimes.

“Mom, I knew Small—” he winced—“Tallgrass was going to be a big difference. I like it. I like the people.” Two, in particular.

“Which you’d tell me even if you hated it because you never could admit you’d made a mistake. Have you found a place to live?”

He leaned against a wall across the corridor from a glass case crowded with sports trophies. “Not yet. I did decorate a Christmas tree for my office.”

“Oh, Jared, that’s what staff are for. You’re a classic case of avoidance. If you don’t commit to something as simple as a house, then you don’t have to commit to the town.” Noise rumbled in the background, then she said, “Your father said his offer to buy out the contract still stands.”

Was he avoiding commitment? No, no way. He was just… busy. Still adapting. A little reluctant. That was all. “Tell Dad thanks, but I’m fine. In fact, I’ve got to go, but I’ll send you my address as soon as I have it. Love you.” Before she could respond, he hung up.

* * *

Wrapping Christmas presents was one of Ilena’s favorite holiday routines. Close behind it was watching specials on TV with mugs of hot cocoa, freshly made treats, and a fire warming the room with its wood-smokey fragrance. This year her new favorite thing was sharing those things with John snoozing in her arms and Jared’s strong arms wrapped around them both.

He made her second Christmas without Juan so much more bearable.

He shifted positions and grunted. “I didn’t realize gift-wrapping could be harmful to your health.”

“It can be when you spend half a day doing it. I’d offer to rub your back, but my arms are full.” She’d already offered to do more:
You show how good you are with your hands today, and I’ll show you how good I am with mine tonight.
Her cheeks warmed at the boldness of it. Not that she’d ever been shy about asking for what she wanted, but propositioning Jared was a whole different issue from doing the same with Juan.

“He’s got to go to bed sometime.”

Heavens, how did the room get so much warmer with that simple observation? She felt as if she were dressed for a polar chill in the Saharan desert, only the heat was coming from inside out. She’d swear even her hair was radiating fire.

“Well…” Sounding husky, she cleared her throat. “It
is
nearly an hour past his bedtime. And I think it would be okay to skip his bath tonight. Don’t you agree, Dr. Pediatrician?”

“It’s not like he’s done a lot of running around since his bath last night.” Jared sounded husky, too, and seemed to pulsate with tension even though he’d gone very still.

She drew a breath, squeezing air into her lungs. Were they really going to do this? Oh, she wanted it with every taut muscle, hypersensitive nerve, and fiber of her being. She didn’t care that it had been longer for her than for him, or that the last man she’d been with was Juan. She didn’t worry about how pregnancy had changed her body. She wouldn’t consider the chance of getting her heart broken. She wanted this. Wanted
him.

It was so easy. Shut off the television. Carry John into his room. Lay him on his back in the crib and stroke his cheek gently when he roused. The red and green lights on his foot-tall Christmas tree cast a warm glow over him, and its ornaments—stars to guide him, angels to watch over him, puppies to make him laugh—shone in the dim light.

“I love you, my baby. I’ll love you forever. No matter how long, no matter wherever,” she whispered as she gave him one last pat. A silly rhyme, but special to her because it was the last thing John heard from her every single night.

Jared waited at the door, arms folded across his chest, handsome and comfortable but with an edge that strained his features, giving him a needy, primal look. As she approached him, she felt the urge to give her own primal growl.

The roar would come later.

Her bedroom was just down the hall, the headboard visible through the doorway. She’d shared that bed with Juan, but not the room, not this house. But he wasn’t a ghost to banish. Just a precious memory to lock away for a bit while she made more precious memories.

The lights on her own tree were white, tiny round globes, and so were the ornaments, angels of every type. Her favorite sat at the top, wild blond curls, wearing a dyed burlap dress, with a thin gold ribbon for a halo and a white cowgirl hat. Red cowboy boots peeked from underneath the dress.

Jared pushed the door up but stopped before it closed. She appreciated the thought, though it wasn’t necessary. When John cried in the night, he did it with great passion.

And his mama was about to do something with great passion, too.

He picked up a photo of her and Juan from the dresser top. “You were very happy.”

“We were. We made the best of what we were given. Now I’m going to make the best of what—” She caught herself before
we
slipped out again. It was too soon to talk about feelings, emotions, potential, futures, love. “What I’m given.”

Jared set the picture down, then studied her. “You’re more beautiful than any angel in this house.”

“Aw… .” The way he looked at her made her feel beautiful. Desirable. It gave her the courage to close the distance between them, to place her hands on his chest, and to brush her mouth across his. Her intent was to tantalize, and judging by his harsh breath and the rigidity of his body, she’d succeeded.

They made short work of their clothes on the way to the bed, constantly touching even when the wrinkle of plastic indicated he’d retrieved one or more condoms from his trousers before kicking them aside. The fabric of the spread was cool against Ilena’s skin, chased away the instant Jared laid his body over hers and sought her mouth for a sweet, needy, hungry kiss.

Great passion
, her own voice echoed, barely audible above the pounding of her heart, the sizzling of her blood, the ragged breathing that rasped from both of them. It had been so long since she’d felt this kind of passion. For everyday life, sure. For John, absolutely. But for a man… Mercy, she’d missed it.

He touched her, kissed her, made her grateful to be alive, and she did the same to him, stroking taut muscles, kissing flat nipples, sending waves of sensation rippling across his belly. When her fingers wrapped around his erection, age-old emotions rose inside her: satisfaction, awe, need, completion. When he settled between her thighs and slid inside her, she was in a perfect daze. This act, this time, this man, this woman… .
Primal.

There was no roar when she climaxed—she really wasn’t the roaring sort—but desperate whimpers of hunger and shuddering gasps of completion. Her entire body strained against Jared’s, her fingers clenching his shoulders, her mind reduced to nothing but feeling.

Feeling incredible.

Jared’s harsh breaths followed immediately, as if the frenzy of her finish propelled him to his. His eyes were squeezed shut, his features sharp and angular in the soft light, and his body rigid, until a guttural groan ripped through him and, an instant later, he collapsed against her.

She stroked his damp hair, let his rasping breaths tickle her ear, and tucked the moment away in her memory forever. There were things a woman never forgot, and falling in love with Jared Connors was definitely one of them.