Do You Believe in Santa? (19 page)

His heart clutched. He couldn't lose her, literally or figuratively. He had to find a way to make this work.

“Mandy.”

She swung around, her smile showing relief. “There you are. I wasn't sure I was in the right place.”

“You did good. You almost beat me to the food court.”

She studied him, a small crease forming between her eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

He worked up a smile that was mostly a grimace. “You just missed it,” he said. “One of those baggage carts ran right over my foot.”

 

 

The tree at Rockefeller Center was everything Mandy had imagined, only more so.

She had to crane her neck to look up at it. It towered over the square, its multicolored lights giving off a radiant shimmer. For a moment she closed her eyes, looking at the afterglow on her eyelids, trying to preserve the mental image of the tree in her mind.

But she was here, now, so she opened her eyes and took it in once again.

Forcing as much understatement as she could into her voice, she said, “Now, that's a tree.”

Jake stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her, a plus in more ways than one because the cold at Rockefeller Center was also more than she'd ever imagined. They were far from the only people here, but the crowd was light enough that their fellow tourists receded to the background.

“About thirty thousand lights,” he murmured in her ear, and this time it was the warm vibration of his voice that made her shiver. “Over seventy feet tall. That star at the top is nine and a half feet across.”

She nodded. Leave it to Jake to learn all the facts and figures. But she'd done her homework too. “It takes a custom trailer to get it in here.”

“And every year in January, they recycle the tree for lumber or mulch.”

“Jake!”

“What? Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. Don't say ‘mulch' in front of the tree.”

Mandy leaned into him, relishing the moment. Jake had been subdued the past several hours, but then, she probably hadn't been a ball of fire herself. A long day of travel could do that to anyone. She told herself that was what spending your life with someone was like. Being together for the tedious stuff, the boring stuff, even the hard stuff. They'd had a little practice so far. But hopefully, there was a lot more to come.

She waited, sure Jake could feel her heart pounding underneath his embrace. But something wasn't happening.

Jake took his eyes from the tree, burying his lips in Mandy's hair. So much planning had gone into this moment, and it was nearly perfect.

Even with his arms around Mandy, he could practically feel the ring in his pocket, burning away like radium. He wanted to reach for it. He wanted to say what he'd come here to say, but something had him by the throat.
Plenty of people get married without a plan,
he thought. He just never thought he'd be one of them. Right now he was staring at a big fork in the road. One of the signs was pointing toward
Florida.
The other one was aimed at
Unemployment.

He needed to offer her a better plan than that.

Turning her toward him, he cupped her face in his palms, trying to drink in every detail of her face under those lights. Trying to think of something to say that was worthy of the moment.

Words failing, he kissed her. It was sweet, delicious, and possibly their most tender kiss yet. Jake held on to her, making it last, because in that moment anything seemed possible.

Finally he looked down at her, and it was just him, Mandy, and the icy December air.

“I love you,” he said, and never had the three words seemed so small and insufficient.

“I love you,” she whispered.

A silence stretched out, until Mandy put her arms around his neck and held him tight.

Say it anyway,
his mind whispered, but the words, and the moment, were gone.

Chapter 19

Maybe the ring fell out of his pocket.

Mandy's eyes skimmed the sidewalk of Times Square for the ring—or the box—but it was hard because the pavement was jammed with passing feet, and the ring might be buried under piles of confetti anyway. The pop of hundreds of firecrackers rumbled under the noise of the bustling crowd. It was New Year's Eve; somehow she'd missed Christmas altogether, and where was Jake?

Back at Rockefeller Center, she realized. So how had she wound up at Times Square?

The rumble of the firecrackers got closer and more persistent, until it sounded like knocking.

“Mandy?” Jake's voice came to her, muffled, as if she were hearing him from underwater.

She opened her eyes. Daylight replaced the night lights of Time Square, and she found herself in a room she hazily recognized. She'd seen it for about five minutes last night when she and Jake had arrived at his parents' house. He'd led her, tiptoeing, up the stairs to the guest room at about one a.m. She remembered the comforter on the bed most, a dark blue plaid, fluffy with down.

Another soft knock came at the door across the room, and she tried to struggle the rest of the way up from muddled sleep. “Come in.”

Jake opened the door, looking tidy and maddeningly refreshed. He paused just inside the doorway as he surveyed her in her horizontal, rumpled glory. Mandy pulled the fluffy comforter up to her chin and tried to assume a semi-sitting position.

“Sorry,” he said. “But it's almost ten. I thought I'd better get you up and give you time to get started.”

She brushed hair back from her face with one hand, holding on to the covers with the other. “That means it's—what—”

“Not quite seven in Tall Pine.”

She rubbed her eyes, still trying to sort out the dream from the reality. So there wasn't an engagement ring lost under some ticker tape. Maybe there'd never been a ring at all. She looked at Jake as the fragments of last night started falling into place.

“You've got jet lag,” he said. “It's normal. You've had a weird schedule, and your time zones are all messed up. But we've only got about two hours till the invasion.”

Her brain was catching up. “All the aunts and uncles and cousins.”

He nodded. “Right. And I wanted to give you time to meet my folks first, before we're up to our eyeballs in relatives.”

His smile was sweet and just a little awkward. Maybe because she was in bed, clutching the comforter like a scared maiden. Truth be told, she didn't remember what she was wearing underneath.

“I'll get dressed,” she said.

Jake nodded again and stepped back, his hand on the doorknob. “Right. The bathroom's next door. And my room's at the end of the hall”—he nodded to the left—“before the stairs. Come get me when you're ready.”

When he closed the door, she lowered the covers and saw that she'd managed to pull on her jersey-style night shirt before she tumbled into bed.

Belatedly, her brain flashed a mental snapshot of what Jake had been wearing: a coffee-brown sweater she'd never seen before. Almost the same color as the one she'd bought him for Christmas.

As she got ready, she tried to sort through what had happened last night.

So he didn't ask you to marry him. Big, fat hairy deal.
He'd planned this whole trip, brought her home to his family. And he'd told her
I love you
underneath the Rockefeller Center tree. What did she have to complain about?

But she couldn't shake the feeling that something had gone wrong.

When she went down the hall to find Jake, he was sitting at a laptop at a hutch-style computer desk. He swiveled quickly in his chair when she walked in.

“Ready?” He closed the lid on the laptop.

“Ready as I'll ever be.” Meeting a boyfriend's parents. It was a ritual she only knew from the movies. He rose to lead the way out the door with hardly a glance in her direction.

“Jake?” Mandy didn't move to follow him yet.

He turned. “What?”

Was it her imagination, or did he seem preoccupied? “Do I look okay?”

She'd chosen a light blue sweater with a snowflake pattern, and her earrings were silver stars. She'd kept her hair and makeup simple. She hadn't wanted to take long, and it seemed best not to stray from the tried and true.

He didn't stop long to examine her, but his smile looked genuine. “You're perfect.” He took her hand and kissed her lightly. “Let's go.”

Still holding hands, they went down the stairs. The Wyndhams' two-story house reminded her of the classic American family home in just about every Christmas movie she'd ever seen, tidy and much more spacious than her house in Tall Pine. Family photos worked their way down the wall alongside the stairs, and pine garland wound around the banister. The effect was homey, but by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, Mandy had time to conjure up a mental image of a forbidding New-England-style couple with stern countenances and—

A woman emerged from a room around the corner, and Mandy's vision dissolved like a soap bubble.

Jake's mother—she had to be Jake's mother—had short brown hair lightly spattered with gray, and a smile that reached all the way to her hazel eyes. She wore a black sweater decorated with an embroidered Christmas wreath.

“Good morning,” she said. “You must be Mandy.”

“And you're Mrs. Wyndham. I'm so glad to meet you.”

“Pam.”

Mandy blushed and felt Jake squeeze her hand.

“Come back to the kitchen,” Mrs. Wyndham said, turning back in the direction she'd just come from. “You must be starving.”

Jake gave Mandy's hand another squeeze and let go. She felt, briefly, like a boat set adrift. “I'll go find Dad while Mom helps you get some breakfast.”

Mandy tugged at her sweater and followed Jake's mother. So far the water seemed fine.

As they walked through the kitchen past the stove, delicious smells greeted Mandy. She must have been half-asleep to miss them until now. The aroma of turkey blended with half a dozen other tantalizing scents she couldn't immediately put a name to. And something else Mandy latched on to immediately. Coffee. She prayed there was some left.

Past the kitchen area, a bay window cast light on an inviting breakfast nook, with bench seats and red-and-white-checkered seat cushions. “Have a seat,” Mrs. Wyndham said. “Would you like some coffee?”

“I'd love it,” Mandy confessed. “But really, that's all I need. You're in the middle of cooking for—”

“Don't worry about it. I didn't have to make anything for Jake this morning. He was already up when I got down here.”

“You're kidding.” Mandy sat on the checkered cushion.

“It's called long experience with air travel.” Jake's voice preceded him into the room. “I'll probably crash around three.”

She looked up to see Jake standing with a slightly shorter man. He looked like an age progression of Jake some thirty years later—the same keen brown eyes, the thick brown hair generously dusted with gray at the temples.

“Mandy, this is my dad,” Jake said, prompting her to stand again and bump the table, which fortunately didn't have any coffee on it yet.

“Don't get up.” The older man extended a hand to her. “Ben Wyndham. It's nice to meet you.”

“Thanks. I mean, me too.” Mandy decided to quit while she was ahead.

The men settled into the breakfast nook while Jake's mother poured coffee for all of them and brought Mandy a Danish for breakfast. Mandy glanced at the clock, saw it read ten minutes after eleven, and wondered how much time they had left before the relatives came crashing in.

With all of them seated, it suddenly felt like a summit meeting. Mandy clutched her coffee mug, grateful for the warmth, the caffeine, and something to hold on to. Determined not to clam up, she started with the most obvious statement she could think of: “You have a beautiful home.”

Pam Wyndham nodded. “Thanks. We've been here nearly twenty years now. It's broken in.”

Mandy nodded. “Jake tells me you—”

Jake's cell phone sounded. He pulled it out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. “Sorry. I need to take this.”

And like a flash, the outer edge of the bench beside Mandy was empty. For the second time this morning she felt unmoored.

Jake's father stared after him. “Do you have to put up with that a lot?”

“Actually, no.” Mandy watched Jake's retreating sweater, trying not to feel deserted. “Maybe because the cell phone reception in Tall Pine is really iffy.”

“What's Tall Pine like?”

“Very mountainy.” Mandy made a face at the awkward word, but they seemed to know what she meant. “We're about seven thousand feet up, and it always smells like pine trees. It's pretty small, but it's nice.”

“It sounds like an unusual choice for a chain hotel.” That was Jake's father again. Weighing the pros and cons. She shouldn't be surprised.

“That's a problem Jake ran into.” She wondered how much Jake had told them about Tall Pine, about her, about any of it. “It took a couple of months, but he got the town council to see the ‘up' side of it.”

Mrs. Wyndham broke in. “Jake tells me you work for a Christmas shop up there. That must be like working in a candy store.”

“Or do you get tired of it?” his father asked.

Mandy nodded in Mrs. Wyndham's direction. “The first one.”

Jake finished his call and got back to the kitchen as quickly as he could. His folks were nice, but being left alone with anyone's parents right after meeting them would be a tall order for most people, regardless.

“. . . and then Jake held up this bag of giblets,” he heard Mandy saying. “I got the first bag out before I cooked the turkey, but I didn't know there was another one.”

“So we threw away the evidence before anyone else saw it,” Jake chimed in, sitting back down beside her.

“And he said,
‘You saw nothing.'”
Mandy imitated his whisper as she glanced up at him, her eyes shining.

They spent the next fifteen minutes chatting until his mother got up to baste the turkey.

Mandy asked, “How can I help?”

Jake stood to free Mandy from the breakfast nook, and she sent him a smile as she went to join his mother. Those two were going to get along fine. He'd seen it as soon as they met. His dad was taking a more reserved role, but Jake knew better. Ben Wyndham just played things closer to the vest. And when you got down to it, this visit wasn't about getting their approval. Jake had brought her here, plain and simple, to show her off.

And, ideally, to welcome her into the family. Jake thought of the ring still waiting in his jacket upstairs, radiating like Kryptonite.

He excused himself from the table. The invasion would be starting any minute.

 

 

Mrs. Wyndham entrusted Mandy with some basic jobs of chopping and rinsing. She wasn't sure how necessary her help was, but as long as she wasn't getting in the way, she didn't care. Being here in this kitchen brought back memories of working with her own mother.

Gradually, the room started to flood with other females.

“I brought the green bean casserole. Where do you want it?”

“Here's the veggie tray. Want me to set it out in the living room?”

“Where can we stash the cake pops so the kids don't get to them before they eat?”

The rush of names made her dizzy. Anne and Liz were Pam's sisters. Marilyn was Anne's daughter, which made her Jake's cousin. Meanwhile, the rest of the house was filling with men and children as well. Mandy started wishing for a diagram. Introductions were made, and names started flying out of her head.

But she had a feeling they'd remember hers.

“So you're Jake's girlfriend!” an effusive brunette exclaimed. It sounded like big news.

“And you're . . . I'm sorry. Roberta?”

“Right.” Roberta squeezed her arm. She had striking brown eyes. She had to be from Ben's side of the family. “I'm Jake's cousin. And your boyfriend was a
brat
to me when we were kids. He—”

“Get away from that one.” She felt Jake's arms grab her by the waist from behind. “She lies.”

“You
lie! You broke that horse statuette and blamed it on me—”

Jake was literally dragging Mandy backward. “I told you. Lies, lies.”

Mandy pulled away. “Wait. I think I'd better hear more—”