Starting from Scratch (21 page)

“N
o?” Elisha echoed. Just a flat no? Okay, so he was a former Navy SEAL, a macho man who took pain like an Apache warrior, with no complaint, no telltale signs of wincing. But this was a get-together they were talking about. And he'd just indicated that he had no real set plans for the day.

Ryan hated being backed into a corner. Hated having to explain himself. Yet here he was, explaining. “Look, with you it's a family thing—”

She tried to keep it light. “We could adopt you if that's the problem.”

“No, thanks.”

She was trying hard to understand what made him tick. Everyone was different, but some things were universal. Like spending the holidays with people who mattered.

“Ryan, no one should be alone on Christmas.”

Traditional family celebrations had stopped meaning anything to him decades ago. Survival meant deliberately closing himself off from things like that. At this point, he had no interest in opening the door again. And probably couldn't even if he wanted to.

“Save it for one of your kids' books, Max. Look, I want to take that shower. Just revel in your success,” he said, referring to the critic's response. “That should be enough for you. I gotta go.”

And with that, the connection was broken.

Not permanently, she hoped. Hanging up the phone again, Elisha sat staring at the rose on her desk for a very long time, thinking.

And then she went into action.

 

The phone call came the morning of the next day. At 6:00 a.m. It jangled into her sleep. She knew who it was before she picked up the receiver. Her hand on the phone, Elisha paused and gave herself to the count of ten to fully wake up. She was going to need all her faculties for this one.

“Hello?”

“What the hell is all this?”

Ryan. Sitting up, Elisha leaned against the headboard and drew the covers closer to her. The air was crisp. The new heater she'd bought for the house last month wasn't programmed to kick in until seven.

“All what?” she asked innocently.

“I came up to the house this morning and found a fully decorated Christmas tree standing in my living room. With tinsel,” he added dramatically. “Now, either the house was attacked by a band of marauding, renegade elves, or you did this.”

A simple thank-you was obviously out of the question. Some people, Elisha thought, were very hard to do things for.

“No marauding, renegade elves, Ryan. Just the girls and me, bringing you Christmas. It was only a little simple redecorating, don't make it sound like a crime.”

It might have been redecorating, Ryan thought, but there was nothing simple about it. Walking into his dark living room to have his vision accosted by a tree was as much a jolt to the eyes as Elisha had been to his system. To his thoughts. She'd secretly redecorated those, too, without his being fully conscious of it. But he was conscious of it now and he had no idea how to move things back to where they'd been.

Ryan dragged his hand impatiently through his hair as he stared at the result of her physical invasion. She'd brought in a live tree. The damn thing stood at least ten feet tall. And looked oddly at home in the dark room. Like a sunbeam trying to break through a fog.

He didn't need this. Didn't need to be invaded like a Normandy beach.

“How the hell did you manage to get in here with all this, anyway?”

“I had help.” She grinned, enjoying herself. “I could go into detail, but then I'd have to kill you.”

He snorted, not amused. “Very funny.”

“The man who runs security at Randolph & Sons is a retired cat burglar. I asked him to help.”

A cat burglar. It figured. The door, when he'd gone to reexamine it, had shown no signs of forced entry, but he hadn't checked all the windows. Not after he saw the tree. “It's breaking and entering, you know.”

“I'll take the fall,” she responded cheerfully. “Besides, I didn't take anything out, I brought something in. A little Christmas cheer, I hope. The girls insisted on helping. They thought it was sad that you didn't have anything up.”

He turned around in the room. Not only had she brought in a tree, but she and her companions in crime had put garland up along his banister and hung what he took to be either mistletoe or some not-quite-dried vegetation in his doorway. He hadn't even been upstairs and now that he thought of it, he didn't want to. No telling what she'd done there.

“Yeah, well, you can't say that anymore, now, can you?”

“Do you like it?”

Did he like it? No, he didn't. He didn't want to. And yet, somehow, it managed to speak to something inside of him. To the boy who hadn't quite died all those years ago. Hadn't died even though there'd been nothing to nurture him.

“I don't like clutter.”

The man would go to the grave before admitting his feelings, she thought. Stubborn, stubborn man. “It's not clutter, it's Christmas.”

Ryan said something unintelligible under his breath. She let it pass, thinking it safer that way.

Finally, he said, “Tell the girls they did a nice job.”

At least he was thoughtful of their feelings. “Thank you, that'll make them happy.” Since he had said something partially amiable, she thought she'd give it one more try. “So, will you come to Christmas dinner? You don't have to stay the whole day,” she added quickly. “Just eat and go. Rocky's going to stop by and Sinclair always spends part of the day here. There'll be other people you know.” She mentioned a few authors he'd run into at the promotion parties.

The woman was talking faster than he could process. “I'm not much for crowds and I've already told you, as far as I'm concerned, Christmas is just another day. Why are you trying to convert me?”

“I'm not,” she protested, wishing that he'd stop being so perverse. He was doing it because he was afraid of something, she thought. But what that was, she wasn't completely sure. “You're free to do whatever you want.”

“Thanks.”

His reply was cool. She tried to regain ground. “I just wanted you to know you had options.”

“Then you didn't have to go through the trouble, Max. I always know what my options are before I ever walk into a situation.”

“This isn't a raid, Ryan. This is just Christmas dinner.”

It was a hell of a lot more than that, he thought, and they both knew it. He was working his way across an abyss using a ladder made of paper towels. “Like you said, there'll be plenty of people around. You're not going to miss another place setting.”

“You're not just another place setting.” There, she'd said as much as she could. As much as she dared. But he was a smart man. He was good at deciphering code. And she had just told him that she cared for him, couching it in words that left them both safe. Mostly him. Because if she told him outright how she felt and he didn't feel anything, that would be the end of it. Words were far more lethal than any physical act they might have shared.

For all she knew, he might still regard what they'd had as sex. He might, but she didn't. As far as she was concerned, she had made love with him. Because, dammit, she loved him.

There it was again, that strange, funny little hitch in the middle of her chest, in the pit of her stomach. Like a huge bipolar reaction, happy and sad by so many turns that it made her head spin.

“Sure I am,” he told her flatly.

He was telling her there was nothing between them, she thought.

Tears came, filling her eyes, filling her soul.
Agree with him, save face and be done with it. This wasn't supposed to have happened anyway.

But it had, and she couldn't back away. “No,” she said firmly, “you're not. You could be the only place setting, but you're not just ‘another' one.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Silence that vibrated straight into her soul. Suppressing the sigh that rose to her lips, Elisha said quietly, “I have to go. If I don't see you before then, have a merry Christmas.”

And then, when he didn't say anything to make her remain, she hung up the phone. Burying her face in her pillow, she let the pillowcase absorb her tears. And called herself a fool for feeling the way she did.

I
t really was true, Elisha thought. The more things changed, the more they insisted on remaining the same. She was living proof.

In the last six months, her life had experienced nothing short of a monumental shake-up. She'd gone from being a single-minded, dedicated career woman to a woman who juggled home and family with her job. Something she'd never thought she would be able to do, even if the occasion did present itself. But she could. That was the “new” Elisha Reed.

But as far as things went on the romantic front, she was still the old Elisha. Her new evolution hadn't helped her lose her knack for being attracted to men who weren't good for her. Men who weren't going to stick around for the long haul.

It didn't matter that she'd told herself that she was past all that. That she'd made peace with never having a husband, a significant other in her life. Had convinced herself that she could just enjoy a night, an interlude of system-blowing, hot sex and be satisfied with that as long as her partner wasn't a Neanderthal. She'd thought that she'd made herself believe that the experience was an end unto itself.

It was a lie. She wanted more.

Wanted more because she'd seen that life could and often
did
offer more. Nothing was set in stone. She'd learned that. More than anything, she wanted that semi–happily ever after that she'd come to believe lucky people had in their lives.

That
was the life she wanted.

Where there's life, there's hope, right? Elisha told herself as she went around the house, switching off lights. Andrea had had her friends over for a Christmas Eve party and it had been past midnight before the last guest, a boy named Adam Tomlin, had finally left.

She'd witnessed Andrea and Adam sharing a kiss beneath the mistletoe and had felt a mixture of sweet pleasure and wistful envy at the sight. Adam looked like the type of clean-cut boy parents wished for their daughters, and she was happy for Andrea.

But really sad for herself.

There'd been no call from Ryan in the last few days. No calls, no e-mails. Nothing. She had a feeling that when he'd said no to her, he was turning down more than just her invitation to Christmas dinner. He's said no to the whole idea behind it. To the whole idea of sharing himself with her beyond an interlude.

For all she knew, that part of their relationship might already be in the past.

Served her right for making a big deal out of it, she thought ruefully.

Elisha couldn't shake the sadness. All during the evening, she'd put on a front—smiling, bantering, pretending that nothing was wrong. But it was. It was very wrong. And there was nothing she could do about it.

Standing at the foot of the stairs, she paused for a moment just to look back into the living room. The house was locked up for the night. She'd done that first before playing Santa Claus and bringing out the presents she'd hidden in the storage shed behind the garage. She'd placed the lot of them underneath the tree. Just like Henry used to do.

It had been her brother's custom to wait until everyone in the house was asleep, then he'd tiptoe down and slip all the gifts beneath the tree. Like Santa Claus. The tradition had begun when Andrea was just a baby. She saw no reason to change it now.

Elisha felt her eyes growing misty and tried not to think that this was not just the girls' first Christmas without him, but hers, as well.

“This one's for you, Henry,” she whispered, leaving just one light burning on the first floor.

Where there was life, there was hope, she thought again as she entered her bedroom and closed the door. But she was realistic enough to realize that as far as Ryan Sutherland went, that hope was gone. If she wanted to continue working as his editor, she was going to have to accept that. Get used to that.

She wasn't altogether sure she could.

Love sucked, Elisha thought, changing for bed. Especially the one-sided kind.

But then, she already knew that. She lifted the covers and got into the double bed that seemed so horribly empty. The sheets felt cold against her body. But then, so did her soul.

 

Elisha's bedroom window faced the front of the house and consequently the driveway. She'd picked it because the room received the first rays of the morning sun. She liked being woken up by sunshine when it was in the offing. But it wasn't the sun that woke her this morning. The sun hadn't even had a chance to make an appearance yet. What woke her was the noise. The noise of someone or something in the driveway.

She forced herself to focus. It felt as if she'd only just finally fallen asleep after hours of tossing around, trying to find a comfortable place on the ordinarily accommodating mattress.

Was someone trying to break into the house? On Christmas morning? She thought that seemed unbelievably crass.

Elisha sat up, listening intently.

Henry's house was close to being forty years old. When he'd first moved in, he'd done a lot of remodeling and refinishing himself. This was not a structure that groaned and creaked like some houses the same vintage. Even if it had been, these weren't the sounds of a house settling. This was the sound of a car pulling into her driveway. Of a car door being closed. And a hood being popped.

She thought about waking up the girls. Should she be calling 911?

Elisha leaned her head closer toward the window and listened harder.

Sinclair had volunteered to dress as Santa Claus for Beth's sake. The author had been almost crestfallen when she'd told him that Beth was too old to believe in that anymore.

These weren't the right kind of sounds for an invading Santa Claus.

Besides, as good as his intentions were, there was no way Sinclair would have arrived at her house at six-thirty, shrouded in the shadows of fading moonlight. He would have come to dinner, dressed in the red suit.

Her heart in her throat, Elisha got out of bed and crept toward her window. She looked out. And saw a Hummer. The black vehicle was sharply contrasted against the fresh blanket of snow that had fallen after ten last night.

Santa drove a Hummer.

She smiled ever so slightly. Opening her window, she looked out, then toward the front door. But from her angle, there was no way she could see who was standing there. The view of the front door was hidden from her.

Elisha withdrew. She closed the window and grabbed her robe as she flew out of the room. Struggling with it, she'd just managed to push her arms through the robe's sleeves when she got to the front door.

At times like this, she wished she had a dog. A big, snarling Doberman or German shepherd. Something fierce that could rear up on its hind legs while she held on tightly to its collar. Just in case the “robber” wasn't who she thought it was. But what kind of robber drove a Hummer?

The only one she knew of who had one of those overpriced vehicles was Ryan.

Taking a deep breath, she yanked open the front door. A blast of cold air rushed in, surrounding her. Elisha hardly noticed it. She was too focused on the man on her doorstep.

She was looking down at the top of his head.

Ryan was caught bending over, placing the last of the foil-wrapped packages he'd brought with him. Gifts he'd gotten up early to wrap because he'd bought them all just last night. Up until that time, he'd resisted making the purchases. Resisted giving in to what making those purchases implied. That, like it or not, he was part of something greater than himself.

He heard the door the instant she'd begun to open it. Caught, Ryan raised his eyes to hers. “Go back to bed, you're dreaming.”

“No, I'm not,” she replied, fighting hard to keep from laughing out loud.

“And why aren't you asleep?” he asked, snarling out the question.

There was no point in telling him he was the reason she couldn't drop off to sleep. He was here now, which was all that mattered.

“I was,” she told him. “But then a noise woke me up. I decided to come down and check things out because I thought I heard Santa Claus making a last-minute run before he went back to the North Pole.” She looked at the gifts on the doorstep. There were at least ten in all. All with gift tags hastily applied. One tag had fallen off. Ryan quickly picked it up and pushed it beneath the ribbon. The latter was askew.

This seemed so out of character for him, for a second she thought she
was
dreaming.

Elisha grinned, her eyes catching his. “Apparently, I did.”