A WEDDING FOR CHRISTMAS Page 2

  Cris knew she could count on her father to spend a little one-on-one time with his only grandchild. That was the good part about living at the inn with the rest of her family. Someone was always around to help out with Ricky when she was busy cooking.

  “I did forget,” Cris confessed. “But have you worked out the logistics yet?”

  “What logistics?”

  “Where you and Wyatt will live after the ceremony?”

  “Here,” Alex said with finality. “Where else would we live?”

  Granted Wyatt had grown up spending summers at the inn with his father, but a lot of men would have wanted to begin their marriage in a place of their own. “Well, Wyatt does have that house in Brentwood.”

  To Cris, Alex had always had an answer for everything. Now was no different. “Where he’ll stay when he can’t avoid being in L.A. Otherwise, we’ve got dibs on the new section being added to the inn. Whenever your guy gets around to finishing it, that is.”

  “He’s not my guy,” Cris protested, even as a bit of color climbed her cheeks, highlighting her embarrassment. “You hired him.”

  “You knew him,” Alex countered.

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” Cris declared. At the time, they’d needed a general contractor and giving her old friend’s brother a job seemed the right thing to do. Her father and Alex made those kinds of decisions, so her input wouldn’t have carried much weight, Cris told herself.

  But Alex had a different take on the situation. “Your knowing Shane helped seal the deal,” she told Cris.

  Cris couldn’t help wondering if there was a reason Alex was laying this at her doorstep. If so, her sister was overlooking one obvious fact.

  “Ha. He could have been Santa Claus, and if you hadn’t liked his references and his plans for the extension, you wouldn’t have hired him and you know it.”

  “Let’s just say you have a point. Meanwhile, break—not that it actually turned out to be that—is over, and I’ve got to be getting back to the front desk. I left Dorothy in charge and you know how much she dislikes being in a position of authority.”

  Cris smiled sympathetically. She herself didn’t exactly care for manning the front desk, although she was getting better at it.

  As for Dorothy, she was one of her father’s lost souls, people who occasionally turned up at the inn. Their father would extend a helping hand until that person could stand on his or her own two feet.

  Dorothy, her life in shambles, had come to them years back. She’d booked a room for one night so that she’d spend her last night on earth in a place with clean sheets and the smell of the sea through the opened window. Sensing her hopelessness and desperation, Richard Roman had stayed up all night with her, talking about everything and anything. When dawn finally arrived, the world somehow didn’t seem quite so bleak for the woman.

  Because she confessed that she couldn’t pay for the room and she wouldn’t take charity, Richard gave her a job. That allowed Dorothy to keep her dignity. The job turned into a vocation and she worked her way up. She became head housekeeper—and was fiercely devoted and loyal to Richard and his four daughters.

  As they walked into the front room, Dorothy immediately released a sigh of relief. She moved away from the desk as if the floor had suddenly caught on fire and she was barefoot.

  “You act as though you didn’t expect me to come back,” Alex remarked, amused.

  Now that Alex had returned, Dorothy could be a little magnanimous. “Of course I did. It’s just that those were the longest twenty minutes I’ve ever spent.”

  “Don’t understand how,” Alex commented, “seeing as I was only gone for fifteen. And I would have been back sooner, but Cris just kept talking and talking.” She slanted a sideways glance at her sister, then added with a completely straight face, “Didn’t seem right, cutting her off and walking away just like that.”

  “No, of course not,” Dorothy agreed solemnly. “I wouldn’t have expected you to.”

  “She’s pulling your leg, Dorothy,” Cris said. There was never any winning with Alex. “You are impossible. I should start composing my letter of condolence to Wyatt now. Better yet, I should tell him to run for the hills while he still can.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Stevi warned, entering with Cris’s five-year-old son in tow. “You do anything to mess up this wedding I’ve been working so hard on and I swear, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” Stevi’s eyes narrowed as her threat became more menacing. “Alex and Wyatt are getting married Christmas Day if I have to hog-tie both of them and pull them up to the altar in a horse-drawn cart.”

  “Nothing weird about that statement.” Alex laughed, shaking her head. “Maybe I should elope.”

  “You do and I’ll hunt you both down and make you pay dearly for my pain and suffering,” Stevi warned.

  Threatening vibes were all but wafting from Stevi’s five-six form. “You do realize,” Alex said, “that you’re just organizing a small wedding reception and not staging the second invasion of Normandy or a military coup in a third-world country, right?”

  “What I realize,” Stevi responded, “is that you have no concept of what’s involved in carrying off a successful reception.”

  Alex extended a sympathetic smile and an offer she knew would be refused. “If it’s too much for you, Stevi, I’ll gladly relieve you of the responsibility.”

  Stevi’s blue eyes widened with complete surprise. “You wouldn’t dare,” she breathed.

  Alex chuckled as she shook her head. “I can’t decide if you just uttered a frantic plea or tossed out a challenge without remembering to throw down the symbolic glove.”

  Stevi blew out a breath, doing her best to rein herself in. “Okay, maybe I am being a little intense,” she allowed.

  Alex’s eyes met Stevi’s, pinning her where she stood. “Maybe?”

  Stevi relented. “Okay, I am being a little intense—”

  “Only in the sense that World War II was a ‘little’ conflict. Stevi, I love you, but get a grip. This is just supposed to be a small gathering.”

  “There’s nothing small about three hundred people in my book.”

  “What three hundred people?” Alex inquired incredulously. Her list had under a hundred people on it. Well under a hundred. “Are you throwing the doors open to the general population?”

  “No,” Stevi insisted. “I’m just counting Wyatt’s list.”

  “Wyatt’s got over two hundred people coming?” she asked.

  “That’s how many names are on his final list.” Stevi nodded. “Wyatt pared it down from five hundred,” she added. “He didn’t want you to be overwhelmed.”

  “Too late,” Alex retorted.

  “How could you and Wyatt not have discussed the invite list?” Cris asked her in disbelief.

  “Well, I...just assumed he was...leaving this to me...” Alex trailed off. “His work has kept him away from the inn a lot. Say, Stevi, when did he have time to—”

  “Now, Miss Alex,” Dorothy interrupted loyally. “You only get married for the first time once.”

  “Wyatt knows I don’t want the wedding to get out of hand or come off like a three-ring circus. It’s supposed to be more or less an intimate gathering. Why is he inviting the immediate world? I want to see the list, Stevi.”

  “I don’t have it with me,” her sister protested. “I went to pick up Ricky, remember?”

  “I can wait,” Alex said matter-of-factly, indicating that she expected her to retrieve the list—now.

  Stevi lifted her chin. “You don’t believe me? Or is it Wyatt you’re asking me to check up on?”

  “Yes” was Alex’s answer. “Now go get the list.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “MAMA.”

  Cris looked down at her son. Thr
oughout the discussion about the guest list, Ricky had been trying to get her attention by pulling on the apron that had become practically a part of every outfit she put on.

  As resident chef, she spent most of her time preparing her kitchen, preparing her menu or preparing the meals themselves for the ever-changing array of guests, who came as much for the meals as they did for the inn’s charm, service and beautiful view.

  Impatience vibrated in her five-year-old’s plaintive cry.

  “What is it, little man?” Cris asked, placing her hands on his slight shoulders.

  “I want to show you something,” Ricky told her with enthusiasm on the brink of exploding.

  Though he was clearly bursting to share whatever it was, Cris knew that her son liked being coaxed. So she played along and asked, “What is it, Ricky?”

  “I drewed you a picture,” he said proudly as he began digging into his bright blue-and-white backpack with its cheerful cartoon character logo—a gift from Dorothy on his first day of school.

  “Drew,” Cris automatically corrected. “You drew a picture.”

  Ricky spared her a glance as if he didn’t see what the problem was. “That’s what I said,” he insisted. “I drewed you a picture. Teacher told us to make one of our family.”

  Cris opened her mouth to try to make the five-year-old understand the difference between the word he used and the word he was supposed to use, but decided to temporarily suspend the grammar lesson when she saw the picture he’d “drewed.”

  At times, she still couldn’t help marveling that she was his mother. She certainly felt less than qualified for the position. Her own image of a mother—based on what she remembered of her mother—was that of unshakable wisdom mixed with love and understanding. While she had more than endless amounts of love to shower on the boy and she thought of herself as an understanding person, she felt sorely lacking in the unshakable wisdom department.

  Every day seemed a challenge and there were days when she felt she’d made wrong choices. Very simply, there were more than a few days when she felt she didn’t know what she was doing.

  Though there was nothing she wanted more than to be Ricky’s mother, she couldn’t shake the feeling that every step she took in this unfamiliar land called motherhood was like walking in a field riddled with pools of quicksand. Any second now, she expected to take the wrong step and be sucked under.

  There were other times, though, when gazing down into the happy little face that seemed the perfect combination of Mike’s features and her own, that she felt she had to be doing something right because just look at how Ricky was turning out. He was wonderfully well adjusted.

  Of course, Cris was the first one to point out that she wasn’t doing it alone. She had a fabulous support system that consisted of her father and her sisters, even Wyatt and his late father, Dan, whom they had all referred to as “Uncle Dan” even though he really wasn’t related to them. They all doted on Ricky, filling his world with love and watching over him to make sure that no harm ever came to him.

  Every night, without fail, Cris thanked God for her family and for bringing Ricky into her life. Without the boy, she didn’t know how she would have survived the sudden, heart-destroying loss of her husband.

  “Hey, you didn’t tell me you had a picture,” Stevi cried, pretending her feelings were hurt as she walked into the kitchen.

  Of the four sisters, only Stevi had artistic abilities—not to mention occasionally the artistic temperament that went with them. She was creating recognizable drawings by the time she was four and was still inclined to find an artistic outlet for her talent rather than joining Alex and Cris in making Ladera-by-the-Sea her life’s work.

  “That’s ’cause I wanted to show Mama first,” Ricky informed his aunt with all the confidence of a child who believed himself to be the well deserving center of his family’s universe. To everyone’s credit—including his own—he was neither spoiled nor truly self-centered. Kindness came naturally to him, tempering most things that he said. “But it’s okay for you to look now, ’cause I showed it to her.”

  He unfolded the drawing and held it up for his mother to see. Stevi and Alex shifted over toward Cris to view it, as well.

  “Do you like it?” Ricky asked, his blue eyes eager and shining as he looked at his mother. “It’s us,” he added, just in case she’d missed what he said about it being a drawing of his family.

  How silly, Cris chided herself, to get choked up over a crayon drawing, even a good crayon drawing, depicting a little boy holding what she could only assume was his mother’s hand. The two figures were surrounded by three female figures and a tall, thin man, who, because Ricky had used a gray crayon for the hair, had to be his grandfather. This was their family, Cris thought, the way her son saw all of them.

  Close.

  Hovering over this gathering was what appeared to be a large, unusual-looking bird. Cris glanced at her son. Approval and maternal pride shone in her eyes.

  “It’s beautiful, honey.”

  Ricky nodded, as if he had expected that response. Proudly, he acted like a tour guide for the drawing. “That’s you, Mama, and me. You’re holding my hand—”

  “I can see that,” Cris said, relieved that she had correctly assumed as much and sounded believable when she commented on it.

  “—’cause I’m letting you,” Ricky added by way of a narrative. “But I am a big boy.”

  Cris knew that was her son’s way of making sure she understood he considered himself independent. “Yes, you are,” she agreed.

  “And that’s Aunt Alex, and Aunt Stevi and Aunt Andy,” he continued, pointing his finger at each figure. All three had blond hair, just as he and his mother did, but he had dressed them in different colors and had managed to capture the height difference. “And that’s Grandpa,” he explained, jabbing a small finger at the other male on the page. “And that’s Daddy,” Ricky concluded, pointing to the winged creation just above his self-portrait.

  “You drew your daddy as a bird?” Alex asked, trying to follow her nephew’s reasoning.

  “Not a bird,” Ricky said indignantly. “He’s an angel.”

  “Of course he is. Can’t you see that?” Stevi deliberately took her nephew’s side, pretending that Alex had to be blind not to see the figure for who it was.

  Cris laughed as she bent over to hug her son, delighted that he thought his father was watching over him, the way she’d explained when Ricky had asked her to tell him about his father.

  “Yes, he is, Ricky. Don’t mind your aunt Alex, she’s not good at seeing what’s right in front of her unless someone points it out.”

  Alex knew Cris was referring to the antagonistic relationship Alex and Wyatt had had on the surface for years before Alex had realized how deep the feelings ran. Because Ricky was present, she decided not to comment on Cris’s barely veiled allusion.

  “You gonna put that on the ’frigerator?” Ricky asked, eagerly shifting from foot to foot as he watched his mother’s face.

  “Yes, I am.” She held out the drawing, taking note of its size. It was bigger than most of the drawings he brought home. “But you realize that means I have to take down another one of your drawings,” she reminded Ricky. “We’ve only go so much room on the refrigerator—even if it is industrial-sized,” she added, winking at him affectionately.

  The boy nodded solemnly. “I know, Mama. I’m not a dummy-head.”

  “Ah, a new term from the playground I see,” Cris noted with a good-natured sigh. He seemed to have a new addition to his vocabulary at least once a week. Usually not of the best variety. “No, sweetheart, you’re not a ‘dummy-head’ and I hope you don’t call anyone else that,” she added, eyeing the boy.

  Silky straight blond hair swung as Ricky shook his head in firm denial. “No, ’cause you said not to call people names
even if they call me those names. Right?” he asked.

  “Right. Because that makes you the bigger man,” Cris concluded firmly.

  An unexpected little frown formed on Ricky’s forehead as he said, “Teacher says I’m not a man.”

  Alex ruffled her nephew’s hair and laughed affectionately. “Your teacher doesn’t know you the way we do,” she assured the boy. “You’re more of a man than some guys three times your age.”

  From the look on Ricky’s face, her nephew clearly saw no reason to contest that. He beamed at her as though she had just lifted a bad spell he’d been forced to endure for the sake of peace and quiet.

  “You hungry, big guy?” Cris asked.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered, once again bobbing his head.

  “Okay, let’s see what we can find for you to eat,” Cris suggested.

  As she slipped her arm around his shoulders, ready to usher him to the inn’s kitchen, Shane McCallister emerged from the section of the inn temporarily curtained off with sheets of plastic. They hung from the ceiling and went all the way to the floor to keep dust spreading to the rest of the inn at a minimum.

  Behind the plastic sheets, the latest addition, as well as renovations to a previously constructed section, was taking place. Dust from his recent foray into carpentry had turned sections of Shane’s dark blond hair to a shade of off-white.

  Ricky had taken to Shane astoundingly fast. Excited to see him now, the boy broke away from his mother and ran over to the contractor.

  “Look at what I drewed, Shane!” he declared proudly, holding up the drawing.