[Ladera by the Sea 01] - A Wedding for Christmas Page 9

  “That was a really nice thing for you to do,” she said, referring to the designer he’d brought out to tackle Alex’s wedding dress. “You’re a good guy, Wyatt.”

  “I did it mostly to keep peace in the family,” he told her frankly. “This way, Stevi doesn’t drive Alex crazy, dragging her from bridal shop to bridal shop and Alex doesn’t strangle Stevi, trying to get a little peace and quiet.”

  “Still,” Cris said, inclining her head, “it was nice of you.”

  “Myra said dealing with a real person instead of a Hollywood personality would be a pleasant change. See, everyone’s getting something out of it,” he told her. “Even you.” When she looked at him quizzically, he explained. “If Alex picks out a dress, Stevi’s happy. If she’s happy, she won’t be in here complaining. See how it works?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do.” Cris took the mop out of the closet, wet it and began to wipe down the floor. “And just between the two of us,” she confided, making short work of the floor beside the stainless-steel worktable, “I’ll be glad when this wedding is finally over and things are back to normal.” Please, God, she added silently, the specter of what her former in-laws wanted to talk to her about never far from her thoughts.

  “Whatever that is,” Wyatt interjected. He’d always maintained that one man’s normal was another man’s insanity.

  “Touché,” Cris acknowledged with a smile.

  Rather than walk out of the kitchen and leave Cris alone, Wyatt decided to stay put a few extra minutes.

  Cris assumed he’d stuck around for the only reason men converged on kitchens to begin with. “Are you hungry? Is there anything I can get for you?” she asked.

  “I can wait until Alex and Myra are free,” he said, choosing to eat with them rather than by himself. He debated for a moment, thinking that Cris might just prefer he didn’t go digging in anything. But he truly cared about her the way he did about Stevi and Andy, and since he was marrying into the family, it gave him a right to butt in.

  So he did.

  Coming closer to Cris so he didn’t have to raise his voice, he said, “So, tell me about this Shane guy.”

  Cris almost dropped the pot she had taken from the shelf beneath the worktable. Only quick reflexes saved it from clattering to the floor.

  “What?”

  He went on to explain his reasoning. “Well, Alex seems to think something’s there,” Wyatt noted. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t have brought up his name.”

  “You mean something between Alex and Shane?” Cris asked, trying to get Wyatt’s question squared away.

  Her question, so foreign to his straight line of thinking, threw him. “What?” And then he realized why she had made her mistake. “Oh. No. No way,” he said, uttering more feeling with each word. “I mean between you and Shane. I saw how Alex glanced in your direction when she said his name. For what it’s worth—and I’d stake a lot on Alex’s people instincts—she thinks something’s happening between you. Now, what do you think? Is there?” he asked, looking pointedly at Cris.

  Cris shrugged, doing her best to appear completely in the dark about any implied meaning.

  “Not in the way you might mean and certainly not in the way Alex would like. Since you and she got together and decided to get married,” Cris explained, “Alex thinks everyone should pair off and get married. Shane and I share a history—a very small history,” she emphasized so no mistake was made this time. “Nancy McCallister was one of my best friends in high school and I was over at her house a lot. Sometimes Shane was there. But I was his little sister’s friend and a guy that age wants nothing to do with ‘children,’ which was what he considered Nancy and me.”

  She deliberately left out the part about dating him a couple of times, afraid she’d lose her last ally if she mentioned that. Especially since it hadn’t really meant anything at the time, she silently insisted. After all, both she and Shane had gone on to marry other people, right?

  “Alex and our dad hired Shane to do some work at the inn and he’s doing it. We’ve exchanged a few words during this time. End of story.” She dusted off her hands to make a point.

  The expression on Wyatt’s face as he regarded her said, Is it? But he said nothing other than, “Well, let me go find your dad before I decide to pop in on Alex and take a look at Myra’s sketches. See you later.”

  She nodded, already busy.

  Not to mention relieved there would be no more questions from anyone.

  At least until “later.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “NEED ANY HELP in here?”

  Preoccupied and in her own little world, struggling very hard not to let her thoughts run away with her, Cris had to exercise strict control not to jump at the sound of the deep voice behind her.

  Taking a steadying breath and congratulating herself for not letting out a squeal, she turned from her worktable.

  She was surprised on two counts to hear Shane asking her a question. First, because he was at the inn so early on Thanksgiving Day—it was barely eight o’clock in the morning—and second because he was volunteering to help.

  “Why aren’t you home, sleeping in?” she asked.

  Because of the holiday the noise associated with renovations would definitely not be welcome today, so she assumed Shane would be still snug in his bed, sound asleep. Mike used to love to grab a few extra winks whenever he could.

  “Never got into the habit,” Shane answered simply. “Between having to get up early as a kid if I wanted to see the inside of our one bathroom ahead of my parents, my brother, Wade, and especially my sister, Nancy, and then being in the army, which didn’t exactly worry about any of us getting our beauty sleep, waking up at dawn sort of became second nature.”

  He peered around the kitchen. The work surfaces were either devoted to pans filled with various items that needed baking or bags of foodstuffs that had yet to be prepared, like the twenty-pound bag of Idaho potatoes. What the kitchen didn’t have, other than the two of them, was people.

  “So,” he continued, now looking at her, “you didn’t answer me. Need any help?”

  She deemed it a strange offer, coming from him, considering what Shane had told her the other day. “I thought you said you really didn’t know how to cook.”

  “I don’t,” he replied honestly. “But I’ve got a strong back and I can fetch and carry any heavy object you might need taken from there to here—like those potatoes,” he said, nodding at the huge bag on the counter. “I also know how to peel and chop—as long as you don’t want anything to look perfect,” he remembered to qualify. “Because I don’t do perfect.”

  She liked the way he didn’t dress things up. “That’s okay, neither do I.”

  His eyes washed over her slowly enough to warm her from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. She had to remind herself to breathe.

  “I find that hard to believe,” he told her, his voice lower than a moment ago.

  “If you want to do something for me, I could stand to have that window opened,” she said after a beat. “With all this moving around and boiling—” she nodded toward the stove top, which, at the moment, was embarrassingly off “—it’s gotten a little warm in here.”

  The way she asked, if there hadn’t been a window in the kitchen, he would have created one for her on the spot. But, luckily, there was.

  “One open window coming up,” he told her with a sharp nod.

  Shane made his way over to the room’s one window, which was located between two rows of cabinets and directly over the industrial sink.

  After flipping the lock that held the two panes together, he slid one pane over the other, then opened the window as wide as possible without physically popping the pane out.

  “Too much?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at Cris.

&
nbsp; She crossed to the window and stood beside him. The cool air felt good on her face.

  “Probably in a few minutes,” she conceded. “But right now, it’s wonderful.” She paused to take in another long breath, to fortify herself as well as calm some unusually jumpy nerves.

  Cris closed her eyes for a second. She could feel a cool breeze ruffling the bangs that were drooping over her eyebrows and were partially in her eyes. She knew that her cheeks were a deeper pink than they normally were and here in the kitchen at least she could attribute the change in her complexion to the heat rather than to the true cause.

  When she opened her eyes again, Shane was looking at her. “Something wrong?” she asked.

  Since he’d come into the kitchen, no one else had walked in. “Are you handling all this alone?” he wanted to know.

  Considering the large meal she’d be making, that she was manning the kitchen by herself did seem incredible.

  “Where’s your part-time help?” Shane asked her.

  “Well, I told Jorge to take some time off so he could go to Taos, New Mexico, and spend Thanksgiving with his family. And both Eddie and Sylvia,” she said, mentioning the other two people who worked at the inn’s kitchen occasionally, “had family coming to visit them, so I gave them both the four-day weekend off, too.”

  Her generosity to others left her without much generosity for herself. “Leaving you with all the work,” he concluded.

  “Don’t make it sound like I’m Cinderella,” she said with a pleasant, amused laugh. “I managed to get a jump-start on pretty much everything last night. All the desserts were done then, and the more complex side dishes. I’m just about finishing up with the sausage and salami stuffing, then that’ll be ready for the oven. As for the turkeys, they’re all prepped and ready to start roasting.”

  That was when he noticed the shallow baking pans—four in all—on the back workbench, lined up side by side like incredibly pale, potbellied soldiers waiting to be called up and pressed into service.

  “Wow, those turkeys look big.”

  “That’s because they are big. All four are around twenty-five pounds each,” she told him.

  “A hundred pounds of turkey,” he marveled. That could go a long way to feed an awful lot of people in his estimation. “Just how many people are you expecting?”

  Cris smiled at the question. She realized that there was a lot of food here, especially given the number of people who’d be sitting in the dining area in another ten hours.

  “I like being prepared—just in case something goes wrong with one of the turkeys,” she confessed.

  He supposed she had a point—but in all likelihood, nothing would go wrong. Which brought him to the next problem.

  “What if you have a ton of leftovers?” he asked. “There are only so many ways to fix turkey leftovers before the very thought of them makes you want to run screaming into the street.”

  Preparing the honey glaze she was going to use for the baby carrots, Cris stopped and grinned at him. “I can’t picture you doing that. And nobody’s going to be running or screaming—because if we do have any significant amount of leftovers, you’re free to take them to the homeless shelter where you volunteer. I’m sure that the shelter could always use some extra turkey.”

  Shane stared at her, surprised that she actually remembered he volunteered at the shelter. With most people, the information went in one ear and out the other. “That’s really very nice of you. I appreciate that—and so will the people who run the shelter.”

  Cris shrugged off the compliment. “I’m just being practical,” she corrected. “I don’t like the idea of wasting food by throwing it out.” And then a question occurred to her. “How come you’re not there today?”

  Instead of answering her, he had a question of his own, asked only partially in amusement. “Is that your way of telling me you’d rather not see me hanging around here?”

  “No, I like having you here.” The second the words were out of her mouth, she realized what they had to sound like to him. And she didn’t want Shane thinking she was trying to crowd him. “I mean, to help with all this. I’m just surprised they didn’t ask you to come in to the shelter today.”

  That was a simple enough question to answer, he thought. “Because on the big holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, the homeless shelter has more than enough volunteers helping out. Celebrities like to show up on those holidays, show how charitable they really are—especially if they just ‘happen’ to have a photographer in tow, ready to snap photographs of them doling out food, playing with little homeless kids, things like that. Makes them feel better about themselves and gets them good publicity at the same time.”

  She was amazed that he didn’t sound cynical about this. It was almost as if he was saying it didn’t matter why the celebrities were there. As long as they were helping out, any reason that brought them there was okay.

  “I need that bag of potatoes moved from the counter to the table,” she told him, pointing to where she wanted the twenty-pound bag deposited.

  “Told you my strong back would come in handy,” he said.

  “Why do you do it?” she asked him suddenly, curious about his reasons.

  Shane raised one eyebrow, puzzled at the question. “Didn’t you just tell me to put the bag—?”

  “No, I mean why do you volunteer at the shelter? You don’t have a photographer snapping your picture,” she said. She went back to making the carrot glaze.

  He shrugged, as if past examining the reasons. “I do it because there aren’t enough people at the shelter to help out the rest of the time.” Having hefted the bag over to the table, he dusted off his hands one against the other. “It takes a lot to run a place like that and the funds are unbelievably limited,” he said. “And I do it because when I look into some of those faces, I think, ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’”

  She stopped working and looked at him. “When were you ever in a situation like that?”

  “If you mean about to forfeit the roof over my head because I lost my job, never,” he told her flatly. “If you’re talking a hopelessness eating away at my gut and driving me into a bottomless pit of despair, then the answer is not as long ago as you might think.”

  She could almost feel the pain he must have experienced, pain as keen as a sharpened carving knife. “You mean when your wife was killed?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper, as if she didn’t want to offend Shane by asking too many questions or speaking too loudly.

  “Yeah,” he answered crisply. “I mean then.” He struggled with the old feelings, trying to keep them behind the protective glass where he’d finally managed to place them. It didn’t protect his feelings, but him.

  Shane thought of just dropping the subject and picking a happier topic. But his wife deserved better than being swept under a rug and forgotten.

  That was why he finally said in a voice that was distant but filled with pain nonetheless, “She was pregnant at the time.”

  Cris’s mouth dropped open as disbelief echoed through her. “My God,” she murmured. “I didn’t know.”

  He nodded, his eyes unfocused for a moment as he looked back into the past. “She was. The doctor who tried to save her—to save them,” he corrected himself, “said it was a boy. I would have had a son if... He would have been around Ricky’s age.”

  Cris stopped dicing the celery stalks she had nervously started dicing when he’d begun talking about his wife, put down the long knife and crossed to him.

  Placing her hands on his shoulders, she wished she could take away some of the pain, pain that in a way they shared because of the abrupt manner in which they had both lost their spouses—suddenly and all too soon. A death swiftly delivered that gave no time to prepare for the loss and left you faced with endless time to endure the pain.<
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  Such pain was hard to crawl out from under, harder still to move beyond to make a new life. She’d done it because she’d had family to support her and she knew she couldn’t rob her son of the only parent he had left by wallowing in self-pity.

  But that was her. Who had Shane had to help him through this valley of endless pain?

  “I am so very, very sorry, Shane,” she told him, wishing the words could somehow better convey the extent of her empathy.

  Shane saw her eyes misting over, and witnessing that hit him in a very sensitive, unprotected spot. He could feel tears gathering, threatening to blind him. If he wasn’t careful, any second now his sorrow would demand release.

  “Cris,” he whispered, placing his hands on her shoulders. His intent was to move her and the unbound sympathy she offered away, at least keep it at arm’s length so it wouldn’t breech his suddenly fragile wall of defense and cause him to shed the tears he had kept back all these long, lonely years.

  Instead, for reasons he did not understand, he drew her closer to him. Moved his hands from her shoulders to her hair, threaded his fingers through the silky blond lengths and brought his lips down to hers.

  * * *

  IT HAPPENED SO fast it took Cris’s breath away. Yet at the same time she felt it was transpiring in slow motion, with every movement forever, indelibly, imprinted on her brain.

  She felt her pulse beating quicker, echoing a pounding heartbeat.

  He’d caught her completely by surprise, but rather than draw back, she melted into the kiss, absorbing it, above all enjoying it to a surprisingly pleasurable degree.

  Not only that, but she found herself an active participant in it. She wove her arms around Shane’s neck, drawing him closer, pulling herself to him as well as she stood on the very tips of her toes to do so.

  She could honestly say that she didn’t know what hit her—but she knew that she wanted it to continue. Wanted to offer him comfort, wanted to—at the same time—draw comfort from him.