A Weaver Holiday Homecoming

Distracted didn’t begin to cover it. But talking about Mallory and her claim was the last thing he intended on doing.

“He’s in a hurry, Bec,” Sawyer inserted. “That’s all.” But Ryan still recognized the speculation in his father’s eyes.

“Of course. We won’t keep you out in the cold, sweetheart. But will we see you tomorrow for Sunday dinner? I’m on kitchen duty this time.”

The Clay family members generally rotated around the big family meal every Sunday. Whoever could come did, and whoever couldn’t, didn’t.

But he’d made a point of avoiding the meals since his return to town.

And now, he could see the shadow of disappointment in his mother’s eyes even before he’d formed an answer. From the corner of his eye, he could see the mechanical Santa positioned inside the front window of the hardware store waving merrily.

“Maybe,” he said, instead of the refusal that was ready and waiting on his tongue.

She smiled, so clearly buoyed by a shot of hope, yet so clearly trying to contain it. “Well.” She patted his shoulder again, then tucked her hands around Sawyer’s arm. “You know where we’ll be. Now go on before you catch your death of cold.”

Like the solid unit that they’d been for most of his life, his parents stood close to each other, watching as he headed to his truck. When he got inside and tossed the paper sack on the seat beside him, they waved and smiled, and he lifted a hand before backing out of the parking space.

He drove back to Mallory’s house only to sit, engine idling, at the curb. His hands clenched the steering wheel. He was looking at the house—two-storied, sharply gabled roof, narrow porch running across the entire front—but his thoughts were turned inward.

If Cassie had gotten pregnant, why hadn’t she told him?

They’d both worked for Hollins-Winword, though she—an expert in foreign languages—had been in a support position to Coleman Black, rather than in the field like Ryan had been. Their paths had crossed occasionally. Never more closely than when she’d voluntarily interjected herself into that sting to save his bacon. She’d been smart and gutsy and engaging and he remembered genuinely enjoying her company, brief though it had been. And he was damn sure that her feelings toward him had been no more involved or deep. He hadn’t loved her. She hadn’t loved him.

He pinched the pain behind the bridge of his nose.

It was hard to believe she’d died bearing a child.

Not any child.

Chloe.

He jerked and started when someone knocked on the window beside him, and stifled a curse over his own edginess.

Mallory stood on the curb. This time, she was wearing a long, beige wool coat with a hood pulled over her head. She looked more like she belonged on the cover of a magazine than standing on the curb in little Weaver, Wyoming.

She was holding his leather coat.

“You came back,” she said through the window. “I wasn’t sure you would,” she added, stepping away when he pushed open the door and got out.

He sorely wished he could just give her the paper sack with the repair clamps and be on his way, but some deeply buried streak inside him made him stay. “Does Chloe know? About…who…her father is?” It was a cowardly way of phrasing it. He knew it. She knew it.

But he gave Mallory credit for not pointing out that particular fact.

She just shook her head and held out his coat. “She doesn’t know anything. And, to be honest, I prefer it that way. Until…until—” She broke off. A line of worry bisected the smooth skin between her eyebrows.

He dropped the paper bag on the hood of the truck and took the coat, pulling it on. “Until?”

She let out a soft, huffing breath that sent a vaporous cloud between them. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know any good way of doing this,” she admitted. “Telling you. Telling her. But Chloe’s welfare is my primary concern. And if you…if you’re not…well, if this is going to cause her any harm—” She shook her head, breaking off again. “I wish there was a manual for situations like this,” she murmured.

“I doubt it would cover someone like me, anyway.” He shoved his hand through his hair and was relieved that it wasn’t shaking, because everything inside of him was feeling pretty damn unhinged. “Keep watching out for your daughter,” he said abruptly. “That’s what a good parent does.”

She was nibbling at her lip and, despite everything, he got distracted by their well-defined softness all over again. “Don’t tell her,” he added doggedly.

“Not yet,” she clarified.

That wasn’t the “not ever” that had been whispering through his brain. “Do you want support money or something?”

Her head reared back, the hood slipping off her shining hair. “That’s what you think this is about? Money?”

He lifted his hand, peaceably. “I’m sorry.” And he was. “I’m not trying to offend you. Just…to understand what it is that you do want.”

The offended glint in her eyes slowly softened. She pushed her hands into the side pockets of her coat and rocked on her feet.

He immediately recognized the motion. Chloe had done the same exact thing in the diner.

“I want my daughter to know she has a father.” Her gaze didn’t meet his. Instead, it was focused somewhere off over his left shoulder.

“Lots of kids don’t have a father around.” Some were better off, too.

The corners of her lips curved downward. “Did you have your father around?”

He’d had two, actually. His mother, believing her relationship with Ryan’s natural father was over, had married Tom Morehouse, who’d raised him until he’d died when Ryan was seven. A few years later his mom and Sawyer reconciled and had never been apart again. “Yeah. I did.” He sighed. The paper sack crinkled as he held it up. “The repair clamp you need,” he said. “I brought you a few extra.”

She blinked a little, obviously surprised. “Thank you. I was going to run to the store before they closed, but—”

“Now you won’t need to.” He jerked his chin toward the house. “I’ll put it on if you want.”

“That’s really not necessary,” she demurred.

But he saw the hopefulness behind the words. “Might as well.” He wasn’t opposed to offering the assistance. He just would have preferred to offer it to an absolute and utter stranger, instead of this woman with her impossibly sexy mouth and her claims about him and her daughter. “I’m here.”

And they were evidently just one big, happy family.

Mallory wasn’t ungrateful for the offer of assistance, but as she led the way up the sidewalk that she hadn’t had time yet to shovel, she found herself wishing the assistance weren’t coming from him.

She hadn’t expected him to do cartwheels of joy when she’d told him about Chloe. She couldn’t think of many men who would appreciate such news coming right out of the woodwork. And while she was trying to be fair—to see the situation from all sides—she didn’t have a hope of really succeeding there, because she was firmly rooted on Chloe’s side.

A child deserved to know their father. Period.

To this day, she still couldn’t understand Cassie’s decision not to tell Ryan about the baby at the time. Growing up, her older sister’s life had been just as devoid of a father as Mallory’s. Maybe Cassie would have changed her mind after Chloe was born if she’d lived to have the chance.

Unfortunately, that was something that Mallory simply would never know.

She preceded Ryan into the house and without a word, he practically bolted up the stairs the minute she’d pushed the door shut after them.

The sensible part of her told her to follow him and watch what he did with those clamp things so that she could do it herself the next time if she had to. But the rest of her mutinied and, instead, she dropped her coat on the hard-backed chair sitting in the front entry next to the narrow console table, and went into the kitchen where Chloe and Kathleen were.

Both were wearing Kathleen’s hand-sewn aprons tied around their neck and waists and both of them were in flour up to their elbows as they kneaded bread dough on the counter. The only difference between them was that Kathleen was sitting on a bar stool while she worked, and Chloe was standing on a chair. Beyond that, their concentrated expressions were almost identical.

And neither seemed to have noticed the sound of Ryan in the house. She decided to leave it that way for now and stood silently in the doorway.

Just watching them eased nerves that were feeling slightly singed.

Are you seeing this, Cassie? Chloe’s making rolls with Gram just the same way you and I used to.

“Get yourself an apron, Mallory,” Kathleen said without looking. “There’s another dough ball for you, too, if you want.”

Mallory just smiled. She walked over behind the only people in the world that she would do anything for, and kissed first the top of Chloe’s head, then Kathleen’s papery-thin cheek. “I need to call the hospital and check on a patient.” She also needed to deal with the very disturbing man upstairs repairing her plumbing.

“Work, work, work,” Kathleen tsked, but without any real heat. “Just remember, there is more to life than work.”

“Yes, Gram,” she agreed dutifully, and just as dutifully admired Chloe’s handiwork with the bread dough before escaping to her office at the back of the house.

She made her phone call to the hospital, talking briefly with the nurse on duty, but that didn’t take long. Her new mom was recovering as nicely as expected.

Which left Mallory with nothing to do but go up the stairs.

She didn’t find Ryan still in the bathroom, though. That small room was quite empty. She looked behind the cabinet door to see the pipe and its new clamp. There was no sign of water leaking, and the bucket she’d used was empty and sitting on the edge of the tub.

He’d even emptied the box containing the shampoos and soaps and whatnot that she’d pulled from the cabinet, replacing everything neatly inside it once more.

His thoroughness—his thoughtfulness—was disconcerting.

Was it possible that he could have left without her hearing his exit?

She slowly closed the cabinet and went out into the hall. Her bedroom was closest to the stairs. Chloe’s was farthest. She turned in that direction and found Ryan there.

He was sitting on the foot of the twin-size bed looking very large and very masculine amid the lilac-hued, childish décor, and her footsteps faltered at the visceral tug the sight of him gave her deep inside.

“I’m getting the hint that she likes purple,” he said after a moment.

She swallowed and managed a faint smile that hopefully masked the strange breathlessness she felt and stepped inside the room, leaning her shoulder back against the doorjamb. “It’s been her favorite color since she discovered the Purple Princess games a few years ago from a school friend.”

“What grade is she in?”

She discreetly hauled in a breath. Let it out. “Third.”

His gaze finally slanted to hers. “Isn’t she a little young for third?”

“She skipped second grade.” She tugged at her ear. “I know that not everyone thinks that’s a good idea, but she’s so bright and I started her in second at the beginning of the school year when we were still in New York, but she was—”

“Bored,” he inserted.

She looked at him a little more closely. It was hard, considering that doing so made her stomach flip around even more in those jittering circles.

But there wasn’t judgment in his deeply blue eyes.

She wasn’t sure exactly what was there, but at least she could tell that. “Yes. She was bored. She was bored through a good portion of the first grade, too.” And bored schoolchildren tended to find more interesting things to keep them busy. Particularly mischievous things.

“I skipped third,” he said.

“Oh.” She moistened her lips.

“And ninth,” he added without expression. “And most of my senior year of high school.”

“That’s…impressive.”

His lips twisted a little. “You registered her over at the elementary school?”

“Yes.” There wasn’t an alternative, anyway. Weaver had one elementary school. One junior high. One high school. And unless it would have been on scholarship, she couldn’t have afforded the tuition for private school even if there’d been one for Chloe to attend. Mallory’s medical school hadn’t come cheaply.

She would be paying off her student loans for some time to come.

“That’s when the school and I decided to start her off here in third grade,” she finished. “So far, she’s keeping up with no problem at all.”

“Sarah Scalise her teacher?”

Was Weaver so small that a single man with no children would know that? Her mind veered off much too easily. Maybe he’d even dated the attractive teacher. “Yes.”

“She’s my cousin.”

She was appalled at the relief that flooded through her. Her interest in the man was supposed to be only because of Chloe. Not…not—

“What are your plans tomorrow?”

Her runaway thoughts screeched to a halt. “Um, nothing much. More unpacking. And Chloe is becoming anxious that we won’t ever get around to getting a Christmas tree, so I imagine I’ll have to find a tree lot somewhere.”

“Folks around here cut their own trees,” he said.

Her lips parted, dismayed. “Like with a saw?”

His blue eyes suddenly lit with amusement, and years seemed to fall away from his face. “That’s the usual method,” he said, only slightly tongue-in-cheek.

Safely hidden behind her back, Mallory’s hands curled. She smiled weakly.

The corner of his lips lifted a little more. The flash of white teeth was brief, but it was still there, when he actually smiled. “Never cut a Christmas tree yourself?”

“Right up there with fixing plumbing leaks, I’m afraid.”

He pushed off the bed and walked toward her. Her spine pressed hard against the doorjamb as she looked up at him when he stopped next to her.

There was plenty of space between them, but her heart rate nevertheless took off like an award-winning marathoner. The only time she’d felt anything remotely similar was the first time she’d delivered a baby. Not even with Brent, her one foray into romance while she’d been a resident, had she been so affected.

His gaze roved over her face and she swallowed hard, afraid he’d hear the pulse roaring in her ears.

“I’ll pick you and Chloe up at noon,” he said, and the amusement was gone from his face as if it had never been there. “That oughta give us plenty of time.”

“Time,” she repeated faintly.

“To find you a tree,” he said flatly, and walked out into the hall. He didn’t look back.

For so long, Mallory had been certain that finding Chloe’s father was the right thing to do.

But just then, watching Ryan head down the stairs as if the devil were at his heels, she realized she wasn’t certain of anything.

Chapter Four

He was twenty minutes late.

So far.

Twenty minutes during which Chloe paced between the windows at the front of the house, pressing her nose against the glass, as she watched and waited. “Are you sure he’s coming?”

Mallory’s gaze snagged in Kathleen’s, who was sitting opposite her, before she looked back down at the medical journal lying open in her lap. Reading it was just a pretense, because Mallory could have easily emulated Chloe’s anxious pacing, waiting for Ryan’s arrival.

“If he doesn’t,” she assured smoothly, “we’ll just get a Christmas tree ourselves.” Maybe there was a tree lot in Braden. The neighboring town was about thirty miles away. Certainly there’d be one in Gillette—though she really didn’t relish the idea of driving quite that far.

The solution, of course, would be an artificial tree, purchased from the discount store on the outskirts of town.

Only Mallory knew that both Chloe and Kathleen would be disappointed. They’d been talking about having a real tree ever since they’d arrived in Weaver. Even when they’d left New York in October, the Christmas decorations had begun appearing in stores. There was barely a fraction of the stores in Weaver, but they, too, had already been getting ready for the holidays.

“Can we get a puppy, too?” Chloe asked, without looking away from the window.

Mallory met Kathleen’s eyes. “No,” she answered. “We’re not getting a puppy.”

Chloe heaved a sigh. “Do you think we’ll find a really, really big tree?”

If he gets here, Mallory thought.

“He’ll be here,” Kathleen said comfortably over the soft clack of her knitting needles. “And I’m sure you’ll find a very fine tree.”

Mallory had the sense that her grandmother was assuring her just as much as Chloe.

She realized she was chewing the inside of her lip and made herself stop. Folding the journal with a snap, she tossed it aside and pushed off the couch, taking her half-empty coffee mug with her. Another ten minutes, and she’d bundle Chloe in the car and they’d drive to Braden. Kathleen had already expressed her intention to enjoy the tree once it was in the living room. Hunting one down whether in the snow or from a tree lot was not something she particularly wanted to do.

“He’s here!” Chloe suddenly darted past Mallory, her boots skidding on the floor as she raced out of the living room to the front door.

Mallory ignored both the jolt that leaped inside her belly and the sideways glance that Kathleen gave her—as if her grandmother knew exactly what Mallory was feeling—and followed her daughter much more sedately to the door.

When she got there, Chloe had already thrown it wide and Ryan stood there on the porch, looking almost unrecognizable with his clean-shaven square jaw. Even his hair looked different. Not cut, necessarily, but brushed away from his face, showing that there was a liberal amount of silver strands among the dark brown.

The severe style made his eyes seem an even deeper, more penetrating blue, and when their focus shifted upward from Chloe to Mallory, every single coherent thought she possessed disappeared in a puff of smoke.

She felt as though he had the ability to look straight down inside her. And was using the ability very well.

It felt…invasive.

Intimate.

She realized belatedly that Chloe was tugging at the hem of her sweater, and she finally yanked her captured gaze away from him. She looked at Chloe, but her brain cells were sluggish. “What is it, sweetheart?”

Chloe’s eyebrows were crinkled. “You’re spilling,” she whispered.

Mallory jerked a little, flushing hard. Along with coherent thought, her hands had gone as lax as her knees had felt, the coffee mug sliding sideways in her fingers. “Silly me,” she murmured, excessively bright.

She grabbed the closest cloth—her red knitted scarf that was hanging over the coat tree—and dashed it over the small spill on the floor. “I’ll be right back.” She couldn’t prevent herself from flicking a glance toward Ryan, then wished she hadn’t, because he was still watching her.

The day before, he’d been a handsome—albeit very scruffy-looking—man.

With his strong features no longer hidden behind too-long, unkempt hair, and a bristled jaw that had been somewhere between a beard and a thirteen-o’clock shadow, he seemed positively devastating.

She felt so rattled that instead of putting the mug in the kitchen where it belonged—and where she’d intended to take it in the first place—she carried it and the red scarf with her upstairs and closed herself in her bedroom.

The mug bobbled sideways when she dumped it on her dresser and she steadied it with a very unsteady hand. The wide mirror hanging on the wall above the dresser reflected most of the bedroom behind her. But she didn’t see the stack of packing cartons in the corner next to the sleigh bed that she’d found years ago in a junk store and refinished with Kathleen’s help.

What she did see were her own eyes staring back at her. Pupils wide, irises a thin brown. So very different from those deeply penetrating blue ones that consumed her mind’s eye.

What had he seen when he’d looked at her?

Who had he seen? Mallory, or Cassie?

Mallory closed her eyes, turning away from the mirror and the thought. She wasn’t in competition with her beloved sister. She was only trying to make sure that Chloe’s life had what hers and Cassie’s had lacked.

A father.

She yanked off the ivory sweater that she’d taken far too long to choose that morning in the first place and replaced it with a gray one, yanking it down over the waist of her blue jeans. In the connecting bathroom, she filled the sink and submerged the coffee-stained scarf in it. Mentally collecting herself seemed fine in theory, but sad to say, she still felt shaky when she went back downstairs.

Kathleen was standing alone in the foyer.

“Where’s Chloe?”

“Outside with Ryan.” Her grandmother’s expression was frank. “Are you certain you know what you’re getting into, Mallory?”

She crossed her arms. Fighting her own uncertainty was hard enough without adding her grandmother’s into the mix. “In life, can anyone ever really know what they’re getting into?”

Kathleen’s lips thinned. “Pretending to wax philosophical won’t wash with me, child.” She pointed at the closed front door. “You’re messing in a lot of lives because of this fixation you’ve got about Chloe and her father.”

“It’s not a fixation.”

Kathleen’s white eyebrows climbed. Ire filled her eyes. “Really, now. It’s been your obsession since Chloe was born. When you should have been finding a man of your own, you were focused only on him.”

“I’m a working single mother,” Mallory returned. “I’ve never had time for a man.” Ergo, the exit of Brent. The fact that she hadn’t been left brokenhearted at the time had seemed to prove that it had been for the best. She’d never been tempted to put a man before her career. “And we’ve talked about this many times.” She’d never made a secret with her grandmother about the reason behind their temporary transplant to Weaver.

“Aye. We have. Yet you’re still determined to do it your way.”

“If I had my way, Cassie would still be here,” Mallory pointed out, struck with pain that was only slightly dulled by the passage of time. “Raising the child she loved enough to die having.” But, of course, Cassie—adventurous, go-with-the-moment Cassie—hadn’t believed she’d ever face that most final result despite Mallory’s warnings. “And choosing what to do about Chloe’s father would have been her decision.”

“She made the decision,” Kathleen reminded. Her face had softened, but her voice was still firm. “She had nearly the entire duration of her pregnancy to contact him. She chose not to.”

“I believe she would have changed her mind.” And arguing the point with her grandmother was as fruitless as the internal debate that had gone on for years inside Mallory about that very point.

She grabbed her coat off the coat tree and shoved her arms into the sleeves. “You seemed to like Ryan just fine, yesterday when he was here. So what’s bothering you about him now, anyway?”

“It’s not me that he’s bothering,” Kathleen said pointedly.

Mallory focused on working her hands into the gloves she pulled out of her coat pockets and tried not to blush. “All I care about is Chloe. Once I’m certain she’s ready for it, I’ll tell her about him and we’ll take it from there.”

“Right. And then it’ll be time for us to go back to New York. And how do you think Chloe’s going to handle being taken away from the father she’s just met, then?”

It wasn’t a new concern, nor was it one that Mallory hadn’t already given plenty of thought to. “She’ll still be able to talk to him. To see him during school breaks.” She pushed her pager and her cell phone into the breast pocket of the wool coat. “I knew before we got here that if…everything worked out…it would ultimately mean coming up with some sort of visitation agreement.” She reached for the door.