Down Home Carolina Christmas (17 page)

“I've felt all evening as if you're shutting me out, Carrie. Does it have something to do with my parents?”

“I like your parents,” she told him truthfully.

He pulled her into his arms. “I'm ready for a little fun and games,” he said. “How about if you walk down the stairs totally naked and I ravish you on the parlor floor?”

“Luke,” she said. “I—” She bit her lip, turning her head away. After today, she was quite certain that she couldn't make love to him as long as she still pictured him between the sheets with Tiffany Zill.

“Today,” she began, “when you and Tiffany were filming that scene—” She stopped, gathering her courage and telling her stomach to calm down, though it seemed to have no intention of cooperating.

Luke frowned and let her go. She walked across the room and regarded him from a distance, hoping she could banish the picture of him in bed with Tiffany from behind her eyelids.

“When you were in bed with Tiffany, I couldn't watch,” she said, stumbling over the words. “You told her you loved her. It hurt me to hear it.” The picture behind her eyelids morphed into a movie, complete with gestures and Luke's dimple. Her stomach flipped upside down and sideways.

Luke looked horrified, though he masked the expression. “Carrie, Carrie,” he said, striding across the room and looping his arms around her waist. To her dismay, she felt tears stinging the back of her throat.

“We were playing the parts of Yancey and Mary-Lutie,” he said. “It had nothing to do with real life.”

“In my head I know that, but my heart isn't getting the message,” Carrie said. She swiped at a tear.

He rested his cheek against her hair. “That's what's difficult about my profession,” he said. “As an actor, I'm able to draw the line between reality and make-believe, but it's too much to expect other people to do the same.”

“I don't want to be on the set anymore when you or any reasonable facsimile are filming love scenes,” she said. That nude wedding-night scene was coming up, and she didn't care if it was Luke or his body double playing the part, she didn't want to see it.

He kissed her temple. “Okay, I'll make sure you don't have to be. Anything else?”

“Oh, just the slight matter of you and me,” she said, moving away from him. She was escalating this, but she couldn't help herself; her emotions were too near the surface now to back off. She sat on the sofa, fiddled with the bracelet she wore and blinked up at him.

He sat beside her and picked up her hand. “I told you I'm crazy about you,” he said.

She steeled herself, knowing she'd come across as a clinging vine if she said what she wanted to say. Then again, she wasn't going to strangle him like the wisteria had done to the oak tree she'd removed from the side yard last year. She just wanted to
know,
for heaven's sake.

Nothing to do but plunge in, so she blurted it out. “What's going to happen to us?” she asked before commencing to hold her breath in suspense.

He stared at her. “We have a great thing going,” he said.

“That's what it means to you? ‘A great thing going'?”

“Well, yes. You're beautiful, you're smart, you're successful in your field—”

“Successful in my field,” she repeated, flummoxed that he would bring that up or even think it in the first place.

“You are,” he said. “Successful.”

She let out all the pent-up air and breathed again. “I'm an auto mechanic. That probably doesn't impress much of anybody where you're from, with all those gold stars in the sidewalk for people famous in show business, so you're excused from saying I'm successful, Luke. But why can't I know how you feel about me?” She'd mustered her gumption, though not all her spirit. It wasn't encouraging that he flushed and clamped his lips together.

Okay, so she'd riled him, which was not exactly a surprise. Most men didn't cotton to confrontation when a woman was the one initiating it.

“Don't run yourself down, Carrie Smith. Ever.”

It sounded as if he was upset on her behalf, not because he felt called upon to defend himself. “Okay,” she said, the word almost lost in an exhalation of breath.

“I admire you for what you've done with Smitty's. People respect you.”

“Uh, okay again.” She looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. Luke hung out with starlets and movie producers; she'd scanned an old copy of
Variety
he'd left lying around his house and learned that he hobnobbed with major players in a business she would never understand. But if he wanted to admire her, she'd certainly let him.

“Carrie, when we're through filming
Dangerous,
I have to go back to California. There are a couple of major deals in the works, and they require my attention. I'll be back in Yewville, though, before too much time has passed.”

She swallowed against a new spate of tears, hoping they'd miraculously dry up. Tears could do that. They could disappear, like socks in the washer. “You will?”

“I'll want to see you. I'll need to check on my parents. Oh, I'll have to leave again soon after, but I should be able to manage at least a week in Yewville and maybe a couple of days more.”

“That's it?” she asked, unimpressed.

“I envision spending a week or two out of every month here unless I'm on location.”

“A week or two out of every month,” she repeated, parrotlike.

Luke stood, paced across the room, turned to face her. Light blazed behind his eyes, a warmth that could be translated as love. Or was it? She'd seen the same emotion on his face today when he was playing the scene with Tiffany.

“I care about you, Carrie, but I can't promise more than now,” Luke said, seemingly as frustrated as she felt. “I can't commit to anything else.”

“We're from different worlds,” she said, all the while thinking,
Trite, Trite, Trite.
“We don't belong together. Is that what you're trying to say?”

“I hadn't exactly thought of it that way, though I know the demands of my work don't make much sense sometimes. What I'm telling you is that we should enjoy and take pleasure in
now.
It's quite a spectacular now. Why isn't that enough?”

Carrie remained silent for a long time, dredging her answer up from where she'd first hidden it when she'd realized she was in love with Luke Mason. “Because I deserve better,” she said, her chin jutting up a notch. Like Shasta deserved more than a doghouse in the backyard.

“Better,” he repeated.

She had the urge to go lock herself in the bathroom as her resolve burgeoned, flared and coalesced into speakable thoughts that threatened to push Luke away for the rest of her life. “It's what I never asked for before when the men in my life zigged off on their everlasting hunting trips and golf tournaments while I was zagging at home with nothing for company but a TV and a lop-eared rabbit.”

“Why didn't you ask for what you wanted?”

She hugged a sofa pillow to her chest. “Never considered it. Maybe I should have.”

“So I'm the one who has to answer for what these other guys did?”

“Didn't. Most of them didn't do squat except conjure up five-year plans that included buying the latest camouflage outfits for hunting or new sets of golf clubs, but never once did any of them mention a set of wedding rings.”

There, it was out. Since she was a little girl, she'd always expected to marry and have a family someday, and Luke's plan of dropping in and out of her life didn't promise anything of the sort. It relegated her to a convenience instead of elevating her to the position she'd always expected to assume in one special man's life. Luke might very well be that special man—he was all she'd ever wanted and more—but he wasn't offering much as far as she could tell.

A steeliness rose up inside her, a hardness springing from her core, and it didn't recognize spectacular nows or a man who believed that dropping in and out of her life was enough. If he couldn't figure out that she was finally asking for what she wanted from a man, he was a pure tee idiot.

“You'd better go, Luke.”

He blanched, and it was such an immediate reaction that she knew for sure he wasn't acting now.

“Carrie, I didn't expect—I mean, don't you understand? I'm doing the best I can.” He held his arms out and let them fall.

For a moment she felt sorry for him, but then, why feel sorry for Luke Mason, who had his own private plane and a home in California and could afford to jet here and there, bestowing on all sorts of women the most spectacular nows of their lives?

“I'm doing the best I can, too,” she said quietly.

He stared at her over the gulf of their misunderstanding for a moment that seemed to stretch out to eternity, and then he gave an eloquent little shrug of his shoulders. He didn't speak, only pivoted and walked out the door, then closed it gently behind him.

She listened bleakly to his footsteps as they crunched across the gravel driveway and after that watched the Ferrari as it drove away.

When the taillights disappeared, she would have drowned her misery with all those tears that she'd been holding back, but the phone rang. It was her sister.

“Hi, Carrie,” Dixie said cheerfully. “I called for a long phone visit. We filmed the Miss Liberty 500 scene at the racetrack yesterday, and a talent scout offered Joyanne a Hollywood contract!”

Joyanne's good fortune was not something that Carrie cared to hear about now. “Dixie,” Carrie said, making an effort to remain calm. “Oh, Dixie, Luke and I just broke up!”

Dixie gasped and something clattered, like a pot lid dropping on the floor. “Oh, Carrie. You'd better tell me all about it.”

“As it turns out, Luke's not that different from every other guy I've dated,” she began, and then, to the accompaniment of Dixie's sympathetic sighs and groans, she told all. Well, almost all. Leaving out the sexy parts, of course.

The house in Malibu smelled musty despite the ongoing ministrations of Luke's staff while he was away. After he arrived, he strolled down the beach for a while, deriving comfort from the rush of breakers to shore, the soothing murmurs of seabirds overhead. He sat on the balcony outside his bedroom, admiring a magnificent sunset but totally unable to enjoy it.

He had no one to share it with. Carrie's eyes would have lit up at the sight of a scene so beautiful, and she would have reached for his hand so they could communicate by touch as they watched the sun sink below the rim of the horizon.

He wondered what Carrie was doing right now, this very minute. Putting her garage back in order now that they were through filming there? Filling the odious Odella Hatcher's gas tank? Sudsing someone's windshield to better scrape the bugs off? No matter what it was, she'd imbue the task with unmatchable grace and glamour.

Feeling lonely for Carrie and sure that she wouldn't welcome a phone call from him, Luke called his mother.

“Oh, Carrie's such a jewel. She didn't even charge your father for putting antifreeze in his engine,” his mother enthused. “And she brought me a book I've been wanting to read. It's her grandmother's, but I can keep it as long as I want, Frances says. And Frances is taking me with her to the Southern Living home show in Charlotte next weekend, can you imagine?”

Luke listened to his mother sing numerous praises of the hairdresser she'd found, Glenda of the Curly Q, who had new pink sinks courtesy of Whip Productions. And the red-orange pyracantha berries growing on a vine that covered the trellis on the west wall of the house. And the amazing fact that it wasn't even really cold yet in Yewville, and it was already late November.

Luke was genuinely glad that his mother was happy, and when he talked to his father, he heard even more enthusiastic comments.

“This dog, Shasta, she's a smart little thing,” his father told him. “I've already taught her to sit up, and we're working on rolling over. And there are these two kids, the Calphus boys—they stopped by with their mother last week and your mom invited them to stay for dinner. I told them they can come play with Shasta anytime they want.”

“You're liable to see a lot of Mike and Jamie,” Luke warned him.

“That's okay. They remind me of you and Sherry when you were kids. Excited about every little thing and fun to be around.”

Luke was surprised to hear his father speak so casually of his sister. Sherry had been dead for close to twenty years, and back in Garrett Falls, his father still headed to his basement workshop whenever her name was mentioned. Maybe the change of locale would encourage him to give up the vestiges of sorrow. They would all grieve for Sherry for the rest of their lives, and she'd never be forgotten, but the shadow her death had cast over their family needed to be swept away so they could return to the business of caring for one another again.

Not that he would ever say this to his father. He changed the subject abruptly.

“Has Carrie been around lately?” Luke asked casually.

“She brought Ruth pecans from her own trees the other day. Ruth seems fond of her.”

I was, too,
Luke almost said. Probably he should have ended the conversation right there, but he was desperate to hear more about Carrie. Information to stir pictures of her in his mind. Although he didn't have much trouble with that. Scenes of Carrie constantly intruded on his consciousness—her hair flowing across his arm as she rolled over in bed, the brilliance of her smile every time he came into view, the gentleness of her touch when they made love first thing in the morning.

Last weekend had been Thanksgiving, and he imagined her whole family gathered at Memaw Frances's house, repeating everything twice for Claudia, coaxing Estill to participate and listening to Jackson's interminable talk about movies, which Luke suspected was sparked by his interest in the X-rated variety. He smiled to himself, caught up short by the memories. He'd had to be in California for those talks about his next project, one that could take him to Europe. Thanksgiving hadn't seemed as important as weighing in with his opinion on the script, costars and myriad production details. His mother had invited him to Yewville, but he hadn't gone. He was certain that his absence was what had caused Carrie to invite his mom and dad to her grandmother's. As soon as Luke had heard about it, he wished he'd gone, too. But Carrie wouldn't welcome him. He was sure of that.

Anyway, he'd promised his parents he'd be in Yewville for Christmas. Howell was already considering the purchase of a live spruce that they could plant in the backyard after the holidays, and Ruth had made arrangements to have their family Christmas decorations sent from New Hampshire for the occasion. This boded well, in Luke's opinion. A change of place, a change of plans, and maybe they'd establish a wonderful new tradition far away from Garrett Falls.

His parents were already talking about making the move to Yewville permanent. It was up to him to find out if they were serious.

C
ARRIE'S HEAD
was buried underneath the raised hood of a Ford Explorer when Dixie breezed into the garage one day in early December.

“Whooee!” Dixie said. “Can't you get those heaters working better than this? It's cold in here.”

“This is a garage,” Carrie said patiently. “If you want it warm, go back to the real-estate office.”

“I talked with Luke this morning,” Dixie said without preamble.

Carrie's head shot up, and she narrowly missed bumping it on the inside of the hood. “Why on earth?” she demanded. “Considering that he crushed my heart like a recyclable can.”

“He asked if the Winders would consider applying the rent he's paid toward the purchase price of their house.”

“He's buying it?”

“For his parents. I spoke with Ruth and she's ecstatic.”

“Good.” Carrie stuck her head back under the hood and made herself focus on the frayed fan belt.

“She said Luke will be here for Christmas and she's planning a party for his birthday, which is on Christmas Eve.”

This was not something that Carrie was prepared to discuss. She emerged from under the hood and slammed it shut. “That's nice,” she said.

“Same date as your birthday,” Dixie reminded her unnecessarily.

“I'm thinking of getting another dog to keep around the garage,” Carrie said, marching inside and sitting down behind her desk. “I miss Shasta now that she's not here.”

“Don't worry. One'll show up eventually. They always do.”

Carrie shrugged and ignored this. At the moment, she wasn't in the mood for Dixie's ironic sense of humor.

Dixie sat on the corner of the desk. “Howell Mason says Shasta's the smartest animal he's ever seen. I saw him walking her with Mike and Jamie at Memorial Park the other day. He showed me how she can stand up on her hind legs and dance.”

“Do tell,” Carrie murmured. She could adopt the next stray dog that came along, or she could visit the humane-society shelter in Florence. She'd get a big one, maybe a German shepherd to be a combination guard and watchdog. One that would take after any movie stars that showed their faces around here and bite them.

“Well, I guess I'll be going. Stop pulling that long face, Carrie. You're supposed to be over Luke Mason.”

How could she get over someone who stared out at her from the front of every tabloid and celebrity magazine in the Piggly Wiggly checkout line? The mention of whose very name caused her skin to prickle with excitement, not to mention anticipation of the next sexual encounter. Not that there would ever be any others. Not that she cared.

“I'm thinking of going on a cruise over Christmas,” Carrie said. Business wasn't all that great at the garage during the holidays, anyway, and Glenda's invitation might still be good.

“Not be here at Christmas?” Dixie said, incredulous. “Miss the candlelight service at church on Christmas Eve and opening our presents together at the home place on Christmas Day and Memaw's dinner afterward? With Voncille's big coconut cake? And shooting off fireworks in the field at the home place to welcome the new year?”

“They probably have coconut cake on cruise ships,” Carrie said glumly. “Maybe even fireworks on New Year's Eve.” And possibly a handsome ship's officer to light them, which was a hopeful thought.

“We've always been together at Christmas.”

“This year is different, that's all,” Carrie said with a sigh.

Dixie looked sympathetic. “I know. The whole situation with Luke wasn't easy.”

“It sucked,” said Carrie. “I never should have been involved with him in the first place.”

“You can always say you dated a movie star. That's something, at least.”

“I changed the oil in his Ferrari, too. Neither is worth much in the scheme of real life.”

“No one else around here ever did either of those things.”

“Lucky them.”

“I got a Christmas card from Tiffany at the office,” Dixie said. “She sent it from Singapore.”

Carrie had also received one. “I miss her, kind of,” she said.

“Yeah,” Dixie said. “She was nice.”

“Yeah.”

Dixie checked her cell-phone messages. “I need to get back to work,” she said. “If you're still down in the dumps at closing time, maybe we could go out to dinner. We could treat ourselves to Pothier's.”

Carrie was determined never to return to that particular restaurant now that Luke was gone for good. It brought back too many memories. “Maybe,” she said despite a craving for chocolate gâteau, which she figured would pass.

Dixie left in a hurry, and Carrie dialed Glenda's number.

“You mean you'd like to go?” Glenda asked delightedly after Carrie questioned her about the cruise. “My sister-in-law, the teacher, was going with me, but she has to help her mother in Cheraw during Christmas break. Her mom's got shingles. You want the travel agent's phone number?”

Carrie wrote down the number, and before she could change her mind, she called.

“Sure, I can handle everything,” the agent said. “Relax and I'll send your tickets as soon as possible.” She outlined the itinerary, which included Mexico, Jamaica and the Virgin Islands. Carrie didn't care where the ship went as long as she wasn't in Yewville when Luke was visiting.

Carrie announced her intentions at Sunday dinner. Memaw complained about her not being in town this Christmas, and Dixie fussed, and predictably, Claudia kept insisting that she repeat what she'd said. In the end, though, they wished her well. Said they understood. Volunteered to feed Killer and take in Carrie's mail while she was gone.

Carrie went shopping in Columbia and bought a couple of new outfits, sleeveless and in neon colors, as well as a slinky black dress for formal nights on the ship. She borrowed a suitcase from Joyanne, who'd bought it for her move to California, and started packing and unpacking, aiming for the right wardrobe mix. She wondered if she'd like Jamaica, and if so, maybe she could move there. Open a garage. Eat ackee rice and fish that was nice and learn to like rum drinks with little parasols floating on top. These were comforting, off-the-wall thoughts that would never go anywhere. She was healing from the rift with Luke.

Then, on the day before she was to catch a plane for Fort Lauderdale, where she and Glenda would board the ship, she woke up with a fever of 102. Worse yet, she could hardly talk.

“Oh, no,” Glenda moaned when Carrie called and croaked out her news. “You'll be the second person to quit on me.”

“Can't help it,” Carrie said, reaching for the throat lozenges that Dixie had brought her. “Can't go anywhere like this.”

“I'm so sorry,” Glenda said.

“Send postcards,” Carrie requested. “Lots.”

“I will, hon, and I'll miss you.”

Carrie hung up and took her temperature again. Still 102, and the packed suitcase mocked her from across the room. She'd be able to wear the sleeveless neon things next summer when she and Dixie made their annual jaunt to Myrtle Beach in July, but as for slinky black, forget it. Maybe she'd give the dress to Joyanne for her trip to Hollywood. Joyanne was going to change her name to Joy Morris and leave after New Year's. She was all atwitter with her plans.

Carrie wished she could be excited about something. But right now, her head hurt and her throat was on fire and she wanted to die.

She dozed, woke up, fell asleep and dreamed that Luke was in bed beside her. When she woke again, there was only Killer, though he comforted her by snuggling close. Tomorrow, Christmas Eve, was her birthday. She'd celebrate it with a lop-eared rabbit, and the only celebratory drink she was likely to have would be NyQuil. She still wanted to die.

Dixie brought her food the next day, a big pot of chicken soup. She stayed only long enough to heat it up before leaving at Carrie's urging.

“Don't want you to get sick, too. Does my voice sound better?”