Home for Christmas (23 page)

“Perfect is overrated,” Owen said firmly, pointing to a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner of the shed. “My old CO had a saying: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Meaning, if you've got a workable strategy that advances your mission, go for it. Don't wait around for something perfect to come along. You can miss out on a lot in life by holding out for some impossible dream of perfection.”

“Dreams were all I had for so long,” Libby murmured, kneeling on the dusty floor and dragging one of the boxes toward her. “Your CO sounds like a very wise man.”

“He is.” She could hear the smile in Owen's voice, even though his face was hidden by his upraised arms as he reached to pull down a box from the top of the stack. “He retired a few years ago, but we keep in touch. I learned a lot from him.”

“Like what else?” Libby asked, intrigued.

“How to walk tall and carry myself with pride, and how to be humble enough to admit it when I needed help or when I didn't know something. How to apologize, how to lead by example. How to be a man, I guess.”

Libby tugged the folded flaps of the cardboard box open and paused. “The way you talk about him, he sounds almost like a father to you.”

“He was. I guess I was looking for that, after I left home so young. A shrink would have a field day with me joining up the way I did, rejecting my dad and everything he wanted for me. Whatever motivated me back then, I have no regrets. Joining the army was the best thing I ever did. It made me who I am. And it got me out of a situation, off a path, that was leading nowhere good.”

Owen paused, the muscles in his shoulders bunching with sudden tension where he was bent over the open box. “Except that path led to Caitlin. So I can't regret the time I spent with her mother, either.”

“Kids change everything,” Libby said softly, her throat aching with sympathy at the lost, stunned expression in the depths of Owen's eyes whenever he talked about Caitlin.

“Not just about the future, either.” Owen went back to rifling through his box, bending his head down so Libby couldn't read his expression. “Caitlin—being around her, trying to get her to open up and talk to me, trying to figure out how to build a relationship with her … it's hard. One of the hardest things I've ever done, and I'm in the damn special forces. An elite solder in the armed forces, and one little girl's got me stymied. It makes me rethink everything about my relationship with my dad.”

She made a cautious hum to show she was listening. Thirsty for any drop of information Owen spilled, Libby didn't want to speak, to break whatever spell was making him talk like this. Every word gave her a new, deeper insight into this man she'd let into her heart.

“I spent a lot of years angry with my dad for the way he shut down after Mom died,” Owen said slowly, his movements halting. He looked up at Libby, letting her see the naked emotion written all over his features. “Dad turned our home into a training program for the police academy, except unlike real cadets, we got no breaks. No downtime. No encouragement. Only discipline, criticism. Coldness.”

“That sounds like a harsh way to grow up,” Libby said, her heart squeezing at the idea of Owen, younger and smaller and more innocent, looking to his father for comfort after the death of his mother, and finding that all softness and warmth had died with her. For the first time, Libby realized that in his own way, Owen was as much an orphan as she was.

“I rebelled every way I could think of, while Andie tried her best to be the perfect kid.” Owen shook his head “I've held onto my anger for a long time. Nothing got me past it—not even learning the meaning of true self-discipline in the army. But now, with Caitlin, when she looks at me with those big eyes and I know that I'm all she has in the world … it's a lot of pressure. And I get how my dad crumpled under that pressure and fell back on what he knew. I don't like it and I never will. But I can understand it a little better now.”

Libby's heart started to pound in her chest. “Does that mean you intend to do better by Caitlin than was done by you?”

“I know what you want me to say.” Owen pulled a blanket out of his box and shook it out, revealing a hand-stitched quilt that tugged at the corners of Libby's memory. “You want me to say I've realized that I can be the father Caitlin needs, and I'll stick around and prove it. But it's not that easy, Libby.”

“I never said it was easy,” she protested. “But I still think what Caitlin needs more than anything is you, in her life. And I think maybe you need her every bit as much.”

“Maybe I do.” Owen stood from his crouch and swirled the quilt out to drape over Libby's shoulders in one graceful, economical motion. “But this isn't about what I need. It's about what I owe. To my men, my country, the army. And what I owe my family—Caitlin is happy here. She has Andie, who loves her like her own. Maybe what's best for Caitlin is to stay here with her aunt instead of with me. I know maybe that's hard for you to hear, growing up the way you did.”

Libby paused, searching her own feelings as she clutched the quilt gratefully around her. “No. My uncle loved me. Still does, when he remembers who I am. I was lucky to have him, and if you don't want Caitlin or can't commit to being there for her, then you're right—she is better off with someone who loves her and is able to make a home for her. But Owen, I know you do want your daughter. I watched the way your face lit up when you talked about her, before you even met her. And now, when I see you together, the tentative steps you're taking toward each other—you can't tell me you don't love that little girl.”

Shadows moved across Owen's face as he turned aside. His voice was wrecked when he admitted, “More than my own life. But that doesn't mean I'd be a good dad. I don't have a lot to go on, here. And I
am
a good officer. That's what I know. It's all I know.”

Libby bit her lip. She didn't want to argue. She couldn't argue—she was sure Owen was a huge asset to his team, and that they'd welcome him back with open arms the minute he was fit for duty. And the knowledge that arguing for Owen to stay could be motivated purely by her own desire for more time with him made Libby want to keep her mouth shut.

But the memory of Caitlin's wide, brilliant smile when she saw that Owen had skipped his rehab to watch her lesson forced Libby to speak up. “When you first joined the army, you didn't know how to be an officer, right?”

Owen cut her a sidelong glance that said he knew where she was going with this. “That's true. But I had good teachers.”

“All I'm saying is, if you put your mind and heart into it, I know you'll figure out this fatherhood thing. And if it were part of your army training, you wouldn't have let fear or uncertainty hold you back. That's what makes you a hero. Deny it all you want,” Libby said stubbornly, crossing her arms over her chest at Owen's shaking head. “You'll never convince me you aren't a hero. But my point about Caitlin is that there's more than one way to be a hero.”

Owen turned away abruptly, reaching for another box and signaling the end of the conversation by saying, “Let's hope there's another blanket in here. Now that the sun's gone down for real, I'm starting to feel the chill.”

Suppressing a sigh, Libby scrambled to her feet and held out a corner of her quilt. “Come here, I'll share.”

That got him to look at her … and what a look. Owen's eyes went from shuttered to blazing with heat in a single heartbeat, and Libby shivered convulsively at the fire-bright desire in his stare. “Sharing a blanket with you would definitely warm me up, but it wouldn't get us any closer to that conversation we got sidetracked from.”

The dark promise in his voice rubbed over Libby's skin like velvet. “Let's keep looking,” she suggested breathlessly, going back to staring blindly down into her box, which seemed to be filled with crumpled newspaper.

Doing her best to focus on the task at hand instead of the wall of heat and solid muscle at her back, Libby started to dig through the papers. Her fingers closed around the top clump of paper and lifted something surprisingly heavy. She could feel pointy bits poking through the newspaper. For some reason, her hands were trembling as she started unwrapping it.

Libby unraveled the paper, which was wound carefully around a small object, no larger than the palm of her hand, but dense enough to have heft to it. Little by little, the paper fell away to reveal a tiny china cow, painted white with big, black splotches across its withers.

Behind her, she distantly heard Owen say, “Oh, of course. Any port in a storm, I guess,” in a resigned tone, but she couldn't look away from the cow figurine in her hand. She stroked its perky ears and short, curved horns—the pointed tips she'd felt through the paper. With a gasp, Libby dove back into the box and pulled out another newspaper-wrapped object.

By the time she finally let herself believe it, Libby was sitting on the shed floor in the midst of a menagerie: three cows, two standing and one lying down; a pair of white curly sheep with sleepy eyes and black legs curled under them demurely; a camel in mid-stride; a long-eared donkey with a sweetly dopey expression.

“We found it,” she murmured, her voice almost choked by tears of gratitude and blessing. “My grandmother's nativity.”

“That's not all we found.”

Libby twisted around and blinked away the tears blurring her vision to see Owen standing with his arms out at his sides, wearing a sheepish smile and a red velvet suit trimmed in white fur. Between one blink and the next, her overwhelmed tears turned to laughter.

The Santa suit hung on Owen's trim frame, making him look like a little boy playing dress up. “It's warm,” he said defensively, cinching the leather belt in as tight as he could. It still draped over his lean hips but at least it gathered the extra material at his waist.

“It's wonderful,” Libby told him, completely sincerely. “You look great.”

“Thanks. But it's not actually what I was talking about. Come see.”

With a last, lingering caress to the manger animals from the nativity, Libby got to her feet and went to see what else Owen had found.

“This was in the last box,” he said, his voice gentle. “It was underneath the Santa suit.”

He handed her a leather-bound three-ring binder that looked like a scrapbook, thick with pages Libby couldn't wait to flip through. “Is it family photographs?” she asked eagerly.

“Turn it over.”

Libby flipped the binder and blinked down at the word
RECIPES
embossed in the brown leather cover. “Oh, my gosh. Owen.”

Her knees went watery, but Owen was there to put a steadying arm around her shoulders and steer her back to the sleigh to sit down. Libby settled back against the cushion and opened the heavy binder over her knees.

Page after page of yellowed, stained index cards, preserved in their individual plastic sleeves. Libby's breath caught at the spidery, handwritten titles of some of the dishes: Sweet Potato Pone, Grandma Helene's Buttermilk Biscuits, Daddy's Fried Chicken. Some of the cards were notched and creased, the writing faded and blurry, but still legible. And the newer cards … that was Libby's mother's handwriting. She recognized it from someplace deep in her memory, deeper than conscious thought.

“This is…” Libby looked up at Owen where he stood beside the sleigh, watching her with a tender expression warming his ocean blue eyes.

“It's a treasure trove,” he agreed. “I'm no gourmet chef, but every one of those recipes I looked at sounded like something I'd love to eat. I think we might have found a way to pull off this Christmas dinner.”

But Libby shook her head. “No. I mean yes, we will definitely be using these recipes for Christmas. But what I wanted to say was, thank you. It feels like you've given my mother back to me. At least, a part of her, a memory I didn't know I had. I'll be forever grateful.”

Owen's gaze sharpened in intensity, and Libby gladly parted her lips for his kiss an instant before he brought their mouths together. In the brief flash of time before the brush of his lips and the velvety rub of his tongue robbed her of thought, Libby made a vow to return the favor, if she could.

I'll do whatever I can to give you back your family, Owen. Even if I'm never going to be a part of it. Maybe that's the only way I can make things right between us.

 

Chapter Twenty-One

Everything changed after that night, Libby thought as she took up her rolling pin and whacked at a stick of butter to soften it. All she had to do was close her eyes to relive the experience of lying for hours wrapped in Owen's arms, sharing body heat and whispered memories and confidences to keep warm.

And then, when the storm finally blew itself out somewhere around dawn, they'd hauled open the storage shed's heavy doors to step out into a winter wonderland. White snow dusted the world, lying in smooth drifts and crusting the tops of tree branches like the sugar Libby sprinkled over the lattice-top crust of her mother's caramel apple pie. Owen had taken Libby's hand and led her home, a sack of precious treasures over his red-clad shoulder, the handsomest Santa Claus in history.

Libby tossed the softened butter into her bowl of measured-out granulated sugar and took a wooden spoon to it, creaming the two together. A tiny bead of sweat tickled at her forehead, and Libby blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes, but kept going even when her wrist started to ache from the repetitive motion.

“We have a mixer, you know.”

The grumpy voice came from behind her, and Libby tensed. She didn't stop stirring, though. “I saw it. But the recipe says to do it by hand, so that's what I'm doing.”

Grandfather stumped into the kitchen, his movements halting and slow, as if he'd passed a long and restless night. Libby resisted the urge to ask him how he was, biting back her concern. He came up beside her at the counter and watched in silence for a long moment as Libby doggedly worked the butter and sugar into a smooth, fluffy mixture.