Mackinnon 03 - The Bonus Mom (8 page)

He took her mouth. Right then. Fast. Before she had a clue what was coming.

He did. He’d known all day, maybe knew from the minute he’d met her, that something was there between them. Maybe it had to be uncovered, searched for, worked for—but he had an absolutely clear vision about what he wanted to do with and for and to Rosemary MacKinnon.

He was going for treasure.

At first, she went tense in his arms.

At first.

The wind picked up a sudden bit. So many scents surrounded them—the tang of pine, the rich scent of wet earth and stinging fresh air. And her. Covered in that fluffy purple jacket of hers, all zipped up...but her lips suddenly parted for his. Her headed tilted back, and she lifted up, lifted into him, her arms swooping around his neck.

Aw, man.

She didn’t kiss like a good girl. She kissed like maybe this was her last chance, the last chocolate in the box, and she was going to savor the best damned kiss with everything she had. She made a sound. A soft sweet sound of yearning, a sound so vulnerable and naked that he felt a silver streak of need.

She wasn’t any woman. This wasn’t any kiss. It was a connection. The kind that made him want to own her—and to be owned right back. To have lusty, wild, sweaty sex...and then take all night, making tortuously tender love. He desperately wanted to hold her through the night. He fiercely needed to protect her through a life.

His hands slid around her, down her back, down to her butt...felt a fierce resentment at all the darned clothes between them. He needed to feel her. All of her. He was too old to invite this kind of frustration, even if it was a hurt-so-good kind of pain. He just didn’t want to let her go.

A sudden rustling sound broke through his closed-eyes concentrated exploring of her mouth.

The sound didn’t immediately stop him. It wasn’t some alien wild animal rustling...it was eleven-year-old girls type of rustling. His twins were close—but they hadn’t discovered them yet. He still had a few more seconds. He didn’t want to give up even a millisecond of these kisses, these touches. With her.

But Rosemary heard Pepper’s voice and suddenly sprang back, her eyes glazed and startled. For an instant he saw an unguarded look on her face, in her eyes. She wanted him. Maybe it took a stolen, breathless kiss to unlock that truth from the closet, but he wasn’t the only one with feelings. He wasn’t the only one who’d never expected an avalanche of emotion and need out of the complete blue.

“Whit,” she started to say. From unguarded vulnerability, she turned on the repression button, snapped that attitude into her voice.

But the girls suddenly showed up in sight, and galloped toward them, chattering and yelling the whole way. “Da-ad! You said a
short
walk! And now we did it and we’re starving. And exhausted. And Lilly lost a mitten.”

“I did not.”

“It was
my
mitten and you took it and now it’s disappeared!”

“Because you dropped it in the woods, you numbskull!”

He interjected carefully, “If you don’t scare off Rosemary with your arguing, I was thinking about asking her to come back home with us, have dinner.”

“We’re not arguing anymore.” Pepper elbowed her sister in the ribs. Lilly elbowed her right back and added a hair pull. Both gleamed beatific smiles at Rosemary.

She opened her mouth as if to say no to the dinner, then shot a quick careful glance at him. “Okay,” she said, but she was still looking at him.

She wasn’t coming back because of food. She was coming back, he strongly suspected, because she planned on straightening him out about a few things.

Rosemary wasn’t one to duck or deny a problem.

But then, neither was he.

Once home, the girls—led by Rosemary, of course—threw him out of the kitchen and insisted they were making dinner...and “he’d better not complain.”

A brilliant way to avoid any one-on-one time with him, Whit figured. But it wasn’t as if he minded getting a chance to put his feet up in the recliner, catch some news, and half listen to the clatter of pots and splash of water and nonstop giggling from the kitchen. He’d known, when he pushed this holiday week in the mountains on the girls, that it wouldn’t be easy. They “played” with him. They had fun with him. But it wasn’t the same as having friends or female company around.

He’d fiercely not wanted them to have a grieving, sad Christmas, not have Zoe on their minds all the time, not get swallowed up by that kind of sadness. No matter what issues came up here, he’d been pretty sure anything would be better than staying at home. And it was.

But having Rosemary around brightened up the twins more than a cache of gold. She wasn’t like their mom. She was just...herself. But if he could have bought a present that really mattered for his daughters this holiday, it’d be her. Rosemary.

“Dinner, Dad!” Pepper announced, carrying a platter in from the kitchen. Apparently they weren’t eating at the table. The menu started with raw carrots, cut in curls. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Chips. A plate of cheese, each piece cut in squares or triangles or circles. And, of course, three kinds of cookies.

The biggest plate was the cookies.

The kids ate like vultures. So did Rosemary. The three of them took credit for putting together a totally junk food meal, but Rosemary couldn’t look at him with a straight face when she claimed that. After dinner, the paper plates disappeared, the kitchen got wiped down, and when Rosemary said she really needed to get back home, the girls swooped on her for hugs...after which Pepper claimed she was going to wash her hair and Lilly was disappearing upstairs to check her email and Facebook.

Rosemary said she was getting her jacket, but she was gone for a bit. Whit figured she’d run into the bathroom. Whatever, he crouched down, started building a Boy Scout fire, the laying of the kindling just so, striking the flame, blowing just a little to help it catch. The fruitwood he’d brought in did a perfect burn, adding to the great scents in the house already.

“What a perfect end to a great day...a warm fire. Especially next to the tree that’s
almost
starting to look like a real Christmas tree,” Rosemary suddenly said, striding in from the back hall with her purple jacket on and already zipped to the throat.

He didn’t need a crystal ball to get the message—she was making a run for the nearest exit. No way she was staying. No way she was risking any more kisses with him today.

Zoe had always told him that he wasn’t the brightest. But when it came to basic communication, Whit always figured he got an A plus. The worry in Rosemary’s eyes told a complete story that started with
n
and ended with
o.

He lurched to his feet, dusted his hands on the seat of his jeans. “I’ll walk you out to your car.”

“No need!”

“That’s okay. I need a second of fresh air.” He kept his hands in his pockets, just so Rosemary could see he was behaving himself. He trailed her out the door, latched it, and then jailed his hands in pockets again. The sky was black and silent as a promise. She dug in her bag for her car key.

“Rosemary, I can’t thank you enough for the day. You don’t need me to tell you how much fun the girls had with you. You’re beyond great with kids.”

“Thanks.” She shot him a grin. “It’s not hard to be great with great kids. Especially when I don’t have to be the disciplinarian.”

“You’d probably be great with that, too.” He scuffed a heel in the gravel drive. “Any plans for kids of your own down the pike?”

The grin on her face froze. “Not likely.” Her tone stayed light and easy, but something was there, in that glued-on grin, in her eyes. “It seems I have skinny tubes. Found out in a physical last year. It’s not impossible for me to get pregnant, but the chances are around one in a zillion, or so they tell me.”

Now it was his turn to freeze up. He’d never guessed he was putting a foot in it. Hell. He’d never have asked her a hurtful question if he’d known. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. No point in lying about it. I took it hard. On the other hand, being an aunt gives me lots of kid time. My one brother’s due his first baby in a couple months...and my other brother has boys, two, just about Pepper and Lilly’s age. My theory is that an aunt should be able to spoil kids, give them noisy presents like drums and percussion instruments, take them places their parents never would. It’s all payback for my brothers. And the older I get, the more involved I can get. I’d like to take them on the Appalachian Trail. Maybe Alaska. Maybe a hike in Europe. When they get older anyway....”

She was easy to talk to. He liked hearing it all. But he couldn’t get it out of his head, that she couldn’t have kids. That she’d found out not long ago. He’d known there was a heavy secret related to the bozo, because he couldn’t imagine Rosemary dumping a guy right before the wedding on a whim. So...he never wanted to pry, never intended to, but somehow the question blurted out before he could stop it. “Rosemary...was that it? Why you broke off the relationship with the man you were engaged to? Because he wanted kids and you couldn’t have them?”

She’d opened the driver’s door, tossed her bag inside, was a pinch away from climbing in and turning the key. But now she stopped. Said nothing for a breadth of a second.

“Hell,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry, Rosemary. None of that’s any of my business. I just...”

“It’s all right. Really.” She climbed in and latched the seat belt before looking at him again. Her face was in shadow. “You know what’s funny? That’s exactly what I’d been afraid of, when I told George—that he’d be really upset if we couldn’t naturally have kids. But his response was the total opposite. He didn’t care. At all. In fact, I realized pretty quickly that he was actually happy about it. Now it seems obvious to me that was a clue.”

“A clue?”

She hesitated, and then shook her head. “Whit, I don’t mind talking about this sometime, but not tonight. We’ve had such a good day. So did your girls. And it’s just two days until Christmas Eve now...so if you’re all not tied up tomorrow, I have an idea for you three.”

“We’re not remotely tied up.”

“I have some work I really want to do, but could I stop over after lunch? I was thinking...the girls might like to make a manger. You know. Like...create a shelter out of boughs, use things we find in the woods to make a crèche, a Nativity scene. Not buy anything. Just work with things we find in nature?”

“Wonderful idea. I love it.”

But as she drove away, he thought what he loved...was her. He kept telling himself that he’d only known her for days, but every minute with her, every second, seemed richer than the last. His life seemed bigger than before he met her. Bigger with possibilities. With hope. With excitement over what could be.

When her taillights disappeared, he turned back to the house.

The mystery of her broken engagement was more troubling than ever. That she was unlikely to have a baby was impossibly sad for a child lover like her...but that information only made Whit more concerned at what the son of a sea dog had done that so devastated her.

He wasn’t sure he had a chance...unless she was past that hurt.

Chapter Seven

R
osemary had glued her behind to the desk chair, determined to get some work done before going over to Whit’s—and for darned sure, before allowing herself to think about the man. Outside, the sun poured down, not a puff of cloud in the whole darned sky—a perfect day to be outside, tromping around, breathing in the sweet mountain air.

Instead she was working on ovaries.

Photographs were spread out over a door—literally a door. No table was large enough to display the photographs, not when she needed to see the whole kit and caboodle to determine the proper order. Whether each orchid was beautiful or plain, huge or tiny, each one needed to be identified as either male or female. Often enough, finding the ovary required a serious magnifying glass.

She’d discovered something unexpected in her research. The girl orchids who did the best job of hiding or protecting their ovaries seemed to be the strongest survivors.

Maybe that was why she had skinny tubes? Because she didn’t have what it took to be a good survivor? At least after George had kicked her in the emotional teeth, and made her feel like less than a woman.

Would you quit? Stop thinking about men and life and get your mind back on sex.

She was trying. Studying a photograph of the Zygopetalum, she tucked a leg under her and measured the darling’s ovaries...and the big lip designed to attract a lusty insect. Measuring the size of the ovaries in proportion to the lip size was taking many hours of painstaking work. The results were fascinating—at least to her. It just took so many exacting, grueling hours that she was starting to fear she’d get blisters on the brain.

When she heard her cell phone sing, she sprang up faster than a criminal let loose from jail.

“Hey, Rose. How’s my favorite hermit doing?”

Tucker, God love him, only insulted her when he was too far away to be whacked upside the head. “Doing good. How’s marriage? How’re my nephews?”

“That’s partly why I’m calling. To tell you that UPS seemed to deliver a truckload of Christmas presents here for my monsters. And also to tell you that you might need a bigger truck next year.”

“Oh, wow, oh, wow. You mean Garnet’s expecting? I’m so excited! Boy or girl, do you know? And when’s it due? And how’s Garnet feeling? And—”

“Wait a minute. I need to get in a word, too.” She heard Ike’s voice, which meant the brothers were conference calling her. They only did that when they wanted to gang up on her about something. She carried the phone into the kitchen, where she found the stupid coffeepot was empty and the maid hadn’t shown up to refill it.

Oh. She didn’t have a maid. Sometimes she forgot.

Ike said, “I’ve got a little one in the oven, too, you know. And a bride who’s going to have Christmas with the MacKinnons for the first time. Rosemary, come on. You could help her like no one else.”

“I can smell guilt in the air.” Rosemary measured the coffee—more or less. Then added cold water and set the machine to brew. “Both of you might as well pour it on.”

“Well, I’m in the same situation. Garnet’s met the parents. But her parents are pretty terrifying, so Christmas overall is going to be an extra test of nerves for her. If you could just come for one afternoon. Christmas Day. We’d all be there.”

“And we’d miss you. Not just the wives. Us. We’re your only brothers, remember? And I know you’ve been nonstop badgered by the parents.” Tucker always went straight to the point. “But we’d be there as buffers. And the idea of you spending a holiday alone just plain sucks—”

“I won’t be alone.”

There. Silence. “Say that again,” Ike insisted.

She glanced at the clock. Whit wouldn’t expect her until after lunch, and it was only ten-thirty. She had more than enough time to change into extra warm clothes, fix herself a sandwich, maybe see if she could remember where she’d buried her makeup from six months ago. Not that she was thinking about Whit. Or that she cared what she looked like when the four of them were doing nothing but tromping around the woods.

“Are you talking about the guy you mentioned the other day? The one renting the place down the mountain?” Tucker didn’t like to waste time in between questions.

“Yes. The same one. The one who has twins, daughters. They lost their mom last year just before Christmas—”

“Yeah, I remember your telling me.”

“Well, no one told me,” Ike complained. “So...this guy is obviously single, then?”

“It’s not like that,” she said firmly. “It’s just...we hit it off. All of us. Started doing holiday things together. I feel like...well, like I have the chance to make a good Christmas for them.”

“Hey, that’s all cool. So...what’s he doing for a job? Making any kind of good living? Is he ugly as a rock? Good-looking?—”

“Ike!” God, having two brothers was sometimes a test of faith. Or patience. Or both. “He has two vulnerable kids.”

“Yeah, well Garnet and I had two vulnerable kids, and you know how that worked for us.” Tucker had a certain tone in his voice. The kind of tone a dog got when someone tried to take his bone. He wasn’t going to give up on this easily.

She poured coffee. Added sugar. Then remembered that she didn’t take sugar, and turned to face the window.

“Guys. I’ll be part of the family again after the holiday. I love you both. I’m going to miss you more than you can imagine—and the kids. And even Mom and Dad. But I just need this time to myself, okay? And finding a family that needed help is just what the doctor ordered—no pun intended about the doctor metaphor.”

“You haven’t slept with him, have you?”

“Let’s tone that down,” Ike chided his brother, only then proceeded to attack from the same side of the fence. “Has he kissed you? Got to first base? Second? How far as this gone?”

“I’ve only known him less than a week!”

“She isn’t answering the question,” Ike said to Tucker. “You want me to go up there?”

“We could both—”

“No. No, no, no. Would you quit it? I don’t need babysitting or big brother advice. I’ll see all of you after the holiday. That’s a matter of days, not years. I need to be here. Would you try to believe me?”

Neither spoke for a moment, which told Rosemary she was finally winning the argument.

Tucker said finally, “Here’s the thing, Rosemary. The longer you won’t talk to the parents about George, the more they worry that something unforgettably traumatic happened to you. I only see one way that’s going to change, and that’s for you to spend some time with them, let them see that you’re okay and doing fine. The holiday’s the easiest time to do that, because the rest of us will all be there.”

Rosemary pinched her nose. Man, she was sick of keeping the damned secret. If it was just for her sake, she’d have spilled the reason for the broken engagement eons ago. Unfortunately, it was for her parents’ sake that she’d kept quiet. They didn’t know she was protecting them. How could they?

“Guys,” she said carefully. “I need you to trust me. I’d walk on water for you two. I already know you’d do the same for me. But I can’t participate in a regular holiday this year. Please just let it go.”

They both said “sure,” but Rosemary knew perfectly well they didn’t mean it. She had to find a better answer than silence, but so far she couldn’t think of a way to explain what happened with George without embarrassing and troubling a whole lot of people.

Once she’d severed the call, she put it out of her mind. She wasn’t the only one who had reasons to feel vulnerable this holiday. Pepper and Lilly mattered a whole lot more than her problems. Her trouble was just an “issue.” The girls had lost their mom.

And Whit had lost his wife.

With another quick glance at a clock, she charged into action. She grabbed a cheese sandwich while she chased down hiking boots, exchanged a sweatshirt for a blue alpaca sweater, brushed her hair, slapped on gloss, filled a thermos with coffee and grabbed her keys. Naturally she had to run back in the house to turn off the coffeepot. Then back again to grab some serious gloves.

The drive to Whit’s place took less than five minutes...but it was enough time to give herself a stern mental talking-to. She’d been making too much over those kisses in the woods yesterday.

Twice now, he’d taken her by surprise. Twice now—she admitted it—he’d taken her breath away. And twice now, she could have gone with those stupendous emotions and made love with him. It wouldn’t be that hard to put aside morals and hurts and life issues—even Pepper and Lilly, because they didn’t have to know. And yeah, there were other major things, like that he lived in Charleston—and she didn’t. For sure her life was more flexible than his; down the pike she could relocate to all kinds of places. But none of those were the most serious reason she needed to get a grip and behave herself.

He was a wounded, grieving husband.

She saw two heads in the window when she turned the knob, saw both girls bob around, as if yelling to their dad that “she’s here!”

Next thing she knew, the three of them tumbled out with a chorus of greetings. She met Whit’s eyes over the kids—and yeah, she felt the
whoop
in her pulse. But sharing a smile with him was about more than that whoop factor. He loved it that his girls were so excited, so happy. He was on her team; she was on his. The look he gave her was a heartwarmer, not just a lustwarmer.

He steered them toward the Gator. His jacket was eons old, a serious outside work jacket, well loved, and as brawny as he was. “Has anyone even asked Rosemary her plan on how to make our manger?”

Since she’d thought up the idea on the spur of the moment, she wasn’t exactly prepared with a complex plan. She said, “Well, first, we should pick a site close to your house, so you can see it from the windows. And we need to be careful that the project isn’t too complex—we don’t want to have a nightmare to take apart after the holiday.”

She got two thumbs up, then had to grapple for more plan ideas. “Well...I was just thinking that we’d start gathering twigs and sticks. We’d start building them in a crisscross pattern, the way Boy Scouts are taught to make a fire? Only in our case, we want to make the shape of a cradle.”

Yup. Everybody agreed they could do that. Only the three of them were still looking at her, and she was fresh out of ideas. “And after that,” she said brightly, “your dad will figure out how to make the shelter around it.”

She got her hair ruffled for that, which made the girls laugh. She pretended to slug Whit in retaliation, but that made them laugh even harder. There was something in Whit’s eyes that had nothing to do with horseplay and teasing...something hot enough to take the chill out of the brisk, windy day.

But she didn’t trust her judgment about Whit, not anymore, and besides that the girls were happy. That’s what the whole outing was about, something fun for them, something about the holiday—and hopefully about doing something they’d never done before, so there was no chance the project would remind them of sad memories.

And it worked so well. The temperature tried to warm up, and the winter sun valiantly tried to shine. Leaves crackled and squirrels scattered, shocked by all the human noise and silliness. Rosemary participated, but she watched, too, loving how Whit razzed the girls, how they teased him in return.

The girls kept running back to the house, because they “needed things.” And Whit had the toughest job, creating a “shed” with boughs draped over long sticks. Eventually Rosemary and the girls finished the crèche. Sort of. The cradle looked like a cradle, as Lilly put it, if you were standing upside down and were really nearsighted. They’d made the baby from rags and twine, a doll that fit exactly in the twig manger. A kitchen towel worked as a blanket.

But then Lilly fretted that they didn’t have a Mary and Joseph or any wise men. She and Pepper charged back in the house, brought back billowing bed sheets, and then more twine and rubber bands, to make them into human characters. Whit said, “Did you guys really bring all the sheets off the bed? What on earth are we going to sleep on tonight?”

But Whit was overruled. The female team already had a new quest. How could you put together a Nativity scene without gifts? Because the wise men—or wise guys, as Pepper put it—had brought “stuff” like frankincense and myrrh.

A long debate ensued over what on earth “myrrh” was. No one was sure—but they were all dead positive they didn’t have any, so they had to come up with other gift ideas.

Lilly remembered there were fresh cranberries in the house. Lots of cranberries. More cranberries than they wanted to string for the tree—ever. Pepper had glitter shoes that didn’t fit her anymore, even though they were almost new. Both girls had hairpins that sparkled. And they both had glow sticks that lit up when you cracked them. The heap of “gifts” kept building, until they were all tired. Whit called a halt, and they all stood back to assess their masterpiece.

“Magnificent,” Rosemary pronounced. “For sure, the most original manger ever created.”

“I’m afraid our wise men look a lot more like Halloween ghosts than people. Except for the baby. We did pretty good with the baby.”

“Dad, you did the best with the shed. That really looks like a shelter. And now that the sun’s going down, our glow lights look really awesome.” Lilly said nothing more for a minute, but then from nowhere she came up with, “Man. Mom would really have hated this.”

“What?” Rosemary’s head whipped around. “Honey, why do you think so?”

Pepper did her classic shrug. “Mom liked things to look just so. And ‘just so’ pretty much meant like from Nordstrom’s or Saks, you know? Tasteful. That was one of Mom’s favorite words.
Tasteful. Expensive. Perfect.
”

Rosemary’s heart sank. She’d hoped they were doing something they’d never done before...but the last thing she’d wanted was to do something “wrong” on their mom’s terms. “But this was a different project than a traditional Christmas thing, don’t you think? We weren’t trying to do anything perfect. We didn’t want to buy anything. We were trying to create something...well, personal...something we did with our own hands, our own effort.”