A Christmas to Remember (20 page)

Jake looked from one to the other. “That grocery store was over in Derbyville. You lived in Derbyville, Irene? I never realized that, either.”

She nodded. “I grew up there. But I couldn’t wait to escape to the big city. I moved to Dallas right after high school.”

Jake narrowed his eyes like he was sensing a deeper undercurrent. “And so did Theo.”

Theo nodded. “Yep. That was a long time ago, though. A lot of water under the bridge.”

“In all your visits you never mentioned you knew Irene,” Jake said suspiciously.

Theo wished they would all just drop the subject. He glanced at Ree who seemed completely unmoved by the conversation. On the other hand he felt like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff, scrambling to get his feet back on solid ground. “It just never came up, and, well, our paths haven’t crossed much since those days.”

Marla Jean swatted Jake’s arm. “Quit being so nosey, Jake.”

Theo smiled at Marla Jean gratefully. “Yeah, Jake, we all have a few secrets in our deep, dark past.” He was talking to Jake, but he looked directly at Irene while he spoke.

Irene met his eyes and lifted her chin as if she was ready to challenge any version of things he might offer. Abruptly, she turned and marched back to the patio table. She grabbed the wedding folder and announced, “I hate to interrupt this walk down memory lane, folks, but we should head over to the pavilion and walk through the ceremony. We have a lot of ground to cover before it starts getting dark.” She started off down the back yard path without waiting to see if they would follow.

“We’re coming.” Marla Jean grabbed Jake’s hand, and they bounded after her like puppies let off their leash. Theo found their enthusiasm for the upcoming wedding to be downright heartwarming. He planned to concentrate on their happiness while he was here, and as much as possible, ignore the woman who had broken his heart without a backward glance all those years ago. That might have been easier to do if the recent picture of her wet, naked body hadn’t been seared permanently into his brain.

Merry Christmas to our troops serving around the globe and to their families, with them or back home missing them. My gratitude is boundless.

Also to the people of my home state of Oklahoma. We’ve had some tough times this year, but we are strong and resilient. I’m proud to be counted among you.

As always, for my husband, Robert. You’re my rock, and I’ll love you forever.

Jared Connors eased through the double doors leading into the community center meeting room at one minute after six. At the front of the room, speaking about gift shopping, holiday meals, and the need for volunteers, stood Joanie Quinton, his office manager for six days. She’d snagged him with that need for volunteers before he’d even had the chance to ask her about community service opportunities.

Catching sight of him, she raised one hand to single him out. “There’s a new doctor in town, guys, and we got him. Dr. Jared Connors is from back east, where he attended Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and our hospital was smart enough to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’s an outstanding pediatrician, and all you have to do to get your kids in to see him is go through me first.”

As she paused for the expected laughter, she gestured him nearer. “Come on up, Dr. Connors, and say a few words.”

Great. Nothing like being put on the spot.
But he obediently climbed the steps to the dais and took his spot beside her. “Thank you for the introduction, Joanie. I’m anticipating getting to know the city of Tallgrass and enjoying a slower pace than the one I was accustomed to in New York.”
You sound like an idiot. What’s wrong with “Hi, nice to meet you”?
His face warming, he went on. “I look forward to working with you all in the Prairie Elf—”

Movement at the back of the room caught his attention. An elf had just walked in the door. He blinked, but the slight figure dressed in red and green, complete with pointy hat, didn’t go away. She just stood there looking elfish.

He blinked again, trying to remember where he’d lost his power of speech. “Um, in the Prairie Elf Foundation.”

“Fundation,” Joanie murmured.

“Fundation. Right.” Because Prairie Elf wasn’t cutesy enough on its own, and the group was about fun and funds, hence the play on words.

There were smiles on the faces looking up at him, along with a few hellos and a round of claps, before they turned away to make conversation. Beside him, Joanie rubbed her glasses on her Rudolph-inspired sweatshirt. “See, that wasn’t bad.”

He grunted.
Wasn’t bad
didn’t to equate to
good.

“Now we’ll eat dinner before we get down to business. Most of us come straight from work, so we usually bring our own meals, but at least once a month, we have a potluck. You’re in for some good cooking, Doc.”

Following Joanie to the tables lining the back wall, Jared tried to imagine his parents tolerating the nickname. Howard Connors was a cardiovascular surgeon, Margaret Baxter-Connors a neurosurgeon. Their home base was Boston, although they traveled the world to see select patients. They were surgeons to the rich and powerful, supremely confident and highly respected. If anyone had ever called either of them
Doc,
his parents would have eaten that person for breakfast.

As he and Joanie picked up plates and joined the line, she introduced him to the people around them. He said the appropriate words and stored the names automatically in his head. Memorization was one of his great skills, helping him make an appearance on every Honors list in his educational career.

“Doc, let me make one more introduction before I run off to our PR person.” Joanie’s smile shifted to the woman across the serving table. “Our elf here is Ilena Gomez. Ilena, this is Jared Connors. Ilena is the heart of Prairie Elf.”

“It’s my passion,” Ilena agreed, nodding at Joanie as she hurried away.

Jared liked women: blondes, redheads, brunettes, and black-haired women, too. In college, he’d even dated a girl with lavender hair. But blondes were his favorite—tall and leggy and sleek, with warm gold hair and perpetually tanned skin that reminded him of tropical beaches—sophisticated and elegant and sinuous and sensuous. Those were the blondes who knocked him off his feet.

Ilena was neither tall nor leggy nor sleek. Her hair was more white than blonde, and her skin looked as if she spent a fortune on super-efficient sunblock and concealing clothes. No way could that whole-face grin pass for sophisticated or the elf outfit for elegant. She was all lush curves in a tiny package, her smile generous, her blue eyes dancing.

He suspected, for an instant, that she could also knock him off his feet, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He hadn’t moved halfway across the country to get involved in a serious relationship.

“So what brings you to Tallgrass?” Ilena asked as she spooned food onto her overloaded plate.

Truthfully, he hadn’t come there so much as he’d fled something else: the position his parents had arranged for him with the country’s most prestigious pediatrics partnership. If he was going to practice an insignificant specialty, they’d reasoned, the least he could do was practice with the significant people in the field.

Of course, he couldn’t give that answer unless he wanted to sound like the awkward teenager his parents still believed him to be. “Oklahoma has a serious shortage of rural doctors, so I signed up.” Pissing off his parents, embarrassing his siblings, and feeling a little better about himself, all in one shot.

“Funny. I don’t think of Tallgrass as rural.” Ilena dished a heaping spoonful of casserole onto her plate. He identified diced tomatoes and green onions, but not much else. “I grew up in a town in South Texas that had a hundred eight people. We got our gas, our mail, our news, and our food all at the same place.
That
was rural.” Ilena scanned the table, then balanced her overflowing plate in both hands. “Where did you come from?”

“New York.”

As they moved along the table, he took a bit of one dish, then another. Except for the garden salad, everything looked heavy and indulgent: lots of cheese, rich sauces, and dressings. It was the kind of food that never made an appearance on the Connors’ dinner table. His father didn’t merely talk the talk. Jared, his brother, and his sisters had been eating a heart-healthy diet since they’d traded the bottle for real food.

He reached the end of the table first, then looked around for a seat. The others had already filled two tables and part of another and were deep in conversation. He felt the way he had at camp the summer the swimming instructor had pushed him off the dock into ten-foot-deep water before he was ready.
Sink or swim,
the girl said with a laugh, and he’d done the first several times before managing the second.

A green-and-red hat bobbed into his line of vision. “Come on,” Ilena said, nudging him with her elbow. “We’ll sit over there.”

He followed her to the end of the third table, then sat across from her. His plate looked anemic compared to hers. Where did she put all that food?

They settled in, spreading paper napkins, putting plastic utensils on their plates, choosing bottles of water from the small ice bucket in the center of the table. She took a bite of pasta salad, another of baked beans, a third of cream-cheese-and-ham-stuffed tortilla, then sighed happily as if her initial burst of hunger had been satisfied. “So, Doc. Go ahead. You know you want to ask.”

Slowly Jared chewed and swallowed savory meat loaf with a caramelized tomato glaze before meeting her gaze. “Ask what?”

“Why the weird costume?”

At least she knew dressing as an elf for a meeting wasn’t exactly normal. “Okay,” he said evenly. “Why the weird costume?”

“What weird costume?” Her laugh sounded like a set of crystal chimes that had hung outside his window at their summer home on Nantucket. Their tinkle had lured him to sleep on many a warm night.

Her expression sobered, but there was still a general sense of pleasure about her. “What we do here is serious business, but people need to laugh. And it’s no weirder than people wearing antlers on their heads or most of the Christmas sweaters this time of year. Besides, the jingle bells make my baby laugh.”

Baby.
Something rose inside him, not a surge or a swell, just a small, strange bit of… He didn’t even know what to call it. Dismay? Disappointment? It drew his attention automatically to her left hand, but it was bare of rings. Didn’t mean anything. His parents had been married more than forty years, and they didn’t wear wedding rings. Too much hand scrubbing and gloving to bother, they said.

But he’d always thought a wedding ring, and the commitment it represented, was worth the bother.

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Six months last week. John.”

“Does he have an elf costume, too?”

“He does. And a snowman and a Santa and a little hooded coat with ears that makes him look like a fat sleepy bear.”

“Is he with your husband tonight?”

“No.” Another emotion he couldn’t easily identify flickered through her eyes, though her expression didn’t change. “Juan was killed in Afghanistan a year ago, so it’s just John and me.”

The information caught him off guard. Sure, a lot of his patients in the city had come from single-parent homes, and some of those missing parents were dead. That was natural. Death happened. It happened more often in a community tied to the military, as Tallgrass was to Fort Murphy.

But those patients’ parents were professional relationships. Jared couldn’t think of anyone among his friends and family who’d lost a spouse at such a young age. “I’m sorry.”

That generous smile curved her mouth again. “We get along. All my best friends are widows. Except for Carly, who got married just before John was born. And Therese is getting married as soon as Keegan gets out of the Army. And Jessy. Hmm, I guess only half my best friends are widows.” She took a moment to eat more—honey-glazed ham, tabouli, chicken and fat dumplings that glistened with gravy. “Is there a Mrs. Connors?”

“Only my mother, though she answers to Doctor instead of Mrs. And my sister-in-law, but she kept her maiden name, since her oncology practice was already established when she got married.”

“So you come from a family of doctors.”

A family who called themselves physicians, surgeons, or whatever their specialty, so people wouldn’t mistake them for the garden-variety MD. “Mother, father, brother, two sisters, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and a niece in her first year of medical school.” He wasn’t bragging. Just giving the facts.

“I’m impressed. My dad was a farmer, my granddad was a deputy sheriff, and my great-granddad made moonshine.”

“Moonshine?”

“Yeah. Hootch. White lightnin’. The kind of stuff you brew illegally out in the backcountry.”

The words sounded so strange coming from her pretty, innocent, happy elf’s face that Jared did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He laughed out loud.

* * *

“What do you think of Dr. Connors?”

Ilena wrapped foil over the empty dish that had contained her cornbread salad before meeting Joanie’s inquisitive gaze. The doctor had left a few minutes earlier, walking out with the reporter from the Tallgrass newspaper who gave the fundation as much coverage as he could. “He seems nice.”

“He is. Cosmopolitan-sophisticated-nice. I mean, can you imagine him wearing a Santa costume or something like that?” She gestured toward Ilena’s outfit. “Dress shirt, trousers, tie—that’s all I’ve ever seen him in.”

“And you’ve seen him—what? Five or six times? At work?”

“Yeah, well, Doc Sheldon used to come in straight from the fields in overalls and knee-high rubber boots. And Doc Patrick never dressed up, not once in the decade he was here. We’re never gonna get this one out of those preppy clothes. Still, if I were twenty years younger…” Joanie’s smile was sly. “Hey, you
are
twenty years younger.”

Although the idea of getting Jared out of those clothes all but demanded a sassy response, Ilena shook one finger at her. “No matchmaking for the elf. Santa’s rules, and you wouldn’t want to tick him off this close to Christmas, would you?”

“No, of course not. But Christmas will be over in three weeks. Then the rules don’t apply.”

With a laugh, Ilena said good night and headed out the door, huddling deeper into her coat when she pushed through the exit and the prairie wind hit her. “O-Oklahoma, where the damn winds have to come sweeping down the plain,” she sang off-key, wishing she’d traded the elf hat for the wool one stuffed in her coat pocket.

“So the song’s true.”

Startled, she lifted her gaze from the curled toes of her shoes and saw Jared standing beside a pricey low-slung car. There was something expectant about his casual stance, as if he’d been waiting for her. He wasn’t shivering inside his jacket, and his hair merely fluttered in the breeze. He was definitely handsome in that rich, upper-crust, privileged way she associated with New England and old money.

“That part of it is, definitely. Sometimes I think it can sweep
me
across the plains. Not that I’m a lightweight. I’m short but solid.” And freezing. The quiet purr of his car enticed her with visions of hot air blasting from vents. She beeped open her door, set the dish and her bag on the passenger seat, then started the engine before facing him again. “You must be used to cold weather back east.”

“We get our share.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot, then shoved his hands into his pockets. “If you’re not in a hurry to get home, is there someplace we could get a drink?”

Ooh, the handsome man wants to have a drink with me.
The handsome, brand-new-in-town, stranger-in-a-strange-land who probably didn’t like sitting in restaurants alone.

She cocked her head to the side, studying him. When he lifted one brow, she explained, “I’m trying to imagine you in Bubba’s, Buddy’s, or Bronco’s. Those are three of our popular spots.” Mostly cowboys and oil field workers frequented Bubba’s, with soldiers and uniform groupies preferring Bronco’s. Plenty of Buddy’s customers were still in suits for their after-work drinks, but she couldn’t quite place Jared among them. “Maybe you should define ‘drink.’ Cocktail, wine, beer, coffee, pop, hot cocoa…”

“Coffee. Cocoa.” His shrug was elegant, made more so by the cashmere of his coat. “I don’t drink if I’m working the next day.”

“Good policy.” She hardly ever drank at all. As a result, she was a very cheap date, Juan had teased. Half a glass of wine, and soon enough, her clothes were coming
off.
“I have the perfect place. Three Amigos on East Main. Have you seen it?”