Coming Home for Christmas (8 page)

“No, but this can be in place of that.” Kenzie put it in simpler terms. “You come with me, I absolve you of that bet. Fair enough?”

“Fair?” he echoed. In all honesty, he couldn't really answer that without getting further information to work with. Information he already knew he wasn't about to get ahead of time. She'd made that abundantly clear. “Ask me again after I get back,” he told her.

A smile that could be described as nothing short of sexy, even by the most oblivious of people, curved the corners of her mouth.

At first glance, Keith found his reaction to the sight of her smile rather unsettling. And yet at the same time, the sight of her smile directed at him was oddly appealing.

At the root of it all, he had to surmise, was the accidental kiss they'd shared this morning. It had placed an entirely different spin on just about everything going on between them.

It certainly affected how he looked at her.

Maybe it had something to do with where he found himself right now—at loose ends, maybe even cast adrift. In two days he would have to go through the motions of a pantomime he had no desire to endure.

At this funeral, the attendees would be expecting him to play the part of a grieving son, but he'd been that already. Ten years ago he'd been that grieving son, as well as a grieving brother.

To lose Amy had been extremely rough on his soul. To lose his mother in the bargain had been all but crushing for him. He hadn't lost his mother literally—she was, after all, still breathing—but for all intents and purposes, he had lost the mother he had known all his life up to that tragic point.

After Amy died in the accident, his kind, loving, levelheaded mother had suddenly transformed into what amounted to a reckless teenager. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing more pitiable than a fifty-year-old teenager, but she had refused to listen to anything he said. He tried to reason with her, even asked her to seek help, but she'd turned him down. Desperate, hurting, he had continued to cajole and plead until finally he'd lost all patience with her.

And then one day, the collision he knew was coming came. Heated, angry words were exchanged. Words that, once they were out, couldn't be taken back.

Words that destroyed all the bridges that connected them to each other.

And even if those words could be taken back, they certainly couldn't be erased from memory. That was where they remained forever, and because they were there, nothing else was allowed to thrive.

“Are you all right?” Kenzie asked him gently.

Snapping out of it, Keith looked at her. “Yeah, sure. Why?”

“You got really quiet there, and you've got this strange look on your face,” she told him.

Keith forced himself to smile for a second, pretending he hadn't been preoccupied with any sort of serious thoughts. “Just contemplating what kind of torture you have in mind for me.”

Kenzie wasn't sure she believed him, but she played along, anyway. There was no point in pressing him. “Not torture,” she promised. “And you'll see soon enough.”

“I suppose I will,” he replied quietly.

He didn't fool her for a minute, but the game continued, anyway. She was counting on her family to help her bring him around to the person she knew he used to be.

Chapter Eight

“I
t's a house,” he said in surprise as Kenzie began to slow down at the curb before the well-kept two-story structure.

They'd turned in to a residential development, so he shouldn't have been surprised, but for some reason he'd thought she might be taking him to a more public place.

There was amusement in Kenzie's eyes as she smiled at him. “Nothing wrong with your powers of observation, I see.”

He had no idea if she was being sarcastic or not. Had the words come from anyone else, he would have gone with the former. But from what he remembered of her from high school and what he'd been exposed to currently, Kenzie was far too positive a person to waste her time with sarcasm.

“It's my mom's house,” she told Keith as she brought her vehicle to a complete stop and turned off the engine. Kenzie could see that he was less than thrilled about being exposed to family, even if that family belonged to someone else. “Ginny's having a birthday party.”

He left his seat belt buckled even though she was undoing hers. He had no idea who Kenzie was talking about. “Ginny?” he questioned.

Kenzie nodded, wondering if he was going to give her a hard time, after all. “One of my nieces. She's three today.”

“You brought me to a kid's birthday party?” he asked in disbelief. This was what he got for letting his guard down and going along.

“I brought you to a
family
birthday party,” Kenzie corrected him. “It just happens to be Ginny's birthday. If this had been two weeks ago, it would have been my mother's birthday. Most of the family live pretty busy lives,” she went on, opening the door on her side. “Birthdays are the excuse we use to get together for a few hours.”

He wasn't moving. Pausing, she bent down and looked into the car at him. “The car's too big to fit in the living room,” she said matter-of-factly.

His eyebrows drew together. “What?”

“You're still buckled up,” Kenzie said, nodding at the fastened seat belt. “And I just thought you'd want to know that the car is too big to take in with you, so you're going to have to unbuckle the seat belt.”

He was clearly having his doubts about attending. “Maybe I should just stay here until you're done.”

“Maybe you shouldn't,” Kenzie countered cheerfully. “The whole point is to get you out of the house and clear your head,” she told him.

He had his own way of unwinding that didn't involve pretending to be interested in what strangers were talking about. “A glass of wine will clear my head.”

“Not hardly,” she told him. “Wine just makes things fuzzy. C'mon,” she coaxed him. “I've got a very friendly family and they don't bite—I promise. Besides, if you come in with me, you'll be doing me a favor.”

“What kind of a favor?” Keith asked suspiciously. His hand hovered over the seat belt, which remained buckled.

She thought back to the other day and her sister's attempts to set her up with a blind date for dinner at her house. “If my siblings see me coming in with a breathing male under the age of fifty, they might leave me alone for a while.”

He was no more enlightened now than he had been a moment ago. “I don't get it.”

Sighing, Kenzie spelled it out for him. “They're all married. I'm not. I'm the youngest and somehow, through no fault of my own, I became everyone's favorite matchmaking project. If they see you, they'll cease and desist—at least for a little while—and I can breathe and focus on doing my job well instead of having to fend off their efforts.”

Now he understood. “That sounds reasonable enough, I guess.”

“Great.” She closed the door on her side. “Now take a deep breath,” she advised. “And let's go.”

The second Keith got out of her car, Kenzie aimed her key fob at the vehicle and pressed it. Four locks all closed simultaneously.

The sounds of people talking, laughing, calling out to one another were all around him long before the front door of the house was opened.

Echoes from long ago rose up to meet Keith, and he stopped short of the front step.

He didn't know if he was up to this, willingly walking into a situation that was already resurrecting memories he had absolutely no desire to revisit.

Memories that had been, until now, too painful for him.

The next moment, just before he started to turn away, he felt Kenzie weaving her arm through his as if it were a long practiced maneuver. Before he could say a word in protest—or tell her that he had definitely changed his mind—the front door opened, and he found himself drawn inside by a woman with warm eyes and a warmer smile. A woman, he realized, who looked exactly like an older version of Kenzie.

“Come in. You're just in time,” she told them.

“Just in time?” he repeated more quietly, glancing at Kenzie as they followed the woman into the living room—a room filled with people, large and small.

“She means that they haven't sung ‘Happy Birthday' yet. Mom,” Kenzie said, raising her voice as she called out to the older woman. When Mrs. Bradshaw turned around, Kenzie said, “You remember Keith O'Connell. Keith, this is my mom, Andrea.”

“Yes, of course,” Andrea replied, taking his hand and shaking it.

He didn't see how that was possible—he had no memory of ever encountering the woman—but he played along and returned the smile.

Keith still didn't want to be here, but he couldn't leave without causing a scene. That seemed like rather a ludicrous thing to do, given that the people here were participating in a child's birthday party, so he refrained.

Making the best of it, Keith told himself that for the duration of an hour or ninety minutes, he could put up with this charade. For some reason, Kenzie wanted him here, and in a way, he did owe her. After all, she had handled all the extraneous details surrounding the funeral and reception for him. And that, in turn, had taken some of the weight of this whole experience off his shoulders.

“Kenzie, you made it. And you brought a man.” The woman who swooped down on them from the left looked as if she were another older version of Kenzie. Younger than her mother, so this had to be a sister, he guessed. An older,
pregnant
sister, he amended as he got a better view of the woman who was currently giving him a very thorough once-over.

“Yes, I did, but he's not for Ginny,” Kenzie responded, smiling at her sister. “This,” she continued, placing the gaily wrapped package she had brought with her into her sister's hands, “is for our birthday girl.”

“And this is?” Marcy asked, clearly not easily diverted. She also didn't bother to hide the fact that she was still giving her sister's companion a very close inspection.

After another moment, Kenzie gathered from the expression on Marcy's face that Keith had met with her sister's guarded approval.

“Is Keith,” Kenzie answered, deliberately being mysterious and leaving out his last name. “That's all you need to know. Keith, meet Marcy Bradshaw Crawford. She's just one of my meddlesome siblings,” she warned him. “All four of them smile and look harmless, but trust me, they're not. This, however,” Kenzie declared, never missing a beat as she scooped up her niece, who had launched herself at her from across the room, “is a regular little charmer. However, she's prone to sneak attacks.”

Laughing, she swung the little girl around in a circle before putting Ginny down again. “Don't turn your back on her for a second,” she told Keith.

She said it so seriously that Ginny looked up at her, an impatient expression on her small, thin face. “Don't worry. I won't hurt him, Aunt Kenzie.”

“I know, Pumpkin. But you're quick, and I'm afraid that my friend here isn't used to that.” She'd said that strictly for Ginny's benefit, so the little girl would feel more confident about herself. An anticipated new arrival in the family was a time for shifting dynamics and self-doubts, and she just wanted to be sure that her niece was equipped to weather it well.

Kenzie tousled the little girl's hair, knowing the day wasn't far away that Ginny would be looking to disentangle herself from her parents and the rest of the family and go off with her friends.

Way of the world
, she thought with resignation.

* * *

Keith had assumed that he could just remain on the sidelines, hidden in plain sight, so to speak. That way, he didn't have to get involved in any of the conversations that were going on all around him.

Or so he thought, only to discover he was sadly mistaken.

There was no such thing as standing on the sidelines when it came to Kenzie's family. He found himself engulfed in warm voices, had questions directed at him that rang with genuine interest and was on the receiving end of amusing stories to the extent that he quickly discovered he didn't even know which way to turn or whose question to answer first.

He also discovered that there was no place to hide. Even more surprising, he didn't really want to, at least not all that much.

To his relief, Kenzie came to his rescue when he found himself facing questions about the cases he took on as a lawyer.

“No shop talk, Tom,” she told her brother, wedging herself in between her oldest sibling and Keith. “I promised Keith that this afternoon was all about unwinding, not grilling.”

Slipping her arm through his, she gently led Keith away from the small cluster of guests.

“I take it we're not leaving yet,” Keith said. To his own surprise, he wasn't having that bad a time. This experience, forced though it was, was not without its merits.

“Soon,” she murmured, drawing him over to another gathering.

She repeatedly came to his rescue several more times that afternoon and early evening.

Contrary to what he thought was happening—that he would stay for a total of sixty minutes, maybe ninety—by the end of his self-imposed time limit, Keith discovered that he was more than amenable to remaining for a little while longer.

That officially ended as dusk was creeping up out of the Pacific waters, looking to embrace whatever it could in order to remain around.

At first, Keith had really tried not to take part in the conversations. He thought, after remaining deliberately closed-mouthed once or twice, that would be the end of it.

However, he had no idea just how unobtrusively persistent Kenzie's family members—from the oldest member to the youngest—could be when it came to doing something they believed, in their heart of hearts, was the right thing. Apparently, getting him to talk fell under that heading.

Drawing him out in conversation had been tricky to say the least, but to Keith's amazement, he was no match for even the youngest of Kenzie's clan.

And just like that, he was pulled in.

Pulled into the conversation and consequently, by and by, pulled into the family dynamic, as well.

That was how one hour turned into two and two into four. Before he knew it, most of the day had gone by. Moreover, he wasn't the least bit annoyed by this.

He liked these unassuming, down-to-earth people even though he initially felt that he had nothing in common with them. But he—and they—had all initially come from a working class mother and father who took on any kind of work to keep their children dressed and fed. That, he discovered, was the American dream to Kenzie's parents, and they had captured it in the palms of their hands, passing it down to their children.

And although it was very much against his will at first, when Kenzie's mother came up to him to exchange a few words later that evening, Keith couldn't help thinking of his own mother—the way she had once been, not the woman whose burial service he was going to be attending the day after tomorrow.

With a great deal of effort, Keith shook off the memory. Nothing good would come of going there. He had to remember that—and resist the temptation to do otherwise.

“I think our birthday girl is ready to be taken home, don't you?” Andrea asked him.

The little girl was sitting beside him on the sofa, her head lolling to one side. She was obviously asleep and had been for the last twenty minutes or so, after valiantly struggling to keep her eyes open. She'd finally lost the battle. Her even, measured breathing attested to that.

“It is getting late,” Keith agreed. His mother had been very strict about bedtime when he was Ginny's age. Apparently, Kenzie's family didn't feel the same way.

Kenzie picked up his cue. Looking at Keith, she inclined her head so that only he could hear her and said, “You've more than paid off your debt. Would you like to go back to your house?”

The candles had been blown out and the cake had long since been eaten. Ginny had gone on to daintily remove the wrapping paper from her gifts. Some of the paper, evading cleanup, still littered parts of the floor. Ginny might have fallen asleep, but her older cousins were awake, and some of them were playing with her gifts, all under their mothers' watchful eyes.

All in all, it was a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting, only done one better. Keith felt a very odd sensation of longing stirring inside before he managed to block it and lock it away.

“Are you serious?” Keith asked, surprised that Kenzie would come around so easily—and on her own, too. He had become fairly convinced that in order to leave the premises before midnight, he would be forced to come up with some sort of an elaborate escape plan.

Not that he really wanted to all that much.

Maybe there was something in the punch, Keith thought.

Obviously amused by his response, Kenzie grinned at him. That grin was getting to him, working its way under his skin. He was finding her harder and harder to ignore or even keep at bay.

“It would be too cruel to tease you like that,” she told him, whispering the words into his ear and creating, unbeknownst to her, waves of warmth that undulated through him. “Yes, I'm serious,” she assured him.