Eight Christmas Eves (11 page)

He hated the
idea of Helen having sex with Ethan. Hated it so much it made him want to claw
his eyes out.

If he were
honest, he had to admit that he hated the idea of her having sex with anyone.

For the most
part, he did just fine in thinking about Helen in the right away—as his little
friend, as almost family. But ever since last year when he’d given into some
sort of twisted urge and kissed her, he had to be on guard against any
flickering of inappropriate thoughts.

Six months ago,
he’d come out to the house for the Fourth of July weekend, mostly to get away
from the holiday mess in D.C. He’d been surprised on his arrival when the
housekeeper told him that Helen had come out too.

On discovering
that she was in the pool, he’d immediately headed outside to say hello.

It had been a
mistake.

He’d watched her
climb out of the pool, soaking wet, wearing nothing but a tiny blue bikini, all
lush curves and bare skin and slick hair, and he hadn’t had enough preparation
to handle the sight.

He’d gotten
suddenly, painfully aroused by her gorgeous, wet body and wide smile. And it
had gotten worse when she’d run over to give him a hug.

He still
tortured himself occasionally at night with memories of how she’d looked, of
how he knew she would look naked, in his bed, in his arms. He did his best to
keep tight control over his mind, since he knew thinking about her like that
was wrong, but occasionally the thoughts snuck up on him anyway.

And it seemed
to get harder every time he saw her.

Cyrus continued
to the media room, wiping such thoughts out of his brain. It was getting close
to midnight on Christmas Eve, and he hadn’t watched
White Christmas
.
While Helen obviously wasn’t going to join him this year, it just seemed wrong
not to be there.

He lowered
himself onto the couch and flipped on the television, turning it to a cable
news channel since he didn’t really care what he watched.

He’d had a good
time watching Helen sing, but he still would have liked to continue their
normal tradition. Christmas just seemed incomplete without it.

But she was
grown up now. She wasn’t the girl who had transformed his world all those years
ago.

“Hey,” a voice
came from the doorway.

He turned
toward it with a jerk. Helen walked toward him, wearing silk pajamas covered by
a thick, white, belted sweater.

“Hey,” he said,
his eyes widening in surprise. ”I thought you were in bed.”

“I was. But it
just didn’t seem like Christmas without Bing Crosby.” She sat down beside him
on the couch and nodded toward the television.

Cyrus cued the
movie up without speaking.

When the music
started, he slanted a covert look at her. She’d plaited her hair into two long
braids, he assumed to keep it out of her face as she slept. And her face was
scrubbed free of make-up. She looked very young. Innocent. Like she’d been
crying.

“Are you all
right?” he asked, before he could think through whether the question was wise.

“Yeah,” she
said, the one word wobbling a little. She gave a sniff and swallowed visibly.

“Helen?” Cyrus
prompted.

Her face
crumpled. “I think Ethan’s cheating on me.”

Cyrus’s jaw
dropped open momentarily and something started to twist in his gut, but he
managed to keep his voice mild as he asked, “Why do you think that?”

“He’s hiding
something from me. I know he is.” She brushed away a stray tear impatiently,
fighting for control of her emotions.

“Do you have
any evidence?” He’d had the best investigators he could find looking into Ethan
for the last year, but they hadn’t turned up any proof that hinted at an
affair.

She shook her
head. “It’s just…he’s hiding something.”

Cyrus took a
slow breath. Then decided to take the risk. “Would you like for me to help find
out if he is or not?”

She shook her
head again, wiping away another tear.

“Helen,” he
said with a frown, “If you suspect—“

“It’s not
that,” she interrupted, straightening up and trying to keep the sob out of her
words, “It’s just that it doesn’t matter. Whether he’s cheating on me or not,
this just isn’t working.”

A spark of hope
ignited in the back of his mind, but he tried to force it back. Helen was hurting,
and he shouldn’t be exulting that she was finally going to dump Ethan at long
last. He bit back a response, since nothing he said would be the right thing.

Instead, he
reached out and pulled her into a hug. She sobbed into his chest as he held her,
and he was hopelessly torn between aching sympathy and relief. She was small
and warm and shaking in his arms, and he held her as tightly as he could,
offering whatever comfort was in his power.

When she
finally pulled away, she wiped at her tear-streaked face and looked up at him
through red eyes. “You always thought Ethan was just with me for the money,
didn’t you?”

Cyrus sucked in
a sharp breath. “Helen, I never would have—“

“I know you’d
never say so,” she cut in. “But you thought so, didn’t you?”

He hesitated a
long time before he admitted, “I thought it was a possibility.”

“I think he
was. I mean, maybe he liked me, but I don’t think he ever really loved me. I
don’t know why I couldn’t see it. I was so stupid. But I thought he was so
attractive and exciting and he made me feel like I was…I was desirable. And I
thought I was grown up, so I could do what I wanted. And since you didn’t…”

When she didn’t
finish, he prompted, “I didn’t what?” He was concerned he'd somehow figured
into her decision to get together with Ethan.

She shook her
head, dismissing the question. “I was so stupid—at first, I think I was just
trying to prove something, but then I really fell for him. But I should have
known it was a mistake as soon as he started to try to turn me against you and
your dad.”

Cyrus blinked.
“When did that happen?”

“Earlier this
year. But I didn’t want to give up on the relationship, so I tried. And I
tried. But I can’t try anymore. It’s just over.”

“Then it’s
probably for the best,” Cyrus said. When her face twisted again, he added, “I
know it doesn’t feel like it. I’ve been through it, remember? But it gets
better. And then you’ll just be…”

She looked up,
as if waiting for the word.

“Relieved,” he
concluded.

“I hope so.”
She rubbed her face with both hands. “I don’t want to feel this way anymore.”

“You won’t.”

That seemed to
be all that needed to be said. The movie was still playing so they focused on
the television again. Helen stayed curled up at his side. She seemed to want to
get closer and closer, so he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her against
him. She snuggled up, yanking a throw over her to get warm. It wasn’t long
before she was stretched out on the couch with her head in his lap.

He didn’t mind.
He liked the weight of her head on his lap, even though it made his stomach
clench strangely. She felt like
his
—his responsibility, his burden, his
blessing. He gently stroked her hair as they watched the movie they’d watched
every Christmas Eve for the last nine years.

By the time it
finished, Helen was almost asleep, and Cyrus was allowing himself to feel a
hope that wouldn’t be denied.

Maybe Helen—and
he and his father—could be free of Ethan at last.

That would be a
good thing. A very good thing. Then things could go back to the way they were
before. He and Helen could be comfortable with each other, like friends, like
family, with nothing tense or weird or inappropriate coming between them.

Cyrus was sure
it could happen, if she could just be rid of Ethan.

And that
thought ended up giving him a pretty good Christmas Eve after all.

last
year

Helen was in such a rush that
she had to try three times to unlock the front door to her apartment.

When she
finally got it open, she stepped into the entry hall and dropped her stuff on
the floor. Her keys ended up on the floor too, since she flung them onto the
console table and they kept sliding off the edge.

She didn’t
bother to pick them up. She just took five hurried steps into the main room and
stared in defeated horror at the messy living area.

Messy was a
generous term. The room was an absolute disaster, and Cyrus would be here any
minute.

She fought
through her glum stupor and raced through the room, collecting dishes from the
last several days that were scattered on the coffee table, side tables, leather
chair, and floor. She’d managed to balance them all in one armful when the
phone rang.

With a groan,
she dumped the dishes in the general vicinity of the sink and snatched up the
phone.

The doorman
very politely informed her that Mr. Owen had arrived.

“Shit,” she
muttered, “I’m not ready. Can you stall him?”

“Stall him?”
the doorman repeated, exactly as she should have expected.

“Don’t say it
out loud,” she groaned, “He’ll hear and—“

“He said he’s
coming up.”

Helen groaned
again and had a brief moment of panic as she stared around at everything that
needed doing in the forty-five seconds it would take Cyrus to ride the elevator
up to her top-floor apartment.

Deciding to use
her time wisely, she ran back into the entry hall and picked up her keys,
putting them neatly on the tray where they belonged.

Cyrus knocked
on the door. “Helen? Are you all right?” he asked through the door. “Why did
you need to stall me?”

She resigned
herself to the inevitable and went to open the door.

He stood in her
doorway, looking as cool and professional as always in black trousers and a
thin charcoal gray sweater mostly covered by a black overcoat. He'd lowered his
eyebrows and was frowning at her.

She scowled at
him. “I wasn’t ready.”

He studied her
closely, from her hair, which was messily falling out of the twist that had
looked sleek and sophisticated that morning, to her pink top, gray pencil
skirt, and expensive high heels. She was obviously still dressed for work,
rather than for a leisurely ride to Clarksburg on Christmas Eve day.

“Why were you
working today?” he asked. “I thought you had the day off.”

She’d recently
won another internship with the same magazine she’d interned for the year
before, but this internship was paid and had more responsibility. “There was a
last-minute crisis with the issue that goes to press tonight. Since I’m low man
on the totem pole, I got the privilege of showing up to fix it.”

“Did you get
everything done?”

“Sure.” She
glanced back at her apartment. “But I didn’t get anything else done.”

The question on
Cyrus’s face transformed to enlightenment as he came into sight of her living
area. “So
this
is why you didn't want me to come up. What happened?”

She scowled at
him again. “Nothing happened.  It’s been a long week.”

“I know you’ve
been swamped, but what happened to the woman who comes to clean for you.”

“I gave her and
her husband a cruise for Christmas, so she’s not been to clean for a couple of
weeks,” Helen explained defensively. She wasn’t normally embarrassed about a
little messiness, but she wasn’t used to living in such a disaster area and she
preferred Cyrus not know she’d been doing so for the last week.

“Well, you
can’t leave for Christmas with it like this,” Cyrus said, staring around at the
piles of dirty dishes, books, mail, and clothes.

“I know that,”
she gritted through her teeth, “I was trying to clean up a little, but I just
got home.”

“Do you want me
to call a—“

“No,” she
interrupted, “It will just take a minute. If you want to help, you can look for
more dirty dishes. I don’t care about the clothes and papers, but I’m not going
to leave dirty dishes.”

Cyrus looked
rather mystified, but he took off his coat and made a circuit through her area while
she went to work in the sink.

“Why is there a
skirt under your coffee table?” he asked, when he headed into the kitchen with
a few stray glasses and a plate. “Do you have a new boyfriend you haven’t told
me about?”

Helen flushed
hotly, for absolutely no good reason. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long
time, and not just because she was too busy for one. “The skirt was getting
uncomfortable while I was eating the other night so I just took it off,” she
said, hiding her face in the dishwasher as she loaded some dishes. 
“There’s no boyfriend.”

He gave her a
quizzical look, which she assumed was prompted by the idea of her eating
skirtless. “Who sent you the flowers?” he asked, gesturing with his head toward
the bouquet of orchids and pink roses on the dining table, barely visible in
the piles of textbooks she’d never put away after the end of the semester.

“Your dad did,”
she said, a little surprised by the question. If she hadn’t known better, she
would have thought he didn’t believe her when she’d said she didn’t have a
boyfriend.

Since she lived
one block from Cyrus, talked to him several times a day, and saw him at least
once a day, she wasn’t sure how he imagined she’d be able to keep a boyfriend a
secret from him.

The truth was
she hadn’t felt much like dating after Ethan. She’d dutifully gone out on dates
whenever one of her friends tried to set her up or a guy in one of her classes
asked her out.

But it was all
rather half-hearted. The truth was she’d much rather just hang out with Cyrus
than try to muster up the energy to be charming and desirable on a date.

“For getting
the internship?” Cyrus asked.

Helen blinked,
taking a moment to remember what they’d been discussing. “Oh, yeah, the flowers
were for getting the internship.”

“You wouldn’t
accept anything from
me
for getting the internship.” Cyrus wiped down
the granite kitchen island that divided the kitchen from the living area.

“If you’d sent
me flowers, I would have taken them,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to take a
piece of jewelry or a car or whatever ridiculous thing you were thinking of
buying me.”

He rolled his
eyes. “It wouldn’t have been a car.”

“Well, good,”
she said, feeling a little flushed and embarrassed again for no good reason.
Since they’d finished the kitchen, she went into the living room and got a
handful of clothes and shoes to carry into her bedroom.

Cyrus just
followed her into the bedroom. “So I take it you haven’t packed for the trip
yet,” he said, eyeing the explosion of clothes and books in the room with
amused astonishment.

“Just sit down
and shut up,” she told him blithely, gesturing toward a chaise next to the
large window.

Cyrus chuckled
and went over to the chaise obediently while she dumped her armful of clothes
in the closet and then went to gather another pile up from the bed and floor.

When she
glanced over, she saw that Cyrus had started to pick up some of the clothes on
the chaise. He held two tops, a pair of slacks, four silk scarves (since she
hadn’t been able to decide which to wear the day before), and a velvet jacket.
He was staring down at a ruby-red bra.

Helen laughed
out loud and went to pick it up for him. She laughed even more when he glanced
away from it.

“I would have
thought a man who dated as much as you would be used to seeing and removing
women’s bras,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed again, but she ignored the
silly, flustered feeling and kept her voice dry.

To her
surprise, Cyrus didn’t respond in kind. His blue eyes narrowed as he said
coolly, “I haven’t dated that much for years, which you should know.”

“I do,” she
said hurriedly. She dropped the bra with the other clothes she’d taken from
Cyrus onto the bed and walked back over to him, feeling bad since she realized
she’d offended him. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry.”

Cyrus dated semi-regularly,
always gorgeous women but never casually or gratuitously. He would usually date
them for at least a month before he moved on. His habit of one-night-stands had
ended when she’d been fourteen—six years ago.

Helen assumed
Cyrus was seriously looking for a woman to share his life with, and he’d even
dated a couple of women who’d seemed smart, pretty, and nice. Not that she’d
liked them. She didn’t really like anyone he dated.

It was probably
some sort of irrational territorial instinct. Cyrus was like a best friend or
family—and so he felt like he was hers in a certain way. His marriage to Rose
Marie had interfered with that to a certain extent, and her relationships with
Ethan had interfered with it even more. But since it had ended, they’d gotten
even closer.

She was quite
happy with the way things were, since it meant she could have Cyrus mostly to
herself. Maybe it was selfish, but she would like it to stay that way for a
little while longer.

She reached out
and put a hand on his chest. “Don’t be mad at me.”

Cyrus’s face
softened. “I’m not mad at you, kid.”

She frowned but
didn’t say anything. She knew it was just an affectionate name for her—a
remnant of their past together—but she was getting kind of tired of his calling
her “kid.” She hadn’t been a kid for a long time, but he didn’t seem to notice
or care.

“What’s wrong?”
he asked, his brows drawing together.

Since it wasn’t
worth going into and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, she didn’t explain
that she didn’t want him to call her that anymore. Instead, she just sighed and
turned back to gather the clothes in her arms again. “Nothing,” she said, “I’m
just rushed and flustered and not thinking straight. Let me get packed real
quick.”

“Can I help?”

“Sure. Go find
me a few outfits—one for dinner and something to wear tomorrow and the next
day. I’ll get the rest.”

Cyrus went into
her closet while she opened drawers and got socks, panties, bras, and pajamas.
She’d packed them in her overnight bag when Cyrus returned with clothes draped
over his arms. She nodded in approval as she inspected and then folded each
article of clothing.

“Shoes,” she
prompted, nodding back toward the closet.

By the time he
returned with two pairs of shoes—sleek black ankle-boots and more comfortable
loafers—she’d finished fitting the clothes in her bag.

She slid the
shoes into the appropriate pockets and then zipped the bag. She went into her
bathroom to pack her toiletries, and—as she quickly put makeup and other
necessities into a small case—she simultaneously unclipped her hair and started
to brush it out.

It fell in a
long straight fall down her back to her waist. She should put it up again for
the drive, so it wouldn’t get in her way, but she didn’t want to take the time.

“Now I just
need to change clothes,” she said, taking her case into the bedroom and setting
it by her bag. “Sorry it’s taking so long. I’ll just be another minute.”

“No hurry,” he
said. He’d been picking up books and piling them the top of the dresser,
organized by size. “We still have plenty of time to get there before dinner.”

“I don’t want
Drake to get annoyed because we’re late.”

“We won’t be
late. He doesn’t get annoyed with you anyway.”

“Well, he
might. And he’s been good to me, so I don’t want to antagonize him.”

Cyrus looked at
her suddenly, as if he’d just realized something. “He likes you, Helen. He’s
not going to change his mind about you.”

She stiffened.
“What do you mean?”

Cyrus stepped
over to her, holding her eyes seriously. “I just mean he really likes you, and
that’s not going to change. He’s always liked you. He’s not going to change his
feelings because you’re late for dinner.”

Helen shrugged.
She felt kind of stupid suddenly, as if Cyrus had caught her in an immature
moment. He’d been right about her worries, though. She realized it in a deep
surge of knowledge. She’d always been very careful around Drake Owen—reading
him as accurately as she could so she could act in a way that would please him.
Even when she was a teenager and had been rebelling, she’d always done things
she was pretty sure wouldn’t overly concern him.

The only thing
she’d ever consciously done that she knew he wouldn’t like was date Ethan. And
she’d done that, in part, because it wouldn’t please him, because it wouldn’t
please Cyrus.

She’d wanted to
prove something—to them, to herself.

But it had been
a huge mistake she didn’t even like to think about now, since her stupidity
humiliated her.

Everyone was
stupid when they were young, they said. But that didn’t mean she was happy
about being stupid herself.

To distract
herself from a line of thought that made her uncomfortable, she slipped off her
bracelet and earrings and put them on the dresser. She stared at herself in the
mirror as she tried to unclasp her necklace. She didn’t look bad, but she
looked a little flustered and flushed, and she preferred to look more stylish
and in control.

The clasp on
her necklace was delicate and very difficult to get without seeing. She tried
for a minute but then gave up. “Can you unhook my necklace?” she asked Cyrus.

He came over
without objecting and stood behind her, his handsome, masculine image next to
hers in the mirror. As always, he already needed to shave again.

He gently moved
aside her long hair so he could reach the clasp, and Helen stared at the two of
them in the mirror for a long time.