Читать книгу A Christmas Miracle - Anna Adams - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

AFTER ENDURING FRED’S shouting and Fleming’s prickly mood, Jason ducked past the registration desk in the hotel that night. It usually took a few weeks for him to get this anxious to leave a work site.

He’d made a mistake. He should have stayed downstairs and asked if he had unexpected company, because a tall, thin woman in a worn dress was waiting beside his door. She blushed and smiled at him, but tears welled in her eyes.

“Mr. Macland?”

“Jason,” he said automatically.

“I’m Rachel Limber.”

“Fred’s wife?” Should he brace for a fight or help her down the stairs?

She held out a Santa-decorated tin. “I make homemade fudge,” she said. “It’s really good, and right now it’s pretty much all we have to offer as a thank-you.”

“Oh.” He took the metal container and shook her hand at the same time. “You didn’t have to go to the trouble.”

“I wanted to. Fred came home hopeful, and for that, I owe you. That old shop of his is mud and oil and nasty smells, but only to me. To him, it’s his favorite place in the whole world. I don’t know what he’d do if he lost it.”

That sounded familiar. Fleming had said the same thing—how many times? “I guess some walls and a place with memories can matter that much, Mrs. Limber.”

“It does to Fred. I was ready to give up and move to Knoxville, but our family’s here.”

Jason smiled. “Remind Fred he can call me or email anytime.”

“Thanks.” She looked at him closely. “I knew your grandmother.”

His grandparents had sold their home and moved to New York to help with Jason. Their support had become ever more vital to his father, who’d managed to retain custody of Jason’s younger sisters and brother as he divorced their mothers.

Robert Macland’s parents had given the family stability. Safety.

“I don’t think she ever came back here. She or my grandfather.” Jason had taken his grandparents so much for granted that he’d never thought to ask if they missed the place.

Why hadn’t he asked? Self-absorption must be a genetic trait.

“I wish she had. She was good friends with my mom. I know she would have been welcome.” Rachel Limber hooked her purse more securely over her arm and turned toward the stairs. “People shouldn’t disappear from each other’s lives. That’s what I hate most about this bank thing. You’re helping Fred, but you were too late for some.”

He nodded. “My grandfather asked me to come and to move quickly.”

“Good people, your grandparents, but we all knew your father. This little world was never going to be big enough for him. Merry Christmas, Jason. I hope I’ll see you around town.”

He stared after her, listening to the clack of her heels on the wooden stairs. Hadn’t he said almost the same thing about his father to Fleming? The small town of Bliss seemed to be closing in on him.

In his suite, Jason tossed the big key that weighed down his jacket pocket onto a table in front of the fireplace. He set the tin of fudge beside it.

Aromas from downstairs drifted up. His stomach growled as he glanced at the mail. He considered phoning down for dinner, but then rejected the idea, striking a long match to the logs and kindling waiting on the hearth.

He turned back to the stack of letters that he’d collected from his temporary post office box. Even in an age where a man did most of his correspondence via email, he still received a bundle of mail most days.

A long, lavender envelope caught his eye. Not the envelope, but the penmanship. Fat, round writing that was familiar because he’d read every line in every one of the day planners his mother had left behind when she’d abandoned him and his father. He stared at the name on the return address: Teresa Macland Brown.

It left him feeling as dazed as if he’d stormed headfirst into a wall.

His mother had written to him?

She’d hardly ever bothered. No cards, no emails, though he’d written to her almost the first moment he’d set up his own email address. He’d searched for her contact information on his father’s computer.

Secretly. Because Robert had been so angry at his wife’s disappearance that he had discouraged Jason from trying to get in touch with her. He’d reminded Jason regularly that she would only hurt him again.

Jason had never forgotten that last morning with her.

After an earsplitting argument between his parents, Jason’s mother had called a porter to take her luggage down to the street, and then she’d left. Jason sneaked into the elevator of their Manhattan loft to follow her, but she didn’t even wait for her bags. She was running out of the building’s other elevator as the doors opened on Jason’s.

He hurried after her, but when he reached the glass doors in the lobby, someone tall grabbed his shoulders and jerked him back.

“Careful, son, that’s a busy street out there.” It was the doorman.

Jason’s mother had run, sobbing, into the arms of a pale-haired man. He’d tipped up her face and wiped at her cheekbones with his thumbs. Then he’d kissed her with a tenderness that made Jason feel sick, because the man wasn’t his dad.

The runaway couple had scrambled into a waiting cab as if they couldn’t escape fast enough. With a jolt, the vehicle had started forward, and his mother and the stranger had disappeared into the flow of traffic.

She’d never looked back.

She’d hardly ever called. Initially, his father had tried to make excuses for her. For that, Jason had been grateful, but that image of her grabbing her new man and running away from their life stuck in his head even today.

No explanations had ever been necessary.

She hadn’t loved his father or him enough to stay. His dad said staying in one place wasn’t her thing, and he couldn’t blame her for that when he suffered from the same affliction. But Jason had never understood what he’d done to make her leave him, too.

Finally, he’d told his dad he understood that his mother didn’t love him, and they’d never discussed her again. She’d called once or twice, and they’d talked like strangers. Then they’d stopped talking at all.

Tightening his jaw, Jason finally opened the ridiculously feminine envelope. A single page slid out onto the floor. He picked it up. Heavy writing had impressed the pale purple paper with a few lines that showed through the back of the sheet. He needn’t have dreaded a long explanation, or an excuse.

But how had she known where to find him? How long had she been keeping tabs on him?

He unfolded the piece of paper. She wrote the way she’d talked all those years ago, as if she still didn’t have a lot to say. Just his name, a diffident request to meet, “I want to talk to you,” and her phone number.

He’d had more emotional communication from the bank’s frightened clients. He dropped the brief note and envelope on a side table with his keys.

After all these years, that was her best effort?

Why now? Why here?

How badly did he want to know?

He changed into running clothes and headed downstairs. The slap of his shoes against the sidewalk felt good. The stretch of his muscles as he ran and the cold air biting into his face reminded him he was alive. He was working. Nothing here was permanent. He just had to keep running to put everything back into perspective.

But then he came to Fleming’s shop, where she was stringing lights along the window. For a second, he considered running on past, but he couldn’t leave her standing on a chair to handle the lights alone.

He stopped, breathing hard enough to cause a cloud of steam to form in front of his face. Fleming, tangled in lights, stared at him as if to ask what he wanted.

If she’d asked out loud, he wouldn’t have known how to answer. He wasn’t even certain how he’d ended up in the one place she was sure to be. “Why don’t you let me help you?”

She looked down at him, considering. “I can do this by myself.”

Ignoring her stubbornness, he put his hand on the back of the chair. “Do we really need this?” He reached up to the metal frame of the awning in front of Mainly Merry Christmas. It was about four inches higher than his fingertips. “I guess we do.”

He took off his hoodie so he could see what he was doing and traded places with Fleming on the chair, noticing as they passed each other, just shy of touching, that she couldn’t look away from him any more than he could tear his gaze from her.

Slowly, she handed him a roll of green duct tape that matched the awning. She’d been using it to fasten the light cords to the canvas. She lifted the string of lights, and he took it, leaning back to see how she’d been lining them up.

“Why are you angry with me, Fleming?”

“I’m not.” She said it in such a rush it was obviously untrue. “I’m sorry. Maybe I am lashing out a little, because I find myself in a bad situation.”

“You can afford this loan. You won’t lose the store.”

“Why are you so helpful? You act as if the bank’s at fault.”

“I guess it is.” He probably shouldn’t say that. “According to the attorneys, Paige kept the loans just this side of legal so they’d go through the system. He’ll be going to jail because he got greedy enough to skim the profits.”

“Otherwise, the bank would have been part of his scam,” she said.

“I guess my family does have a level we won’t stoop below.” Jason smiled, but he wasn’t entirely joking. “I’m helping you and everyone else he cheated because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s best for this town if all of you can continue to do business with Macland’s.”

“Now you sound like a commercial,” she said, with a smile that made him feel less insulted, more as if they were back on the shaky footing of their unacknowledged attraction.

“That burns a lot more than being called heartless.”

“You’re imagining things.” Briskly, she handed him the last of the lights, and he put them up, secured them with the heavy-duty tape, and then stepped off the chair.

“Want to turn them on?”

Nodding, she went inside and threw a switch. The lights began to twinkle just as a snowflake landed on his cheek. He looked up and saw blue-gray sky, but when he turned his head to look at the courthouse behind him, he saw more flakes, thickening in the air.

“Snow,” he said, as the shop bells jangled and Fleming rejoined him.

“About time. That should help everyone in business up here.”

He searched her face, impressed that he’d never heard panic in her voice, even the day she’d agreed to sign the loan.

“I swear you’re going to be okay,” he said, taking her hand. “I took into account the slow times. You’re in this for the long haul. If you were only looking to make a quick profit and turn the place over to a new owner, we would have discussed different terms.”

She nodded, tears pooling in her eyes. Her throat moved as she tried to swallow, and he pulled her closer still, wrapping one arm around her.

“Until you close on the loan, nothing is permanent.”

“I need to close. My life here is permanent.” She pressed her cheek to his chest. She was warm and alive and unguarded on this cold day, and she needed his comfort.

It was a potent combination, but when she said the word permanent, it reminded him who she was. He couldn’t tip up her face and kiss the generous mouth that haunted him when he should have been busy with his own plans. He couldn’t put his other arm around her and pretend they could be more than friends.

He did hit-and-run relationships with a mastery he’d learned at his father’s knee. Fleming was not a temporary kind of woman.

“Let me take your chair inside before it gets wet,” he said.

“I hope the snow now is a good sign for more to come.” She held the door, and he carried the chair past her.

Fleming followed him inside, but the bells on the door didn’t sound as cheery as now.

“You know, I don’t think you’re heartless.” She went to the front window of the store as if looking for customers to drag inside. “No one here thinks you’re heartless.”

“Have you been gossiping?” He went to the tall, silver coffeepot she kept behind the counter and poured two cups. He passed one to her, making no effort to avoid contact.

She put one finger through the handle and wrapped her other hand around the cup’s rim. He couldn’t help noticing every little thing she did.

“Maybe it’s gossip,” she said. “Maybe people are grateful, and we’ve talked about it over the doughnut case in the bakery and the egg fridge in the grocery store. When you first arrived, you were all rules and regulations, even when you were sorry you had to do the right thing for the bank.”

“I may still have to do that.” But he wasn’t sanguine as he thought of the number of loans he still had to study.

“You’re accidentally getting to know us, and business as usual isn’t as easy as it’s been in the past.”

“You’re right about that. I didn’t expect to be treated as if I belonged here. People take me at face value.” He moved away from her, fingering the thick batting that nestled the miniature village in faux snow in the window. “But I am still the bank’s representative.”

“I haven’t forgotten you’ll put the bank ahead of us.”

“If I have to, but I didn’t with your loan.”

“That’s what I don’t understand about you. You obviously cared about Fred, and I know you’ve been considerate of me, but if the bottom line creeps up, that’s where your attention will go.”

“It’s my job.”

“Your job,” she said. “That’s your first priority, isn’t it?”

He met her measured gaze, knowing she wouldn’t let him put his arm around her now if he tried. “The job is why I’m here.”

“I won’t let myself forget again.” She took her cup to the counter. “But aren’t you ever tempted to find out if you could belong somewhere?”

“Fleming—”

“I know,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”

“You’re content here in these mountains. I’m not asking you why you aren’t tempted by everything you’d find outside this world.”

“Because I belong. My life here is a suit of clothes that fits. You haven’t found that outfit for yourself.” She opened her laptop. “And I don’t think you’ll allow yourself to look.”

“Just like I don’t believe you’re capable of opening your eyes to anywhere else.”

“And now we’re getting personal. That’s a mistake.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “I’m asking the attorney for a closing date.”

And shutting him out. Making sure he knew she wasn’t open to any relationship that might take her away from her beloved mountain home.

“Good,” he said. “The sooner you commit to your business, the better.” He looked at his watch, not even seeing it. “I should get back to work, too. Good night, Fleming.”

“Night.”

Her cheery voice irritated him. He set his cup on her counter and looked at her, not hiding his awareness of what they were truly saying to each other. She belonged here. He was leaving.

Neither spoke again as he exited the store and walked away.

* * *

FLEMING FELT THE silence in the shop as if it were a pillow smothering her. She sent her email to the bank’s loan attorney and closed the laptop, not even tempted to open her story file for a change.

Her heart felt a little broken. She and Jason had talked a lot since she’d first met him in his office that day. They’d never been as personal or as honest as in these last few moments.

She’d met other men, been interested in other men, but laughed to herself now, recognizing that she’d never felt like this before. Attracted, afraid, grateful for the sound of his voice, at a loss when he left her.

But she’d always been clear about where she stood, where she’d stand forever. In Bliss, her home.

Her phone rang, startling her as it vibrated in her pocket. She reached for it and tears burned in her eyes. “Mom,” she said, answering.

“Am I too late? Why haven’t you called me?”

Fleming picked up her coffee cup and carried it to the back room, where she put it in the sink. “The grapevine got hold of you?”

“I’ve heard a few things. Is it true about the loan?”

“Absolutely true, but everything’s fine. I have a new one that I’ll be able to cover, and the shop will be fine.”

“I don’t care about the shop.” Her mother paused. “Right now, anyway. You sound sad.”

“No.” Fleming lied as she never had to her mother before. She couldn’t explain that her heart had gotten involved without her permission. “I’m fine. Where are you calling from?”

Her mom didn’t answer.

“Hello?” Fleming glanced at the phone. It was a long way to a beach hut, but the call remained connected.

“I asked Hugh if we could come home early. Just a few days. I’m on my way from Knoxville right now. I hope you won’t be upset with me for being concerned, but we both thought you might need me.”

Fleming didn’t know how to respond. “I’m twenty-four, Mom, not a child. Hugh will think—”

“That I wanted to see my daughter. He’s part of our family now, too. He understands what the shop means to us both. Besides, he’s excited about getting back to the hospital in the morning. Who knows how cardiology might have changed since the great Dr. Belford tempted fate by taking a vacation?”

Her mom was rightly proud of her new husband, who’d never go out for pastry and disappear. “Thank him for me,” Fleming said, “and be careful getting here. It’s starting to snow.”

“Oh, that’ll be good for business.”