A Weaver Holiday Homecoming Page 9

  “Aye, the poor girl,” Kathleen tsked as they trooped through the door. She shut it after them and followed them into the kitchen, twisting her hands in the red-and-green apron tied around her waist. “What can I do?”

  “She just needs to rest,” Mallory assured. “And lunch was a long while ago for her.”

  “A long while ago for everyone, I imagine. It won’t take me a minute to get some dinner on.” Kathleen patted Chloe’s uninjured arm gently. “I’ll fix you up a tray and bring it to you.”

  “Thanks, Gram. The living room,” Mallory told Ryan, and he carried Chloe through to the other room. She dumped her things on the kitchen table and avoided her grandmother’s speculative expression as she followed.

  Ryan was lowering Chloe onto one of the couches and Mallory grabbed a few pillows to tuck behind her back and another beneath her splint.

  Chloe, it was plain to see, was staring up at Ryan as if he were even more wonderful than Purple Princess.

  “I don’t see how you can be comfortable on these couches,” he said, straightening again.

  Mallory smiled. “Don’t knock ’em until you try them. I got them for a song at an estate auction, actually. And even though this place came with some furnishings, it was less expensive to move our stuff here than to pay storage for everything in New York until we go back.”

  “But if we stayed here,” Chloe inserted quickly, “then could we have a puppy?”

  Mallory eyed her daughter, shaking her head slowly. “Enough with the puppy.”

  “But—”

  “What kind of puppy do you want?”

  “Ryan—” Mallory turned her warning gaze onto the man. “Please don’t encourage her.”

  “Relax, Doc.” He sat down on the couch next to Chloe’s feet. “We’re just having a conversation, aren’t we, sweet pea?”

  Chloe’s cheeks were still pale, but her sly grin was full of delight. “Yeah, Doc.” Despite her giggle, she didn’t tear her attention from Ryan’s face. “And I want a little puppy that can sleep on my bed. One with white and brown spots and long, floppy ears.”

  “I had a dog when I was your age,” he said. “Buster. He was a brown and yellow mutt that was so ugly he was cute.”

  “Did he sleep on your bed?”

  “Yeah. But my mom didn’t much like it,” he said in a whispered aside.

  “Conspirators,” Mallory complained lightly, but there was a hitch in her throat and she went to the kitchen to see if she could help Kathleen.

  It was hard to tell, though, whether the hitch was caused by the shine in Chloe’s expression from Ryan’s attention, or whether it was because she was suddenly facing the possibility that once Chloe knew that Ryan’s interest in their family was entirely because of her, Mallory might well end up learning how it felt to be quite superfluous where Chloe was concerned.

  Chapter Eight

  Much to Chloe’s delight, Ryan stayed through dinner.

  And a short while later, when Mallory couldn’t overlook the tiredness that her daughter had been valiantly trying to hide and proclaimed it to be bedtime, Chloe seemed to think it was perfectly natural to beg Ryan to carry her upstairs to bed.

  Not that it seemed to take much begging, since Ryan seemed more than willing.

  He scooped her off the couch and tipped her sideways so she could deposit a giggling kiss on her great-grandmother.

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” Mallory said when they turned toward her. She’d need to help her daughter get ready for bed.

  “I get to sleep in my mom’s bed,” Chloe told Ryan as they headed toward the staircase.

  Mallory nearly choked when Ryan looked back in her direction over her daughter’s head. “Makes you pretty lucky, I guess.” His low voice was plainly audible.

  “If I ever get a puppy, I think Buster would be a good name.”

  “And here I thought you’d want to name him or her Purple Princess,” he teased as they went up the steps.

  Kathleen caught Mallory’s eye. “Smitten,” she assessed, her low voice crisp.

  “I hope you’re talking about Chloe,” she returned, just as crisply.

  Her grandmother arched a white eyebrow and pushed herself out of her chair. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  She reached for the tray that held the remnants of their meal, which they’d all eaten in the living room to keep Chloe company. Mallory waved her hand. “Don’t worry about the dishes, Gram. I’ll take care of them.”

  “I won’t fight you for the privilege,” her grandmother said easily. She moved past Mallory and patted her on the cheek in the same way she’d been doing since she’d come to the United States and met her teenage granddaughters. “There’s a holiday program on the television I want to see, so I’m just going to turn in and watch it from bed.”

  Mallory wasn’t fooled. Kathleen was making herself scarce. “Ryan is only here because of Chloe,” she said softly, but was well aware that she was reminding herself just as much as her grandmother. “So I hope your thoughts aren’t of the matchmaking variety.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman who’s not getting any younger,” Kathleen reminded.

  Mallory gave a wry laugh. She was thirty-three. “You’re going to have me feeling like I’ll have to show my teeth to my next suitor.”

  “Next suitor,” Kathleen repeated, shaking her head. “There’d have to be a first for there to be a next.”

  “Another lovely reminder.” Mallory sighed. “Regardless of the desert my love life has been since Brent and I broke up, thinking that anything might—” she sighed again “—with him, is out of the question. Gram, just yesterday you weren’t even convinced that I’d done the right thing by bringing us all to Weaver in the first place.”

  “That was yesterday,” Kathleen said blithely. Her head perked upward even before Mallory heard Ryan’s footsteps on the stairs and she headed out of the living room. “I’m off to bed,” Mallory heard her tell Ryan. “Thank you for what you’ve done today.”

  “Didn’t do much.” His voice was gruff.

  “Ah. You were here now, weren’t you?”

  Mallory couldn’t resist turning her head and looked over her shoulder in time to see her grandmother pat Ryan’s hand as she passed him on her way to her bedroom. Like Mallory’s office, her grandmother’s room was located at the rear of the rambling old house.

  And without her grandmother’s presence, Mallory was acutely aware of Ryan’s.

  She pushed off the couch, restlessly brushing down her slacks, and headed toward the stairs.

  Toward him.

  “I should get up to Chloe,” she offered somewhat obviously. “Thank you for carrying her up. She could have walked, or…or I could have carried her.” But her daughter had wanted him.

  He nodded, silent.

  She needed to get Kathleen’s comments—and Chloe’s—about him out of her head. They were seriously messing with her equilibrium.

  Or maybe that was simply caused by standing a foot away from him and breathing in the same air.

  Her cheeks felt hot.

  She put her hand on the newel post, her foot—bare since she’d kicked off her high-heeled boots and thin socks after eating—on the first riser. “I’ll just go up, then.” She wasn’t certain if she was waiting for a response from him or not and she went up a few more steps.

  “She’s a good kid.”

  Her fingers tightened over the polished wood banister. “Yes.”

  He watched her for a moment longer, then nodded once and turned away from the staircase.

  She hesitated, but he said nothing else. Certainly not a word of goodbye.

  She wasn’t relieved. Nor was she disappointed.

  Not exactly.

  Mostly, she couldn’t quite identify the oddly incomplete sense she had, but taking her cue from him, she remained silent as well as she continued up the stairs.

  Chloe was sitting at the head of Mallory’s sleigh bed, propped up by a mountain of pillows and looking
much like a pampered little princess, if not for the sling. “I’m going to get your nightgown,” she told her as she passed the room.

  “The purple one,” Chloe called after her.

  No surprise there.

  Mallory retrieved a clean nightgown from the chest of drawers in Chloe’s room and went back up the hall to her bedroom, deftly helping her daughter out of the sling and her clothes, into the nightgown and back into the sling. She helped her brush her teeth and wash her face, and tucked her back into bed.

  “Will you brush my hair?”

  The exhausting day showed not only in the splinted arm but in the dark smudges beneath Chloe’s eyes. “Only for a little while.” She retrieved the mother-of-pearl-backed brush from her dresser and sat down beside Chloe, slowly drawing the natural bristles through her daughter’s hair.

  The brush was old and the ritual was one that lived on from Mallory’s childhood. The brush had been her mother’s and every night before Mallory and Cassie had gone to sleep, their mother had brushed their long hair and told them stories of growing up in Ireland.

  Now, as Mallory stroked through the shining brown hair and Chloe’s sturdy little body relaxed against Mallory’s, she could almost believe that both her mother and Cassie were there with them.

  “Mr. Ryan told me a bedtime story,” Chloe murmured sleepily after about the tenth stroke.

  “Did he? About what?”

  “A little girl who gets lost from her mom and dad, but gets rescued after she finds a magic rock.”

  She swallowed her surprise and smoothed Chloe’s hair back and ran the brush through it again. “Think you can sleep?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” To prove it, Chloe buried her cheek in one of Mallory’s bed pillows. “Does Mr. Ryan got a job?”

  “He works at his cousin’s place.” She repeated only what she knew about him from Rebecca. “He…fixes things.”

  “Like he fixed our bathroom?”

  “Yes.” She slid off the bed and kissed Chloe’s smooth cheek. “Now go to sleep. I love you, sweetheart.”

  “Mr. Ryan calls me sweet pea.”

  “Yes, I noticed.”

  “I don’t like peas. They’re green.”

  And Chloe usually wanted to avoid eating anything green. It made vegetables in general a challenge.

  Mallory smiled. Despite her daughter’s misconception, she hadn’t seen any indication that Chloe minded being compared to a green pea. Not when it came from Mr. Ryan. “A sweet pea is a very pretty little flower.” She tucked Chloe’s hair behind her ear. “I think that might be what he’s referring to.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “And I think the wild ones are purple,” Mallory added.

  Her daughter looked even more pleased as Mallory shut off the light and left the room. She didn’t close the door; she wanted to be able to hear her downstairs if Chloe needed her.

  Only after she left the room did she realize she was still holding her mother’s brush, pressed against her chest.

  She descended the stairs, rubbing her thumb over the stubby, soft bristles before lifting it to run it through her own hair. She reached the bottom and released a long sigh.

  “Is she asleep?”

  She started.

  Ryan was standing in the living room next to the gigantic Christmas tree that, as yet, was decorated only with numerous skeins of popcorn garland. Chloe had been adamant that they not add any more decorations until she could participate.

  “She will be within minutes, I’m sure.” Her thumb pressed against the brush bristles. “I thought you’d left.”

  His fingers were pushed into the front pockets of his faded blue jeans and his shoulders seemed to strain the seams of the faded black T-shirt he wore. “I almost did.”

  Feeling cautious, she balanced the hairbrush on the newel post and padded across the wood floor. With the distance of the couch length between them, she stopped at one end. “What…why’d you change your mind?”

  He didn’t immediately answer.

  He pulled his hands from his pockets, looked up at the unadorned top of the tree and paced to the other side of the fireplace. “How did you find me?”

  The question wasn’t unreasonable. Nor was it unexpected.

  She just hadn’t expected it right then.

  Her gaze dropped to the tray of dishes that still sat on the coffee table between the couches. “It wasn’t easy,” she admitted, and caught a wisp of something ironic in his expression.

  “Yet you didn’t give up.”

  She hesitated. “Actually, I did. For a while.” She moved around the couch to pick up the laden tray and carry it into the kitchen.

  Farther away from the staircase.

  At the far end of the hall, she could see the closed door of her grandmother’s bedroom.

  She looked at him. “Some coffee?”

  He followed her. “I have the feeling I might be needing some of your grandmother’s kick in it.”

  She smiled faintly, though there was really nothing humorous about the situation.

  She set the tray on the counter next to the sink and began filling the coffeemaker. The normal, practical motions helped to soothe the edge off her nervous energy. “I told you already that Cassie didn’t talk much about you. The only thing I had to go on was that she’d worked with you.” She filled the water reservoir and couldn’t help glancing at him.

  His arms were folded over his chest and he was leaning his shoulder against the kitchen door—an easy escape?—but his expression was unreadable.

  She focused on the coffee again. “Cassie never talked much about her job at HW Industries. She had an apartment in Connecticut.”

  “Hartford,” Ryan added.

  “Yes.” She pushed the power button on the maker and it immediately began hissing and gurgling. “Gram and I were still in Queens.”

  “The same apartment building with a super?”

  “Yes. We lived there with our mother. Then Gram came, and we’re still there.” Or were, since she’d sublet the place while they were in Wyoming.

  She turned to face him, glad for the steadying force of the counter and cabinets behind her. “To be honest, at the time, I didn’t think all that much about Cassie’s reticence. I was pulling double shifts at the hospital and she was doing something with her linguistic degree that was earning her enough to afford a really nice place in Hartford. She visited occasionally; usually called to talk about the crazy neighbors living next door to her, or whatever movie she’d seen, what guy she was dating.”

  The comment earned no reaction, though she wanted to believe she hadn’t been looking for one.

  “Anyway, one weekend Cassie came to visit and announced that she’d quit her job.” Mallory lifted her shoulders. “And that she was four months’ pregnant.” The coffeemaker hissed behind her. “Gram, of course, demanded more details, but Cassie wasn’t cooperative and, for a while, we assumed that things had ended badly between her and the guy. Shortly before she—” she swallowed “—delivered, she wanted us to know that wasn’t the case. That the father—Ryan—was a good guy. Someone she’d worked with. Someone whose life didn’t need to be turned upside down by an unexpected baby.”

  He straightened and paced across the room. “Okay. So why’d she die?”

  Mallory frowned.

  The task of finding Ryan was one thing. Telling him about the rest, another.

  “What does it matter? She’s gone.”

  His gaze slid toward hers. “It matters because of what you said this afternoon.”

  “I was…emotional.”

  His eyebrows lifted slightly.

  “I told you I’m not good with my own crises,” she defended. “People say all sorts of things in stressful situations.”

  “Yeah. Usually what they most dearly believe. Or feel.”

  “And what do you say when you’re under stress,” she returned, her tongue miles ahead of her discretion.

  “We’re not talking about me.”
>
  She lifted her hands. “Everything lately seems to involve you.”

  “You’re the one who came here to Weaver.”

  As if she needed any reminder that she’d brought all of this on their heads. “Yes. Another action I’m completely responsible for.”

  “You’re not responsible for your sister’s death.”

  Her throat ached. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Then tell me why she died.”

  Her hands curled at her sides. The calmer his voice became, the more agitated she felt. “Because I wasn’t a good enough doctor,” she said abruptly, and hated the out-of-control way she felt. “And she was stubborn.”

  “I don’t want an editorial. I want the facts.”

  “Those are the facts!”

  “Mallory.”

  Her shaking fingers pulled at the single button on the front of her suit jacket that she’d kept on for the simple reason that her blouse beneath was practically transparent. And she hadn’t wanted him to see that every time she looked at him, her nipples went tight. “It has nothing to do with why we’re here.”

  “It has to do with you.”

  She exhaled. It was his tone that tore at her the most. She seemed no more capable of resisting anything to do with him than Chloe.

  And there was danger in that.

  “Cassie wasn’t quite twenty-four weeks along when she was diagnosed with preeclampsia,” she said abruptly. Once he knew the truth, he’d stop looking at her with that intensity that threatened to warm her through to her soul.

  Her soul was just fine.

  Perfectly warm. Perfectly independent.

  She just needed…no, she wanted Chloe to have what she and Cassie hadn’t had as children.

  “What’s that?”

  She blinked, almost saying a father, but realizing with something akin to hysteria that she was supposed to be thinking about Cassie’s death.

  She realized she’d tugged the loose button right off her jacket when it came free in her hand.

  She shoved it into her pocket, mentally reeling in her unraveling senses with the doggedness that had gotten her through med school.

  “It’s a condition marked by high blood pressure and a high level of protein in the urine.” She knew she sounded remote but couldn’t seem to help it. “Cassie developed it particularly early. The only cure for it is delivering the baby, but—”