A Magical Christmas (6 page)

She stared at him for a split second, then ran down the steps. Lawrence offered her a hand and she leapt up on his mount behind him, her heart racing. “How far do we have to go?” she demanded, slipping her arms around him to hold on for the ride.

He hesitated again, then turned his head slightly,
angling his face toward her. “Oak River Plantation, Mrs. Captain. I’ve—I’ve just got to get you home.”

She was twelve, nearly thirteen, nearly a woman. She heard her mother’s voice, heard the soldier.

Heard what had happened.

Saw her mother ride away.

No!

She raced for the door.

Aunt Rachel came running down the stairs. “Wait, sweetheart, where are you going—”

“My mother has just ridden—”

“You must stay here.”

She should fight Aunt Rachel. She never did such things, of course, but these were desperate circumstances. She knew it, deep in her heart. She had to follow her mother.

Or never see her father alive again. She knew.

Aunt Rachel wasn’t that much bigger than she was.

Uncle Andrew was.

Hmm…

“Fine, Aunt Rachel,” she said, subdued. She lowered her head. “I’ll wait by the window.”

“I’ll find Uncle Andrew and he’ll see to it that we find out just what’s going on,” Aunt Rachel promised.

She nodded, and pretended to be the perfect
lady, sitting with tremendous protocol on the love seat by the bay window.

She waited, with outward impatience.

Until Aunt Rachel was gone.

Then she fled from the house.

She was going to follow her mother.

She was going home.

T
here were extra cars in front of Jon Radcliff’s house when he finally made it home. He swore softly to himself. The last thing he wanted tonight was company, and surely Julie would know that.

But then, Julie didn’t care a heck of a lot what he wanted anymore.

He irritably switched off the ignition of his car and sat staring at the house for a minute, hearing the echo of whatever tune had been playing on the radio.

Court had been horrible. The meeting with his fellow counselors afterward had been worse. After all his years of schooling and now more than fifteen years as a practicing attorney, he was still just learning to accept the fact that the law wasn’t perfect, that there was often no way that justice was going to prevail. Deep in his heart he believed that, though the system wasn’t perfect, it was still the
best to be had in the modern world. Guilty men might walk, but the law tried very hard to see to it that innocent men didn’t hang—or weren’t electrocuted, executed by lethal injection, or cut down by a firing squad. Or even incarcerated unfairly. Still, it was damned hard to see it when a guilty man went free because of a technicality, which was stupid.

Until five years ago, he had worked in the D.A.’s office, and though he’d been exhausted and underpaid, he’d been happy.

Then he’d had a great job offer. And he’d gone from being a prosecutor to being a defense attorney for one of the most prestigious law firms in town.

And now he was defending Bobo Vinzetti. They called it the Vinzetti pizza case—the media had started it, now the people on the streets followed the media. It was a horrendous case. In Jon’s opinion, Bobo Vinzetti—decked out in a ski mask to disguise himself—had willfully and with malicious intent attempted to smother his philandering wife with a cheese and pepperoni pizza. But Jon was obliged by the law to defend Vinzetti, and that very fact was making him crazy. His cocounselors thought he was insane. Defense attorneys defended the accused. That was life. It was unlikely Bobo Vinzetti would ever attempt to kill again, his cocounselors said. His wife intended to divorce him and move to Tahiti the minute the case was over.
Bobo should be no threat to society. Unless, of course, he were to marry a philandering blonde once again.

Jon’s firm was trying hard to get a continuance on the case. They had agreed the best course of action would be for Vinzetti to admit his guilt and make a plea—since the pizza trail led straight to him despite the disguise he had worn.

Vinzetti, however, was certain that good attorneys could get him off.

And he might just be right.

The fact that the entire country—other than the city in which he lived and worked—was having a good laugh over the case didn’t much help Jon’s continual feeling of absolute frustration.

And his wife was certainly no help whatsoever.

Sometimes, he was desperate to talk.

She was never willing to listen.

If she wanted a divorce so damned badly, he should just give it to her. She was making his life a living hell as it was. If she didn’t understand anything about him anymore, it was probably time that they did move on. Why the hell didn’t he just give it up?

Because he loved his home. He loved Ashley throwing her arms around his neck when he came in the door. He was continually aggravated by the teenage Jordan and Christie, but sometimes they’d
just walk across the room and he’d be proud. Christie was almost all grown up and beautiful, a carbon copy of Julie twenty years ago. Jordan was going to be tall. He wasn’t a great athlete, but he loved sports, liked people, and was a great-looking kid with a pleasant manner to match. He had no interest in the law at all, but he loved biology, and if his mind could just maintain a semblance of direction…

He might be headed for med school.

Right. He loved his kids. His wife was torturing him, but he loved his kids.

He took a deep breath. He loved his wife as well. They had lost something, and what they had lost might have been his fault. Was his fault—in her eyes. But she wouldn’t take an apology for what he had done, much less a suggestion that she just might have driven him to his actions. And still…

He did love Julie.

Even if right now she was…

“The worst bitch this side of heaven or hell!” he muttered, sliding out of his car at last, his briefcase in hand.

He had barely stepped out of his car when Sam, their neighbors’ Saint Bernard, came loping around to the front of the house.

“No, Sam!” he shouted.

Too late. Sam came rocketing toward the car,
jumping up to slam Jon against it. With his massive, sticky tongue, he licked Jon’s face from chin to forehead.

“Get down, you lunk!” Jon demanded, pushing at Sam’s gigantic barrel chest. Sam had enough dog spit to drown a human with a single lick. “Sam!”

His voice was firm and hard and Sam fell to all fours, wagging his lethal tail a mile a minute.

“Sam, Sam!” Mari Twigs, the skinny little twelve-year-old from next door who considered herself Sam’s master, came running into the yard. “Oh, Mr. Radcliff, I am so, so sorry!” she gasped.

He wanted to yell. He wanted to tell her to keep her moose-dog creature in her own yard, but somehow, he counted to ten. “Mari, get him home, huh?”

Mari nodded gravely. She clutched Sam’s collar. The dog started to drag her home, but she was still looking at Jon, giggling.

“Um, there’s just a bit of mud on your shirt, Mr. Radcliff,” Mari said. “Sam’s sorry though, really sorry.”

“Yeah, Sam’s sorry,” Jon muttered, heading into the house.

He banged on the front door, but no one answered. He could hear an old Doors number blaring from his daughter’s stereo system. He fumbled in his
pockets for his keys, then realized the door wasn’t locked. Swearing, he entered his front hallway.

He tripped over his son’s Rollerblades, nearly falling himself, sending the Rollerblades sliding so that they knocked against the foyer table. The vase upon it crashed to the floor.

Still, no one appeared.

“Hello, I’m home!” he called out.

Right. As Christie would say,
Like anyone cared!

Skirting the smashed vase, he made his way through the handsome sunken living room, the dining room, through the pantry, and into the kitchen. Julie was leaning against the refrigerator, sipping a glass of champagne. Millie Garcia—dragon woman—was seated at the kitchen table, and old Jack Taylor was at the sink, working at the cork of another champagne bottle. Ashley was cutting the napkins into tiny pieces with her new plastic scissors, and Jordan had his gerbils running around on the kitchen counter. No one seemed to notice Jon as of yet—the strains of “Light My Fire” weren’t quite as loud here, but they were still more audible than the sound of footsteps.

Jon discovered that he was almost uncontrollably angry. Whatever the hell had happened to a home being a man’s castle? Hell, he didn’t need a damned castle, just a quiet refuge from the storm.

He strode into the kitchen, tossing his briefcase
on the table and loosening his tie. It probably didn’t help that the temperature seemed to be holding at an all-time high for December. “Hello, darling,” he told Julie, who looked startled and unhappy at his arrival. Julie would be thirty-eight on her next birthday; somehow, she still managed at times to look no more than a woman of twenty or so. She stayed very slim, and her face was a classic oval that never seemed to age. Her blue eyes had gone from an excited, exuberant bright shade to a dark and guarded one the second she had seen him. Her smile had faded. If there had not been others in the room, he was certain she would have moved away when he planted a quick kiss on her lips. As it was, he was certain that she’d cringed.

He could damned well guarantee she didn’t pucker in return.

But he didn’t care right then. He opened the refrigerator, drawing out a beer even as Millie offered him champagne.

“Naw, thanks, I’ll stick to the classless stuff in the can,” Jon told her. “What’s the celebration?” he asked, taking a long swallow and staring at his wife. God, he was starving. He’d skipped lunch to get to his meeting faster. Now one swallow of beer and he felt a strange buzz in his head. No food. He’d better be careful. The kitchen might smell of
champagne, but there wasn’t the first scent of food within it.

Julie didn’t answer; she was swallowing champagne, a big swallow of it.

“Jon, your wife made her first half-million-dollar sale today,” Millie told him. “She sold the Pearsons the Trendmark house in the Gables.”

He arched a brow to Julie, feeling the strangest sinking sensation. Well, hell. He didn’t think that he was that much of a chauvinist. He wanted her to be a success, right? Or did he?

Honestly—no. So far, he’d thought that maybe she was holding on to him for the money. Not in a really greedy way—just holding on because his was the income that kept the home and the kids in good shape. His was the income that would send Christie—then Jordan and Ashley in good time—to college.
And admit it, old buddy!
he told himself. He had wanted her to need him for that income.

He lifted his beer can to Julie. “Here, here! Congratulations!”

He set his beer down. Not to kiss his wife again. One brush of cold lips was enough for the moment. He went to the table and slipped his arms around Ashley. She looked up from her industrious cutting at last. “Daddy!”

“Ash. Napkins aren’t for cutting, huh?” He
kissed the top of her head. “Jordan—get the rodents out of the kitchen,” he said firmly.

His son, tall for his age, a nice-looking combination of him and Julie, with his green eyes and Julie’s light blond hair, looked up guiltily.

Jon glanced to Julie. His glance, he was certain, was condemning, and he just couldn’t manage to care that he was going to aggravate her further. “Julie, what’s he doing with the rats in the kitchen?” he grated.

She was going to hate him for that. She hated to be humiliated in any way in front of Millie. Millie was the next best thing to the Messiah in Julie’s eyes. He didn’t care. No matter what the celebration, the gerbils didn’t belong in the damned kitchen.

“They’re not rats, Daddy,” Ashley corrected, “they’re gerbils.”

“One and the same, honey,” Jon said.

“They weren’t hurting anything,” Jordan protested, eyeing him evilly.

Right. Jordan’s mother was the good parent, willing to overlook the small things.

“I love the gerbils, Daddy,” Ashley said.

“But you’re going to get gerbil poopies in your peanut butter sandwiches if you’re not careful!” Jack Taylor warned.

“Get them out of the kitchen, Jordan,” Jon said firmly.

Jordan obeyed. Ashley started to laugh, pointing at Jon’s shirt and jacket. “Daddy, you have marks all over you. Are those gerbil poopies?”

“No. It’s mad-dog muck,” Jon said.

“Mad-dog muck?” Ashley asked.

Even Jack Taylor was smiling then. “It does look like your latest client was a mountain lion out for blood,” Jack said ruefully.

Jon tried to smile. “Yeah, right. My last client was that Saint Bernard. Julie, haven’t you asked the neighbors to please keep that animal in their own yard?”

“I’ve asked them, Jon,” she said. Her tone was abrasive.

“Daddy, I like Sam in our yard!” Ashley wailed. Her eyes welled with tears. She stared at him as if he were planning to send her best friend away. Jordan suddenly swore as he dropped a gerbil. Jon snapped at him quickly. Before Jordan could apologize, a door slammed from elsewhere in the house. Jon frowned and started back through to the living room in time to see his elder daughter chasing out after the dark-haired kid who was hurrying from her bedroom toward the front door.

“Christie!” he thundered.

She stopped. The dark-haired kid had already
gotten out. Christie looked fearfully from the door to her father as if he were the worst possible nuisance imaginable.

“What!” she snapped out.

“What the hell were you doing in your bedroom with a boy?”

“Playing the stereo. I’ve got to go, Dad, I’ve—”

“Get back in here.”

“I can’t. He’s going to think—”

“Want to hear what the hell I’m thinking?” he demanded. His fists were clenched at his sides. He was about to blow a gasket. He had to get himself under control. “I think that I’d better not see a male coming out of that side of the house again, unless you want to find yourself grounded until your twenty-first birthday!” he raged at her.

Christie gasped. Good. He hoped that he was rattling her, damned hard. She had on too much makeup, and her little plaid skirt was too short. And she was too thin. She was dieting for her boyfriend, or so it seemed. All the cool girls wanted to be toothpicks.