Father Christmas (31 page)

Yes
, Molly thought, her love expanding to include him. All the
pieces fit, and the puzzle was solved. Like Michael, she and John
could work it out. If John wanted the pieces to fit as much as she
did, they’d get it done.

“
SHE’S BEAUTIFUL,” John
whispered.

“
You’re telling me,” Jamie
whispered back.

Through the open door John could hear
laughter, conversation and the occasional clink of glasses
touching. But Jamie McCoy, the host of this Christmas Eve party,
had insisted on marching him down the hall to the nursery so he
could admire the baby whose life he’d saved—or so Jamie claimed—by
first tracking down her AWOL mother and then helping Jamie gain
full custody of the child.

She wasn’t as small as she’d been when John
had seen her last June. Then, she’d been barely a month old. Now
she was a gorgeous little girl, clad in white pajamas with little
pink kittens printed all over them, sleeping peacefully, her thumb
in her mouth. Her hair was pale and downy, her eyelashes
silver-white and her mouth pursed as she sucked on her finger.

“
You realize,” Jamie
murmured, gently spreading her blanket over her compact body, “that
I owe you big for this.”

John didn’t believe the citizens of
Arlington owed him anything more than the generous salary and
benefits package he received for doing his job. He was glad when a
case came out well, but it was his professional responsibility to
make as many of them come out well as he could.

If anything, he owed Jamie. It was thanks to
him that John had gotten the name of Allison Winslow—Jamie’s
Daddy-School teacher and now his fiancée—as a source for child-care
information, and thanks to Allison that he’d gotten Molly’s
name.

“
Allison’s going to adopt
her,” Jamie told him, keeping his voice down so he wouldn’t disturb
the child. She was so deeply asleep, John doubted she could be
roused by a nuclear explosion, let alone a couple of hushed voices.
“She wanted to begin the adoption process now, but Dennis said to
wait until we’re married. It’ll be simpler if she’s my
wife.”

“
Dennis?”

“
My lawyer, Dennis Murphy.
You probably wouldn’t know him. He doesn’t handle criminal cases.
I’m about as wicked as his clients get.”

Discretion forbade John
from reporting that Dennis Murphy actually
did
handle criminal cases—specifically, the criminal
case of two seven-year-old imps who happened to be his next-of-kin.
He recalled the well-dressed lawyer who had come to bail out his
bank-scamming offspring, and who had later stopped by John’s desk
to thank him for keeping his kids out of the juvenile justice
system.

Nobody ever said
fatherhood was easy. John knew—and Jamie surely knew, as well—that
raising children was a high-risk undertaking. Even if Jamie’s
daughter and John’s son had never gotten conned into ripping off
an
ATM,
neither
Jamie nor John would know whether their fathering efforts had paid
off until their kids were grown and gone.

A swell of laughter from the living room
reached down the hall and into the gloom of the nursery, which was
lit only by the dim green glow of a frog-shaped night-light. John
listened for Molly’s warm, rolling laughter in the sound. Wanting
her so much still frightened him, but he was trying hard to be as
brave as she thought he was.

Molly made it hard to be a pessimist. She
refused to let him carry the weight of their relationship on his
shoulders. She had actually gotten him to accept that the collapse
of his marriage hadn’t been all his fault. “It takes two to make a
relationship succeed,” she argued. “And it takes two to make a
relationship fail.”

If this relationship with Molly failed—and
against his better judgment, he believed it might not—at least the
issue that broke them up wouldn’t be his job. Molly seemed to
understand that police work wasn’t always a nine-to-five thing,
that sometimes he worked late and sometimes he brought his work
home, not in a briefcase but in his heart and his gut, where it
would gnaw at him long into the night.

Only five days had passed since she’d
persuaded him to take a chance on loving her, and in those five
days she hadn’t seen him at his worst. She hadn’t witnessed what he
could be like after spending a day working through a
murder-suicide, after spending a night trying to erase from his
mind the vision of Mr. and Mrs. Balfour lying side by side in their
marriage bed, holding hands, violently dead. Molly had no idea how
bad it could be.

But she was prepared to defy the odds, and
so was he.

“
It was good you could
come tonight,” Jamie remarked, leading him from the nursery. They
paused to adjust to the bright light of the hall, then proceeded to
the even brighter kitchen. “But I wasn’t exactly expecting you.
You’ve screwed up my plans.”

John didn’t know how to
respond to that. Molly had assured him he would be welcome at the
party; she’d asked Allison if she could bring him and, according to
her, Allison had sworn that she’d be in big trouble if she
didn’t
bring him.

He remained silent as Jamie dug into the
refrigerator and pulled out two chilled bottles of beer, one of
which he passed to John. “See, I had this idea of setting Molly up
with a friend of mine,” he explained as he wrenched off the cap and
took a swig from the bottle. “You want a glass?”

John shook his head, both intrigued and
appalled by the thought of Molly with another man.

“
Allison hates it when I
drink from the bottle,” Jamie griped. “She’s trying to civilize me.
She thinks she understands guys, but she doesn’t. You tell me, am I
an expert on guys, or what?”

John smiled. He read
Jamie’s weekly newspaper column,
Guy
Stuff
, and found most of his observations
right on the money. When it came to guys, Jamie was an expert.
“Tell her beer tastes better from the bottle,” he suggested. He
himself couldn’t recall the last time he’d drunk beer from a
glass.

“
That might work.” Jamie
took another drink, then lowered his bottle and gave John a
good-natured smile. “My buddy, Steve—you met him, didn’t you? He’s
the guy moping in the corner by the tree. He’s in a funk because
I’m getting married. He thinks my getting hitched is a betrayal of
everything I stand for. I had this notion that if I introduced him
to Molly, he’d feel the sting of ol’ Cupid’s arrow and maybe
understand that falling for a woman isn’t such a terrible
thing.”

John had felt that particular arrow’s sting,
and while he wouldn’t call it terrible, he wasn’t quite convinced
that it was good. It was good for him, certainly, but was it good
for Molly? Would it be good for her once she realized what cops
were like on a bad day?

He had to stop being so fatalistic. She
loved him; maybe she’d be able to deal with the rest. “I’m sorry I
ruined your plans,” he said.

“
Well, for Molly’s sake, I
guess I’ll forgive you.” Jamie tapped his bottle against John’s.
“Here’s to her. Make her happy. She and Allison are like sisters,
you know. If Molly isn’t happy, Allison grieves.”

John smiled impassively, his thoughts on
Molly’s real sister and her angry honesty. If he’d listened to her
and kept his distance, he would have done his part to guarantee
Molly’s happiness. But he hadn’t kept his distance, and he could
only hope this thing worked out the way Molly was certain it
would.

Sipping his beer, he
followed Jamie back into the living room. In one corner stood a
towering spruce, its boughs decked with tinsel and metallic silver
and gold balls. A glum-looking fellow hunkered down on an ottoman
next to the tree—Jamie’s disappointed pal, Steve. Molly stood amid
a cluster of guests, relating preschool stories. “One of the kids
told me she’d seen Santa Claus at the mall, but she knew he wasn’t
the
real
Santa Claus. She
insisted that the
real
Santa
Claus was living in a condo in Tampa. She said he was spending
Christmas Day at Walt Disney World, and she wished she was, too. I
swear, I don’t know how kids come up with this stuff!”

“
It makes more sense than
what we tell them,” one of the women near her observed. “If you
were Santa, where would you rather live, the North Pole or
Tampa?”

“
No contest. Tampa’s got
football,” a man pointed out.

Molly’s gaze snagged on John and she
smiled—not the smile she’d worn while regaling the other guests
with tales from the Children’s Garden, but a smile just for him, a
smile that told him she trusted him and loved him and believed in
him.

He trusted her, too. He was close to
admitting he loved her. And yes, he believed in her. The trouble
was, he wasn’t sure he believed in himself.

But right now, in the cozy room, redolent
with the scent of the tree and the fire blazing in the fireplace,
with Molly’s smile and her lovely eyes bewitching him, he could
believe in almost everything—even the possibility that loving Molly
was the right thing to do.

***

SHE WAS GOING to have a tree for Christmas,
after all. John’s tree, John’s and Michael’s.

“
Are you sure you want me
to spend the night?” she asked as he steered down Jamie’s winding
driveway, the tires of his car crunching on the snow-glazed
gravel.

John shot her a quizzical glance. “Why
wouldn’t I?”

“
It’s Christmas eve.
Michael’s going to wake up at six a.m. tomorrow.”

“
Why would he wake up so
early?”

“
Christmas,” she said with
a laugh, even though the reality of having to pass this precious
night alone in her own bed depressed her. “Nobody under the age of
fifteen sleeps past six a.m. Christmas morning,” she
explained.

John mulled over her statement and shrugged.
“So he’ll wake up early. What’s the problem?”

“
I’ll be there,” she said
quietly. “In your bed.” It wouldn’t be the first time she’d stayed
all night at John’s house. But she and John had always risen before
Michael. By the time he’d climbed out of bed, they’d been dressed
and in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. Michael was too young to
realize what they might have been doing before they’d reached the
kitchen. All he cared about was the fact that Molly was having
breakfast with him, which seemed to please him
immensely.

She hadn’t yet dealt with the possibility
that Michael might blab about her presence in his home to his
classmates at the Children’s Garden. The school was closed for the
holidays. Once it opened again, after New Year’s Day, she and John
would have to reassess their situation.

But that was more than a week away, and
Molly didn’t want to think about it now. If she thought about it,
she would start hoping that by the end of that week a bond would
exist between her and John, something as strong as her love for
him—and if that bond formed, the rest would be easy.

If the bond didn’t form, if it was too soon,
too fast for John to acknowledge it...well, then, she might have to
be more discreet about spending time with John. Which would be
awful.

She wouldn’t dwell on it tonight. Not when
the black winter sky was strewn with stars and the scent of snow
danced in the air. Tonight was Christmas Eve, and tomorrow would be
Christmas. There would be time to worry about the future when the
future arrived.

The high-school girl John had hired to
baby-sit sat in a stupor in the den, her eyes unfocused and the TV
tuned to a low-budget science-fiction flick. Stirring herself to
life when John and Molly entered, she reported that Michael had
thrown a fit when she wouldn’t let him have a second ice-cream
sundae but calmed down when she warned him that Santa only visited
good little children. John pressed a very large bill into her hand
and helped her on with her coat. Once he had departed to take her
home, Molly collected the pile of wrapped gifts she and John had
hidden in his cellar and arranged them under the tree. She slipped
into the pile the two presents she’d gotten him, smuggled into his
house inside her overnight bag. She’d purchased a Shetland wool
sweater in burgundy, because he looked so handsome in sweaters, and
a book about fathers, filled with soul-baring poems, amusing
anecdotes and beautiful photographs of fathers and their children.
She camouflaged her two presents among the wrapped gifts for
Michael, and then headed down the hall to John’s bedroom.

She liked the room. She liked his house. She
felt almost too comfortable in his kitchen, his living room, his
bed. If Santa could bring her only one gift this year, she wished
it would be that John felt for her what she felt for him—and that
he trusted his feelings.

She slipped out of her dress and went into
the bathroom to wash. When she emerged, wearing only her slip and
nylons, John was in the bedroom, his tie undone and dangling from
his collar, his shirt unbuttoned, and his eyes seductive as he
scrutinized her. The heat in his gaze ignited tiny fires inside
her, fires that grew hotter and brighter as he crossed the room to
her. And then his hands were on her, his touch burning through the
silk of her lingerie, his mouth claiming hers, and she knew that
even if Santa couldn’t give her her heart’s desire for Christmas,
she would at least have John’s love tonight.

***

“
HE CAME! Santa came!”
Michael screamed through the door. “Daddy, get up! Santa
came!