Kissing Under The Mistletoe: The Sullivans (Contemporary Romance) (24 page)

The phone would have fallen from her numb
hand had Jack not taken it from her.

“My mother is sick. Papa was calling from the
hospital.” Mary pressed her hands to her churning stomach. “She’s
never sick. Never.” Her father hadn’t stayed on the line long
enough to tell her much other than that her mother had been
coughing so badly that he’d decided to take her to the hospital. “I
need to go to her. To them. Tonight.”

She started to move toward her bedroom to
pack, but her legs were trembling so hard that when Jack brought
her over to the couch and made her sit, she didn’t try to fight
him.

He knelt in front of her. “First, I’m going
to get you a drink to steady your nerves, and then I’m going to
book our flight and pack your bag.”

Again, she was too shell-shocked to argue, to
do anything but accept the glass of whisky he handed her a few
seconds later. But just as she was lifting it to her mouth with a
shaky hand, she realized what he’d said:
Our
flight.

He had already picked up the phone and was
dialing the airline when she put down her drink and went to him.
“Jack, are you planning to come with me?”

“Of course I am.”

He said it as if there had never been any
doubt that he would, but she’d been alone for so long that she’d
immediately assumed she’d be alone in this, too.

Only, she wasn’t alone anymore, was she? Not
now that Jack loved her.

But though the trip back to her childhood
home would be a thousand times harder without Jack by her side, it
was her love for him that had her trying to take the phone from his
hand.

“Your launch is tomorrow. I’m so sorry I’m
going to miss it, that I won’t be there for you to celebrate your
dream coming true, but I can’t let
you
miss
it. Not when you’ve worked so long and hard for this day.”

“My dream came true the moment I found you,
Mary. And we both know that family is what matters most. We’re
going to Italy together to see your parents.”

He kissed her then, a soft press against her
lips that was at once empathetic and passionate, before he put the
phone back up to his ear and booked two tickets to Rome.

* * *

Mary hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep a
wink on the airplane, but with Jack sitting warm and steady beside
her, his arms holding her tight, she was asleep almost as soon as
she closed her eyes. By the time she woke, they were flying over
Rome. Hand in hand, Mary and Jack got off the plane with their
carry-on luggage.

Fear that they were already too late sent her
to the first pay phone she found in the airport. But when she
called the hospital, an old childhood friend who was now a nurse
gave her a very welcome piece of good news: Her mother had been
diagnosed with pneumonia and had spent the night at the hospital,
but had been discharged this morning.

Mary told Jack, “My parents left the hospital
an hour ago.”

Jack dropped a kiss onto her mouth. “Whatever
you just said, I’m glad it’s good news.”

She’d been so relieved by the news her old
friend had given her that she’d forgotten to switch back to English
after getting off the phone.

She repeated what she’d just told him in
English. “They’ve diagnosed her with pneumonia, which I know is
still dangerous, but would they have sent her home if she wasn’t
well enough to recover there on her own?”

“From everything you’ve told me, your mother
sounds like a very strong woman.”

He was right. Lucia Ferrer was too strong
willed to let illness get the best of her. Then again, Mary thought
as panic rose again, she was also so stubborn that she might have
let the infection go on for too long.

Jack pulled her to him and kissed the top of
her head. He didn’t give her a bunch of empty words that she would
have been too anxious to take in anyway. He simply told her with
his steady warmth, just as he had a hundred different times since
she’d met him, that he was there for her.

Now, and always.

When she felt stronger and calmer, they found
a taxi to take them to her hometown. She’d been back to Italy many
times during the past thirteen years, but she’d never been brave
enough to go to Rosciano. Once, twice, she’d come close. But each
time fear—and pride—had her turning back.

She wouldn’t turn back today.

Mary was holding Jack’s hand so tightly in
the back of the airport taxi that he should have been complaining,
or at least trying to pull free. He did neither; he simply held her
right back, letting her know that he truly was there for her when
she most needed him.

Trying to keep panic at bay, she looked at
her watch and calculated the time difference. “The launch has just
begun in San Francisco. Maybe we should stop at another pay phone
and call Allen’s offices to check in with everyone.”

She could tell by the look in Jack’s eyes
that he knew exactly what she was doing. “We don’t need to stop. We
don’t need to call. I’m sure everything in San Francisco is going
just fine without us.” He gently squeezed her hand. “Your hometown
is beautiful, just like you described it. One day soon, I’d like my
own mother to come and see this winter wonderland.”

Mary forced herself to look out the windows
of the taxi, to stop and really see where she’d come from.

Christmas in Rosciano had always been the
event of the year. From the strings of lights crisscrossing
overhead to the beautifully built Nativity scene in the center of
town, every inch was transformed with light and color. As a child,
she’d spent eleven months of every year looking forward to the
twelfth, and though she wasn’t a child anymore, she wasn’t at all
immune to the wonder of the holiday season.

Everything, it seemed, was exactly as it had
always been. The boys and girls out picking up a big tray of
pastries at the
pasticceria
for the family
lunches that would stretch on for hours. The young women, some of
them barely out of their teens, cradling small babies in their arms
as they met with friends by the fountain for a few precious moments
before finishing the marketing and returning to their familial
duties at their mother-in-law’s house. The men meeting in the bar
first for an espresso and then a glass of grappa to talk of old
sports dreams while making bets on teams they’d laid their new
dreams of glory on. The stone buildings stood just as they had for
hundreds of years. The grapevines just beyond the buildings were
groomed back for winter, and the sky was a clear and crisp
blue.

Mary felt as if she’d blinked at nineteen and
woken up thirteen years later in the same exact place. How, she
wondered, could it feel as if nothing had changed when she had
changed so much in so many ways?

She’d left Italy as a naive girl full of a
hunger to experience life. The beauty she’d seen, the thrills she’d
experienced as she’d flitted from one spot on the globe to the
next, had far exceeded her dreams. And yet, all that time, she’d
still been searching, longing, for something she had never been
able to find by getting on another airplane or seeing another
amazing vista.

As if he could read her mind, Jack stroked
his hand down over her hair and shoulders.

Love.

It was all she’d ever truly wanted, the only
thing that could have made her feel whole again when she’d been
broken for so long.

Jack’s love had filled so many empty places
inside of her…but that hollowness right in the center that had
begun to burrow into her soul as a little girl when she’d realized
that she could never be what her mother wanted her to be was still
there.

Finally, the taxi pulled up in front of her
childhood home. And as Jack helped her out of the backseat and the
driver took their bags out of the trunk, all she could think was,
Oh God, this is such a bad idea.
Why have I come back? Why don’t I know
better?

She wanted to dive into the taxi and have it
take her down the narrow cobblestone street and away from
everything she was afraid of facing.

“I’m scared.” She reached for Jack’s hands
and pulled them into her chest as if he could somehow get her heart
to stop racing so fast. “What if my mother sees me and tells me to
leave again? What if my coming here, being back in her house, makes
everything worse instead of better?” They’d been in the country
barely over an hour, and yet she couldn’t stop the Italian accent
from quickly seeping into her words. “What if—” The fears crowding
her mind piled on one another too fast for her to clearly put a
voice to them. “I made so many mistakes, Jack. I can see that now.
What if it’s too late to undo them?”

“Everybody makes mistakes. But that’s the
magic of family—knowing that underneath whatever you’ve said and
done, you are still loved. And that you always will be, no matter
what.”

Jack had been right about everything else so
far. She wanted desperately to believe that he was right about
this, too.

Knowing she needed to be brave enough to find
out, she lifted a hand she couldn’t stop from trembling to knock.
Before she could make contact with the old wooden door, a
gray-haired man opened it.

Her father’s face was just as she remembered
it, with perhaps a few more lines, but his expression was one of a
man who had just witnessed a miracle.

Oh, how she’d missed him, every single day
since she’d left.

“Carissima,
you’re
finally home!”

On a joyful sob, Mary threw herself into her
father’s open arms, still—
always
—his little
girl.

“Papa, this is Jack. Jack Sullivan. He’s the
man I love. We’re going to be married.”

Despite the fact that she’d spoken in
Italian, Jack didn’t seem at all surprised when her father grabbed
him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Your mother will be very happy.” He took
both of her hands in his. “Come see her.”

Mary’s feet felt as if they were filled with
lead. “Papa? When she asked for me to come see her, was she—” She
stopped speaking when she saw the guilty look on her father’s face.
“She doesn’t know you called me, does she?”

“Your mother has too much pride. So do you.
Your silence has gone on long enough. Come, it’s time to see and to
talk to each other again.”

Perhaps her father had been wrong not to tell
either Mary or her mother about what he was doing, but he’d been
stuck in the middle of things for too many years. So when he pulled
her through the living room and down the hall to the bedroom he
shared with her mother, Mary let him. But since she knew she
couldn’t do this without Jack, she reached for his hand with her
free one so that the three of them were a connected chain.

Her father gave a soft knock on the door
before looking inside the bedroom. “
Tesoro,
I have someone here to see you.”

A half-dozen questions flew through Mary’s
head as her father slowly opened the door. How much would the
years—and illness—have changed her mother? Would her mother see
that her daughter was no longer a girl but a woman now? Would there
be softness in her mother’s eyes? Or would her gaze be just as cold
as it had been that horrible day so many years ago?

As Jack squeezed her freezing cold hand with
his warm one in a show of support, Mary knew there was only way to
find out. She sucked in a deep breath and threw her shoulders back,
calling on years of poise in front of the camera to get through the
hardest moment of her life.

Lucia Ferrer had always been a beautiful
woman. Thirteen years had turned her dark hair fully gray, but her
skin was still relatively unlined, her mouth still full, her limbs
long and firm. Mary had been a girl when she’d left, but now that
she was an adult, she saw in her mother’s face the same eyes, nose
and chin that she saw every time she looked in the mirror. How
could she have forgotten how similar they were, not just in
temperament, but in looks, too?

Mary couldn’t remember her mother ever being
sick when she was a child. She’d inherited that from her, too—good,
healthy genes that meant she’d never once called in sick. For Lucia
to spend any part of the day in bed meant that she was really and
truly not well.

“Mama.”

The short, simple word sounded raw and
uncertain from lack of use. Her mother looked shocked, so stunned
by her daughter’s sudden reappearance in her life that she couldn’t
yet speak.

How Mary longed to run into the room and
reach out to her. But Lucia had yet to give any sign that she was
happy to see her daughter, and the pride that was never far from
the surface began to bubble up again inside Mary as it had so many
years before.

Only, she was no longer a headstrong, foolish
girl with only dreams and adventures ahead of her. This time, Mary
was a woman who had experienced some dreams coming true and others
crumbling. She’d known terrible heartbreak and then had been lucky
enough to find a love that would last forever.

And, most of all, for thirteen years, she’d
longed for the family she’d left behind.

Her father was right: Pride had kept her away
for too long. If her mother wasn’t ready to see her again, well,
that was too bad. Because it was long past time for this nonsense
between them to come to an end.

Decision made, Mary quickly moved into the
room, holding her mother’s gaze all the while. But before she could
take more than a couple of steps, pure joy moved across her
mother’s face, and her arms lifted from the covers, wide open for
her daughter.

Her emotions bubbled to the surface, and Mary
felt incredible release as she ran into the room and put her arms
around her mother. Despite her not being well, her mother pulled
her even closer. Sitting on the bed together, Mary breathed in the
familiar smell of her perfume and felt how strong and warm her arms
still were.