Sweet Christmas Kisses (75 page)

His face became a stony mask. “No one betrays me and gets a second chance. It’s over, Diona. Go home to your father, the only person you’d do anything for.”

Diona ignored the stinging accusation in his advice and fell against him, her hands gripping his collar. “Listen to your mother, Rock,” she said in a tearful voice, obviously desperate to melt his heart. “She only wants what’s best for us and that’s why she approves of our marriage. We don’t need to have a large wedding, at least not now. We could take the midnight flight to Las Vegas, say our vows tonight and start working on a family right away. Rock, I love you!” A large tear slid down her cheek. “I want to have your child!”

His eyes narrowed as he pried her crushing fingers from the collar of his expensive suit. “Leave, Diona. That’s all I have to say.”

“You’ll regret this,” Diona spat and jerked her hands away from his. “One day you’re going to realize that you’ve lost the love of your life, but by that time I’ll be happily married to someone else; someone richer and more handsome than you!” She picked up Kim’s crystal candy dish on the coffee table and hurled it into the fireplace, shattering it. “I hate you!” With that, she charged out of the room.

“Rock! Don’t be a fool. Go after her!” Zelda bellowed.

“Bravo,” Kim countered in a bored tone and clapped her hands as Diona stomped out of sight. “The white queen shows her true colors.” However when she glanced at Rock, his lack of emotion startled her. Suddenly, the ugly truth became like an elephant in the room.

She spun around, facing him. “You knew about her disguise all along, didn’t you?”

His brows furrowed and he suddenly began rubbing the back of his neck. “Look...Kim, I can explain...”

Her mouth gaped. How could she have been so naïve, so blind? “You used me, didn’t you?” she cried as her heart began to break. “All you wanted was to make her jealous to pay her back for what she did to you. I can see that now.”

Rock placed his wide palms on Kim’s shoulders, gripping them tight. “That’s not true, darling. I swear it. I simply wanted to keep her away from me and presenting you as my wife was the only way I could think of to force her to keep her distance.”

She pushed him away. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Rock. You could have cleared the air immediately.” She pointed in the direction of Diona’s exit. “You
should
have settled things with her the moment she showed up looking like she’d just come off her shift at the psych ward. You didn’t need to set up this little drama. No, you wanted to pit us against each other.”

Somewhere at the far end of the hallway, more glass broke as a door slammed.

He shook his head. “Honestly, I didn’t mean for that to happen, Kim. I thought that if I went along with their ruse, Mother would eventually see Diona for the deceiver she is and admit that she shouldn’t have tried to interfere in my life.”

Did he really believe he could extract an apology from Zelda, much less her cooperation?

“Get away from me, Rock. It’s over; your little game played itself out and now it’s time for me to get back to what I was doing before you knocked on my door with champagne and a trumped-up story.”

Before she could walk away, he took her hands in his and held them tightly. “Don’t go.” He looked intently into her eyes as Zelda silently watched. “Please, Kim, stay. I don’t love Diona and I know now that if I’d forgiven her and married her anyway, it wouldn’t have lasted long because she
never
made me feel the way you do.” He pulled her close. “It’s you, Kim. You’re the one who makes my pulse fly off the charts. You’re the one I think about all the time when we’re not together. You’re the one I want to serve coffee in bed for the rest of my life. And you know why? Because I’m falling in love with
you
.”

She backed away. “No, no, I can’t listen to this. It’s not true. You told me how you feel about someone using you for your own gain, so why would you do it to me if you really cared about me? I don’t want to end up just like my mother. She fell for every good-looking guy with a wallet full of money and a fast line, and we both know what happened to her.”

YEOW!!

Sharp claws gouged the back of Kim’s leg. She gasped and stumbled backward to get her heel off Roscoe’s paw, almost falling over him. “Ouch! Rock—”

Luckily, Rock’s long arms reached out and caught her before she fell, but in doing so, he almost tripped as Sasha dashed out from under the couch and tore after Roscoe. The monstrous tabby raced across the living room with a fat Chihuahua yipping at his tail, his barrel-like stomach getting in the way every time he tried to slip under a piece of furniture.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Zelda cried. “Rock, do something about that mean little dog! It’s going to hurt Roscoe!”

“She’s not mean,” Kim snapped, wiping a thin line of blood trickling from her calf. “She’s just trying to protect me.”

Roscoe scrambled under the tree and began to climb the branches as Sasha circled the balsam fir, barking shrilly.

“No! No! Not my beautiful tree!” Kim screamed. “Rock, get him out of there before he tears it all to—”

Roscoe had nearly reached the blinking star when the Christmas tree began to topple. Ornaments and jingling bells flew off and bounced across the carpet as the barrel-shaped kitty meowed and furiously fought to untangle himself from being stuck between two branches. It might as well have been a building coming down for all the noise it made.

Rock and Kim ran to the tree to find the buried cat. Zelda sprang from her place on the sofa, crunching on ornaments as she rushed toward the tree and knelt on the floor, calling loudly to Roscoe. She pulled him from the jangled mess and held him to her chest, even though he meowed and squirmed to get away.

“Roscoe, Roscoe, oh, my darling! I’m so happy you’re all right,” she exclaimed as she clutched him and rose to her feet. “My poor, sweet pussy cat—” Her voice abruptly cut off midway through the last word, as though something had startled her.

“Oh-h-h-h,” she said, clutching her chest, her face turning ashen. Roscoe meowed and sprung away from her, landing on the floor with a loud thud. “Buggers...”

Then the mighty Zelda Henderson collapsed.

Tuesday, late afternoon, December 22

The television blared in Zelda’s hospital room as Kim stood outside the doorway, mulling over what to say to her. She’d come to check on Rock’s mother and to politely, but firmly, tell Zelda what she thought of the woman’s hair-brained scheme to reunite her son with his former Jezebel of a girlfriend, but for some unaccountable reason, the words weren’t easy to come by. Deep down, Kim regretted upsetting Zelda just before she collapsed and truly wished for Zelda to make a full recovery—then go back to sunny St. Petersburg and stay there.

A doctor emerged from the patient room across the hallway, giving her a curious look. She turned away and took a deep breath, knowing she couldn’t hesitate forever.

“Hello, Zelda,” she said as she held her uneasiness in check and stepped through the doorway. “How are you feeling?”

Zelda seemed genuinely surprised to see her, but offered a grateful smile. She appeared restless and uncomfortable in her light green, standard issue hospital gown. Her short, white hair needed combing and dark circles under her eyes formed shadows on her pale face.

“Hello, dear, come over here and sit down.” She removed a pair of red-framed eyeglasses and placed them on her bed tray. “It’s good to see a familiar face for a change. I’m doing well enough, but the situation will definitely improve once my son arrives to take me home. The doctor says it was a bit of indigestion that caused all the pain, though it certainly felt like more than tummy trouble to me.”

She shook her head. “I thought I was having a heart attack! Alas, I shan’t be eating anchovy pizza again.” She picked up the remote and turned off the television. “How is Roscoe coming along? Is he being fed at the proper time?”

Kim nodded and slipped off her down-filled, floor-length coat as she perched on the edge of a cold, hard chair. If Rock was due to show up soon, she didn’t want to stay long. “Roscoe is just fine. I checked on him this morning before I left for the hospital and he was sprawled across the sofa, watching the lights on the Christmas tree.”

“Oh, dear.” Zelda clasped her hands together. “The tree, is it salvageable? If I recall, it fell over.”

Yeah, it went down all right, with your pot-bellied cat clinging to the top like King Kong...

Kim cleared her throat. “The tree looks great. There are just a few crooked branches that we can easily straighten. I went back to Rock’s place this morning after he’d left for work and cleaned up the mess. I had to vacuum about a dozen crushed bulbs out of the carpet, but miraculously, the crystal icicles survived.” She shrugged. “It had too many ornaments on it, anyway.”

Zelda ran a hand through her mussed hair. “I don’t remember anything, but my son tells me that when I collapsed, you took charge of me, calling 911 and accompanying us in the ambulance to the hospital.”

“Why, yes, of course,” Kim said, surprised. “I couldn’t leave you, Zelda. I had to make sure you would be properly taken care of.”

Zelda reached out and clasped Kim’s hand. “My dear, I owe you a debt of gratitude. I’ve been wrong about you, stubbornly so. You’ve been good to me ever since we met, despite the way I’ve treated you.”

Kim sprung from her chair and stood close to the bed. “Zelda, I’m the one who needs to apologize. I should never have said the things I did about your smoking and pretending to be ill,” she said, blurting out the words before she realized she had spoken them. “Those issues are between you and Rock and I had no place commenting on them. You have every right to want to see your son happily married, regardless of which path you choose to deal with him, and I don’t blame you for trying.”

“Nonsense, my dear,” Zelda countered. “It was wrong to interfere in his life. My son is a brilliant businessman, but in the past he has made some irrational decisions concerning women. I simply want him to be happy and thought I was doing the right thing by encouraging the match between him and Diona.”

Zelda expelled a sigh of regret. “Diona came to me a couple weeks ago, literally crying on my shoulder that Rock had broken her heart over a misunderstanding. She’s quite an actress, that one. At any rate, she convinced me to help her get into Rock’s flat to confront him again, promising that if he took her back and married her, she’d settle him down and start a family.”

In a crystal-clear moment, Kim suddenly saw Zelda in a new light and clearly understood the lonely old woman’s plight. She patted Zelda’s hand. “You want a grandchild to fill that empty spot inside you...”

Zelda’s eyes misted. “Yes, I do,” she said, her voice heavy with longing. “I want a little girl to take the place of the one I never had. A darling little princess that I can dress up and spoil at will. Is that so terrible?”

“Not at all,” Kim managed to reply as she blinked back a sympathetic tear. Zelda simply needed someone to shower with her love.

“I’m not getting any younger, you know, and neither of my sons possess the slightest attraction whatsoever to marriage. At least Rock is interested in women, but Patrick is so focused on racing that fool car of his, sometimes I wonder if he isn’t a bit...” Zelda finished the sentence with a wave of her hand and another loud sigh. “Enough of that,” she said briskly, returning to her former spunkiness. “It’s pointless to dwell on such things. My sons will marry when they are ready and I must accept that.” She glanced downward then looked up with a hopeful expression. “I see you’re still wearing the wedding rings.”

Kim held up her hand. The magnificent four-carat diamond sparkled despite the dimness of the lights on the walls above Zelda’s bed. “I moved back into my own place last night, and I haven’t had a chance to give the set back to Rock yet, so this is the safest place to keep it.”

“He is truly in love with you, you know.”

Kim froze, embarrassed by Zelda’s abrupt assertion. “I realize that’s what you want to believe, but it isn’t true. He’s simply infatuated with me.”

Zelda pursed her lips, her face reflecting the stern, imperious attitude she usually reserved for Rock. “My dear, I know my son and I’ve never seen him so happy in his life. His eyes shine brighter than the star on top of your tree when you come into the room. The signs were subtle at first, but the more time you two spent together, the more obvious it became.” She paused for a moment, her face softening. “Of course, I didn’t want to believe it. I hate to admit when I’m wrong, and although you come from a respectable family, you didn’t have either the present social standing or connections that Diona had, so I dismissed his growing affection for you as mere infatuation.”

“Hold it right there, Zelda.” Kim held up her hand like a school monitor directing traffic. “Just so you know...as far as the bedroom is concerned, I’ve never participated in anything more intimate than a handshake with your son. We shared the same bed, but he spent the night on his side and I on mine.”

Zelda burst out with an astonished laugh. “My son would never agree to such a thing.”

“Oh, yes, he would,” Kim fired back matter-of-factly, “if the stakes were high enough and those were the only terms he could get.”

“I see. What are those terms, pray tell?”

Kim briefly explained the circumstances that led to her agreement with Rock and the rules they set.

“You’re
perfect
for him.” Zelda laughed in delight. “Don’t you see?” Color began to return to her face as her eyes flashed with their former brilliance. “You’re hard-working, trustworthy, compassionate toward others and you’re a wonderful cook—everything he needs in a wife and the mother of his children.”

“Whoa,” Kim said and backed away with her hands up. “Zelda, you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions here. I understand you want to find the perfect wife for your son, but I am definitely not his type and he’s
absolutely
not mine. We had an interesting four days together. That’s all it was. Before last Friday, we barely knew each other. I’ll admit it was fun getting to know him after I laid down a few rules, but I’m not in the same league as the women I’ve seen him with at parties in the complex. I’m not tall, willowy or elegant, radiating sexuality like expensive perfume. I’m exactly what you described, hardworking and down to earth—too predictable for a man who lives on the edge. That’s why Rock convinced me to be his stand-in wife. He knew he could count on me to smile and play the part—while he was secretly pitting me against
her
. He never meant it to turn into anything more and, frankly, neither did I. Now he’s gone back to his normal routine, and I’m...I’m...”