A Wedding for Christmas

“Sorry, just my basic wariness rising to the surface.” He had to remember who he was dealing with. Cris had always struck him as one of the “good ones.”

“I deal with a lot of people whose favorite phrase is ‘the check’s in the mail’ when it isn’t. I tend to forget that there are really honest, decent people like you and your family around.”

That there were gave him hope, the will to continue in a world made suddenly and painfully empty three years ago. He was just now finding his way again, finding how to rebuild himself and be whole once more.

Shane also realized that he liked working at the inn, liked interacting with Cris and her entire family. He was getting a kick out of her son. He’d have to be careful not to allow that to influence him. If he wasn’t alert, his feelings might unconsciously cause him to slow down so he could continue working in this atmosphere, soaking in these people’s company.

The compliment he’d just paid Cris and her family caused Cris to blush. She sensed her cheeks growing warm. Which meant they were already turning pink.

There were moments when she would have killed for a darker complexion, she thought wistfully.

It was really time to retreat—before she started guiding in ships from the sea with her glowing cheeks. “Well, I’d better be getting back to the kitchen and start making dinner.” She paused one last time, cocking her head. “You’ll stop by?” she asked, realizing that the matter really hadn’t been settled.

“I’d be a fool not to.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Cris declared, turning on her heel.

Cris heard Shane humming “What A Wonderful World” as he raised his mask again to cover his mouth and nose then lowered the goggles he’d had on when she’d walked into the work area.

Cris smiled without realizing it as she hurried back to the kitchen.

* * *

CRIS GLANCED AT her watch again. She’d lost count of how many times she had looked at it in the past half hour. Right now, it was a little past six o’clock and neither Stevi nor Andy had ducked into the kitchen to tell her Shane was in the dining area.

Where was he?

If he planned on being at the homeless shelter at seven, that didn’t leave him much time to eat and get there... That was when she realized she had no idea where this homeless shelter was located.

Also, as a volunteer, Shane didn’t punch a time clock, she reminded herself. He could be a few minutes late getting there—if he ever got here first.

You’re spending way too much time thinking about something you have no business thinking about, Cris upbraided herself.

But in a way, she knew why she was fixating on Shane. Seeing him after all these years reminded her of a far simpler time. A time when life, with all its promises, lay before her, fresh and new. A time before the scaly hand of death had twisted her heart from her chest. In short, a time when innocence still surrounded her and anything was possible because ugliness had not yet reared its head in her world.

And, she had to admit, when she saw Shane playing with Ricky, it also reminded her of what her life could have been like if Mike had returned from his tour of duty on his own power rather than lying in a coffin.

“That is the fifth time in the past few minutes I have heard you sigh,” Jorge, her assistant, observed. “Is everything all right?” he wanted to know, concerned.

“I can’t breathe,” she told him, the less-than-truthful reason coming automatically to her lips. “Allergies,” she added for good measure.

Jorge stopped stirring the giant pot of potatoes he’d already mashed, now warming to perfection, and reached beneath the white tunic he always wore while in the kitchen. He extracted a small rectangular package from his pocket and held it out to her.

“Here, have one,” he urged. “I take two a day for my allergies. They say to take one, but that doesn’t work for the whole day,” he told her. When she made no effort to reach for the small, over-the-counter medication from him, Jorge held it closer to her. “C’mon, try it, Miss Cris,” he coaxed.

Embarrassed because she’d lied, Cris shook her head, sinking a little deeper into her untruth. “No, I already took something. Wouldn’t want to mix the two medications, just in case.”

“No, of course not,” Jorge agreed, although his tone really didn’t tell her whether he believed her or was just playing along so she could save face.

Just then, Andy, the youngest of the Roman sisters, burst into the kitchen. “Red alert,” she cried. “Hunky contractor guy has just landed in the dining room.”

Cris caught Jorge looking at her knowingly. “I think that your allergy medication has arrived,” he told her just before he turned back to his work.

Maybe she should have sent a tray to Shane’s work area, Cris thought. Too late now.

“He’s an old friend,” she protested to Jorge, not wanting the man to think that anything was going on between Shane and her. She’d dated once in the five years since Mike’s death and had vowed never again.

Everyone at the inn had watched her one attempt at dating go down in flames when she’d started seeing a man who, it swiftly became evident, wasn’t fit to polish the boots of Mike’s shadow. In addition, he tried to isolate her from her family and felt she wasn’t being strict enough with Ricky. That had been the last straw.

After that little fiasco, she’d promised herself she would never date again—and if by some wild chance she did, she wouldn’t let anyone at the inn know, so when that, too, blew up on her, she wouldn’t be the object of sympathetic looks and peppy comments that were meant to raise her morale but only succeeded in lowering it.

“An old friend,” Jorge echoed, then nodded. “The best kind to have.”

Cris frowned, reading between the lines. “Don’t patronize me, Jorge.”

He frowned at the unfamiliar word. “I do not know what that means, but I am fairly sure I am not doing what you asked me not to do,” he told her. And then he became very, very serious. “Do not let one mishap make you close yourself off,” he warned. “Breathe with your whole body and soul,” he counseled, obviously building on the allergy excuse she’d given him to explain why she was sighing.

Cris’s hands were flying as she chopped celery stalks into tiny pieces. The staccato noise went to double time as she told her assistant, “Tell you what. You take care of your body and soul, Jorge, and I’ll take care of mine. Deal?”

“But of course,” Jorge agreed. “I would never try to argue with you.”

He wasn’t agreeing at all, she thought. His ironic tone told her as much. But she knew that if she said something to him about it, Jorge would simply feign innocence and somehow turn the whole thing into an object lesson with her being its unwilling recipient.

She would just have to get used to people looking out for her and worrying about her, she told herself. Everyone at the inn was like family, whether they shared DNA or not.

“Why do you not take the cause of your allergies his dinner?” Jorge suggested, nodding at the tray she had prepared. “I will stay here and watch over the rest of the cooking for you.”

His offer was sweet, but if she accepted, she would be attesting that this man was special, someone apart from the others she helped. She was in no way ready for that and in no way was she even remotely searching for it.

“I don’t need you to watch over anything for me,” she informed Jorge. “Because I’m not going anywhere.”

“That much is true,” he concurred far too readily. “Unless, of course, you wake up and see that spending your life without someone there beside you really is like not going anywhere,” he told her pointedly. “It is not even really living.”

“I’m beginning to think that working in the inn’s kitchen is the wrong place for you, Jorge. You should be working in a Chinese restaurant, baking fortune cookies and stuffing them with your words of wisdom,” she told him with a laugh.

She gazed at the man who had been her assistant off and on for the past year and a half. She knew he meant well. But at the same time, he was making things difficult for her.

“Look, I know you believe you’re helping, but I’ve got to find my own way through things—without help. Okay?”

“I am just making sure you are able to see the road ahead of you,” he said. “A lot of people lose their way.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she promised.

The next moment, she left the kitchen and took a peek into the dining room.

Shane was sitting at the table.

And Ricky was sitting on a booster seat right beside him.