Christmas Where She Belongs

So, he’d had to bring the dog, and it wasn’t actually deliberate that he was encouraging Mike to investigate an interesting new city smell just a couple of yards from the classy-looking entrance to the apartment block.

A couple of yards from the camera he could see winking above the numbers and name plates on a panel beside the door!

Deep breath, press the buzzer, you’re doing this for Hester. You loved Hester and deep down you love Mike, for all his lack of ability to learn even the most basic of dog commands.

‘Heel!’ he said hopefully to Mike, who’d wandered as far as his lead—well, bit of rope, really—would allow.

Mike turned around and smiled goofily at him—smiling was the one thing the dog was good at and anyone who’d seen him smile had to admit it was a smile.

Mac smiled back.

Clancy jumped as the sound of the front-door buzzer blasted through the small apartment.

Well, maybe not blasted, but she’d been sitting on a beanbag—in the beanbag—and gazing blankly at the ceiling, trying to decide if she was bored enough with the long summer break to go down and visit her mother.

‘Come for Christmas,’ her mother kept urging, but, much as Clancy loved her beautiful, warm, zany mother, and was fond of the group of friends who shared her mother’s life in the commune, memories of the nut loaf in the shape of a turkey that had been the centrepiece of last year’s Christmas dinner were still vivid in Clancy’s mind.

That and the lantana flower wine.

So she’d reached the ‘probably not’ stage, and was just considering starting on the ‘to do’ list she’d written at the beginning of the holidays when the noise of the buzzer startled her. It was enough of a shock that getting out of the beanbag became more of a battle than usual—it clutched at her so that tipping it to one side and crawling out became the only option.

The buzzer sounded angry the second time, so she grabbed at the handset, dropped it, picked it up and finally peered at the picture on the small screen.

There was a pirate on her doorstep.

Or maybe he was a buccaneer—she had no idea what constituted the difference between the two. Tousled, over-long dark hair, a couple of days’ beard and dark, deep-set eyes glared into the camera. His lips were moving and she could read the impatient words. ‘Come on, answer the door.’

She responded to the unheard request.

‘Yes?’

Hardly a welcoming ‘yes’, in fact a very cold, detached response, but now she was over the initial shock of having a pirate on the doorstep, her rational brain had put together the tousled hair and beard and told her it was some emissary from her mother—a fellow hippie from over the border, probably carrying a woven reed basket full of inedible cheese, green gooseberries and very hard bread.

‘Miss Clancy? I’m a lawyer and I need to talk to you about an inheritance—’

He didn’t look like any lawyer she’d ever seen. And unless her father had remembered he had a daughter and then died, she couldn’t imagine she’d be getting an inheritance.

Actually, from the little she’d heard of her father, an inheritance was highly unlikely.

Piratical conman?

But why choose her?

Had he buzzed at all the doors and she was the only one who’d answered?

And wouldn’t a conman look presentable, or at the very least clean shaven?

‘Here, I’m holding up my ID from the hospital—I’m a doctor as well as a lawyer and I flew a patient down from Carnock early this morning so needed my ID.’

Clancy barely glanced at the name, seeing first the words ‘Angel Flight’ with the halo over the top of the word ‘Angel’. She’d supported this charity since treating a child from the country, flown down by a volunteer pilot for a follow-up appointment after an operation. The men and women involved in the charity were doing really useful work.

Was it because of the halo that she pressed the button to open the front door—something she never did to strangers without a far more lengthy interrogation?

Or had a certain authority in his voice overcome her usual caution?

It certainly couldn’t have been the voice, for all it had made her think of rich, dark, slowly melting chocolate.

She was still pondering these alternatives—adamantly denying the last—when the front-door buzzer sounded. The man who looked like a pirate had obviously arrived.

Security conscious as she was, Clancy had the door chain in place. She opened the door the mere four inches its reach would allow, and peered through the gap at the man—more piratical than ever close up, although maybe that was the effects of the rather worn red shirt and fraying, cut-off jeans.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

At least his hands were free of woven baskets.

His answer was a grin, so slight yet so cheeky, so—endearing somehow—it took her breath away.

‘I’ve brought you your inheritance,’ he said, ‘but it won’t fit through that small a gap.’

He turned his head and said, ‘Mike!’ in a very stern voice, and to Clancy’s total astonishment a huge dog bounded into view, its long, thin nose poking inquisitively through the crack in the doorway.

Dumbstruck, Clancy stared at the dog—which seemed to be smiling at her.

Then anger built, slowly at first but rising to heat her entire body.

‘If this is my mother’s idea of a joke then it’s not funny,’ she growled, trying to push the dog’s nose back through the door so she could slam it in the man’s face. ‘I live in a one-bedroom apartment that isn’t big enough to swing a cat, let alone accommodate a dog the size of a small horse. I am perfectly happy living alone, I do not need a dog, or a cat, or a bird, not even a goldfish. I like living alone, and it’s about time my daffy mother recognised and accepted that fact.’

The speech was slightly spoiled by the fact that she’d continued to push at the dog’s muzzle, but rather than budging he seemed to be trying to ease more of his considerable length into her apartment, happily licking her hand as he did so.

‘I don’t actually know your mother.’

She shot upright, staring in horror at the dog, although she now realised it was the man, not the dog, who had spoken.

‘May we come in?’

Still regarding the dog with suspicion and shock, Clancy opened the door.

Once inside the apartment, both the man and the dog grew bigger, taking up most of the space in her minimal living room.

‘Good thing you don’t do furniture or we wouldn’t have fitted,’ the man said, smiling cheerfully at her.

‘Who are you?’ Clancy demanded. Nerves jangled throughout her body, no doubt because she’d been stupid enough to let this stranger into her flat.

Although the jangling didn’t feel like fear …

‘I’m called Mac,’ the man was saying, and he was holding out his hand, very politely.

It was an automatic reaction to take a hand that was held out to you, but no sooner had skin touched skin than Clancy knew she’d made a big mistake.