Their Unexpected Christmas Gift

Vivian parked a fist on her hip. “Women are complicated?”

He liked seeing this spark in her. This, Nick suspected, was the Vivian with her hair down. Unrestricted. Spontaneous. Intriguing. “Not all women.”

“Then what kind of women are you talking about?” Vivian arched a brow. A half smile played at the edge of her lips.

Damn, she was beautiful. Interesting. He moved closer to her. She was wearing a perfume that lured him in—dark, deep, sexy. Like a garden after the sunset. Ellie went on sleeping, and the house went on being quiet and a world of just the two of them. “Women like you. With your practical heels and your suit and your bun.”

“That’s how I dress for work. What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s very…businesslike. Why are you working so hard to hide that you’re beautiful?”

“You…” She swallowed. Her eyes widened, and the tough bravado dropped away. “You think I’m beautiful?”

“Oh come on, I can’t be the first man to say that to you.” Surely a woman like her had dozens of men lined up and eager for a chance to spend time with her. She was smart, confident and gorgeous. A trifecta.

“I… I don’t date much.” For the first time since he’d met her, Vivian looked embarrassed, unsure. “Nor do the men I work with ever say anything like that. Probably because I’m winning more cases than them, but still.”

He laughed. “I bet you’re a barracuda in court. I saw the battle strategy you had on the legal pad back there. Clearly, that’s your comfort zone.”

“It’s that obvious?” Her cheeks flushed.

“Yep. When Ellie was crying earlier, you looked like you’d rather have a stroke than pick her up.”

Vivian laughed. Damn, she had a nice laugh, too. Too bad she worked in the one field he gave a wide berth to. In his experience, lawyers had a tendency to argue and control, two things that never really worked well with Nick.

“I really don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to babies,” she said.

The soft admission made him forget all his reservations for a moment. She looked so beautiful right now, with her hair once again escaping the restraints of the pins, and the questions in her face. He knew what it was like to doubt yourself, to wonder if you were doing the right thing. And maybe it was just the kindred spirit he saw in her, or maybe it was something more, but Nick shifted closer to Vivian. “There,” he said. “Was that so hard?”

“Was what so hard?”

“Opening up. Letting that hyperconfident facade drop.” He smiled at her. “You really should do that more often.”

“Maybe…” Her gaze met his and held. “Maybe I will.”

Nick leaned closer, almost close enough to touch…and then Viv leaned in the rest of the way, bringing their lips together. Slow, easy, sweet, his lips meeting hers with a gentle pressure that begged her to let him in, let him know her. His hand reached up to cup the back of her head, to capture the stray brown locks that had escaped the bun. He kissed her, tenderly, leisurely—

And Viv started to cry.

Chapter Four (#ufbb9c6d9-e3f2-54fc-9457-436bbc1364d1)

Vivian never betrayed weakness. Doing that meant certain death in the courtroom. She prided herself on keeping her emotions on a tight leash. It was part of what made her a formidable opponent. But the second she and Nick kissed it was like a dam had burst, and the tears that rarely showed in her eyes began falling.

This man—a total stranger—had seen a part of her that no one ever saw. The unsure, hesitant, out of her element Vivian, who had to ask for help. And despite that, he’d called her beautiful and been drawn to her enough for them to kiss.

She broke away from Nick and took several steps back. He was still six feet of tall, dark, handsome and tempting as hell. She swiped at her eyes, and tried to still her hammering heart with a deep breath. What is wrong with me?

There was nothing wrong with the kiss—that had been phenomenal. Tender, slow and easy, as if she was a dessert he wanted to savor. The scent of the food he’d been cooking—buttery and as warm and comforting as an early-fall day—lingered in the space between them. She had the most insane urge to put her head on his chest.

“I’m sorry,” she said, the words giving her a moment to center herself, bring her heart and mind back to the world of common sense. A world where she didn’t feel completely overwhelmed by a three-month-old and a dark-haired man with espresso eyes who called her beautiful. “I don’t normally cry.”

“I’m the one who should be apologizing. I thought…” He shook his head and managed to look both embarrassed and contrite at the same time. “Argh. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s not that. I didn’t cry because we kissed. I cried because…” Because you saw a side of me I never let anyone see. Because you reminded me of what I’ve put to the side time and time again in my life. Because for a brief second, I was caught in a different world. She didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, she resorted to a half-truth. “I’m stressed. I just…for the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do.”

She sighed and dropped onto the sofa. Easier to do that than to look at Nick and wish he would kiss her again. Maybe she’d been working too much or maybe it had been the you’re beautiful, or the fact that she was so far out of her comfort zone with Ellie it might as well be another planet, but right now, Vivian felt as vulnerable as a fawn in an open meadow. That was not a place she liked to be. The walls she had erected decades ago crumbled a little, and everything inside her was trying to shore them up again, but it was like bracing against a tidal wave with a piece of cardboard.

Ellie had woken and was staring up at Vivian with that “do something, Aunt Viv” look. What could Vivian do? She was in such deep water that she was sure she’d drown and screw this up. Ellie needed a mother, not an aunt who was more comfortable with a deposition than a diaper. “I have a new client who is depending on me to go after this shoddy equipment manufacturer. I need to prepare for a potential trial, which means hours and hours and late nights and weekends of work. My apartment is in the middle of a total renovation. I don’t have room or time for a baby. But I don’t want to hire a stranger to watch Ellie, because…” She shook her head. Where were all these tears coming from? What was wrong with her?

Nick sat beside her. “Because what?” he asked, his voice soft, gentle. And another chink in those walls opened.

“Because Sammie and I spent our lives with strangers and we swore that when we grew up, we would never do that to our kids.” The words came out in a whisper, words that edged along the secrets Vivian had kept close to her heart all her life. The vulnerabilities she hid behind the suits and the heels and the attitude.

Her childhood had been spent moving from one house to another, as her mother got sober, fell off the wagon, got sober again, a hamster wheel of changes. Some foster homes had been great, others had bordered on nightmarish. There’d been people who had refused to feed her unless she finished an endless list of chores. Foster parents who believed a belt was the best means of communication. Families she loved and said goodbye to before she could spend more than a handful of weeks there, the happiness she’d had with them just a fleeting mirage. Living her life out of grocery sacks and someone’s worn, discarded luggage. Long before the roller coaster of foster care began, Vivian had taken one look at Sammie, so thin and scared and frail, and vowed to be the one person her little sister could depend on, the one person who would never leave her. It had taken a lot of fighting with the system and the rules, but Viv had done her best to keep her promise, until she’d graduated high school and gone on to college. She’d made the mistake of thinking Sammie would be okay once she was out on her own. Viv had been wrong.

Maybe it was being in this town again, in the same place where Viv had learned to roller skate and where she’d found out she hated beets but loved pancakes for dinner on Thursday nights that had her emotions running high.

“Then don’t do it. Don’t hire a stranger.”

She glanced at Nick. “What are you talking about? I have to do my job, and I can’t just leave Ellie home alone with the cabinet installers. Yes, they’re strangers, but there’s a day care at the office. It’s not like she’s going to be alone.”

“Stay here tonight. Let me help you.”

Let me help you. Four words that Vivian had never before admitted she needed to hear. She glanced at her niece, at the pile of baby things that could have been a pile of books written in Greek for all she knew about them, and then back at Nick. “What time is dinner?”

Nick had made a lot of meals in his lifetime. So many, he’d lost count a long time ago. There was something about being in the kitchen, measuring and stirring and tasting, that centered him. As soon as he started cooking the rest of the world dropped away. Every single time.

Until he’d invited Vivian to stay for dinner, in his space, at his table. She wasn’t even in the kitchen right now—she’d kept the baby in the living room to feed the baby some formula—which meant Nick should have been able to concentrate on the artichoke and tomato sauce.

Instead, as the chicken cooked in the braising liquid of wine and broth, he found himself listening to the sounds of Vivian talking to the baby in the other room. Her soft voice, nearly a whisper, captivated him. His mind kept straying from the recipe—memorized because he had made the dish a thousand times—so much that he ended up searching the internet for the ingredients list and forgetting what he had just searched a minute later.

She distracted him. And that couldn’t be a good thing.

“Smells good.”

He damned near cut his thumb off when he swiveled at the sound of her voice. Vivian was standing in the doorway, with the baby back in the basket. When he’d peeked in earlier, he saw that she hadn’t held Ellie to feed her; instead she’d sat beside the basket with the bottle. He vaguely knew that babies had to burp after they ate, but how to make that happen…he had no idea. And clearly neither did she. Given the amount of “yucks” he’d heard as she changed Ellie’s diaper, she was clueless with that as he was, too. He got the feeling that Vivian was about as comfortable with a baby as she would be with a hand grenade. Not that he was much more of a parental figure, so he had no room to talk. “Thanks. It was one of my grandmother’s recipes.”

Yeah, all cool, no betraying the little hiccup in his chest just then.

Vivian came into the kitchen and gestured toward the maple table. “Mind if I work a little and watch you cook?”

“Sure.” He rarely had company in the kitchen because when the inn was fully booked, both Della and Mavis were busy with the guests and general housekeeping. When the inn was empty, there was no one around to check in on him while he cooked. And the last time he’d had a beautiful woman in his kitchen—

Well, it had been a while.

His ex-girlfriend Ariel hadn’t come to his place that often, and he hadn’t offered to cook for her more than a handful of times. After a busy day at the office, it was easier just to stop at a restaurant, grab a bite, then go back to her place for a few hours. He rarely slept over, and Ariel had rarely invited him. Now that he thought about it, their relationship had seemed to be more one of convenience than anything else. No fireworks, no surprises, nothing but moving from one expected step to the next.

Well, until he received the totally unexpected, blindsiding news about Jason. But looking back now, after the anger had dissipated, his strongest emotion was a whole lot of relief that he hadn’t created a messy, legal mistake by marrying her. With his parents, he’d seen firsthand what an unhappy marriage looked like—the chill in every conversation, the tight lips, the great pains to avoid physical contact. Not what Nick wanted for his future at all.