A Family for the Holidays

Using her daughter’s full name should have let the child know she meant business, but still there was no response.

Adrenaline was tying Shandie into tighter and tighter knots.

“Kayla, this isn’t funny. Where are you?” she said, feeling and sounding on the verge of terror as her mind raced with awful thoughts.

But again there was no response to her plea.

There were a lot of hiding places in the laundry room, though. In the revamping of the shop Shandie and her cousin were adding massage rooms, a sauna, a relaxation space and a room that would alternate between an aerobic workout room and a yoga room. As a result, the laundry room was now also used for storage, and because Shandie had yet to organize it, things were stacked and piled everywhere.

“Come out now, Kayla,” Shandie ordered as she searched behind everything. But this time what Shandie’s search brought her to was the door to the utility room. And it was ajar.

“Kayla?” she called again as she opened the door and went in herself.

The buildings that housed the Clip ’n Curl and the motorcycle shop behind it had once been owned by the same person. That person had connected the two properties across the alley, extending the room that contained the Clip ’n Curl’s furnace, water heater and electrical panel to reach that other structure. Kayla wasn’t in the utility room, either, but there was a door on the other end of it that led to the motorcycle shop. And that door was wide open.

With her heart in her throat once more at the thought of her little girl going through the motorcycle shop and out that front door to who knew where, Shandie crossed the utility closet and rapped on the door that was open into a garage.

“Hello? Anyone?” she called as she went from the utility room into the garage without waiting for an answer or an invitation, too worried about where Kayla might have gone now to hesitate. “Is anybody here? Kayla?”

“We’re in front,” came a man’s voice.

Shandie held her breath, hoping that the we included her daughter as she headed across the garage to a doorway that provided access to the sales section of the motorcycle shop. Only when she spotted Kayla did she breathe again, nearly wilting with relief.

“Kayla Jane Solomon, you scared me to death! What are you doing here?” Shandie demanded, rushing to her three-year-old, her focus so concentrated on the child that she was only peripherally aware of the man she knew owned the shop—the somewhat notorious Dax Traub.

“I need a big bike,” Kayla informed her simply.

“Apparently Jack S. is giving her a hard time about the size of the bike she has now,” her daughter’s companion contributed, despite the fact that Shandie continued to stare fiercely at her daughter.

Still, she used his comment as the springboard to say, “And you want to go from a tricycle to a motorcycle?”

“I need a big bike,” the little girl repeated.

Shandie closed her eyes, shook her head and sighed, just glad she’d found Kayla and that nothing horrible had befallen her.

Then she opened her eyes, scooped the tiny tot into her arms to hang on to her and finally settled her gaze on the man standing only a few feet away.

“I’m sorry about this,” she apologized.

He shrugged it off—literally, with shoulders that were wide and straight and powerful enough to imply, “Don’t mess with me.”

“No problem,” he said. “I do sell big bikes, after all. It was the logical place to come for one.”

Shandie appreciated that he was making light of it. “I’m sure you didn’t need a three-year-old wasting your time, though.”

“Actually, she’s been my only customer today. Wasting time is all I’ve done, and she was a nice change of pace.”

A smile went with that information. Not a huge grin, merely a minor upturning of the corners of a mouth that was a touch on the full side.

“I guess it’s good she didn’t blow your biggest sale or something, then,” Shandie said.

Belatedly she realized she hadn’t introduced herself, and so she added, “I’m Shandie Solomon, by the way.”

“Dax Traub.”

“Like Max the dog, only Dax,” Kayla explained.

Shandie didn’t tell either of them that she knew who Dax Traub was. Besides the fact that she’d seen him a time or two coming and going from the rear of his store, and he was too attractive a man not to notice, his name had cropped up on occasion among some of the women who frequented the Clip ’n Curl. Enough so that Shandie was aware that Dax Traub was the dauntingly good-looking daredevil, hell-raiser, heartbreaker and all-round bad boy who currently had tongues wagging about a very sudden—and very brief—engagement to someone, a rift with his brother over someone else he’d formerly been married to, as well as apparently uncharacteristically dour spirits that had turned him dark and brooding and had him avoiding old friends who were all wondering what was going on with him.

Although at that moment Shandie didn’t see anything that seemed dark or brooding about his mood since he appeared to be amused by her daughter’s misbehavior.

“I’m Judy Johnson’s cousin,” Shandie said then. “She sold me a half interest in the Clip ’n Curl, and we’re in the process of expanding and remodeling. Judy had to leave town—her mother had some health problems and Judy has to stay with her until her mother is back on her feet. So I’m overseeing everything along with trying to build my own client base, and Kayla was supposed to be having an after-school snack and watching the Wiggles in the break room.”

“Seems more like she had the wiggles,” Dax Traub joked.

“Anyhow, there’s a lot of work going on in the utility room because we need to add a second water heater and another electrical box, and that must have been how Kayla discovered the room and found her way through to you.” Shandie wasn’t sure why she was giving the man such a lengthy explanation. Although it did provide the opportunity to look at him a while longer, and she was enjoying that. Even if it did make her feel slightly jittery inside.

“I need a big bike,” Kayla said yet again as if that was the reason she’d ended up where she had despite what her mother was postulating.

“These are motorcycles, not bicycles, and they aren’t for little girls,” Shandie informed her daughter.

“I’m a big girl,” Kayla insisted.

“Not motorcycle-big, you aren’t,” Shandie countered.

Ignoring the mother-daughter debate, Dax Traub commented instead on what Shandie had said about the Clip ’n Curl. “I know there’s been a lot going on back there for a while now. I heard all the noise and wondered what was up.”

“It wasn’t supposed to take this long, but I guess that’s how construction goes. We started in the summer and here it is—Thanksgiving on Thursday—and we’re still further away from being finished than I even want to think about.”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, but are you saying that you’ve been around since the summer—right behind me—and I’ve missed it?”

“I haven’t actually been around much until the last few weeks. Judy and I worked up the plans for what we wanted to do while she was visiting me in Denver, and she got it started. I’ve been in and out of Thunder Canyon to deal with a few things on the shop and to find a place to live, but I had a house that had to be sold and a whole life to wrap up in Colorado before I could make the move.”

Dax Traub nodded as if that accounted for why he hadn’t known she existed before. He also suddenly seemed to be making up for lost time by studying her, and Shandie became very self-conscious under the scrutiny. She couldn’t help taking mental stock of her unimpressive jeans and the equally unimpressive tennis shoes she’d worn today for comfort. And the black smock all the stylists used to protect their clothing totally hid the fact that she had on a T-shirt she considered one of her better ones because it was formfitting and gave the illusion that she was a C-cup rather than barely a B.

At least she knew her shoulder-length blond hair was in good shape because she’d had one of the other girls highlight it just that morning. She’d also done her blush, mascara and lipstick right before leaving the shop to pick up Kayla from preschool, so while she might be wearing something tantamount to a choir robe, her high cheekbones, blue eyes and not-too-full, not-too-thin lips were taken care of, enough to leave her presentable.

Still, she felt at a disadvantage, and just as she was about to end this encounter to escape, it registered that her purse was on the floor near where Kayla had been standing.

“You took my purse?” she asked her daughter, retrieving it to sling over her shoulder.

“She was going to pay for the bike with what’s inside,” Dax Traub said, again seeming to find some humor in the situation.

“Kayla! You know better than that!”

“You don’t gots ’nough money. But we could use the bad charge ’cuz this is a ’mergency.”

Embarrassed by that, Shandie grimaced and felt obliged to explain again. “That sounds worse than it is. The bad charge is bad because it’s the account I have a balance on and am trying to pay off. I only use it in emergencies.” Then, to her daughter, she said, “And you getting a motorcycle isn’t an emergency.”