Chapter Twenty-Two
BLESSED WINTER – Chapter Eight
Page 65, word count = 16,257
Brock didn’t mention trying to continue their relationship again. He did take Pandora to her appointment the next morning and held Nick in the waiting room while she was examined. She and her son were both declared healthy, but she was prescribed some iron and Nick had his heel pricked and was given an injection.
On their way home, Brock ran in for a handful of groceries while she waited in the warm car with Nick.
“Thank you,” she said when they got back and she was sitting to nurse. Nick had begun fussing in the car after a night of broken sleep. She was feeling as frazzled as he sounded. “I don’t know how I would have dragged him through a store then got the steps swept and him in here…”
The nurse had warned her she might become emotional as her milk came in. A baby’s cry is supposed to make you want to do anything to soothe him, the nurse had added with good-natured humor. Then she’d talked about baby blues and had given her a pamphlet for a support group.
Brock only put away the groceries and made her the tea from the shower gift. It was supposed to be good for nursing moms. Then he sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and answered some work emails.
“Do you have to go back?” she asked with dread when she heard him sigh.
“No, I’m booked off until the new year.”
Right. He was supposed to have gone to Mexico with his ex. Instead, he was here, every day and night, changing her son if she happened to be napping, making meals while she nursed, watching Nick while she was in the shower…
“How do single moms do it?” she wailed on day three. “I don’t want to lean on you, but I don’t know how…” She looked to the ceiling, trying to hold back her tears. She had just put Nick into his bassinet, fed and dry and sleeping. Now her arms felt empty. It was all really, really overwhelming.
“Pandora.” Brock shifted next to her, setting his elbow on the back of the sofa and lightly drawing a stray hair from across her damp eyelashes. “I’m trying to make myself indispensable. You need to see that we’re a good team.”
“I can’t even have sex. You’re such a great catch. You can have anyone. I can’t figure out why you would want to be with me.” Her voice thinned as she spoke what was really plaguing her.
“Are you serious? Sweetheart, you’re a great mom and—”
“The family thing again.”
“No. I mean…” He looked past her to the tree that was still up. “I’m here for Nick, too. I told you that I already feel responsible for him. But I’m not playing house. I’m fighting for something a lot bigger than a picture on the back of a cereal box. Yes, I wish we were having sex. I think about that a lot. But maybe it’s a good thing we can’t blindly lose ourselves in that. We both have to look beyond the physical infatuation and I see a lot to love, Pandora. How could you doubt what you have to offer?”
“I have a minimum wage job and a newborn dependent.”
“Yeah, and you know what I know about you? You would make that work. Somehow. Which scares me because that means I don’t have anything to offer you and, damn it, I want this.”
She was drowning in the fiery blue of his eyes, fingers going to his jaw as she searched his expression seeing no doubt, no hesitation. Only tenderness and earnestness.
“I keep thinking I’m falling in love with you, but I know it’s too soon and that scares me so mu—”
He pressed his lips to hers, silencing her while he stole and gave, gentle, but so impactful, her tears welled anew.
“I’m falling, too,” he whispered against her mouth, then kissed her again. And again. He drew her into his arms so along with her own pounding heart, she felt the thump of his against her swollen breast, powerful and sure in the cage of his ribs.
They shifted and angled their heads to kiss more passionately. A moan escaped her and he growled, shifting again to gather her under him. She felt him hard against her thigh and she wished—
Nick started to fuss, making them break apart, foreheads together, panting breaths mingling as light laughter.
“See, even with his lousy timing, I’d rather be here than anywhere else.” He stood and adjusted himself, sighed with rueful disappointment, then went to gather the boy.
They slept together that night, spooned like an old married couple, sleepily taking turns tending to Nick and waking to stare at each other.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered. “Why can’t you sleep?”
“I’m worrying about your parents.” He was having his belated Christmas with them tomorrow. She was going along to meet them, but it felt like a test. “What if I don’t mesh? The way your ex didn’t. You didn’t, like, make it sound like we’re…”
“They’re going to love you. Can you please trust me on that?”
She wanted to, but she braced herself for disappointment. All she had ever wanted was to be part of a ‘real’ family, but Brock’s was too perfect. Too nuclear and ideal. How could there be room for someone as flawed as she was?
But when he ran out that morning for a couple of hours, replacing all the Christmas presents he’d given to her, she not only felt guilty, she felt scared, too. Lonely. Nick was being a peach, not fussing. She got the kitchen cleaned and a few jars of jam wrapped as a hostess gift for his mom along with dabbing on a smidge of makeup and straightening her hair. She still wound up fretting at Brock’s absence. Sure she could cope as a single mom, but her heart couldn’t survive without him.
He returned and they quickly wrapped up the replacement gifts, almost got themselves out to the car, then had to run back in and change Nick.
Finally, they pulled into the driveway of a really nice house. Somehow, Pandora had pictured his parents in a bungalow, since this was a vacation cottage. Nope. It was probably thirty years old, but it had been a mansion when it was built and they’d kept it up. It was decorated with red and white Christmas lights and there was a huge tree sparkling in their front room window.
The door opened before they’d climbed the stairs. Pandora hung back, shy, but wound up warmly hugged in the foyer by his mother. It was New Year’s Eve, his family was all tanned and smelling like coconut oil, but Christmas carols were playing and the place smelled like candy canes and nutmeg.
Brock’s mom stole Nick while Amber, who looked fantastic for having had a baby three months ago, dragged Pandora into the kitchen because she was busy preparing appetizers to snack on while they opened presents.
“Sit. Tell. Brock freaked out the first time he saw spit-up on his shirt. I cannot believe he caught your baby.”
Pandora laughed, revealed that he had almost fainted, but had to defend him since he’d been so wonderful throughout. They bonded over organic eggnog and sat on the sofa side-by-side when their babies insisted in unison that it was time for a feed.
The men cracked a bottle of scotch for a toast and Brock’s mom said it was time for ‘the rest of’ Christmas. “It wasn’t the same without you, Brock. But two Christmases are better than one, so thank you for this Pandora.”
“Oh, none of this is my doing.” Brock had broken up with his ex. Didn’t they remember that? “It’s just really nice of you to invite me to tag along today.”
She was trying to downplay things between her and Brock, but his mother gave her a funny look then looked to Brock.
“Well, we were excited that you could join us. I think Santa even had time to drop by with a few packages for you and little Nick.”
“What?” But she hadn’t got anything for them aside from the hostess gift! She looked at Brock, mortified, even as his father placed a package in her lap.
It was a diaper bag, one that Amber assured her was, “The only one worth having. Seriously, you’re going to love it.”
Subdued chaos ensued, which was fun in a heartbreaking way. They were all so great. If she could have anything, it would be this, every year, for the rest of her life.
“I think that’s it,” Brock’s father said, sitting back in his armchair and lifting his empty glass. “Pour us another one, would you, Terry?”
“I have one more,” Brock said, scooping the now sleeping Nick from Pandora’s arms and sliding him into his mother’s. Then he pushed back the coffee table and went down on one knee in front of Pandora.
“Oh, my God.” She picked up the baby quilt with turtles and surfboards on it that his mother had given Nick and used it to hide her face.
“Come on,” he chuckled, trying to make her lower it.
“It’s too perfect, Brock. All of this is way too good for me. You know that.” She blinked her wet eyes over the edge of blue into the vast, turbulent ocean of his gaze. “Whatever you think I am, I’m not. I’m just a runaway from—”
“Hey,” Brock said, firmer this time. “You’re the mother of my parents’ newest grandchild. You’re the new sister-in-law who brings a kickass cousin for my brother’s kid to grow up with. That’s who I think you are. I think you’re the woman I love, which is what I told this bunch when I said I was bringing you here today. I came to Tahoe for you, Pandora. You know I did. If you want a long engagement, that’s fine. But we’re meant for each other. You know we are.”
Was that why she had run away and zigzagged across the country with all the wrong men? So she would be in the right place at the right time when Brock walked into the Tavern?
Very, very slowly she let the quilt sink into her lap. Brock picked up her left hand. She was shaking and so was he.
“Will you marry me, Pandora? Be my wife and let me be the father of your children?”
Her trembling mouth didn’t know if it wanted to smile or what. She nodded jerkily, managing to say, “I would like that very much. I love you.”
He threaded the ring onto her finger and leaned forward to kiss her. His family was making happy noises and she was so full of joy herself, she could hardly breathe.
He drew back and the happiness in his eyes might have matched her own, but all she could see was him and a blur of Christmas lights behind him.
“You guys are okay to watch Nick for a few hours, right?” Brock said.
“Oh, nice try,” Amber said, giving his shoulder a shove.
He chuckled and shifted to sit next to Pandora, snuggling her in to his side and kissing her temple. The rest of the day was a fog of elation, one where her cheeks hurt from smiling so much. She kept looking at the diamond on her finger, finally confiding to Brock when they kissed at midnight, “I haven’t woken up yet, so I guess this is real.”
“It’s real. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Merry Christmas.”
“Happy New Year.”
“Very happy.” And they were.
*
Glory wasn’t. She hit ‘send’ on her latest revisions and felt like the biggest fraud alive. Pandora had entrusted her child to a man who wasn’t the father. Where was her courage to entrust herself?
She hated Seattle. October rains had arrived and it was nonstop gloom. Her father said they’d had their first snowfall last week, but it hadn’t stuck.
The soft opening for the lodge was this weekend. He wanted her to come.
She wanted to go, but she was afraid. Afraid she would see Rolf and… And what? Fall even more in love with him? She had demanded both he and her father support her by leaving her alone. They had and she was utterly miserable, wandering a studio apartment that she’d taken because it was cheap and furnished and who cared that there wasn’t an actual bedroom when she lived alone and only moved from her desk to the sofa to the refrigerator to her bed?
She was writing, yay, but doing little else. When she did come up for air, she saw nothing but emptiness. Not the terrifying emptiness of before. The quiet loneliness of being homesick.
She missed her friends. She missed her dad and she missed Murphy and she missed Rolf.
*
“You could thank me, you know,” Vivien said from the other side of his desk, list of questions still in hand. “Instead of acting as though this is time you could better spend elsewhere.”
Rolf sighed and said an impatient, “Thank you.” Then he pinched the bridge of his nose and said more sincerely, “Danke schön. I know you’re organizing more than the soft opening. I appreciate your stepping in to help hire Macy and get her up to speed as well.”
“My goodness. Is it Christmas?”
He gave her a look. “Sarcasm is my purview.”
“And you’re over-exercising your right to it lately, in my opinion.”
She sat back and crossed her legs. She was wearing boots with a stiletto heel made of snakeskin and satin with a cuff of marten fur—her idea of dressing rugged for her big adventure of driving her new four-wheel SUV from the lodge to the base. You could bring the redneck back to Montana, but you couldn’t make her dress like one.
“Is everything going all right here?”
“It’s not terrible.” Things had slowed down as the weather curtailed outdoor work and turned them toward procurement and logistics.
“Just like your father,” she murmured. “It’s like pulling teeth.”
“I’m not trying to be evasive. There’s nothing to say.”
“Except that you’re missing Glory and that’s why you’re being such a bear.”
He turned his head away, rolling his eyes at how pat that sounded. How right she was.
“Am I just like him? Because he was a jerk most of the time and you seemed to like him. What did you even see in him? I mean, I know he supported you once Trigg came along, but you weren’t angling for that from the beginning. Were you?”
“No.” She sighed. “And I did love him. He was… He was like you, Rolf. Trigg has it too. Star power. It’s very compelling. And then he could be very human at times. Your mother had another miscarriage and—”
“‘Another?’ I never knew she had one. Why am I kept in the dark all the time?”
“Perhaps it’s the snarling expression. I could be wrong.” She looked to her manicure, but spoke with affection. “I don’t think they were keeping you in the dark on purpose. You were a child and it was hard enough to get their own hopes up. Your mother was ready to give up and your father was quite upset and confided in me about their struggles. I was already in love with him. I consoled him a little too warmly, I suppose, and wound up pregnant. I couldn’t refuse to have his child when I knew what it meant to him, but I couldn’t have Trigg under your mother’s nose, could I? So I quit and moved back to America. He came to see us when he could and was quite devastated by her loss. At the same time, we were still very close and we had a child. What else could we do? We had to marry.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said with a certain amount of resentment.
“No,” she agreed with a smirk that suggested she knew otherwise. “Not me.”
“I’m mad that he died before we stopped knocking heads, not because of you.”
“I don’t think that was ever going to happen. You were too much alike. So are you and Trigg, not that you want to hear it. Thick skulls and sharp horns.” Her brows went up with disdain.
“Well, this has been fun.” He picked up his phone and checked the time.
“Marvin has asked her to come back for this.” She ruffled the papers she held.
“Is she going to?”
“I don’t know. But if she does, maybe knock her up. See if that keeps her here.” She winked and walked out.