Their Unexpected Christmas Gift. Shirley Jump

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.

      Which reminded him yet again that lawyer Vivian wasn’t someone for him to consider for anything beyond dinner tonight. She’d already told him in no uncertain terms that she placed a high priority on her career. Like his parents, her job consumed her life. Hours and hours of work, weeks and weeks of preparation. The kind of single-minded workaholic tendencies Nick steered clear of, especially when associated with a law degree.

      Vivian sat down at the table, with Ellie in her basket on the seat beside her. As if to prove his thoughts true, Vivian set the almost empty bottle on the table, then pulled out her enormous black leather planner and her laptop. For a long time, there was only the sound of her fingers on the keyboard and the soft coos of the baby.

      After a while, Vivian sat back, stretched and glanced over at Nick. “So, how’s the chicken coming along?”

      He shrugged. “Since I’m making it for two after buying ingredients for one, I added some fresh linguini I made yesterday.” He scooped a ladleful of starchy pasta water out of the pot, then stirred it into the artichoke sauce, which began to thicken, velvety and rich.

      “You make your own pasta? I can barely boil water.”

      He picked up the pasta pot and crossed to the sink to drain it, then set the cooked pasta aside. “It’s not that hard. It’s almost…therapeutic to make pasta and bread. All that kneading is very zen.”

      Now it was her turn to laugh. “If there’s one thing I could use, it’s a little zen.”

      She did seem very uptight, as if she was held together with steel wires. That had been him, two months ago, when he was working with Carson and hating his job. “Growing up as the child of two lawyers, I know that lawyering is stressful. My parents operated on short fuses, still do. My brother Grady runs his own company, and my other brother and I used to provide tech support. None of us went into the family business, so my dad thinks we’re all failures, except Grady because he has a lot of zeros in his paycheck. I thought my job was stressful, but Grady’s was ten times worse. He was a working advertisement for avoiding that kind of thing.”

      He hadn’t strung together that many words at one time in weeks. What was wrong with him? Pouring out his life story to a woman—a lawyer—who he barely knew? In his experience, nothing warm and fuzzy ever came out of a lawyer.

      “And now you’re cooking?”

      The lilt on the end of her voice made it sound like she thought he’d taken a step down the career ladder. And yes, he had in terms of salary and benefits, but his days were far less tense and most mornings, he rolled out of bed, his mind whirring with menus and ingredients and purpose instead of dread and tension. “It’s where I’m happy. I think.”

      “You think?”

      He used metal tongs to toss the pasta and sauce together. A quick taste, and then a dash of salt, and the meal was done. He grabbed two white plates out of the cabinet and set a fat twirl of pasta in the center, topped it with slices of chicken and a smattering of vegetables, then added sliced homemade bread on the side.

      All to avoid answering that question of whether he was happy or not. The answer was complicated, and Nick didn’t feel like explaining anything complicated right now.

      “Dinner is served.” He laid the plate before her with a little flourish, then handed her a rolled napkin with silverware tucked inside. “I can carry the baby upstairs, if you want to eat in your room again.”

      A