The Man Under The Mistletoe

FRANCIE AND DEREK’S wedding was as perfectly organized and executed as any major military or political event Matt had ever covered as a journalist. He knew it was a testament to Rosie’s expertise that every detail was perfect, right down to the red ornament at every place setting. FRANCIE AND DEREK and the date, had been hand-printed on it in gold leaf.

Matt overheard several women at a table behind where he sat with Chase speculate over why it was, when Rosie could probably be an event planner in Hollywood if she wanted to, that she felt tied to Maple Hill.

“She lost everything here,” one of them said. “Her brother, her father, her baby, her marriage. And contrary to popular opinion, you don’t run when that happens, you stay and spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what went wrong.”

“I think she stays because her mother needs her,” another guessed. “Sonny Erickson comes on like she knows and understands everything, but I’ll bet she’s hollow inside since the tragedies. If it wasn’t for Rosie, she’d fall apart.”

“I think she’ll leave now that her sister’s moving away next year.” That came from a younger voice. “Francie’s brilliant, but a little wild. Rosie’s been a steadying influence.”

“Rosie was just waiting for Matt to come and take her away,” a fourth voice said with authority. “She never stopped loving him. Have you seen how she watches him now? There’s greed in her eyes! I’ll lay you odds—”

“Shh!” One of the other women, probably recognizing the back of his head, stopped her abruptly. Matt heard mad whispering, a giggle, a groan of regret. Ordinarily he might have been annoyed at being the object of gossip, but he was happy to hear that last opinion.

“Aunt Francie looks beautiful!” Chase said, scarfing down his third piece of cake with ice cream. “Even with her blue hair.”

“Yes, she does.”

“And so does Aunt Rosie.”

She certainly did. The raspberry-colored dress clinging to her breasts and waist, and yards and yards of filmy stuff flying out around her, lent color to her complexion and drama to her very presence. Everything was going so well that she’d stopped being the wedding planner and reverted to her role as maid of honor.

He had a sudden flash of memory of when she’d been the bride and the sparkle in her eyes had been all for him. That had been an eternity ago.

“Hey, handsome.” Sara Ross, Rosie’s old high-school friend, sat down between Matt and Chase, looking very glamorous in a plum-colored suit and a broad-brimmed hat in the same color. She patted Chase’s hand. “Or should I say, you two handsome men?” Chase preened. “You guys look so cool,” she went on. “And I hear you’re on your way to China with a hefty advance in your bank account, Matt.”

Matt reached for the carafe in the middle of the table to pour coffee into her cup. He remembered her as a smart but plain young woman, not at all the curvaceous beauty she was today. He didn’t even remember that she’d been blond. He had to stop himself from staring. “I am,” he replied finally. “And what have you been up to? Whatever it is, it agrees with you.”

“I’m working for a law firm here,” she replied, placing a pink linen napkin on her lap. “And I’m going back to school next term to get a law degree.”

“I’m impressed.” As he recalled, she’d worked for the city, the hospital, and clerked in several stores. She’d even done a stint in the army, though there was nothing remotely military about her appearance. “Ambition is very appealing in a woman.”

Her cocoa-brown eyes widened.

“To whom, exactly?” She heaved a big sigh as she picked up her fork. “I had a life of domestic bliss planned,” she said in a jocular tone, “but that doesn’t seem to be working out, so I’m making new plans. Smarts and money are my focus now.” She winked at him and picked up her fork. “Well, tell me what you’ve been up to. If Rosie knows, she isn’t talking.”

They spent half an hour catching up, then Corin and his wife joined them, and by the time they noticed that the crowd was thinning and Francie and Derek were ready to leave for their honeymoon, it was midafternoon.

Everyone collected coats and gathered outside where Francie threw her bouquet. It was caught, ironically, by Sara. The small crowd pressed the bride and groom toward a waiting limousine, but Francie broke free to throw her arms around Matt’s neck. “Thanks for coming,” she said. Her smile was blinding. Then she grew serious and said for his ears only, “Make this work, Matthew. Get her back.” Then she kissed him noisily on the cheek and got into the car.

They drove off to cheers and applause and birdseed thrown after them. Matt looked for Rosie, but she’d avoided him all day.

“You think I could have one more piece of cake?” Chase asked him, following him back inside.

“No.” He did head for the buffet table. “Did you have anything at all substantial today? Ham? Cheese? Deviled eggs?”

Chase made a face. “I thought there’d be hamburgers or hot wings.”

“It’s a wedding. They have classier stuff.” He studied the array of food. “How about some vegetables and dip?”

“How about more cake?”

“No.”

Chase looked betrayed. “You sound like Aunt Rosie.”

“That’s because we love you and want you to be healthy.”

Matt finally talked Chase into eating a spring roll by telling him it came with hot sauce. Chase felt honor-bound to try it.

By the time he’d finished two of them and a few carrot sticks, the Yankee Inn’s banquet hall was empty of guests and the waitstaff was beginning to clean up.

Sonny appeared, changed out of her elegant pink suit and wearing casual slacks and a faux fur-trimmed black parka. She was still very chic. As Matt stood, she wrapped him in a fragrant embrace.

“A cab’s picking up Ginger and me to take us to the airport. You’ll be long gone when I return, so I just wanted you to know how good it was to see you again and…” Her smile seemed to falter and that deep sadness he’d often seen in her came to the fore. “And…how much I wish things had turned out differently for you and Rosie.”

“So do I.” He returned her hug. “I haven’t given up yet, though she’s not doing much to inspire hope.”

“I think you should kidnap her,” she said, “and take her to China.”

“I’ll give that some thought.”

Ginger shouted from the doorway that the cab had arrived. Rosie, still wearing the raspberry gown, had pulled her coat on over her shoulders and hurried toward them from the other direction. She and Matt and Chase followed Sonny and Ginger to the cab.

It was almost four and the sun was already low on the horizon. Snow-covered rooftops and church steeples were pink in its glow.

There were hugs all around.

“Do think about what I said,” Sonny murmured to Matt as she followed her sister into the cab. She held the door open when the cabbie would have closed it. “I’ll be home the night before the community Christmas dinner,” she shouted at Rosie. “If anybody needs me for anything, you can give them Aunt Sukie’s number. You know Carol Walford. Everything’s a crisis!”

“Okay, Mom. Don’t worry.”

“What’s that all about?” Matt asked.

“Mom’s giving the welcoming speech at the Revolutionary Dames’ annual Christmas dinner on the tenth. Carol Walford is the chair, and Mom swears she wears starched underwear. You can imagine how stiff she is if Mom thinks she is.” The cabbie closed the door. “I heard her tell you to think about something. What was that?”

“She wants Uncle Matt to kidnap you and take you to China,” Chase reported, looking from one to the other.

Rosie gasped indignantly.

Matt brought his fist down playfully on top of Chase’s head.

He should have let him have another piece of cake, then he’d have been too engrossed in it to overhear their conversation. “Just a little joke, Rosie,” he said placatingly.

Rosie turned to wave as the cab drove away with the snick of tire chains in the rutted snow. Quiet settled over the parking lot, now empty of cars. The staff still inside were parked in the employee lot in back.

“Like carting me off somewhere would solve anything,” she said while she continued to wave. “You and I just aren’t…”

Matt heard only part of her assurance that nothing in the world could bridge the chasm between them. His attention was caught by the glint of a slanting ray of setting sun on metal or glass. It had an eerie familiarity. He’d been a soldier during Desert Storm, and he’d covered a year of battles in Yugoslavia before he decided that he missed home too much and gave up being a foreign correspondent.

His brain processed what he saw more quickly than it reeled out the accompanying thoughts. He’d already pushed Chase to the ground when a bullet smashed into the ground between him and Rosie.

Rosie turned at the strange sound, and Matt lunged toward her to knock her to the ground as a second shot rang out.

Something slammed into his upper arm, burning like a branding iron, and knocked him to his knees.

He heard Rosie scream, saw her white and horrified face as she knelt beside him, and thought with perverse satisfaction that he finally had her attention.

CHAPTER FOUR

ROSIE COULDN’T SEEM TO get enough air. Shock, disbelief and horror at the sight of blood spreading on the sleeve of Matt’s jacket took control of her body. How could this keep happening to her? The bloodstain brought back the memory of the red on the side of her father’s face, streaming to his shoulder, the stuff dried on the sleeve of his shirt, congealed on the arm of the chair, in a little pool at his feet, her own backward tumble off the porch.

With that came the wrench of pain in her stomach and the certainty that something awful had happened to the baby she carried. Then there was blood on her legs, on her tennis shoes.

She remembered hearing herself scream and that sound came back to her with all the shrill clarity of the moment she’d made it.

She had a weirdly disassociated sense of having lost the past two years. Every small step she’d made in the recovery of her good sense, in her willingness to go on, in collecting her shredded hopes and dreams and trying to start over was being wiped out.

“Rosie,” Matt said, his voice surprisingly strong. “Rosie!” He shook her, then swore, the action probably hurting his wound. “Rosie, come on.”

She came back to the present, on her knees facing Matt. She had hold of his arms and he held hers, his fingers biting into her flesh. She’d lost the jacket she’d thrown over her shoulders to come outside and was aware of being cold as she yanked the decorative handkerchief out of Matt’s pocket and reached inside his coat to press it to the wound. Nausea rose to the back of her throat. She prayed she wouldn’t be sick.

“Chase,” Matt said, “put Aunt Rosie’s coat back on her shoulders.”

Chase, his eyes enormous and terrified, scrambled to his feet.

“Never mind the coat,” Rosie told the boy. “Run inside and get my purse. The cell phone’s in it. Call nine one one and tell them where we are, and that Uncle Matt’s been shot.”

“Okay.” The boy began to run off, but Matt stopped him.

“Get the coat first,” he said calmly, “then call nine one one.”

As the boy came back to do his uncle’s bidding, Rosie snapped at Matt, “You’re bleeding, you idiot.”

“And you’re freezing, angel voice,” he returned. “Stop yelling, okay? I’m starting to get a headache.”

The coat had fallen right beside her and Chase picked it up. He placed it on her shoulders, then took off at a run for the inn.

“You okay?” Matt asked, his eyes roaming her face as she held the handkerchief firmly to the wound.

“Of course I’m okay,” she retorted. She didn’t know why she felt so testy. “I didn’t get shot. I swear to God, hunters get more careless every year. Farmers and ranchers have to put red blankets on their cows and horses so they’re not mistaken for deer or elk! Pretty soon we’re all going to have to wear—”

“It wasn’t a hunter.”

She’d been rambling and his statement stopped her short.

“How do you know?” she challenged.

“Because somebody aimed at me. Unless he’s seen deer wearing tuxedos…”

“How do you know someone aimed at you?”

“Before the first shot, I saw sunlight wink off metal or glass. And I am shot, aren’t I?”

She put her free hand to his forehead, certain he was hallucinating. “Matt, don’t be ridiculous.” She whipped the coat off her shoulder and put it around him. He was starting to look pale and there was blood everywhere. “Who’d want to kill you? And I was standing just a few feet…from…you.”

Her denial that he’d been shot lost impetus as she remembered that moment. She’d heard Chase’s gasp of surprise and turned to find that Matt had pushed him to the snow. She’d opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing, but he’d been coming toward her, his eyes on something in the trees across the road. Then she’d heard the loud pop, watched his body take the impact that drove him to his knees.

Her brain was muddled with lingering shock and the upsetting sensation of having his warm lifeblood oozing onto her fingers. She was having difficulty thinking this through. But if he’d thought there was a gun out there, and he’d been running toward her—

“You mean…the barrel of the gun was aimed at me?” she asked.

Before he could reply, Chase came running outside followed by Jackie Whitcomb, who, as well as being the mayor, was the owner of the inn. She was carrying a blanket.

“The ambulance is coming right away,” Chase said, kneeling beside Matt. “You’re not gonna die, are you?”

“No,” Matt replied. “I think the bullet just nicked me.”

Rosie doubted that. This was a lot of blood for a simple nick, but she knew Matt was trying to allay Chase’s fears.

“Good Lord!” Jackie exclaimed, handing Rosie the coat and wrapping the blanket around Matt’s shoulders. “Can you stand? Let’s try to get you out of the cold.”

They had him on his feet and, supporting his weight, they’d taken several steps toward the inn when the sound of a siren split the air.

“Here comes the ambulance!” Chase said.

Rosie pushed him gently toward the sidewalk. “Go flag them down, Chase, so they don’t go in around the back.”

Rosie and Jackie, Matt between them, reversed directions down the snowy path. The siren grew louder, then stopped.

They were intercepted by Chase who ran ahead of two EMTs, one carrying a bag, the other pushing a gurney. The one with the bag was tall and fair, the other short and sturdily built.

“Hi, Rosie.” The tall one was Randy Sanford, her friend Paris’s husband. He looked inside Matt’s jacket, removing the large cotton square Rosie had pressed into the wound. “Not too deep,” he said after a moment. “Okay, let’s get you on the gurney.”

The other technician, Randy’s friend Chilly Childress, had opened it out and helped him ease Matt onto it. Rosie’s reality teetered dangerously. Matt, whom she would never forgive for having abandoned her when she’d needed him so much, still represented for her the happiest period of her life. For the first time since then, she had a clear memory of how cold and distant she’d been. She wanted to remember why, but found she couldn’t and Matt was now supine on a gurney, being lifted into the back of an ambulance, wincing and pale.

While Randy climbed into the back with the gurney, Chilly opened the passenger-side door of the ambulance, beckoning her. “Want to ride with us?” he asked.

She hesitated. She wanted Matt to be all right, but she didn’t want to be where people were struggling for life and possibly dying. She’d had all she could take of that.

“Your husband’s going to be fine,” he assured her, still holding the door. “But we have to get him to the hospital.”

Her husband.

“Go,” Jackie said, her hands on Chase’s shoulders. “I’ll take care of Chase.”

“No, I want to come,” Chase protested, trying to follow Rosie.

“You stay with Jackie, sweetie,” Rosie said as she ran back to give Chase a hug. “I’ll call and tell you what’s happening, and the minute I’m home again, I’ll come and get you.”

“He’s not going to die?”

“No.”

“You’re sure. ’Cause…lots of our family does that.”

“Well, see there. He isn’t our family. He’s a DeMarco, not an Erickson.”

“But you’re a DeMarco, and he’s your family and you’re my family, so—”

“I promise you,” Rosie said firmly, holding both his hands, “that he is not going to die, and I’m going to bring him home, and whenever that is—tomorrow or the next day—we’re all going to have hot buffalo wings together. Okay?”

Chase finally bowed to pressure. “Okay. But I’m gonna be really mad if you’re wrong.”

“Go,” Jackie encouraged Rosie. “And don’t worry. Matt will be fine.”

MATT FELT as though he was in hell—or, at least as if his arm was. Though he doubted seriously that Christmas was celebrated there. There were cardboard cutouts of Santa, elves, and puppies in Santa hats all over the windows and walls. A glittering, three-dimensional paper star hung from a light fixture in the middle of the ER.

The EMT had been right; it was just a flesh wound. He’d been bandaged, given an antibiotic and pain medication.

“You’re going to have to rest this arm for a couple of days,” the doctor said, then turned to Rosie. “The bullet scraped some muscle, so he’s going to be pretty uncomfortable. This dressing will have to be changed a couple of times a day.”

Rosie didn’t look thrilled at that notion. Of course, she wasn’t thrilled that he was here at all. But he’d seen that horrified expression in her eyes when she saw he’d been shot, and remembered that she’d worn it two years ago after she’d found her father on the porch and lost their baby. He guessed it was the blood that had upset her.

The doctor continued with his instructions. Rosie nodded, looking stoic and controlled.

The doctor studied her closely. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

He turned to Matt. “She should have a brandy when you get home.”

“I’ll see to it.” Matt slipped off the table to his feet, feeling the pain in his arm reverberate all the way into his head. Okay. He was going to have to move more carefully.

The doctor caught his wince, shook one of the pills he’d given him into the palm of his good hand and went to the sink for a paper cup of water.

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