A Family for Christmas (Willow Park #3) Read online

  “But my fingers are too big to mess with little buttons like that.” Gabe caught the girl’s eye in an expression Lydia was starting to recognize—the silent reminder that she needed to be good.

  “Okay,” Ellie said with a frown, turning around in front of Lydia.

  Lydia saw what was wrong with the hang of the dress as the girl showed her the back. She’d mis-buttoned a couple of the buttons, so the fabric wasn’t aligned straight.

  Lydia squatted down and gently undid two of the buttons and re-did them.

  “What are you doing?” Ellie asked, looking back over her shoulder. “Those weren’t the ones.”

  Lydia wasn’t about to tell the girl she’d buttoned the dress wrong. With a smile, she replied, “I like these little pearl buttons so much I was checking them out. Here you go—you’re all buttoned now.”

  Ellie peered at Lydia suspiciously, but then she got distracted by the dress.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lydia said, praying that this was the last dress they needed to try on. She’d never been big on shopping—even for herself.

  Ellie peered at herself in the big mirror, turning around and inspecting the dress from every angle.

  “I really like it,” Gabe said. “I think that’s the one.” He hadn’t shown any of the impatience that Lydia felt, but she was sure that shopping wasn’t at the top of his list of things to do either.

  Ellie didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she finally turned around and faced her father. “This one is it.”

  Lydia almost slumped with relief, and she felt Gabe relax too. “Excellent,” he said. “Let Aunt Lydia unbutton it for you, and then you can change clothes so we can go get something for lunch.”

  Lydia didn’t like being “Aunt Lydia.” She also didn’t like being “Miss Lydia.” And it would definitely be wrong for her to be called “Mom.”

  Whatever she was to Ellie clearly didn’t have any sort of name.

  Pushing the thought aside, she unbuttoned the dress quickly and stared at the bottom of the dressing room door as Ellie changed clothes, recognizing every step of the process by the inches she could see beneath the door.

  When she glanced over, she saw that Gabe was watching her.

  She had no idea what to make of his expression, so she just smiled.

  He smiled back, but it didn’t reach his eyes. She wondered what he’d been thinking about and if he was, for some reason, unhappy with her.

  She didn’t want him to be unhappy. This marriage was the way to finally get what she wanted. She needed to make sure she didn’t look impatient again.

  “We can add a red satin sash to the dress for the wedding,” Lydia said brightly, when Ellie emerged, dressed in her sweater and blue corduroy pants. “That’s what Mia is going to wear with her dress.”

  Mia was Lydia’s five-year-old niece—her brother’s daughter.

  “I like pink better.”

  Shit. Even her attempts to be friendly always seemed to backfire. “I like pink too, but since it’s Christmas, all the flowers are going to be red. So a red sash would match better.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can have pink if you—” Lydia began. The wedding was going to be very small. No one but family. If it meant the girl would be happy, Lydia didn’t care if her dress didn’t match.

  But Gabe interrupted, “You like red too, don’t you, Ellie?”

  “Yes. I guess so. But I wanted a pink sash.”

  “A pink sash won’t match the flowers. So you can have a red sash or you can have no sash. Whichever you’d like.” His voice was a little sterner than normal. Not much, but it obviously had an impact on Ellie.

  The girl’s head dropped. “I’ll have a red sash,” she mumbled.

  “All right then.”

  “It will be really pretty,” Lydia said, feeling bad that she’d somehow gotten the girl in trouble with her dad and not wanting Ellie to blame her for it. “We can make it hang down really long like the dress. We can do a knot or a big bow in the back.”

  Ellie looked up at her soberly. “Bows are for little girls.”

  “Okay. Then Mia can have the bow and you can let your sash hang down. There are wedding dresses that are made like that sometimes. And your flowers will be red tulips that match.”

  “I like tulips.” The girl wasn’t smiling, but she looked a little less upset.

  Feeling encouraged by this progress, Lydia said, “I do too. They’re my favorite flowers.”

  As they stood waiting to pay, Gabe stroked Ellie’s hair. She leaned against him, and he put his arm around her.

  Lydia felt an odd, completely irrational pang in her chest.

  They were clearly family—as close as people could get. She wasn’t part of it. She might be marrying Gabe, but she wasn’t going to be part of this family. She would always be an outsider.

  Someone without even a good name to be called.

  It was fine. It was what she wanted. She couldn’t have ties like this if she wanted to devote herself to her work in India. It would only pull her away from her calling.

  This was all part of the transitory life she would be leaving behind.

  But, still, her chest ached a little as they left the store.

  ***

  They ate lunch at a restaurant in the mall that had macaroni and cheese that Ellie liked, and they were on their way out when Lydia saw familiar faces.

  “Micah,” she called, seeing the couple walking with a toddler beyond the sunglasses stand. “Alice.”

  Daniel’s brother, Micah, turned and grinned when he saw her. He was an attractive, rugged man with a warm smile, and his wife Alice was quiet and sweet with beautiful, long, wavy hair that Lydia had always envied.

  Lydia liked both of them, so she was smiling for real as they approached with their daughter, Cara.

  Lydia gave Micah and then Alice a big hug, feeling more comfortable than she had before—since these were people she really knew and understood.

  Gabe and Ellie she didn’t really know. And she didn’t really understand them.

  “We heard the news,” Micah said, looking almost rakish as he grinned at her. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” Lydia was a little embarrassed, the way she always was when she introduced Gabe as her fiancé, but she managed to hide it. “This is Gabe. And this is his daughter, Ellie.”

  Micah and Gabe shook hands, and then Alice, who was chasing after Cara, waved and said it was nice to meet him.

  “Have we met before?” Micah asked, giving Gabe a close look.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You know Mary and Henry from church, right? He’s their son. But he’s a lot older than us, so he was in college by the time we were in school.”

  She glanced up at Gabe and saw he’d tightened his lips, and she realized that maybe she shouldn’t have said he was old.

  She was terrible at being a fiancée.

  She stepped over toward him and tried to think of something nice to say to temper the “old” comment, but she couldn’t think of anything. “But he bought one of your houses,” she added to Micah. “The one on Elm.”

  “I love that house,” Micah said, still smiling and watching them with a slightly questioning expression.

  Gabe reached out to put an arm around Lydia, pulling her against his side with a gesture that must look affectionate. “We love it too. You did a really good job with it.”

  Alice had returned with Cara in tow. “So when is the wedding?” she asked, holding Cara with one hand and pulling a stray thread from Micah’s shirt with the other.

  “December 6th,” Lydia said, feeling kind of strange in Gabe’s embrace but being sure not to pull away. “It’s just family, though. We don’t want any big hoopla.”

  “Maybe we can do a dinner or something for you all afterwards then,” Alice said. “We want to celebrate with you in some way. I’ll talk to Jessica about it. If you don’t mind, of course.”

  “I’m sure that will be
fine,” Lydia replied, since she couldn’t figure out any good way to refuse. They were keeping things low-key on purpose, since it felt like a lie to go through all the normal wedding traditions in their situation. “Thank you for thinking about it.”

  “Of course. I’m so excited for you.”

  Lydia understood that Alice was being genuine, and that she was also surprised. It wasn’t all that long ago that she’d told Alice straight-out that she didn’t think she would ever get married.

  She hated people to think she was wrong like that.

  “We better get going,” Gabe said, glancing over at Ellie, who had been watching the proceedings with typical silence. “It was good to meet you both.”

  After they said farewells, they continued walking toward the exit. Ellie walked a few feet ahead, and Gabe kept his hand on the small of Lydia’s back.

  He gave her a strange look but didn’t say anything.

  “What is it?” she asked, since she figured it was better to keep things open between them.

  “Since we’re supposed to be engaged, it might be a good idea for you to act as though you like me as much as you like other people.”

  Lydia stiffened slightly, feeling immediately defensive at what was clearly a reproach, however mild and casual his tone.

  “What did I do?” She’d called him “old,” but it didn’t sound like that was what he was referring to.

  “You appeared happier to see Micah than you were to be with me.” He wasn’t looking at her. He was watching Ellie walk in front of them.

  “Oh.” Lydia thought about that, realizing he was right. She had been happy to see Micah and Alice, since they were friends, familiar, comfortable. Nothing at all like Gabe.

  “Especially since you used to be with Micah.”

  Lydia sucked in a surprised breath and looked up to scan Gabe’s face. He’d sounded almost jealous.

  But he definitely had a point about her needing to treat him more like a future husband. “Sorry,” she said. “This is new. And strange.”

  “I know.” His face, when she checked, looked natural again. He never revealed very much, but he didn’t appear to be unhappy with her anymore.

  “I’ll do better.”

  She felt guilty and rattled as they walked through the parking lot, but she comforted herself with the thought that this in-between time wouldn’t last very long.

  Soon she’d leave it all behind her. Soon she’d be who she wanted to be.

  ***

  Two weekends later, just after Thanksgiving, Gabe and Lydia were moving her stuff into the house.

  She’d been living with her parents since she graduated from law school, so she didn’t actually have all that much stuff. She had her clothes and her incidentals, plus a few pieces of furniture.

  Gabe had professional movers move him from Raleigh, but they were doing Lydia’s stuff on their own.

  Ellie was with her grandparents for the day, which was a good thing. Even given the minimal amount of Lydia’s belongings, neither she nor Gabe were in very good moods as they carried her favorite chair upstairs into the bedroom that would be hers in the house.

  “Damn it,” Gabe muttered. “You need to keep walking.”

  “I’m trying.” She felt like she was holding the whole weight of the chair, although she knew it wasn’t true. “Slow down a little.”

  He was in front, and she was behind, and unfortunately the stairs were old and rather steep.

  “Do you have it?” he asked, shifting somehow in a way that took some of the weight of the chair off Lydia.

  “I have it.” She mostly had it, although the chair was so wide that she couldn’t get a good grip on it.

  “Do you have it?” he asked again, as he started ascending the stairs.

  “I have it!”

  The man really was the bossiest, most frustrating man in the world.

  “Do you have it?” he asked again, as they neared the top of the stairs.

  Lydia’s arms were shaking, and she could barely see through the perspiration. He was moving fast now, and she couldn’t keep up.

  “Wait!” she cried, when she felt the chair slipping from her arms. “I don’t have it.”

  He made a growling sound as he stopped, crouching down to keep hold of the chair as it lowered quickly to the stairs after it slipped from Lydia’s grip.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, keeping the chair from falling down the stairs with her body. She panted and tried to summon her energy and coordination again. “You were moving too fast.”

  He gave her a narrow-eyed look over the chair. “You said you had it.”

  “I had it until you moved too fast.”

  He took a few deep breaths, his expression changing as he looked at her. “Are you okay?”

  She straightened up, realizing he thought she was too feeble to carry the chair. “I’m fine. I’m ready. Let’s get going again.”

  So they hefted the chair back up and managed to get it into the corner of her room where she wanted it.

  They’d agreed they wouldn’t be sharing a bedroom. They shouldn’t have very many visitors up on the second floor of the house, and if someone noticed, they could find an excuse.

  Lydia was fully prepared to announce to one and all that Gabe snored like a freight train.

  When they got the chair in place, Lydia collapsed on the bare mattress of her bed, feeling like she’d been through a war.

  “I told you I could have had the movers get your stuff.”

  “I know. But it wasn’t all packed last week, and I don’t have that much stuff. The chair was the worst.”

  Gabe was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and as she watched, he lifted the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe the sweat off his face. She couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of his flat belly before he let the shirt drop again.

  He really had a very good body. Very good shoulders. Very good abs. Very good arms.

  Lydia got up from the bed quickly and told herself to get a grip.

  Her back caught, and she winced slightly.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, a little gruffly, as she leaned over to stretch out her back.

  “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m not going to fall apart from carrying a chair upstairs, you know. I’m in pretty good shape.”

  She wasn’t built like a model, but she was tall with long limbs, and she liked to run and swim.

  “I know you’re in good shape.”

  His voice sounded strange again, so she glanced over at him as she straightened up. He was eyeing her body.

  She was suddenly conscious of both her body and his. She’d been wearing an oversized hoodie earlier, but she’d taken it off when she’d gotten hot, so now she just had on a pair of leggings and a t-shirt that wasn’t quite long enough.

  She recognized something in his expression, in his tense stance, that gave her a shiver of excitement.

  He’d told her that sex was a standing offer, and she was suddenly picturing what it might be like for him to take her to bed.

  She’d never had sex before, since she’d always been committed to waiting until marriage. In the last year or so, she’d been starting to wonder if she’d remain a virgin all her life. She hadn’t thought that would be all that bad.

  She wasn’t sure why, ever since she’d met Gabe, she’d started thinking so much about sex.

  After a minute, she turned away from him abruptly, worried that he might recognize what she was thinking.

  This marriage wasn’t for her to indulge in sex. It was for her to get over to India.

  That was what was most important. These unexpected feelings for Gabe definitely weren’t.

  Four

  Lydia stared at herself in the mirror, wondering if the reflection was really her in the wedding dress.

  She had a fairly large circle of friends, so she’d been part of a lot of weddings, and she’d seen many brides who—in an effort to look as beautiful as possible on their wedding day—ended up with hair, make-up, and dress tha
t made them look like an entirely different person.

  Maybe that was the point, but she’d always secretly thought some of them would have looked better and prettier if they’d toned it down and looked more like themselves.

  Her hair was hanging down around her shoulders, and she didn’t have on a lot of makeup. If it hadn’t been for the dress, she could have been ready to start any other day.

  Instead, she was getting married in an hour.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to do something else with your hair?” asked Martha Hendricks, the wife of one the church elders and self-appointed wedding organizer.

  Lydia liked the woman just fine—despite her busybody qualities—but she wouldn’t have invited her to the wedding if her mother hadn’t insisted.

  “It’s good this way. I don’t like it to look too fancy or unnatural.” Her hair glowed red and was hanging in a shiny fall to her shoulders. “I don’t want a big fuss.”

  “You look beautiful,” her mother said, coming over to stand near her and inspecting Lydia in the mirror. “I’m so glad you chose that dress.”

  Lydia would have chosen a much simpler dress, but her mother was so excited about the wedding, and Lydia didn’t like to disappoint her. The dress she’d ended up with had wide straps, a fitted waist, and a full skirt—with ruffles on the neckline and big flounces down the skirt. It wasn’t too over-the-top, but Lydia still felt a little strange in it.

  “Maybe a little more lipstick, dear,” Martha said, coming toward her with the tube.

  Lydia jerked away slightly and had to bite her lip to keep from saying something rude to the older woman, whom she’d known all her life.

  “Martha,” Lydia’s mother said, “maybe you could go out and check on Ellie and Mia—to make sure they’re ready to go.”

  This suggestion pleased everyone, since it gave Martha a way to be helpful and also got her out of the room.

  “You don’t need any more lipstick,” her mother said with a smile, when Martha had left. “You look beautiful.”

  “Well, I look like myself, and I guess that’s all I can expect.” Lydia smiled, to make sure her mom knew the self-deprecation was teasing.

  “Of course, it is. And it’s all that Gabe will want.”