Once Upon a Christmas (55 page)

He blinked at her and straightened his glasses. “What’s
the matter? All protested out? You look like I do when I’ve been working on an
invention all day and it won’t quite come together. Like that damned growth
accelerator…”

Or maybe that yes-kids thing was only wishful thinking
.
Nick went on talking, telling her something about his invention and the meeting
he’d set up for Wednesday with an interested investor in California, but Chloe
could only listen with half an ear.

His inventions will always come first
, she realized.
She watched his eyes light up as he described the prototype he’d come up with
for the licensing meeting with the investor’s board of directors, and her heart
sank.
Always
.

“Come in and check it out,” he was saying.

In encouragement, Nick’s fingers touched hers, warm in the
twilight. Smiling that devastating, you’ll-like-it smile of his, he tugged her
gently past the staked-out Christmas decorations in his yard.

Her feet hit the porch floorboards at the same time her
conscience made up its mind once and for all.

“Nick, wait!” Chloe blurted.

He squeezed her hand. “For what? If you’re worried
about Larry, Moe and Curly—”

“It’s not that.”

“—and Shemp, I’m sure they’re okay.”

“I, I, ummm…” Oh, God. When had telling the
truth become so difficult?

When you started lying for a living, Carmichal.

Chloe twisted her handbag’s short straps and stared up at
him, trying to dredge up some courage. Surely she had some beneath the layers
of well-meant lies she’d told. She was the same woman who’d just staged a
showdown at the bank, wasn’t she?

Except looking at Nick’s tender expression and lopsided,
familiar grin made everything twice as hard. Biting her lip, Chloe pulled her
gaze from his face and looked at the soft-lit windows behind him instead.

Just say it!
she ordered herself.
Nick, this is
your baby. Sorry I’ve lied to you about it for the past nine months. Ha, ha!

Right. That would go over like Curly’s exercise ball sinking
in the fish tank.

“Chloe?”

She tried again. “Remember how you said you’d go to the
hospital when the baby’s born, if I needed you?”

“Yes.”

Something in the way he said it drew her gaze back to him.
He’d put on that analytical scientist’s expression of his—the one she’d dreaded
all these months. Was she giving off lie-detector signals, or what?

“I meant it, and I will.” Nick bent to speak to
her navel. “Wouldn’t miss your debut for anything, big guy.”

Tenderness washed over her. He loved the baby already, and
he didn’t even know the truth.

The truth.
Get back on track
, she ordered herself.

“What if it’s a girl?” she asked instead.
Where
had that come from
?

“A girl?”

“You said, ‘big guy.’ What if it’s a girl?”

He straightened and gave her a quizzical look. “Then I’ll
teach her to play football anyway.”

Behind him, something bumped inside his house. Chloe thought
she glimpsed something dart past his half-opened blinds.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” He took her hand again. “Look, let’s
talk about this inside.”

“No. I’ve got to tell you this now.” Sheesh, she
sounded like a spoiled brat. Next she’d be stomping her foot. “It’s…”
Her breath caught in her throat, making her gulp for air. “…about Bruno.”

Another noise inside made her jerk. And breathe harder.
Suddenly, Chloe couldn’t get enough air. Beside her, Nick’s image wavered like
the Day-Glo castle inside her aquarium.

His voice yanked her back to the land of the listening, but
that didn’t help her breathing any. Probably a panic attack, she figured,
brought on by the stress of actually telling Nick the truth.

Not to mention risking the loss of the man she loved.
Forever. Dear God, he’d never forgive her for this.

“Huh, huh,” she gasped, grabbing his arm for
support.
Help. I’ve become physically incapable of honesty
.

He mistook her grappling for something else. Insistence that
he listen to another Bruno story, probably.

“We can’t do this now.” Abruptly, Nick hauled her
inside his front door.

“Wait, I’m—I’m—”

Lights burst on in a blinding flash. No wait. Those were
flashbulbs popping all around her. Noisemakers screamed. What looked like a
hundred people surged up from their hiding places in the tropical rainforest
that Nick’s living room had become.

“Surprise!” they yelled.

“…hyperventilating,” Chloe finished weakly.

Then the world turned black.

Chapter Eleven

Surprise parties were underrated, Chloe decided once she’d
come to and been ensconced in the chair of honor—in this case, Nick’s weathered
Barcalounger, specially decorated with pink and blue balloons and pastel
stick-on bows. Because this party, this surprise, had saved her from making a
potentially disastrous mistake.

Telling Nick the truth.

Maybe she wouldn’t have to, some cowardly part of her
thought. To look at him now, surrounded by all their friends and most of his
family, it was easy to believe they could go on the way they had
been…partners in parenthood, just like they’d been partners in pregnancy.
Even without the white picket fence and the ring and the happily ever after.
Any guy who’d stage a surprise baby shower couldn’t be all work and no baby,
could he?

From across the room, Nick’s voice drifted toward her. “That’s
right,” he was telling Red’s husband, Jerry. “A growth accelerator. I’ve
been working on it night and day.”

Then again, she might be wrong.

Beside her, Nick’s mother patted Chloe’s hand. “Poor
dear. You still look a little pale. But I guess a day like the one you had
would make anyone feel a bit peaked, wouldn’t it?” Heads nodded all around
their little Barcalounger ladies’ group. “Are you feeling better now?”

Chloe gazed fondly at Mama Steadman.
Except for wanting
to leap in your warm, hugging arms and never let go? Sure
! She’d never
envied Nick his close-knit family as much as she did at this moment, when they
were all around her.

Just as though she were part of a real family.

“I’m fine.”
Your son is going to be a daddy
.
No, she couldn’t say that.

“Nick told us about your showdown with Griggs,”
Red said, speaking around her
faux
-cigarette carrot stick. It was her
latest concession to a smoke-free, baby-ready environment. “Congratulations,
hon. I was starting to wonder how many of those developers I’d have to trot in
front of you before you got the hint.”

“You knew?”

“‘Course, I did. But I also knew you wouldn’t accept my
help if I offered it, so I decided to give you a nudge in the right direction
instead.”

The five Steadman “N” women murmured to each other,
heads together. Nancy leaned over the coffee table to cut the Italian cream
cake she’d made, and Naomi handed out thick slabs of it.

“Nicky says Chloe’s stubborn as a mule,” she told
Red as she handed over a tottering, white-iced slice. “That’s why we had
to surprise her with the party. He said she’d never agree to it otherwise.”

“As if Nick doesn’t have a monopoly on stubbornness
himself,” Nora said with a snort. She ducked beneath a towering rubber
tree plant and sat on the sofa opposite Chloe, then waved her arm toward the
rest of the plants cluttering the living room. “Just look at this place!
All these plants around—it’s like a greenhouse in here.”

“This latest invention is the worst,” Nancy
agreed. The Steadman women nodded, looking concerned. “He acts as though
he’ll actually make money from this one!”

“With that investor of his in California,” Nadine
put in. She forked up some cake and gave her brother a pitying glance. “Can
you imagine, embarrassing yourself in front of an entire board of directors?
This hobby of his has gone too far.”

“He’s going to get hurt,” Naomi murmured. “Danny
says he blows things up pretty regularly.”

Nancy put down the beribboned silver cake server and shook
her head toward Nick. “Someone really ought to speak to him.”

Nadine nodded. “I don’t see why he can’t just find a
nice girl, settle down, and have kids, like the rest of us.” She paused to
wipe her toddler son Nigel’s nose with a tissue. “What’s so wrong with
that? That’s what I want to know!”

“He’s got a perfectly good job at BrylCorp, too.”
Mrs. Steadman sighed. “Exactly the type of thing to support a growing
family, the same way his father and grandfather did. I wish he’d stick with
that and stop all this inventing nonsense.”

Chloe couldn’t stand it any longer. “It’s his dream!
How can he give that up? He’s worked so hard, for so long, and—”

“—and maybe that ought to tell him something,”
Nadine interrupted gently. “Like maybe he’s not cut out to be an inventor.
Like maybe life’s passing him by while he chases some impossible dream.”

Chloe stared at her.
No wonder Nick works so hard
,
she thought.
He’s trying to make them all believe in him
.

Suddenly she was glad she hadn’t added one more expectation,
one more obligation, to the ones he already shouldered. Suddenly she was glad
she hadn’t confessed out on the porch and given him another reason to give up.

“How can you say that? Don’t any of you have dreams?”

“Shhh.” Nancy cast a furtive glance toward Nick. “He’ll
hear you!”

“Maybe he should hear me!” Chloe cried. “Nick’s
brilliant. And creative. If working night and day will let him share all that
with the world, I think he ought to do it.”

The room had gone silent, she realized. Even the CD player
had stopped between Christmas carols. Nick’s head turned toward the ladies, and
the troubled expression on his face was one Chloe had never hoped to see. Had
he heard what they’d said?

“What’s all the fuss about?” he asked.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Nadine moaned beneath
her breath. “We never meant to hurt him. Now he’s on to us.”

“He was already on to you,” Chloe told her.

She waved cheerily at Nick, just in case he
didn’t
know what they’d been talking about. It was possible, between the Jingle Bells
music and the crowd—and the sound-muffling qualities of his Amazonian plants—that
he hadn’t heard all of it. She plastered on a big, bright smile.

“We’re just fighting over the last piece of cake,”
she called. “You know us women. Calorie deprived.”

He bought it, thank God. United in their common,
be-nice-to-Nick cause, the women clustered together. In mutual, unspoken
solidarity, they started discussing something else.

“Oh, look!” Nadine said. “Nick’s brought out
the baby shower gifts we dropped off earlier.”

He had. Nick emerged from the hallway with an armload of
them. With Jerry’s help, he piled them on a ratty bachelor chair beside the TV
and started going through them.

“Uh-oh,” Naomi murmured.

“What?”

“That. Watch. You’ll see.”

As instructed, Chloe watched in amazement as Nick picked up
one of the oddly shaped, gaily wrapped gifts and bashed himself in the forehead
with it. Grinning, he nodded and put it in a separate pile.

“I didn’t have time to check all these earlier,”
he told Jerry.

“He’s been doing that with every one of them,”
Nora whispered. “He said nobody got into the party with a…a…shoot,
what did he call it, Nadine?”

“A baby basher.”

Nora snapped her fingers. “Yup, that was it.”

“He wouldn’t let us put anything in boxes before
wrapping it, either,” Nadine added.

Chloe flashed on the monogrammed silver rattle from her
father and had to smile. This time, Steady Steadman was taking no chances.

“No boxes, huh? I guess that might have interfered with
his bash-detection device.” She tried hard not to giggle as Nick picked up
anther gift and, looking intensely serious, bonked himself on the side of the
head with it.

“My husband Rikk got kind of crazy like that, too,
right before our youngest was born,” Nadine confided. “I thought it
was kind of cute.”

All four sisters smiled fondly.

Behind them, Nick frowned at a purple-wrapped package and
walloped it over his head for a second time.
Must be a tough case
, Chloe
thought.

Nancy, the eldest sister, plunked her chin in her hand and
rolled her eyes. “He’s so protective of you and the baby. You’d almost
think Nick was the father, wouldn’t you?”

For the second time, silence descended. Dammit, did the CD
player have a Social Mortification detector, or what?

“Almost. Ha, ha,” Chloe choked out, strangling on
a bite of Nancy’s Italian cream cake. She managed to get her napkin to her mouth
seconds before causing a mascarpone cheese disaster.

“So!” Naomi slapped Chloe’s knee cheerfully. “Why
don’t you tell us all about your guy?”

“My guy?” she wheezed.

“Yes, tell us!” Nora urged. “We’d love to
know all about your mystery Marine, uhh…B-something…shoot, what was it
again, Nadine?”

Chloe devoutly hoped memory loss wasn’t an inescapable
consequence of motherhood. Poor Nora only had three children, but she couldn’t
remember her way out of a paper bag.

“Bruno,” Nadine supplied. She smiled at Chloe. “Yes,
do tell us all about him.”

“Arrgh!” In the kitchen, Nick slammed his forehead
on the refrigerator, gripping both sides hard enough to wobble the appliance. “I
can’t take it anymore, Red. It’s ‘Bruno this,’ and ‘Bruno that.’ ‘Bruno’s sooo
wonderful.’”

“I heard.” Red grabbed another carrot stick. “So
what are you going to do about it?”

“What am I going to do about it?”

“Yeah.”

Pound a new head-shaped dent in my Frigidaire.

Nah, that wouldn’t help.
Pound a new dent in Bruno
.