I'll Be Home for Christmas Read online

  And for what? So everyone in her life could be happy except for her?

  “I like him,” Gabi said, surprised to hear how staunch she sounded.

  “Everybody likes Joe. He’s hot and funny and kind and he has an uncanny knack for making money without even trying. But he has a hard time sticking with something long-term. Like relationships.”

  Gabi’s pulse quickened. “I see.”

  “All I’m saying is that women go crazy for him, but then they think they can change him. Joe is who he is, but at least he’s authentic.”

  “Um … thanks?”

  “I just thought you should know. In case …”

  “Good grief, Katie, I’m only here for three weeks. I’m not going to fall in love with your brother.”

  “Oh good.” Katie sighed with relief. “Because you both are awesome people and I’d hate to see either one of you get hurt.”

  Where was this coming from? What in the heck had Joe said in that text he’d sent his sister?

  “If you decide to … you know … start something with him, just understand that it can’t really go anywhere,” Katie continued.

  “I don’t want it to go anywhere.” Except to bed. That thought startled Gabi because it was true. She wanted to bed Joe Cheek. “I’m not looking for true love.”

  “Well then …” Katie gave a narrow chuckle. “What are you looking for?”

  She wanted to find herself. Discover what she really wanted out of life. And maybe, if the opportunity presented itself, to have great headboard-banging sex along the way.

  Joe.

  She was looking for a guy like Joe to open her up to her own sexuality. A guy who could curl her toes with one long, sizzling kiss.

  And even though she’d known him only the better part of an afternoon, she got him. All that laid-back charm, all that overprotective caring, all that passion simmering beneath the surface just waiting to bubble over like hot soup on a cold day. She wanted those calloused palms on her naked body, wanted to grip his broad shoulders in the throes of mind-blowing intercourse, wanted to melt into those smoldering dark eyes.

  She wanted, and that in itself was a miracle. She wanted something eagerly. And that was a wonderful first step.

  “Me,” she told Katie. “I’m looking for me.”

  “That’s good.” Thankfully, Katie let the topic drop, and shifted gears. “Are you figuring out the yurt?”

  “Joe’s helping me.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “Yes, I’ve got a few about your volunteer work?” Before they had switched places, Katie had asked Gabi if she minded assuming her duties for the charities where Katie volunteered. Gabi hadn’t minded at all. It would give her something to do and make her feel useful.

  “Shoot,” Katie said.

  “The organizations where you volunteer are expecting me, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Gabi consulted the instruction list that Katie had e-mailed her. “I’m meeting with your aunt Belinda tomorrow morning about the annual toy drive.”

  “That’s right, and don’t forget that on Thursdays I’ve been volunteering at the free clinic.”

  “I hope I don’t disappoint,” Gabi fretted.

  “Don’t worry, they’re happy to get all the help they can get.”

  “I feel guilty that I don’t have any volunteer work to keep you busy on your vacation,” Gabi said. “Law school ate up all my time.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep plenty busy getting a suntan and driving your convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway. And hey, now that you’ve ditched law school, you’ll have time for plenty of volunteer work.”

  Gabi liked that idea. She liked it a lot. There was a whole world of opportunities just waiting for her. For the first time in … well, for the first time ever she felt as if she was in charge of her own life.

  And it felt magnificent.

  In the light from the stars, Joe sat on the front porch, his cell phone resting on his knee after he’d texted his sister to ask her if she was in California.

  It had been an easy guess. He’d seen the “Eureka!” sticker on Gabi’s luggage tag, and put two and two together. Katie might have been peeved that he’d figured out where she was, although he didn’t see why she’d wanted to keep her location a secret.

  He’d been sitting here in the dark, trying to figure out exactly what it was he felt for Gabi Preston. He had not experienced anything quite like this before. What was he feeling? Curiosity, yes ma’am. Sexual attraction, no doubt about that. But there was something else, something more, and it stumped him.

  The light was on in the yurt and an image of Gabi getting undressed for bed flashed in his head, even though it was only six-thirty and far too early for sleep.

  In his mind’s eye, he imagined her pulling that fluffy tit-hugging sweater over her head, unbuttoning that prim white blouse with slow deliberate movements, running her fingers through her tousled hair to tame it. Her bra peeping out from the folds of her open blouse, the swell of her breasts spilling over the lacy edge. Blood pounded from his heart to his groin.

  It had been so long since he’d been with a woman. So long since anyone had stirred him the way Gabrielle Preston did.

  “Don’t go there.” He growled under his breath, fisted his hands, and got up.

  He did not need the picture of a naked woman in his head when he had no outlet for his urges. He’d known from the second he laid eyes on her in Perks that she spelled trouble.

  Mainly because of his body’s instant reaction to her, coming in hot and swift and hard. In regard to women, he’d discovered his body was a champ at leading him astray.

  Straight and narrow.

  That was his new path. He’d taken way too many wide, twisty turns in his twenty-nine years. Part of it had simply been youthful rebellion. As the second youngest in a family of six children, he’d had to do something to stand out, and making up his own rules had been Joe’s MO. He’d had a hell of a lot of fun, but the mistakes he’d made still haunted him.

  He paused at the front door. Despite his intentions to the contrary, he couldn’t help casting another gaze back across the field toward the yurt.

  Gabi.

  She had a lot of courage. A city girl like her swapping houses with Katie sight unseen and staying in the yurt once she saw what she’d gotten. He admired her spirit. And those gorgeous blue eyes that sucked a man right in. Not to mention that spunkiness that made him hanker to stick around.

  But sticking around had never been his long suit.

  The toughest part? She was right across the road. Practically arm’s reach. And clearly, she was not used to country life. She’d need help. Chopping firewood. Taking care of Katie’s animals. Navigating the eccentricities of yurt living.

  Chasing off those hiccups …

  “Stop it,” he muttered. “Just stop.” Uh-huh. Kinda hard for a guy whose childhood nickname was GoGo.

  He wiped his boots on the welcome mat, went inside the house, and hung his coat on the rack by the door. His cell phone rang and when he saw the name on the caller ID, he was tempted not to answer, but he knew from sad experience that she would only call back. Repeatedly.

  Might as well get this conversation over with.

  Grunting, he pushed accept.

  “Hey Joe Cool,” the sexy voice purred.

  He ran a palm up the nape of his neck, suppressed another grunt. He really wanted to hang up. Would have hung up if it weren’t for Casey.

  “Hello, Tatum,” he said, keeping his voice steady, noncommittal.

  “How have you been?” she asked, and he could almost see her gnawing her thumbnail.

  “What do you need?” he asked brusquely, not cutting her any slack. He did feel some sympathy for Tatum because of the awful things she’d suffered in her childhood, but as an adult she’d made lots of bad choices, and she kept making them, and he wasn’t about to let down his guard. Casey was the only reason he still put
up with her.

  “Can’t a girl just call to say hi?”

  A regular woman? Sure. His ex-wife? Never. Joe dropped down on the couch, stretched his legs out across the coffee table.

  “Joe? You still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For a minute I thought we got cut off. You sound …” She cleared her throat. “Different.”

  Maybe that’s because he was different from the twenty-year-old guy who’d married eighteen-year-old Tatum at the justice of the peace because she was pregnant.

  “How’s Casey?” he asked because that’s who he cared about.

  “She’s fine. Doin’ real good in school. Don’t know where she got her brains.”

  “I’m glad to hear she’s doing well. Is Casey getting the money I send to your aunt every month?” He sent the stipend to Tatum’s aunt because he wasn’t dumb enough to send it straight to his ex-wife.

  “Yes, yes, but Auntie is pretty stingy with it. She won’t give me a penny even though I need it for things like gas.”

  “That money is for Casey.”

  “I know. It’s just that how am I supposed to make sure she gets to school if I don’t have gas in my car?”

  He closed his eyes, swallowed past the irritation coating his throat. Only the thought of Casey’s well-being made him say, “How much do you need?”

  “You know I wouldn’t ask if I had any other choice. See—”

  “I don’t need the story.” There was always a story, much of it exaggerated, if not downright fictitious. “Bottom-line it for me.”

  “Five hundred?” she asked on a hopeful note.

  Joe wanted to tell her to find some other sap to bleed dry, but he and Tatum had a long, complicated history and he couldn’t help feeling partially responsible for the shape she was in. He was the one who’d taken her out of the safe fishbowl of Twilight, and let her loose in the world.

  Once upon a time, he and Tatum had a lot of fun together. They’d been a lot alike. They both had ADHD and problems concentrating in high school. They’d been restless rebels—playing hooky, hanging out with a sketchy crowd, indulging in underage drinking, getting up to mischief.

  “Peas in a pod,” people said.

  And Joe had mistaken the ease of their sameness as being something more meaningful than it was.

  But, while they had similar temperaments, one place where they differed was their upbringing. Tatum came from a broken home. Her abusive biological father had abandoned the family when Tatum was small, and her mother had gone through a string of unsuccessful relationships. Whereas Joe came from a large, loving, stable family. He had tons of people he could trust and depend on, but no one had Tatum’s back.

  Except for him.

  Joe had to admit that being her hero appealed to his ego, at least in the beginning. But her flirtatious nature and volatile personality—up one minute, deeply moody the next—started to wear on him.

  When Joe graduated from high school, a friend of his who was working construction in Las Vegas offered him a job. Eager to see the world, Joe accepted. He couldn’t lie. He’d enjoyed his newfound freedom and he’d broken things off with Tatum so he could explore his options.

  Three months later, Tatum had shown up on his doorstep, tearful and shattered, telling him stories about her mother’s new husband who’d raped her and her mother refused to believe her. Joe’s impulse had been to drive home to Twilight and confront the son of a bitch, but Tatum begged him not to.

  “He’ll kill you,” she’d said, looking genuinely terrified. “He’s been in prison.”

  Feeling like he didn’t have much of a choice, he’d let her move in with him and they’d taken up where they’d left off.

  But Vegas was toxic for Tatum. While he worked, she couldn’t find a job and fell in with the wrong crowd. She dabbled in drugs and got busted for shoplifting. He caught her in lies, and when he learned she’d been stealing money from him, he told her they were finished and she’d have to find somewhere else to live.

  That’s when she broke the news that she was pregnant. She begged him to take her back amid promises of changing her ways. He’d been young and thrilled with the idea of becoming a dad, and his parents had raised him to accept the consequences of his actions. He’d gotten Tatum pregnant, and it was time to step up to the plate. When she agreed to counseling, he’d married her.

  Then he recalled the worst day of his life.

  Christmas Day. Eight years ago. He and Tatum were living in the efficiency apartment over his parents’ garage, celebrating their baby’s first Christmas. Casey had been more interested in crawling inside the boxes and chewing on bows than the baby toys. He’d been so damn happy, snatching the decorations away from Casey as fast as she could stick them in her mouth. The easygoing kid looked up at him, grinned, and went for another no-no.

  “Our daughter is freaking adorable.” He laughed and looked up at Tatum, thinking her accidental pregnancy had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. She stood there in a pink housecoat over her nightgown, biting her bottom lip, arms crossed over her chest, scratching the back of one calf with her other foot. His breath stilled, and instantly he’d known something was wrong.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Casey isn’t yours.”

  Casey isn’t yours. The words that shattered his world. Joe heaved the sigh he’d been trying to hold back. So much murky water under that bridge.

  Over the phone, Tatum cleared her throat. “The money?”

  “I’ll send it through PayPal,” he said.

  “You’re the best.”

  “Tatum?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take care of Casey …” He paused, not wanting to give her any kind of false hope about their relationship, but wanting her to know that her well-being was important for her daughter, he finally added, “… and yourself.”

  “I’m doin’ my best, Joe. I’m doin’ my best.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.” But her best was never good enough, was it? And when it came to Casey’s welfare, Tatum’s “best” made him nervous as hell.

  “Um … Joe.”

  “What else?”

  “I’ve got Casey’s Christmas on layaway at Wal-Mart and if I don’t make a payment by Tuesday, I’ll lose the money I put down.”

  “How much?”

  “Four hundred dollars.”

  He blew out his breath. “That’s a lot of money for kids’ toys.”

  “It’s for clothing too.”

  “That’s what the money I send your aunt is for.”

  “Kids grow quick, Joe. Seasons change. And she’s getting to the age where she cares about clothes and wants pretty things.”

  “Which Wal-Mart? I’ll go make the payment.”

  “Umm, could you just send the money to me? I’m—”

  “No,” he said. “You want the things out of layaway tell me where it is.”

  Tatum hemmed and hawed. “Never mind. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Are you coming to Twilight for the holidays? Will I get to see her?” Joe asked, his throat tightening.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Tatum said. “She really likes you and it’s confusing when you pop in and out of her life. Plus, she’s a total brat for weeks after she sees you. You spoil her.”

  Frustration punched a hole in his chest. He wanted to see Casey something fierce, but was Tatum right? Did his infrequent appearances in Casey’s life hurt more than help?

  A two-knuckled knock sounded on the front door, and before Joe could get up to answer it, the door swung open and two of his older brothers and his brother-in-law walked in.

  “Gotta go.” He grunted and hung up so he wouldn’t say something he’d regret.

  The first man through the door was the second oldest Cheek brother, Mac. He was an electrical engineer, newly married, with a baby on the way. His wife, Coco, was a caramel-skinned beauty with a lyrical Jamaican a
ccent and a talent for finding and restoring vintage cars and flipping them for a tidy profit. Usually, Mac was too busy building his own house in his spare time to hang out with his brothers, but tonight the womenfolk were at their annual Christmas cookie swap. No men allowed. And the husbands were at loose ends without their mates.

  Chalk one up for the single life. Joe was free to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, and that’s the way he liked it.

  “Please tell me you are not talking to your ex-wife again.” Mac groaned. “You’ve got that sheepish look on your face that you get when you talk to Tatum.”

  Behind Mac came Sam. Sam was the closest in age to Joe. He was a veterinarian and the handsomest of the Cheek brothers. Sam had coal black hair and movie-star good looks, but he also had a ragged scar across his face that was a result of being mauled by the mountain lion he’d tried to help when he was in Boy Scouts. He was married to actress Emma Parks and they were raising their four-year-old daughter, Lauren, and Sam’s eleven-year-old stepson, Charlie, from his first marriage to an army nurse who’d been killed in the Middle East.

  Sam grabbed Joe’s cell phone from the arm of the couch and checked his caller ID. “Tatum,” he confirmed, and nodded at Mac.

  “Seriously?” Mac shook his head. “Are we gonna have to roll you up in a rug like we did when you were a kid when we wanted you to be still so we could talk some sense into you?”

  “Casey needs me,” Joe mumbled, stuffing the cell phone into his back pocket. That little girl was the only reason he put up with Tatum. He simply could not turn his back on Casey.

  “I can’t believe Tatum has the stones to keep asking you for help,” Dean said. Dean was an affable, former high school football star who was married to Joe’s older sister, Jenny. They ran a local B&B called the Merry Cherub and had three kids under the age of four. They’d had fertility problems, but once they’d started having children they were unstoppable. “After the epic bait and switch she pulled.”

  Yeah, well, finding out that Casey wasn’t his daughter didn’t affect Joe’s love for the child. In fact, it kind of broke his heart when on Casey’s first Christmas Tatum confessed that Casey wasn’t his child and that she was leaving him to go live with Casey’s real father.