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Liar, liar. You like being around Joe.
With a jerk of her head, she silenced the snide little voice and dislodged Joe’s finger. Her chin tingled, as if that phantom touch lingered warm against her skin.
Bearlike in his red-and-green plaid shirt, Moon waited for them to join him. “Well, then, you folks ready to check out?”
He held up a red plastic ball made of two hoops and topped with mistletoe and a green yarn bow. “Free kissing ball with each tree.” Moon wagged the kissing ball in front of her until she thought her eyes would cross.
Resolutely, she kept her gaze fixed on the tip of Moon’s Santa hat and told herself she was merely imagining the heat lapping at her, washing from Joe to her, and wrapping her in warmth and thoughts of more than kissing.
“Somethin’ special for old Moon’s customers, this is. And we got treats in the shed. Cookies. Apple cider. The boy can have a cup of hot chocolate while I bundle up this beauty. So come along, y’all.” A trail of brown needles followed Moon’s progress as he herded them forward. “Good stuff, cocoa. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, young fella?”
Oliver ducked before Moon’s beefy hand landed on his head. “Maybe. Maybe not.” He trudged after Moon and the tree.
Moon grinned back. “Shucks, kid. Everybody likes hot chocolate.”
Oliver planted one new shoe after the other, following Moon and hanging one hand tight to the edge of Joe’s pocket. “I only like it the way my daddy makes it. Out of the brown can and stirred on the stove. And only with little marshmallows.” Head down, ignoring Moon, Oliver adjusted his shorter stride to Joe’s, matching left foot to left
The boy needed physical contact with his father. Gabrielle slowed and let the two of them walk slightly ahead of her, a team, just as the boy had stressed. Everybody else on the outside.
Her curiosity stirred again as she watched the two, one rangy and dark, a lean length of man, the other, short and dark, a stubby child with eyes only for his father.
“Where’s your tree, Gabby?” Joe stopped and looked over his shoulder at her. “Oliver and I’ll give you a hand with it while Moon bundles ours.”
“Umm.” She saw something tall and green from the corner of her eye and pointed. “That one.”
“That one?” Not believing her, Joe stared at the ratty tree. The one Oliver had insisted on was three good shakes away from mulch, but Gabby’s tree—“You sure?” He frowned at her. “This one is, uh, well—”
“It’s a terrific tree. It’ll look wonderful with all the old ornaments.” Gabby tilted her face up at him. Her off-center smile filled her face. Christmas lights sparkled in her mist-dampened soft brown hair, and he wanted to touch that one spot near her cheek where a strand fluttered with the breeze against her neck.
The look of her at that moment, all shiny and sweet and innocently hopeful, symbolized everything he’d come back to find in Bayou Bend, a town he’d hated and couldn’t wait to leave. Like the star at the top of a Christmas three, Gabby sparkled like a beacon in the darkness of Moon’s tree lot.
“Come on, Daddy. We got to go.” Oliver pulled anxiously on his hand.
Still watching the glisten of lights in the mass of her brown hair, Joe cleared his suddenly thick throat. “Right. But we’ll help Gabby first, Oliver. Because we’re stronger.”
“She don’t need our help. Moon can wrap her tree.”
“Mr. Tibo to you, squirt.”
“She looks strong enough to me.” Oliver scowled and kicked at the ground.
Joe scanned Gabby’s slight form, the gentle curves of her hips under some red, touch-me, feel-me material, the soft slope of her breasts beneath her blouse, breasts that trembled with her breath as she caught his glance. His gaze lingering on her, he spoke to his son. “Well, maybe she is strong in spite of the fact that she looks like a good sneeze would tip her over. Let’s say helping out’s a neighborly kind of thing to do, okay?”
“Neighbors?”
He would have sworn her breathy voice feathered right down each vertebra under his naked skin. Even as a teenager, her voice had had that just-climbed-out-of-bed sigh. He wondered if she knew its effect on males.
Her voice was the first thing he’d noticed about her back when he’d moved to Bayou Bend as a surly high school troublemaker.
Even then, the soft breathiness of Gabby O’Shea’s voice held something sweet and kind that soothed the savage creature raging inside him.
Seeing him on the sidewalk outside the grocery store where he’d lied his way into a part-time job, she’d smiled at him in his black leather jacket and tight jeans and said, “Hi, Joe Carpenter. Welcome to Bayou Bend.” Her voice slid over the syllables and held him entranced even as he folded his arms and gave her a distant, disinterested nod.
At seventeen, a year older than his classmates and new to this small community, cool Joe Carpenter didn’t have time to waste on thirteen-year-old skinny girls with kind voices, not when high school girls fell all over one another offering to give him anything he wanted. Thirteen-year-old junior high girls were off-limits, not worth wasting time on.
But, touching that bitter, angry place he’d closed off to the world, her voice made him remember her over the next two years as she grew into a young woman, made him lift his head in baffled awareness whenever he heard that soft voice reminding him all the world wasn’t hard and mean and nasty.
And now, even years after he’d fled Bayou Bend, her voice sent his pulse into overdrive with its just-got-out-of-bed breathiness.
“We’re going to be neighbors?”
He shook his head, clearing his thoughts as she repeated her question. “Yeah, Gabby. All of us. You. Me. Oliver. We’re going to be neighbors. I bought the Chandlers’ house. Down the block from your place.”
“Oh.” Her hair whipped against his shoulder, tangled in the fabric of his jacket, pulled free as she turned toward the tree she’d chosen. “I hadn’t heard.” With two hands, she lifted her tree and thumped it up and down on the ground a couple of times.
He could have driven a pickup truck through the spaces between the branches, but at least her tree didn’t drop needles like a cry for help.
“We’re living in a hotel.” Oliver tugged him toward Gabby’s tree and checked it out critically. “For now. With a indoor swimming pool. I like the hotel.”
“You’re going to have a tree in the hotel?” Gabby’s quick glance at him was puzzled. “That’s nice, but—”
“A friend’s letting us store the tree for a day or two.We’re moving into our house on Tuesday.” Joe watched as her eyes widened, flicked away from his.
“Ah.” She touched the branch. “Tuesday. You’ll be busy. Do you need some—” She stopped, just as she had before she’d issued her invitation.
Help was what he thought she almost offered before she caught herself.
She was uneasy with him. Edgy. Aware of him.
He took a deep breath. Nice, that awareness.
With one hand still wrapped around Joe’s, Oliver poked his head under one of the branches. “This is a okay tree. Not as good as ours, though.”
Joe inhaled, ready to scold Oliver, to say something, anything, because the kid had a mouth on him. But then Gabby’s laughing hazel eyes stopped him. Her mouth was all pursed up as if she was about to bust out laughing. He shrugged.
“No problem. And Oliver’s right.” She gasped as his son glowered at her. “His tree is better. In fact, a few minutes earlier, we were negotiating which one of us was going to walk away with it.” Her expression told him not to sweat the small stuff.
At least that’s what he thought it meant.
“Right, Oliver?”
“We didn’t nogosh—didn’t do that thing you said,” his son, stubborn as ever, insisted. “It was my tree ’cause I seen it first. Me and her settled that.”
“Yes, we did,” Gabby confirmed, smiling down at Oliver.
Joe ran a hand through his hair. Should he make Oliver give up their tree to Gabby? Was that the right thing to do? Hell, what did he know? He was the last person to try and teach a kid about manners and being a good neighbor and—
This daddy business didn’t come with instructions. Wasn’t like putting a bicycle together. More like flying by the seat of your pants, he was beginning to see. He didn’t think he’d ever get the hang of it.
And he wasn’t used to having a small recorder around, copying his words, imitating his ways, watching everything he did.
The responsibility made him lie awake at night, his blood running cold with the sure knowledge that he wasn’t father material, while Oliver’s warm neck rested against the crook of his arm.
“I like this tree, Joe,” Gabby said gently, as if she could read his thoughts.
Her voice warmed the chill creeping through him. Scrubbing his scalp hard, he stopped his spinning thoughts. “Fine, Gabby. If that’s the one you want.”
“Oh, it definitely is.” Her laugh rippled through the air. “It will be absolutely perfect for Dad and me.”
“Whatever you say. Come on, Oliver. You take that branch and haul it up to your shoulder.”
“’Course.” His son puffed out a biceps you could almost see without a microscope. “Because I’m strong.”
“I can see you really are,” Gabby said admiringly, her expression tender as she looked down at his grumpy son.
God. His son.
Once more that weight settled over him. The responsibility. The constant fear that he’d mess up. But he’d asked for this responsibility, gone looking for it, in fact. He would do what he had to do.
“Ready, Oliver?” Joe heaved the tree off its temporary stand.
“Sure.” Oliver clamped onto the assigned branch with both hands. “This is easy.” His whole body was hidden by the branch held tightly in his grip.
“Can you see?” Gabby’s question brought Oliver’s attention back to her.
“I can see my daddy’s behind.”
“A guiding light, huh? So to speak.”
This time Joe was sure he heard a strangled laugh underneath her words.
“Watch it, smarty-pants,” he muttered to her as she walked beside Oliver. “Nothing good happens to smart alecks.”
“Who? Me?” Her hair glittered and glistened, shimmered with her movements in the damp air.
“Oh, sure. You have that butter-won’t-melt-in-your-mouth look to you, Gabby. Even in eighth grade, you looked as if you were headed straight for the convent. Still do, in fact.” He lifted one eyebrow and felt satisfaction as her face flamed pink. “But I know better. That nifty red skirt gives you away, you know. That skirt’s an invitation to sin, sweet pea.”
She sped up her steps, trying to pass him.
“You’re wicked, Gabby, that’s what you are.” He liked the flustered look she threw him. “Wicked Gabby with the innocent eyes and bedroom voice.”
Her mouth fell open even as she danced to his other side.
He liked keeping her off balance. One of these days, if he ever had the time, he’d have to figure out why he liked pushing her buttons. Always had. “You’re a bad girl, Gabby.” He waggled a finger in a mock scold. “Santa’s not coming down your chimney this year, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, stop it, you fool,” she sputtered, finally darting past him with a laugh. “You’re incorrigible, Joe, that’s what you are.”
“Shoot, everybody knows that.”
“What’s corgibull?” Oliver planted his feet firmly in place, stopping the procession. He stuck his head up from behind the branch. “And why are you and her laughing? What’s so funny?”
“Your daddy is funning with me. He’s making very inappropriate jokes,” Gabby said primly, digging in her wallet and sending Joe a sideways scolding look as she dragged out money for the tree.
“Yeah?” Oliver stuck his fist on a nonexistent hip and rushed to Joe’s defense. “My daddy’s ’propriate.”
“Oliver’s right, Gabby.” Joe tightened his mouth. “I’m very appropriate. Especially—”
“Uncle,” she said, her eyes gleaming with laughter and something else that made Joe want to step closer and see for himself what shifted in the depths of those changeable eyes.
But he didn’t.
Getting too close to Gabrielle O’Shea would be one of the stupidest moves in a lifetime filled with mistakes.
“I give up, Joe. Let me pay for this dratted tree and get home. Dad’s probably wondering what sinkhole opened up and swallowed me.”
Joe stood the tree against a pole.
Pine needles in his hair and all over his clothes, Oliver stomped up beside him.
“Stay with Gabby, Oliver, while I lug this tree over to Moon.”
Mutiny glowered back at him.
“It’s polite, son. To provide ladies with an escort.” Feeling like a fool, Joe didn’t dare look at Gabby. She’d be laughing her head off at him. Him. Giving etiquette lessons to a kid. What on earth was the world coming to?
When he turned around, though, she wasn’t laughing. Her face had gone all blurry and kissable, and he couldn’t figure out what he’d done to make her look at him the way she was.
If they’d been alone, he would have kissed her for sure. Would have stepped right up to her, wrapped his arms around her narrow waist and given in to the itch to see what that shiny blouse felt like under his hands.
No question about it. He wanted to kiss her more than he’d wanted anything for himself in a long while.
Instead, ignoring the warning alarms in his brain, the voice screeching Stupid! Stupid! he gave in to the lesser temptation and slicked back the curl of hair that had been tantalizing him for the last fifteen minutes.
Against the back of his hand, her hair was slippery like the silk of her blouse. Against his palm, the slim column of her neck was night-and-mist cool. For a long moment she stood there, not moving, just breathing, hazel eyes turning a rich, deep green, jewels shining in the darkness as she stared at him. He curled his palm around her nape and dipped his head.
Well, he’d never laid claim to sainthood.
Against the end of his finger, her pulse fluttered and sang to him, a siren call.
And beside him, clinging like a limpet, his son leaned, small and cranky and utterly dependent on him.
The strains of “O Holy Night” drifted to him. Heated by her body and nearness, the scent of Gabby, so close, so close, rose to him. Surrounded by scent and sound, he forgot everything except the woman in front of him.
Forgot the silenced alarms in his brain.
Forgot responsibility.
Forgot everything.
