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then, Andy, the youngest of the Roman sisters, burst into the kitchen. “Red alert,” she cried. “Hunky contractor guy has just landed in the dining room.”

      Cris caught Jorge looking at her knowingly. “I think that your allergy medication has arrived,” he told her just before he turned back to his work.

      Maybe she should have sent a tray to Shane’s work area, Cris thought. Too late now.

      “He’s an old friend,” she protested to Jorge, not wanting the man to think that anything was going on between Shane and her. She’d dated once in the five years since Mike’s death and had vowed never again.

      Everyone at the inn had watched her one attempt at dating go down in flames when she’d started seeing a man who, it swiftly became evident, wasn’t fit to polish the boots of Mike’s shadow. In addition, he tried to isolate her from her family and felt she wasn’t being strict enough with Ricky. That had been the last straw.

      After that little fiasco, she’d promised herself she would never date again—and if by some wild chance she did, she wouldn’t let anyone at the inn know, so when that, too, blew up on her, she wouldn’t be the object of sympathetic looks and peppy comments that were meant to raise her morale but only succeeded in lowering it.

      “An old friend,” Jorge echoed, then nodded. “The best kind to have.”

      Cris frowned, reading between the lines. “Don’t patronize me, Jorge.”

      He frowned at the unfamiliar word. “I do not know what that means, but I am fairly sure I am not doing what you asked me not to do,” he told her. And then he became very, very serious. “Do not let one mishap make you close yourself off,” he warned. “Breathe with your whole body and soul,” he counseled, obviously building on the allergy excuse she’d given him to explain why she was sighing.

      Cris’s hands were flying as she chopped celery stalks into tiny pieces. The staccato noise went to double time as she told her assistant, “Tell you what. You take care of your body and soul, Jorge, and I’ll take care of mine. Deal?”

      “But of course,” Jorge agreed. “I would never try to argue with you.”

      He wasn’t agreeing at all, she thought. His ironic tone told her as much. But she knew that if she said something to him about it, Jorge would simply feign innocence and somehow turn the whole thing into an object lesson with her being its unwilling recipient.

      She would just have to get used to people looking out for her and worrying about her, she told herself. Everyone at the inn was like family, whether they shared DNA or not.

      “Why do you not take the cause of your allergies his dinner?” Jorge suggested, nodding at the tray she had prepared. “I will stay here and watch over the rest of the cooking for you.”

      His offer was sweet, but if she accepted, she would be attesting that this man was special, someone apart from the others she helped. She was in no way ready for that and in no way was she even remotely searching for it.

      “I don’t need you to watch over anything for me,” she informed Jorge. “Because I’m not going anywhere.”

      “That much is true,” he concurred far too readily. “Unless, of course, you wake up and see that spending your life without someone there beside you really is like not going anywhere,” he told her pointedly. “It is not even really living.”

      “I’m beginning to think that working in the inn’s kitchen is the wrong place for you, Jorge. You should be working in a Chinese restaurant, baking fortune cookies and stuffing them with your words of wisdom,” she told him with a laugh.

      She gazed at the man who had been her assistant off and on for the past year and a half. She knew he meant well. But at the same time, he was making things difficult for her.

      “Look, I know you believe you’re helping, but I’ve got to find my own way through things—without help. Okay?”

      “I am just making sure you are able to see the road ahead of you,” he said. “A lot of people lose their way.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind,” she promised.

      The next moment, she left the kitchen and took a peek into the dining room.

      Shane was sitting at the table.

      And Ricky was sitting on a booster seat right beside him.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CARRYING A TRAY WITH the dinner she’d prepared for Shane, Cris made her way over to the table. She kept her eyes fixed on her son as she approached.

      “Aren’t you supposed to be with Grandpa right now?” she asked Ricky. Shifting her eyes, she looked apologetically at Shane as she set his dinner in front of him. “I’m really sorry about this. He usually knows better than to bother people.”

      “I’m sure he does,” Shane responded with amusement. “Which is why he’s not bothering me.” He glanced in Ricky’s direction. “We were just having a man-to-man talk about the holidays.”

      “Holidays?” Cris repeated, a little confused at the reference. Just what was Ricky bending Shane’s ear about? “Thanksgiving?” she guessed since it was the next holiday to come up.

      “No, Christmas!” Ricky corrected her with all the enthusiasm of a child looking forward to what he considered the absolutely best time of the year.

      “Inside voice, Ricky. You know you’re supposed to use your inside voice when you’re inside,” Cris reminded her son, glancing around to see if anyone in the dining area appeared annoyed at the high pitch her son’s voice had reached.

      At this hour, only half the tables were filled. The rest of the inn’s guests would be by later, unless they were eating out. She was relieved to see that none of the guests there seemed to have taken note of the exuberant boy.

      “Sorry, Mama,” Ricky said, lowering his voice by two octaves.

      That minor issue out of the way, Cris addressed the one that Ricky had brought up. “Okay, what about Christmas?”

      Ricky instantly dove into his explanation. “He said—”

      She needed to nip this in the bud. “It’s Mr. McCallister, not ‘he,’ Ricky. You know better than that,” Cris said, then tactfully suggested, “and why don’t you let Mr. McCallister speak for himself?”

      Rather than become crestfallen because he had to be quiet, the boy grinned and said, “Sure,” then turned to look at his hero. “Tell Mama what you said.”

      “Yes, please, by all means,” Cris added, “‘Tell Mama.’”

      Shane grinned at the reference and something inside her stomach fluttered.

      “Well, I hope I didn’t tread on any toes,” Shane prefaced before he went on to fill Ricky’s mother in on what he and her son had talked about. “But I told Ricky that I liked the smell and appearance of a real Christmas tree.”

      Unable to contain himself any longer, Ricky all but crowed, “See, Mama? Him, too.”

      Cris sighed. “Mr. McCallister agrees with me, too,” she said, rephrasing her son’s words.

      “He does?” Ricky asked, beaming like a starburst. “Then it’s okay? We can get a real tree again?” He took her answer for granted, assuming that it would be positive.

      Rather than argue with Ricky about whether they would get a real tree to celebrate Christmas, she slanted a glance toward Shane. She supposed that he deserved some sort of an explanation.

      “Putting up an artificial tree instead of a real one is more practical,” Cris told him.

      All the other years, they’d had a tall, real tree standing in the main room. But escalating costs was a practical consideration that

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