LITMIR.BIZ

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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,

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