Devon felt the same way about white wine, preferably a nice Napa Valley chardonnay, but she didn’t say so. Probably not so much as a bottle of wine in this entire house, she thought, as, in complete surrender to the inevitable, she poured herself a cup of steaming cocoa from the thermal carafe on the tray.

She was taking a cautious sip when her eyes collided with Eric’s across the rim of the cup. She gulped instead, and felt a delicious warmth spreading all through her insides-similar in effect to a slug of good brandy.

Brandy…yes. That’s what his eyes are like. Brandy.

Had he been watching her all that time, she wondered, with his mocking smile and whiskey eyes? Her heart skipped and jumped beneath her ribs, but she defiantly refused to let herself look away. She blew gently on her cocoa and stared back at him through the fog of rising steam.

“Speaking of snow days,” Lucy announced to the room at large, “the noontime weather report says the storm is supposed to be over by tomorrow. Should be ending late tonight.”

“Thank God,” Devon muttered, tearing her gaze away from Eric’s with a determined shake of her head. He and his father went back to untangling the strings of lights and bickering about whether to begin installing them at the top of the tree or the bottom.

Mike contemplated the end of the string he was holding. “Doesn’t this white one have to go at the top? For the star?”

“Okay,” Eric countered in a disgusted tone, “if you do that, what’re you gonna do with the plug? It’s got to hang all the way down the back of the tree. Shoot, you’re gonna need an extension cord just to reach the socket.”

“You’re going to have an extension cord, no matter what.”

“Of course,” said Lucy, looking thoughtful, “there’s no telling how long it’ll take them to get all the roads plowed…”

“What about you, Devon?” Eric was watching her again, with that curious and unnerving intensity she’d seen in his eyes before. “How do you do it-bottom up, or top down?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said dismissively, veiling her eyes with her lashes as she sipped cocoa. “I don’t usually have a tree, since I’m generally at my parents’ house for Christmas.”

“No tree?” Lucy sounded horrified.

“Okay,” said Eric, “so how do they do it?”

“How should I know?” Devon snapped. Why did she feel as though she were in the witness box, being cross-examined by a hostile prosecutor?

“You were there, weren’t you? When you were a kid? Don’t you remember-”

“No,” said Devon, seething with inexplicable anger, “I don’t.” It was too warm in that room, stifling, rather than cozy. Under her cashmere sweater, her skin felt damp and itchy.

“What I think is,” said Mike, “we should get an artificial tree.” That was met with a loud duet of protests that effectively broke the tension. He put up both hands, laden with lights, as though to shield himself from a shower of thrown objects. “No-wait-hear me out. That way we’d only have to put the lights on once, see? Then we just leave them on when we take the tree down.”

But nobody was taking him seriously, not even Devon. It was as impossible for her to imagine a fake tree in that farmhouse parlor as it would have been to envision herself serving cookies and hot cocoa to guests in her Los Angeles apartment.

And just like that she felt a wave of homesickness for her own apartment, for the serenity of its uncluttered furniture and neutral colors…its cool, quiet elegance, and sweeping city-view.

“I remember,” Lucy said with an air of amazement, “when we still used real candles on the tree.”

“Come on, Ma.”

“No-it’s true. It was when I was a little girl-I’ll bet Rhett would remember. Earl might have been too small. We had these little metal candleholders that you clipped onto the ends of the branches. Then there were special little candles that fit into the holders.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?” Devon asked, conscious of the century-old wood-frame house around her.

“They were only lit once,” Lucy explained. Her face was wistful, and her features blurred and softened with it so that she seemed almost to become that little girl she remembered. “That was Christmas Eve. They turned the lights out, Mama’d get her guitar, and everybody’d sing ‘Silent Night.’”

“Except you, I hope.” Leaving the light-stringing to his dad, Eric had moved close enough to his mother to give her an affectionate bump with his elbow. He threw Devon a grin and explained, “Mom can’t carry a tune to save her life.”

“Pop couldn’t, either,” Lucy ruefully confirmed. “Who do you think I got it from? And passed it on to Rose Ellen, poor thing. Thank goodness you got Mama’s voice, Eric-like Rhett and Earl. My brothers,” she explained for Devon’s benefit. “They used to sing with our mother-for church and weddings…community get-togethers, mostly.” She looked up at her son and gave him a light swat with the back of her hand. “And I did too sing. Nobody cares that you can’t carry a tune when you’re a child.”

“That’s true.” Eric sat on the arm of the couch and hitched himself half-around so he could reach for a handful of popcorn. “What about you, Devon?” He lifted an eyebrow, regarding her over one shoulder as his arm came within an eyelash of brushing hers. “You sing?”

Vaguely embarrassed by the question, she opened her mouth to answer it. And inexplicably couldn’t. She wanted to look away from him and found that she couldn’t do that either.

“That’s the kind of reaction you get from most adults when you ask that question,” Mike said kindly when Devon, at last, gave a helpless shrug. He paused to consider the arrangement of light strings on the tree. “I did a column about that once, years ago-it was after I’d gone to visit Ellie’s kindergarten classroom. Ask a bunch of five-year-olds if they can sing, and every hand goes up. Ask an adult and ninety percent will shrug and look embarrassed. It’s kind of too bad, really.”

Devon cleared her throat. “I never said I couldn’t sing.”

“Well, can you?” Eric’s eyes glinted teasingly. So close to her, she found their effect more than ever like swallowing straight whiskey.

She lifted her chin and glared back at him. “I do well enough.”

“Oh, yeah?” He tossed a kernel of popcorn into the air and caught it adroitly in his mouth. “So, let’s hear you. Sing something.”

“Eric!”

Devon gave an incredulous laugh. “Oh, sure, like I’m going to sing a solo right here!”

“A duet, then. I’ll sing with you.” He leaned back on one elbow, completely relaxed. His eyes caught hers and crinkled with smile lines. “I’ll bet we’d be good together,” he murmured under his breath, as though for her only.

Her breath made a surprised sibilance as she stared at him. What’s in that cocoa? she wanted to exclaim. Unless she was badly mistaken, she was almost certain he was flirting with her. In front of both his parents, for God’s sake.

In the next moment she was sure she was mistaken, that she was being overly sensitive, that she’d misjudged him. Again. Because Lucy was beaming at them both, hands clasped under her chin, and once again her eyes had a wistful shine.

“Oh, you know, I’ll bet you would be. It would be so nice to hear you two young people sing Christmas songs together. That’s always been one of my favorite things about Christmas-hearing the old carols. It makes me think of Mama and Papa, Christmases when the boys were both home-and when you and Ellie were kids, Eric-remember?”

The look she gave her son was suddenly fierce and accusing, and her voice had grown husky. “We’ve missed you so much, Eric. These last ten years-”

“I’m here now, Mom.” He spoke softly, but even from where she sat, Devon could feel the tension radiating from his body.

“It’s getting late,” Mike interjected quietly from across the room. He was peering out the windows. “Time for chores.”

But Lucy wasn’t going to be forestalled. “For how long?” she said in a choked voice, transferring her fierce and accusing glare from Eric to Devon. “Until the roads are cleared?”

“Lucy-”

“Mom-”

“I’m sorry,” Devon began. She put down her cup and was appalled to hear it clatter on the tabletop. “It’s not my-”

“Please let them stay.” With the spriteliness of a little brown bird, Lucy hopped off the recliner and came to take Devon’s hands in both of hers. “Devon, why not? At least until Christmas. It’s only a few days…”

She’s so small, and yet there’s so much energy, so much power in her, Devon thought. Eric’s mother was a tiny human dynamo incongruously wrapped in a comic-strip cat. She shook her head, feeling dazed. “I can’t-”

“You stay, too.” She threw her husband a brief, silent plea. “We’d love to have you-wouldn’t we, Mike? So, why don’t you stay for Christmas-all of you?”

Chapter 9

T he silence in the room seemed absolute. When, Devon wondered, as three pairs of eyes focused on her with varying degrees of intensity, had that cozy parlor begun to seem to her more like a hostile courtroom?

She freed her hands from Lucy’s grasp and hitched herself uneasily on the couch’s cushions. Beside her, she could feel Eric’s body tense and come upright on the arm. In preparation for his mother’s defense? she wondered.

Wait a minute, she wanted to shout, I’m not the villain, here, dammit! I’m not the one who took a baby girl and fled the jurisdiction in defiance of a judge’s order.

“What day is it?” she demanded, her eyes darting around the room as if the answer must be somewhere in plain sight.

“December twenty-first,” Mike supplied.

“There, you see?” Lucy straightened and tucked one wing of her chin-length hair behind her ear with an unmistakable air of triumph. “Nothing’s going to happen until after Christmas anyway.” She said that as if it were a done deal, as if the decision had been hers and hers alone to make. “You might as well stay here-spend Christmas with us. Your parents will understand, won’t they, if you miss one Christmas with them?”