This Holiday Magic Read online

  Renee gave him an “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea” look.

  His hopes soared. She would decline and then he wouldn’t have to worry about Keisha’s bad influence on Kelly. At eight, Keisha was just the right age to impress a six-year-old, and that influence boded ill based on what he’d seen so far.

  “You know what?” Renee said. “We’d love to come bake cookies with you. What time?”

  Trey could have kicked himself for letting his dormant libido get the best of him. Putting on a smile to hide his dismay at having to host Keisha, he named a time.

  With a finger wave, Renee said farewell to both him and Kelly.

  Still standing, he watched her head down the aisle of the craft store. Her perfectly rounded behind and legs encased in tights called to him.

  “Mercy,” he muttered, still watching the sway of her hips.

  “Thank you for volunteering, sir,” he heard someone say.

  “Daddy?”

  Trey glanced down at Kelly. She was busy on her next snowflake.

  “What is it, princess?” he said.

  “Come on now. Don’t be shy, sir. We all want to see your handiwork.”

  Trey glanced up. Was the macramé instructor talking to him?

  “Go ahead, Daddy. Show everybody,” Kelly urged, practically bouncing in her seat. “You stood up when she asked if anyone wanted to show off their new skills.”

  New skills?

  What the…?

  He glanced at the mangled mess on the table in front of him. Then he looked back down the aisle in the direction that had initially captured his attention. Renee Armstrong had disappeared.

  He was left with a tangle of knots on the table and the evidence of arousal in his jeans.

  “Mine needs a little work,” he told the instructor. “Kelly, why don’t you show the class what you made?”

  As she jumped up to go show off her craft project, Trey settled back in his chair. Nice save, Calloway, he thought.

  * * *

  For the past three and a half weeks since moving into a new house on Stanhope Drive, Renee Armstrong had been telling herself that her next-door neighbor was hot. But was it only because she’d been so long without male companionship? she thought. Her racing heart and suddenly sweaty palms told a different story. Trey Calloway was fine, with a capital F and sugar on top.

  As she made her way through the craft store to find Keisha, she thought about her neighbor and her reaction to him.

  He was the sort of man who carried himself in a way that made you stop to notice when he walked into a room. Not exceptionally tall, he stood about five-eleven, maybe an even six feet. Always impeccably dressed and groomed, whether like today in pressed jeans and a cream-colored ribbed sweater, or in an expensive suit and overcoat for church, as she’d seen Sunday morning from her window. He always seemed ready for a magazine cover shoot.

  His little girl, Kelly, was the same way. Partial to pink, Kelly Calloway clearly had her father wrapped around her finger. Why else would a man like him be in a craft store doing macramé, of all things? When she’d spied him at the table with a group of little girls wearing all shades of pink, she’d thought she might be mistaken. But it was him.

  As he’d clearly struggled with the craft project, he’d been even sexier than normal. There was just something that warmed her heart—and some other places—about a man who didn’t feel or at least didn’t look threatened by a bunch of little girls doing craft projects.

  She was suddenly glad—very glad—that she’d actually put on a cute outfit for the trip to the craft shop at Commerce Plaza. She’d almost just grabbed a college sweatshirt and a pair of lived-in jeans. After a week in her high-maintenance work clothes, she preferred getting comfortable on the weekends.

  She wondered if he’d noticed the outfit. In the event he was watching as she walked away, she put a little extra sway in her hips to give him something to contemplate.

  He was kind of hard to read. She knew she’d been sending hot and cold vibes his way. He’d come to the rescue with a tool kit and some male expertise when her kitchen sink had gone crazy. Beyond that, they’d just shared a wave and a hello in the morning or as they crossed paths taking the garbage or recycling to the curb.

  He didn’t wear a ring and in the three weeks she’d been in the house she hadn’t seen a wife. There was just one car in his driveway. Out here in the suburbia of Cedar Springs, North Carolina, wouldn’t there be two if he were married?

  What if the invite to bake cookies was a family thing—one of those neighborly invitations that folks in the suburbs routinely offered? She didn’t want to go waltzing in ready to make a play only to be greeted by a perfect little Mrs. Calloway standing in the kitchen.

  Oh, dear.

  Her first instinct—hesitation because of Keisha—now had another layer of worry.

  She found Keisha exactly where she thought she would—in the fine-arts section of the store, mulling over choices of papers and pencils.

  Renee made a mental note to find an art class for her to take. Maybe the Common Ground Recreation Center offered something. This interest in drawing had sprung up out of nowhere. But if Keisha was finally taking an interest in something beyond sulking, Renee was all for it.

  “Hey, sweetie. What did you find?”

  Keisha sat on the floor, legs crossed with two different colored-pencil sets in her lap.

  “I can’t decide which one is best.”

  Renee crouched down so she could see the two options. “That one gives you lots of different colors to work with,” she pointed out.

  Keisha nodded. “But this one has a book that shows you how to draw cartoons. I want to try that.”

  Renee smiled and helped her up. “Then it sounds like you’ve made a decision. Let’s get that one.”

  “Okay,” Keisha said. She tucked the chosen pencil set under her arm, but didn’t immediately put the other back on the shelf.

  When Keisha finally relinquished the second set, putting it back in its place in the display, Renee made another mental note to get that one for a Christmas present for Keisha.

  “Guess who I saw in the store?”

  Keisha glanced up at her, but didn’t ask the obvious question.

  “Mr. Calloway from next door and his little girl.”

  Keisha made a face.

  “What?” Renee asked.

  The girl poked her lips out. “Nothing.”

  Renee blew out a sigh. She was going to have to ask Dr. Hendrickson about this new uncommunicative phase Keisha seemed to be in. It had started a few weeks ago and seemed to be getting worse.

  “They invited us over to make Christmas cookies tonight. Would you like that? It’ll be the five of us.”

  “Who else is coming?”

  Renee blinked. That was more interest than she’d seen from Keisha in anything except the art supplies.

  “Mr. Calloway, his wife and his daughter.”

  “He doesn’t have a wife,” Keisha announced as they made their way toward the checkout.

  “How do you know?”

  “Kelly told me.”

  Kelly told her? Every day after school as they worked through homework, Renee tried to get Keisha to open up about the new school, the new friends she was making—if any—and anything else that might be on the girl’s mind. This was the first she had heard of Keisha actually engaging long enough for the briefest of interactions with other kids, let alone in a full-fledged conversation about family.

  “Do you and Kelly play together?”

  The question seemed ridiculous. Renee knew full well that Keisha hadn’t been outside to play with anyone since moving into the new house.

  “I see her at school.”

  “What did she say about h
er mom?”

  “She doesn’t have a mom,” Keisha said. They reached the checkout and Keisha put her art kit on the counter as Renee opened her purse for her wallet.

  She had a hundred questions for Keisha but knew better than to press or rush the girl. Nothing would shut down Keisha faster than undue interest on Renee’s part.

  With the transaction completed, the clerk handed Keisha the bag. The girl grinned, mumbled a thank-you and then skipped to the door. Renee smiled. Glad to see—at last—a glimpse of the old Keisha.

  When they were in the car with the heat’s air chasing away the December chill, Renee broached the subject again.

  “So did Kelly say what happened to her mom?”

  “She died.”

  Renee gave her a sharp look. “Recently? Oh, that’s so sad.”

  Keisha took the art kit out of the craft-store bag and read the back panel with the explanation of what was in the package out loud before answering. “No. A long time ago when Kelly was a baby.”

  Renee bit back a smile. A long time ago from a kid’s perspective could be anywhere in the past from an hour ago to the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The “baby” part narrowed it down a bit. Kelly looked to be no more than five or six years old, so she hadn’t been a baby too long ago.

  “She told me we were meant to live beside each other because she doesn’t have a mother and I don’t have a father.”

  When Keisha didn’t say anything else, Renee glanced over at her. The eight-year-old was staring at her hands. Renee started formulating one of the open-ended questions that Dr. Hendrickson said would draw Keisha out in times like this. Before she could get the gentle question out, Keisha spoke.

  “I didn’t tell her you weren’t my mom.”

  Renee’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Her heart felt as if it had been gripped in a vise. Maybe this was what the past few weeks of acting out had been leading to. She so desperately wanted to ask Keisha if that was the case, but she couldn’t get past the lump in her throat.

  At least she hadn’t qualified it by saying Renee wasn’t her “real mom.”

  Renee was starting to feel as if she needed her own fifty minutes in the therapist’s chair. Maybe Dr. Hendrickson would make an exception in his practice and take on an adult as a patient.

  “Thank you for buying me the art pencils,” Keisha said.

  You’re the grown-up here, Renee, she told herself. What matters most is what’s best for Keisha.

  “You’re welcome, sweetie. I’m glad you like them.” Then she added, “We don’t have to bake cookies with the Calloways tonight if you don’t want to.”

  Keisha tucked her art kit back into the bag and put it right next to her on the seat.

  Security, Renee thought. She’s keeping the important things close by. She’d definitely look into an art class…if Keisha was still—

  “I want to,” Keisha said, interrupting Renee’s thoughts. “It’ll be fun. Can we make gingerbread men?”

  Renee beamed. “Definitely.”

  * * *

  At exactly six-thirty, the front doorbell chimed.

  Great, Trey thought. They would be punctual on the one night when he needed more preparation time. Kelly had just dropped a bombshell on him.

  “Kelly, our guests have arrived. I want you to be on your absolute best behavior,” Trey said. “We’ll cut and bake the cookies, put some icing on the tops and make it an early night.”

  From across the kitchen table, his pint-size princess gave him one of the looks that fathers the world over had fielded on many occasions and hated every time they got one.

  “Daddy, I’m not fibbing. It’s the truth. Keisha doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like anybody. She’s mean.”

  But because he had the hots for Renee Armstrong, he was about to put his daughter and therefore himself in miserable company.

  Trey sighed.

  This “cookie-baking neighbors” thing was going to be a disaster through and through.

  In the grocery store where they’d picked up sprinkles, three tubes of Pillsbury cookie dough—one each of chocolate chip, sugar and peanut butter—and something called “edible glitter,” Kelly had sulked. Now he knew why.

  He couldn’t very well open the front door and say, “Go away. My kid doesn’t like your kid.” So he did the next best thing. He resorted to bribery.

  “Can you be a gracious hostess for ninety minutes?”

  Kelly eyed him dubiously. “How long is ninety minutes?”

  Trey thought about that, trying to compute the time into a six-year-old’s frame of reference. An hour and a half would be long enough to bake the cookies and get them cooled, decorate them, eat a few and call it done.

  “As long as watching three back-to-back Dora the Explorer shows,” he told her.

  Kelly wrinkled her nose.

  The doorbell chimed again.

  “That’s a looong time, Daddy. And you never let me watch that many Doras.”

  “If you can be a gracious hostess for Keisha while we bake cookies tonight, we can go pick out a new Dora backpack for you.”

  “And I can watch three?”

  This was his kid, all right.

  Trey nodded wearily. He knew when he was beat. “Yes.”

  Kelly immediately brightened. “Okay.”

  She scrambled down from the chair and skipped toward the front door with Trey following.

  The gracious-hostess concept was from his aunt Henrietta, the Calloway family matriarch, who was apparently running an underground comportment academy for girls from her home.

  Kelly had spent a long weekend with Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Carlton a few months back when he’d had to make an out-of-town business trip. Somehow, over the course of three days in that house, Kelly had learned how to host a garden tea party, including the proper way to brew tea and fold linen napkins into intricate shapes.

  From then on, tea parties were real, no longer the imaginary kind. At Kelly’s insistence along with Aunt Henrietta’s coaching, he’d invested in a proper teapot and kettle. All tea bags had been banished from the house and replaced with specially blended concoctions in expensive canisters from Tea Time, a downtown tea shop.

  The doorbell chimed again. “We’re coming,” Trey called out.

  A few moments later, he opened the door to find Renee and Keisha standing there, each holding a full bag of something in her arms.

  “Hi there,” Renee said. “We were starting to think the cookie party had been canceled.”

  I wish, Trey thought.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Come inside out of the cold.”

  The December evening had a nip in it. The forecast was for a cold front to move into the area over the next few days. But it felt as if the weather prognosticators had gotten it wrong because the cold was arriving earlier than anticipated and their guests were bundled up accordingly.

  “Hello,” Kelly said as Renee and Keisha entered the foyer. “Welcome to our home.”

  Trey glanced down at his daughter, who had evidently morphed from a six-year-old into a mini–Stepford wife in the past thirty seconds.

  As Keisha passed by him, Trey peeked into the bag she carried.

  Then, as if reading his mind or divining his intent, Renee said, “We weren’t sure what type of cookies you bake for the holidays, so we brought ingredients to make a couple of different kinds we thought you’d like.”

  “The orange-marmalade button cookies taste the best,” Keisha said.

  Orange-marmalade button cookies? That sounds like something that will take longer than ninety minutes.

  The four of them stood in the foyer until Renee prompted, “If you’ll show us the kitchen, we can get started.”

  Kelly swept a hand out as if
she were Vanna White displaying tonight’s big prize on Wheel of Fortune. “Right this way,” she said.

  Trey eyed her suspiciously. Either the whole gracious-hostess bit had been too much or his kid wanted that Dora backpack awfully bad.

  A few minutes later, after coats were in the hallway closet, the kitchen countertop was covered with two kinds of flours, three kinds of sugars, little bottles of flavorings, small containers of spices and assorted canisters with candies.

  Troy bit back a groan as he glanced at Kelly.

  While the girls were busy pulling mixing bowls from the cabinets under the island, Trey touched Renee’s arm. The contact must have surprised her because she looked up with wide eyes.

  “What is all this?” Trey asked with a nod toward all of the stuff that had come out of their two bags.

  “Ingredients,” Renee said, giving him an odd look.

  “Ingredients for what? A state dinner?”

  Renee put one hand on her hip. “You’re the one who invited us over to make cookies. If you’d rather not…”

  “Cookies,” Trey said. “Not…” He waved a hand at all of the stuff on the island countertop. Then, taking a few steps toward the refrigerator, he pulled out one of the Pillsbury cookie-dough rolls. “Cookies.”

  Renee gave him the stink eye. “You cannot be serious.” She advanced on him and snatched the tube from him. “This is cheater dough.”

  Trey looked affronted. “Sandra Lee and I beg to disagree.”

  Renee stared at him openmouthed for a moment. Then a giggle burst through. “You watch the Food Network?”

  “I have skills,” he boasted.

  “Oh, really,” Renee said, humor still lacing her voice. “Well, we’re here to kick it down-home like the Neelys visiting Martha Stewart.”

  Laughing, Trey placed the ready-to-bake cookies back in the refrigerator. From the pantry, he pulled out three aprons and handed one to each lady.

  “None for you?”

  Picking up a wooden spoon, he held it forward like a shield and poked his chest out like a superhero. “Chef Trey doesn’t need an apron to whip up gastronomical delights.”

  Renee laughed. “We’ll see about that.”