Spencer Nation's Christmas Miracle Read online

  "I saved you the second drawer," she said, noticing his conundrum. "And if you ever want to start reading comics again, let me know. I don't read a lot of superhero titles, but I can suggest some other stuff. Saga is pretty much the greatest thing I've ever read. You should give it a try."

  Kit stuffed his underwear and t-shirts in the drawer, the whole time wishing he had Superman's X-ray vision so he could catch another glimpse of that bra.

  "You read comics?" He asked as he made his way back to his bag.

  "I read everything," Spencer said. "I like books. It's why I majored in literature."

  Kit rolled his jeans up together so she wouldn't be able to tell he'd only brought two pair for the entire week. "I thought people majored in literature because they liked to talk about how the blue curtains symbolized WWII or something."

  "I'm of the belief that the blue curtains mean the curtains were blue." She shot him a smile as he carelessly stuffed his jeans in beside his shirts. It was the first true smile he'd seen from her, and it was disarming.

  What kind of idiot let her slip away once he had her? Whoever her ex was, he was a moron.

  "I can bullshit about symbolism all day long, but I majored in literature because I like stories. I don't care what form it comes in. Novel, comic, movie, video game... As long as it's a good story, I love it."

  "You play video games?" His little professor was nothing like what he thought she would be.

  Not that she was his little professor. She wasn't his anything. And no matter how sexy he thought she was in her nerd glasses, or how interesting she might be, she would never be anything to him other than an almost-sister-like person.

  That didn't mean he couldn't enjoy the next few days with her. Hell, Mack had practically ordered him to make a move.

  "I love video games," she said. "Assassin's Creed is my jam."

  Kit began opening random drawers, finally finding what he was looking for in the ancient filing cabinet he had used as a bedside table in high school. "I don't have Assassin's Creed, but I do have this," he said, holding up the case for Resident Evil. "Feel like killing some zombies?"

  "Always," she said with a grin, already reaching for the control he tossed her way.

  "Then let's play."

  Chapter 6

  It was late in the morning when Spencer finally rolled out of bed. She would have slept longer if it hadn't been for the sound of multiple children crying and the constant bam-bam-bam of a hammer.

  And people said living in the city was loud. There were frat houses that made less noise on a Saturday night than this.

  It had been well past midnight when she and Kit finally grew tired of killing zombies. After, she'd lain awake in bed, listening to him fall asleep on the other side of the room. When she finally fell asleep herself, it wasn't a restful slumber. Her dreams had her running from zombie hoards with a half-dressed Kit. The undead hadn't bothered her nearly as much as the things she did to her roommate's body in those dreams.

  Thankfully he was nowhere to be seen when she pulled herself out of bed. She stumbled to the bathroom and cringed at her own reflection. A shower helped matters, but once all was said and done, she was still "funny looking."

  It was her parents’ fault. Her genes couldn’t make up their mind if she should be thin and bony like her dad, or soft and plump like her mother. In the end, they decided to attempt at being both. The result was her face looked too thin to support the weight of her lips. She’d gotten used to the sight, but she could definitely see where little Emma was coming from.

  With a sigh that would have done her teenage self proud, she flipped off the light and steeled herself for yet another day of getting to know Mack’s family. She followed the smell of blackberries and sugar up to the kitchen. "Morning, Mama," she said as she topped the stairs. "Are you making a cobbler?"

  Rita placed a cup under the Keurig and popped in a pod of French Vanilla. "With the Christmas festival being today, there isn't much of a need to make a big lunch. I thought we could have a little something."

  "Like cobbler and ice cream?"

  Rita's grin was pure mischief. "Sounds good, doesn't it?"

  Spencer could only shake her head at her mother's antics. The woman had to have more than one sweet tooth in that crazy head of hers. Spencer grew up with cake lunches and banana split suppers. Mack's grandkids were going to be bouncing off the walls all week. Speaking of the grandkids...

  "Where is everyone?" she asked. The house wasn't exactly large enough for a dozen people, five of which were children, to hide.

  "It's warm outside today. Supposed to get up in the sixties, so Kit is getting started on his Christmas present for Mack and me. Everyone is outside either helping him, getting in his way, or playing on the swing set."

  Spencer looked outside, and sure enough, everyone was scattered across the yard. The kids were running circles around the elaborate pirate ship decked out with swings, slides, monkey bars, and every other outdoor plaything a child could want while their mothers kept an eye on their shenanigans as well as the men. From her vantage, Spencer couldn't really see what they were doing, but she thought she saw some wooden beams sticking up from the ground.

  "What exactly is Kit’s gift to you guys?" she asked as her mother handed her a homemade blueberry muffin.

  "It's going to be a pavilion," Rita said, sweeping around Spencer to check the oven. "He won't get it finished until the spring, but he wanted to go ahead and get a start on it this week. It's going to have a fire pit and a table big enough for all of us to have picnics out there this summer. He built one for Tim and Faith last summer, and it was beautiful."

  "Tim and Faith? Are they friends of yours from church?"

  Rita sighed the sigh of a disappointed mother. "Tim McGraw and Faith Hill."

  “Kit built a pavilion for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill?" And he was making a replica of it for her mom and Mack? She looked at the pirate ship again, her suspicions on its origin growing. "That must have been a pretty exciting job."

  "I suppose he’s used to it. He's done work for Garth and Trisha, Keith and Nicole, and even Carl and Dolly. Kit is pretty much the go-to guy for the Brentwood and Franklin set."

  Spencer fell back against the cabinet and took a long, hot swallow of coffee. "He told me he does odds and ends jobs."

  "I guess that's one way of putting it. He does all sorts of things. Cabinets, furniture, decks. If it can be built, then Kit can do it. But he won’t take on big projects. He was offered a literal fortune to oversee the construction of a house for some investment banker, but he turned it down. Said he didn't want to commit himself to something that was going to take forever to finish."

  "So a commitment-phobe, but not the penniless drifter he makes himself out to be."

  "Penniless?" Rita laughed long and hard. "If that boy pulls in less than half a million a year, I'll give up sugar and bread for a month."

  Rich, handsome, and acquainted with the who's-who of Nashville. Spencer wasn't great at math, but by her estimate that put him about three million-bazillion miles out of her league.

  There was no reason such a realization should weigh like a lead balloon in her stomach, but there it sat all the same.

  "Come on. I'm going to turn off this cobbler and let it set for a while to let the flavors mingle a bit. Let's go outside and see how things are going. You still haven't met Amanda and her family."

  Chapter 7

  Spencer didn't particularly want to meet Amanda and her family, especially not after the disaster from yesterday, but she knew she couldn't put it off forever. At least outside there was a higher chance of something falling from the sky and causing her sudden death should things go too horribly wrong.

  Thankfully, Kit’s description of Amanda was accurate. Her children both tried to hide behind her legs as she quietly introduced them. She looked a lot like her sister -- the same dark hair, brown eyes, and flawless skin -- but Amanda was a little rounder. Although, the slight belly she
was sporting might have been a recent development. Something told Spencer that someone was going to be opening a pregnancy test on Christmas Day.

  "There you are," Kit said, ambling over to where Spencer was talking to Amanda about her older child's love of picture books. "I was starting to think you were going to pull an Aurora on us and sleep for a hundred years."

  "You know Sleeping Beauty's name?" If possible, he was even more attractive than she remembered. He was wearing an old, faded Captain America shirt. From the way it clung to his chest and biceps, she suspected it was one he'd worn in high school and rediscovered in the basement this morning.

  "I have four nieces. I know more about princesses than Walt Disney."

  "Walt Disney is dead," Maddie informed him with an air of sophisticated superiority. That little girl was going to conquer the world one day, but until then she was going to be a pain in the ass of every adult she met.

  "Dead isn't a nice word," Alejandra, Amanda's five-year-old, told her cousin. "You shouldn't say it."

  "What am I supposed to say instead, Allie? He's not alive anymore. He was alive a really long time ago. Like when Poppy was a kid."

  "You're supposed to say he's no longer with us. It's nicer."

  "It means the same thing."

  "But ‘dead’ is mean and ‘no longer with us’ is nice."

  Allie stomped away with Maddie on her heels, determined to make her point known.

  "They're going to argue over this for a long time, aren't they?" Spencer asked Kit.

  "Until they find something better to argue over. Those two are like oil and water."

  "I imagine their moms were the same way as kids." Whether it was nature or nurture, those little girls were their mamas made over.

  "Probably," Kit said, wiping the sweat off his face with the bottom of his shirt. Spencer's brain temporarily shorted out at the sight of his stomach. She'd never seen an actual six pack in real life. It was everything she imagined it would be and more. "They were both grown, or close enough to grown, when I showed up. By the time I moved in, they'd chilled a lot. But they still have a good row now and again. Amanda might be the quiet one, but when she's pissed, the claws come out."

  "Siblings are strange and odd creatures," Spencer decided. She'd been an only child of only children, so she'd never had anyone her own age to argue with as a kid. As a result, she had no claws of her own.

  You're just so fucking meek, Spence. How is a man supposed to get passionate about a woman who doesn't know how to fight for what she wants?

  Travis was a dick, but he was right. She was meek. Maybe if she'd had a sister of her own she would have been able to have thrown him out on his ass sooner.

  "Beth and Amanda are certainly strange and odd," Kit agreed with a smile. No matter how strange and odd he might think they were, it was obvious he cared for them a lot.

  It seemed there were other advantages to having siblings beyond a chance to sharpen your claws.

  "Are they your only siblings?" He hadn't mentioned other sisters or a brother, but beyond the fact that his mother had briefly been married to Mack at some point, Spencer didn't really know anything about his family.

  "They're the only ones I claim. My mom has been married..." He paused to tally up a number on his fingers. "Five times. Four of those guys had other children, but Mack and the girls are the only ones who kept in touch after Mom and I took off."

  "And your dad?"

  "Signed away his custodial rights when I was a year old. I haven't seen him since."

  No wonder he had commitment issues. What would it be like to be continually thrust into new families and then have them walk out of your life as quickly as they came in? And he would have been young in a at least a few of those marriages. This whole new family thing was wearing on her as an adult. How much more difficult would it have been for him as a kid?

  "I'm sorry," she said. The fact that he'd came through it with any of his heart and soul left in tact was a miracle.

  Kit watched his boot scuff across the grass. "Not your fault."

  "Still, it sucks that you had to go through all that."

  He obviously had no desire to discuss it further, which would have been okay if he hadn't decided to turn the tables on her.

  "What about your dad? Do you still see him?"

  Had no one told him? How did he not know?

  "My father is dead,” she said around the lump in her throat. After all this time she still couldn’t talk about him without feeling like she was going cry or puke or both.

  Kit finally looked up. "Damn. I'm sorry. When did it happen?"

  A lifetime ago, yet it didn't feel that way. Not on Father's Day or near his birthday or around the anniversary of when it happened. And most definitely not around the holidays.

  "I was fifteen. He was driving home from the grocery store and hit a patch of ice. The car ended up wrapped around a light pole. The coroner said he died instantly."

  It had been a shock. She thought her father would live forever, or at least until he was a crooked old man. It had been rough on her and her mother afterwards. Rita had been a stay-at-home mom and never paid any attention to the bills. Through their grief they still had to find a way to keep the lights on and water running.

  "This conversation is depressing as hell," Kit said, which caused a startled laugh to burst out of Spencer's throat.

  "That it is." Although, it wasn’t awkward. Not like it should have been. Conversations about your ever-changing family dynamics or a dead parent weren’t exactly the typical getting-to-know you chit-chat, yet with Kit it felt natural.

  "What we need is a distraction.” Kit studied her for a long moment, long enough she had to clench her hands into fists to keep from fidgeting. "What are you doing tonight?" He finally asked.

  "Isn't there some sort of winter festival thing in town we're all expected to go to?"

  "The Lake County Christmas Spectacular. Trust me, there is no getting out of it, but you really don't want to. The Ladies' League started it five years ago, and it gets bigger and more awesome every time they do it."

  Bigger and more awesome weren't exactly synonymous to an introvert.

  "Well, I guess those are my plans for tonight."

  "That is where you're going to be. But you have to have a plan before you get there, or else you're going to end up lugging around a bunch of kids wondering where their parents have snuck off to." There was more than a small chance he was talking from experience. Those kids all adored their Uncle Kitten.

  "I'm not sure I could handle even one of those kids alone." Especially not Maddie. That child would eat her alive. "What do you suggest?"

  "Go ice skating with me."

  Spencer had only driven through Timber once, and that was on the way here. Still, her impression of the town was that it was nothing more than two or three blocks of small businesses, a Dairy Queen, and a WalMart.

  "Timber has an indoor ice skating rink?"

  "Timber doesn't have a McDonald's. Of course it doesn't have an indoor ice skating rink."

  Spencer looked around the yard. Despite being just a few days before Christmas, insects were buzzing around and all the kids were running around without jackets on.

  "Okay, I give. How are we supposed to go ice skating in ninety degree weather?"

  Kit tapped the face of his watch. "It's only sixty-eight out here, thank you very much. And you'll have to trust me on this." He smiled at her, and her heart did a series of cartwheels from her chest to her stomach and back again. "Come on. It'll be fun. Say you'll go with me."

  Chapter 8

  "This is supposed to be ice skating?"

  The Methodist Church's parking lot had been transformed to look like the Times Square ice skating rink. A wall had been made out of orange and white striped barriers from the Road Department, and tiny flags were taped along the edges. At one end of the enclosure was a tinfoil sculpture of Prometheus, and on the other a giant Christmas tree.

  "Where is
your sense of imagination?" Kit asked as he handed over ten dollars to the grey-haired woman in charge of renting out the roller skates.

  "I think there is a chance these skates are older than me," she said, holding the yellowed leather with the very tips of her fingers.

  "I'm pretty sure they're are the same skates Mack used when he was a teenager, but don't worry. Their not going to fall apart, and I've personally seen them disinfect every pair between users. You'll be safe. I promise."

  Safe from toe fungus and loose bolts maybe, but how was he going to protect her from falling on her face? She hadn't been on roller skates in years, and she wasn't exactly skilled back then.

  "You realize this is weird, right?"

  "This is Timber," Kit said as he knelt down to help her with her laces. "Weird is a relative term here."

  As Spencer suspected, it took her several minutes to find her balance. Kit waited patiently while she shored up enough courage to follow him out to the "ice." People streamed by them the whole time, several of them speaking to Kit as they passed.

  "There are a ton of people here," she said, chanting lean left, lean right, lean left, lean right over and over in her head as they made their inaugural lap around the rink. "I didn't think this many people stayed in Lake County year round."

  "They don't." Kit steadied her with a hand on her waist when turning the corner threatened to be her literal downfall. "People from the neighboring counties come for this. There is stuff set up not just here in town, but out by the lake where all the touristy stuff is located. It brings a lot of money into the county."

  Spencer was loathe to admit it, but it was fun. The spirit of Christmas hung heavy in the air, despite the unseasonably warm day. Someone in a Grinch costume sped by her and a gaggle of girls dressed like Sugar Plum Fairies practiced tricks in the middle of the rink.