Just a Kiss Away (50 page)

“Now see here, young woman—”

“No! You see here.” She rammed a finger against his chest. “I’m your daughter. I’m Eulalie Grace LaRue, the same girl who spent all those years trying to be what I thought you wanted. A lady. Well, I’m not a lady. I’m a person, with feelings, a mind, and a heart. And I’m a good person, with a lot of love to give someone. Too bad you never came around to find that out, isn’t it?”

“Lollie . . . Ladies don’t—” Jeffrey warned.

Lollie turned to her eldest brother. “Ladies don’t what? Argue? Swear? Talk? Eat? Think? Who made up those stupid rules anyway, Jeffrey? Aren’t ladies allowed to be human? Well, if they’re not, I’m glad I’m no lady!”

The sound of someone clapping sent the room into silence. It was Sam. Lollie turned and smiled at him. “Thank you.”

Sam looked at the men in her family. “She’s right. She’s no lady; she’s a woman.”

“Who’s that?” Jedidiah asked.

“Sam Forester,” she answered, turning back to her father. “And if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here. A real father would be thankful I was alive. What kind of man are you, anyway? What kind of man abandons his child?”

“I didn’t abandon you,” he scoffed. “You had your brothers and the servants, who obviously didn’t teach you respect.”

“Respect is earned.”

“And how do
you
earn respect? By running all over the country in rags?” He turned toward her brothers. “Look what you’ve created. My God—”

“I think you mean
thank
God. At least I know my brothers tried. They cared enough to be there.” She waved a hand at her brothers, standing behind her father. “I also know they love me, in their own way, but you—you don’t know anything about love. I don’t understand you. You have these ideals you live by. You won’t take the trolleys in Manila because of the mistreated horses. But what about the daughter you never gave a fig for? You care more about those sick trolley horses than you care about your own flesh and blood. How sad.” She stepped back against Sam.

Her father gave her a cold look, icier than her own eyes. “I’ve always found horses to be of more value than women.”

She took a long, deep breath to help control her hurt. Her father turned his disdain toward Sam. “Who are you?”

Sam assumed that position of nonchalance, the one that he’d used with Colonel Luna. “I’m Forester, from the slums of Chicago.”

“You’re that American mercenary, the man who kills for a price.” Her father looked at him as if being in the same room with Sam was offensive.

Lollie shook with anger. “Why, you aren’t even half the man Sam is.”

Sam’s arm slid around her.

Her father looked pointedly at Sam’s arm, then at her. “You whore.”

Sam stiffened. “One more comment like that and my price won’t matter. I’ll tear out your throat.”

Her father turned and walked to the door. Her brothers parted as he walked by. He grabbed the door, opened it and turned around. “She’s not worth the trouble. Nothing like what I expected. You boys raised this . . . You handle it. I don’t have a daughter.” He left and closed the door behind him.

“That dirty bastard,” Sam muttered, his hand tightening so hard on her shoulders that she flinched. He released her shoulder and rubbed it slightly while he glanced down at her. “Sorry.”

She cried then, and Sam pulled her into the haven of his arms. She cried hard, not out of hurt, not out of loss, but mostly for all those wasted dreams. The time she had spent trying hard to be something special to someone who didn’t want her. She cried for the parents she’d never had. She cried for the child she’d been, Eulalie LaRue, who’d never had her questions answered, who never known a parent’s love.

She pulled back from Sam’s chest. Her brothers were there, looking as they always did when she cried, uncomfortable and helpless. But they loved her. She knew that they loved her and had tried.

Jeffrey rubbed his forehead, something he always did when he had to tell her something unpleasant. “We tried to protect you, Lollie. All those years. He’s a hard man.”

“He’s stone, pitiable stone,” she said. “I understand now that you all tried to protect me. I think you tried to protect me from everything.”

She turned to Jedidiah, the brother who so reminded her of Sam. “Especially you, Jed. I didn’t understand until now why you didn’t want me to come to the Philippines. You don’t really think I’m a jinx, do you?”

He looked embarrassed and seemed to accept that emotion about as well as Sam did. “No, you’re not a jinx,” he groused. “Just trouble, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.” Then he actually smiled.

“I’d bet a month’s pay he hasn’t got an L-shaped scar on his chest,” Sam muttered.

She hugged each of them, one by one. When she reached Jeffrey he said, “Come on, little sister, we’ll take you home now.”

“No! Sam . . .” She turned away from her brother and ran back to Sam just as the little Filipino man opened the door. Medusa flew inside and landed on Lollie’s head, like she always did.

Her brothers stood stunned, staring at the bird. She smiled. “This is Medusa.”

“Awk! I’m Medusa! I’m a mynah! Sam’s an ass!” Her brothers laughed.

Sam didn’t.

“Awk!” Medusa’s voice lowered to Sam’s timbre. “You taste like whiskey, fine, aged whiskey.” Her voice changed again to one that was breathy and female. “Oh . . . Sam.”

Lollie’s brothers stopped laughing.

“Awk! Come on, sweet. Come now. I want inside you.”

There was a ponderous moment of silence, and five sets of Calhoun blue eyes turned from the bird to Sam, then to Lollie, then back to Sam.

Lollie felt Sam stiffen and heard him mutter, “I thought Medusa was asleep.”

She looked at her brothers. “Now, Jed . . .”

Jedidiah threw the first punch.

Lollie threw the second.

Wedding bells rang
from the Church of the Blessed Virgin the next morning. The curious filed into the adobe church and quietly sat in dark mahogany pews to watch the ceremony. The priest, in gold and white vestments, blessed the union, ignoring the squawking black bird with the dirty mouth, the battered, bruised faces on the bride’s brothers, who stood in a human wall around the couple. He ignored the cut lips, the black eyes, the occasional wince. He also turned the other way when the plain gold wedding band wouldn’t fit over the bride’s bruised and swollen knuckles.

He did his job in the eyes of God, and he blessed the union. The instant the blessing was over the bridegroom, a tall, blacked-haired devil with a sinister patch on one eye and shiner on the other, grabbed the bride and kissed her, and not the length it took to give the Benediction, but as long as the Liturgy, the Apostles Creed, and the Eucharistic Prayer all combined. When the groom pulled away, not a soul inside those thick walls doubted his willingness to wed her.

They walked down the aisle, this motley group that bore all the markings yet none of the actions of a shotgun marriage. The bride and groom were too happy. No one could doubt that. The priest watched them leave and, shaking his head at life’s little oddities, turned back to the altar, and suddenly froze.

Deep booming laughter echoed in the rafters of the church. God was laughing.

And God kept on laughing,
for over the next ten years he gave Sam and Lollie Forester six little girls, all of them with hair as black as jet and light blue eyes the color of alpine ice. Each little girl had said her first word when she was ten months old and hadn’t stopped talking since.

Samantha, the oldest, had her father’s strong, square jaw, determined nature, and stamina. She could out-run, out-think, and to her father’s secret pride, out-fight any boy in the neighborhood. Anna moved as slow as a Southern drawl, yearned to be a great actress, and always wore pink. Priscilla loved animals and had a menagerie of pets that kept the house in turmoil—two dogs, a cat, a parakeet, four hamsters, three goldfish, sixteen guppies, two turtles, three frogs, and her favorite pet, a twelve-year-old, peanut-eating, snoring mynah bird named Medusa who tattled on her sisters.

Abigail was known for her mild temperament. She needed that sweet nature since not a week went past that she didn’t trip, slip, or break something. Most recently, she’d managed to get stuck in the dumb waiter, in between floors. It’d taken Sam an hour to get her out. Jessamine was the little chatterer. She fired questions like a repeating rifle fired bullets, but she’d learned to add numbers this Christmas and she was only four. Sam had taught her to add up the burnt batches of her mother’s Christmas cookies.

Last, but certainly not the least, nor the quietest, was Lily, the baby. She was the screamer. All of McLean Virginia knew when Lillian Grace Forester was awake. Her father had been known to swear he had heard her from his office as a government military advisor at the capitol.

But on Christmas night, 1906, it was fairly quiet.

Sam picked up the magazine that lay on his favorite leather chair and sat down, dropping the magazine onto the table beside him. He leaned back and rolled his stiff shoulders, then locked his hands behind his head and stared at the flickering candles—thirty for every foot—on the huge Christmas tree. He wondered why women, of any age, had to have the biggest tree on the face of the Earth. In fact, the most quiet moment in the last week had been when he’d suggested getting a smaller tree and setting it on table. Six pairs of ice blue eyes had turned and stared at him as if he had just blasphemed.

The giant fir tree stood ten feet tall, anchored in a heavy stone crock he’d filled with sand and water. Lollie had argued with him for fifteen minutes over whether or not the tree was straight. He eyed it for a moment. It still leaned a little too much to the left.

It was decorated with sparkling, three-dimensional paper animals and scenes imported from Germany that his wife called Dresdens. There were striped candy sticks tied with Calhoun pink ribbons, lacy fans, and twinkling blown glass icicles. Hanging in gilded cages were musical birds that sang whenever someone would wind the aggravating little suckers.

Sam patted his pocket. He had the winding key.

Glass fairy-tale figurines and angels hung among the gold and silver crinkled wire and shiny paper cornucopias that he and Lollie had filled with sweets and were now empty. Crowning the tree top was a huge porcelain angel and here and there, among the laden branches of the tree, dangled a burned gingerbread man.

Late last night, locked behind the huge sliding doors of the parlor after they’d laid out the gifts, filled the stockings, and lit the candles, he’d made long hot love to his wife by the light of that tree. Over the years, the kid from Quincy Street had learned to love Christmas.

He looked at Lollie, who sat on the floor playing jacks with their daughters. She hadn’t changed much. She’d filled out a little from the births of their children, but only in the chest, which was fine with him. Her whiskey-colored hair puffed out around her head and topped in a lopsided knot that always looked as if the whole thing might tumble down at any minute. It reminded him of bedrooms, crumpled sheets, tousled hair, soft white skin and a husky Southern drawl . . .

Sam moved his gaze to safer territory—Matilda, their housekeeper, or as he liked to refer to her—his Lolliekeeper. She was fifty years old, built as square as his new Pierce Great Arrow touring car, and ran the household with the command of the Kaiser. She sat at the piano, playing Christmas carols while Medusa sang “0 Holy Night” off key. Soon the girls stopped playing and joined Matilda by the piano. Lollie got up and came over and sat on the arm of his chair. He slipped his arm around her.

After a few comfortable minutes, he glanced at the table next to his chair, looking for his pipe and hoping that Jessie hadn’t put soap in it again. He picked up the magazine but something in it caught his eye. It was the latest issue of
The Ladies Home Journal
and an article illustrated with bows and flowers and other frilly female stuff stared back at him. It was entitled, “The True Spirit of Christmas,” and Sam began to read:

Children are God’s own angels, sent by Him to brighten our world, and what we do for these messengers from the sky, especially at that time of year which belongs to them, will come back to us threefold, like bread cast upon the waters.

He looked at his family—his bread cast upon the waters. His daughters stood there, all dressed in white linen and lace with Christmas red sashes, singing like a group of motley angels. Samantha had a shiner and Annie had a giant Calhoun pink bow in her hair despite the fact that it clashed with the red on her dress. Prissy had that ever-present cat slung over her shoulder, a hamster in her pocket, and the parakeet on her head; Abby had her finger stuck in a candlestick, but managed to yank it out before he could get up, and Jessie was singing louder than Medusa except when she’d interrupt to ask Matilda who invented Christmas carols. Lily was upstairs, sound asleep. She had just turned ten months old and said her first word today. But Sam smiled, anyway. The word had been “Daddy.”

He turned his gaze to his beautiful wife, dressed in velvet and lace with her whiskey-colored hair piled on top of her head in a knot that looked as if it was going to tumble down any minute. Her love had given him those children and her harebrained ways had captured his heart. If their children were his angels, then she was his heaven.

A lazy, comfortable smile cut across his jaw.

Sam Forester lived for this.

(Continue reading for a message from Jill)