This Year's Christmas Present Read online

  She was hoping he’d meant the threat figuratively. She was hoping it had only been the pain speaking. She was hoping God listened to the prayers of Blessed Mother impersonators.

  They couldn’t afford a new barn roof and a lawsuit.

  “Well, then, perhaps we should admit you,” the doctor told him. “At least overnight…for observation.”

  “I’m going back to my hotel room,” Clay argued, shimmying forward to get off the examining table and stand. In the process, his boxers rode high, giving Annie an eyeful, from the side, of a tight buttock.

  And her temperature cranked up another notch.

  Who knew? Who could have guessed?

  “Ouch.” He groaned as his feet hit the floor. He staggered woozily and braced himself against the wall.

  “You could stay at the farm with us for a few days,” Annie surprised herself by offering. The fever that had overcome her on first viewing this infuriating tyrant must have gone to her brain. “Aunt Liza can help care for you.…” While we’re in the city doing our Nativity scene. “It’ll be more comfortable than a hotel room.” And you wouldn’t see us on your property.

  “That’s a good idea,” the doctor offered, obviously anxious to end this case and move on to the next cubicle.

  “Okeydokey,” Clay slurred out, the time-release medication apparently kicking in again. He was leaning against the wall, bemusedly rubbing his fingertips across his lips, as if they felt numb. Then he idly scratched his stomach…his flat stomach…in an utterly male gesture his lordliness probably never indulged in back at the manor house.

  Her heart practically stopped as the significance of his quick agreement sank in. Criminy! I’m bringing Donald Trump home with me. What possessed me to make such an offer? My brothers will kill me. But no. It really is a good idea. Get him on home turf where we can talk down his anger. Perhaps convince him to let us continue our Nativity scene the rest of the week. Take advantage of his weakened state. Heck, we might even persuade him to change his plans about razing the hotel.

  On the other hand, Elvis might be alive and living in the refrigerator at Pizza Hut.

  “A farm? I’ve never been on a real farm before.” A grin tugged at his frowning lips, and he winked at her. “Eeii, eeii, oh, Daisy Mae.”

  Holy cow! The grin, combined with the sexy wink, kicked up the heat in her already feverish body still another notch. Even worse, the man appeared to have a sense of humor buried under all that starch. It just wasn’t fair. Annie didn’t stand a chance.

  “Uh-oh.” His brow creased with sudden worry. “Do you have out houses? I don’t think I want to live on a farm if I have to use an out house.”

  Live? Who said anything about “live”? We’re talking visit here. A day…two at the most. But Annie couldn’t help but smile at his silly concern.

  “Hey, you’re not so bad-looking when you smile.” Clay cocked his head to one side, studying her.

  “Thanks a bunch, your smoothness,” she retorted. “And, no, we don’t have out houses.”

  “Do you have cows and horses and chickens and stuff?” he asked with a boyish enthusiasm he probably hadn’t exhibited in twenty-five years…if ever.

  “Yep. Even a goat.”

  “Oh, boy!” he said.

  As the implications of her impetuous offer hit Annie— Mr. GQ Wall Street on their humble farm—she echoed his sentiment; Oh, boy!

  “Did you ever make love in a hayloft?” he asked bluntly.

  “No!” She lifted her chin indignantly, appalled that he would even ask her such an intimate question. Despite her indignation, though, unwelcome images flickered into Annie’s brain, and her fever flared into a full-blown inferno.

  “Neither have I,” Clay noted, as he stared her straight in the eye and let loose with the slowest, sexiest grin she’d seen since Elvis died.

  At the sign, SWEET HOLLOW FARM, Annie swerved the pickup truck off the highway and onto the washboard-rough dirt lane that meandered for a quarter mile up to the house.

  Tears filled her eyes on viewing her property, as they often did when she’d been away, even if only for a few hours. She loved this land…the smell of its rich soil, the feel of the crisp breeze coming down from the Blue Ridge Mountains, the taste of its wholesome bounty. It had been a real struggle these past ten years, but she prided herself on not having sold off even one parcel from the 120-acre family legacy.

  “Oh, darn!” she muttered when she hit one of the many potholes. The eight-year-old vehicle, with its virtually non ex is tent springs, went up in the air and down hard.

  She worriedly contemplated her sleeping passenger, who groaned, then rubbed the back of his aching head. His eyelids drifted open slowly, and Annie could see the dis-orientation that hazed their deep blue depths. As his brain slowly cleared, he sat straighter and glanced at the pasture on the right, where sixty milk cows, bearing the traditional black-and-white markings of the Holstein breed, grazed contentedly, along with an equal number of heifers and a half dozen new calves.

  “Holy hell!” Clay muttered. “Cows!”

  Geez! You’d think they didn’t have dairy herds in New Jersey.

  Slowly, he turned his head forward, taking in the clapboard farm house up ahead, which must be a stark contrast to his own Princeton home. She knew she was correct in her assessment when he murmured, “The Waltons! I’ve landed in John Boy Central.”

  His slow survey continued, now to the left, where he flinched visibly on seeing her…still adorned in all her Priscilla/Madonna garishness.

  His forehead furrowing with confusion, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt. Then his fingers fluttered in an unconscious sweep down his body, hesitating for the briefest second over his groin.

  Annie understood his bewilderment, even if he didn’t. For some reason, an odd heat—of an erotic nature, not the body-temperature type—was generated when they were in each other’s presence. She empathized with his consternation. Clayton Jessup III was a gorgeous hunk…when he wasn’t frowning, that was. He, on the other hand, would find it unbelievable that he could be attracted to a tasteless caricature of the Virgin Mary.

  “Can you turn down the heat?” he asked testily.

  “There is no heat. The thermostat broke last winter.”

  “Humph!” he commented as he rolled down the window on his side. “Pee-yew!” He immediately rolled it back up. “How can you stand that smell?”

  “What smell? Oh, you mean the cows.” She shrugged. “You get used to it after a while. Actually, I like the scent. It spells good country living to me.”

  “Humph! It spells cow crap to me.”

  Clay’s condescending attitude was starting to irk Annie. She had liked him a whole lot better when he was under the influence.

  “Am I being kidnapped?” he inquired hesitantly.

  “What?” Where did that insane idea come from? Oh, I see. His gaze was riveted now on his far left, where Chet’s hunting rifle rested in the gun rack above the bench seat. “Of course not.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Don’t you remember? You fell outside the hotel. I took you to the hospital emergency room. Oh, don’t look so alarmed. You just have a sprained ankle and a goose egg on your head. The doctor said you need special care for a day or two because of the reaction you had to the Darvon, and I offered to bring you out to the farm. We’re about a half hour outside Memphis.”

  “I agreed to stay on a…farm?” His eyes, which were really quite beautiful—a deep blue framed by thick black lashes—went wide with disbelief.

  “Yes,” she said in a voice stiff with affront.

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  Yep, his superiority complex was annoying the heck out of her. “Maybe because you were under the influence of drugs.”

  “I don’t take drugs.”

  “You did today, buddy.”

  “Take me back to the hotel.”

  She let loose with a long sigh. “We’ve alr
eady been through this before. You need special care. Since you have no family, I volunteered—out of the goodness of my heart, I might add—and do I get any thanks? No, sirree.”

  “Who said I have no family?”

  “You did!”

  “I…did…not!” His face flushed with embarrassment.

  Geez, why would he be uncomfortable over revealing that he had no family? It only made him appear human. Ha! Maybe that was the key. He didn’t want to be human.

  “I don’t discuss my personal life with…strangers.”

  Bingo! “Well, you did this time.”

  His eyelids fluttered with sleepiness even as he spoke. “What elsh did I saaaay?”

  The little demons on the wrong side of Annie’s brain did a victory dance at Clay’s question. Here was the perfect opportunity for her to get even for his patronizing comments.

  “Well, you did a lot of singing.”

  His eyes shot open. “Me? In public?”

  “Hmmm. Do you consider the emergency room a public place?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “And, of course, there was your remark about haylofts…”

  “Huh?”

  Annie could see that the poor guy was fighting sleep. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from adding, “…and making love.”

  “Making love in a hayloft? I said that?” Clay murmured skeptically. “With you? Humph! I couldn’t have been that much out of my mind.”

  Before she could correct his misconception that he’d associated making love in a hayloft with her, his head fell back. Good thing, too, because Annie was about to give him a matching goose egg on his insulting noggin. “Did you say humbug?”

  “No! Why does everyone think I’m a Scrooge?” he said drowsily, following with a lusty yawn.

  “Maybe because you are.”

  “I said humph,” he mumbled in his sleep. Then a small snore escaped from his parted lips.

  “Humph you, you egotistical bozo.”

  Clay awakened groggily from a deep sleep to find it was dark outside. He must have slept a good four hours or more.

  For several moments, he didn’t move from his position on the high maple poster bed, where he lay on his stomach, presumably to protect the back of his aching head. He burrowed deeper beneath the warm cocoon of a homemade patchwork quilt and smiled to himself. So this is how it feels to be one of the Waltons.

  By the light of a bedside hurricane lamp, he studied his surroundings. It was a cozy room, with its slanted dormer ceiling—hardly bigger than his walk-in closet at home. The only furniture, besides the bed, was a matching maple dresser and a blanket chest under the low double windows facing the front of the house. A well-worn easy chair of faded blue upholstery sat in one corner, flanked on one side by a floor lamp and on the other by a small sidetable on which sat a paperback book and a pile of magazines. A few photographs, which he couldn’t decipher from here, a high school pennant, and some cheaply framed prints of cows—What else!—adorned the pink rose–papered walls.

  It had to belong to the Blessed Virgin bimbo who’d brought him here. Unless the collection of teddy bears on the chest and the toiletries on the bureau belonged to one of her brothers. Somehow, though, he didn’t think any of the strapping young men he’d seen in that wacky Nativity scene were gay farmers.

  Clay should have felt outrage at finding himself in this predicament. Instead, a strange sense of well-being filled him, as if he’d been running a marathon for a long, long time, and finally he’d reached the finish line.

  Slowly he came fully awake as the sounds of the house, which had been deathly quiet before, seeped into his consciousness. The slamming of a door. The clomp, clomp, clomp of boots on hardwood floors. Laughter and male voices. Water running. The never-ending blare of Elvis music, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…” Good Lord! People have the nerve to call that caterwauling music. Humph!

  The cry of a baby emerged from down the hall—from one of the other second-floor bedrooms, he presumed— mixed with the soft crooning voice of an adult male, a mixture of lullaby and words of comfort. “Shhh, Jason. You’ve had a long day. What a good boy you were! Just let me finish with this diaper; then you can have your bottle. Aaah, I know, I know. You’re sleepy.” Gradually, the crying died down to a slow whimper, then silence, except for the creak, creak, creak of a rocker.

  From the deep recesses of Clay’s memory, an image emerged…flickering and ethereal. A woman sitting in a high-backed rocking chair, holding an infant in her tender embrace. He even imagined the scent of baby powder mixed with a flowery substance. Perfume? The woman was singing a sweet, silly song to the baby about a sandman coming with his bag of magic sleepytime dust.

  A lump formed in Clay’s throat, and he could barely breathe.

  Could it have been his mother…and him? No! His mother had left when he was barely one year old. It was impossible that he could recall something from that age. Wasn’t it?

  With a snort of disgust, Clay tossed the quilt aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. He gritted his teeth to fight off the wooziness that accompanied waves of pain assaulting him from both the back of his head and his bandaged ankle. Once the worst of the pain passed, he took in the fact that he was clothed only in boxers. Had he undressed himself? No, it had been the woman, Annie Fallon, and her Aunt Liza, a wiry, more ancient version of the grandma on The Waltons. God, I’ve got a thing about the Waltons today. They’d helped him remove his clothing, then encouraged him to take half a pill before tucking him into the big bed.

  In fact, Clay had a distinct recollection of the old buzzard eyeballing his near-nude body, cackling her appreciation, then telling Annie, “Not bad for a city slicker!”

  He also had a distinct recollection of Annie’s response. “Don’t go there, Aunt Liza. He’s an egotistical bozo with ice in his veins and a Scrooge personality disorder.”

  “Scrooge-smoodge. You could melt him down, sweetie. Might be a nifty idea for our Christmas good deed this year.”

  Annie had giggled. “I can see it now. The Fallon family Christmas good deed, 1998: bring a Scrooge home for the holidays.”

  I am not a Scrooge. Not, not, not! I’m not icy, either. In fact, I’m hot, hot, hot…at least when the Tennessee tart is around. Furthermore, nobody—especially not a bunch of hayseed farmers—had better make me their good deed. I am not a pity case.

  Clay wanted nothing more than to be back home, where his life was orderly and sane. He was going to sue the pants off these crackpots, but he had more important things on his mind right now. An empty stomach—which rumbled at the delicious scents wafting up from downstairs—and a full bladder.

  First things first. Clay pulled on his suit pants gingerly, and made his way into the hall, using one crutch to avoid putting full weight on his injured ankle. Across the corridor, a boy of about thirteen—the one who’d been a shepherd in the Nativity scene—was propped against the pillows on one of the twin beds in the room, reading a biology book and writing in a class notebook. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed, FARMERS HAVE LONG HOES. His hair was wet from a recent shower and no longer sported the high pouf on top or duck’s tail in the back. It was from a stereo at the side of his bed where the Elvis music was blasting.

  When he noticed Clay in the doorway, the boy set his schoolbooks aside and turned down the volume. “You’re up. Finally.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Gotta take a leak, huh?” the boy inquired. “My name’s Johnny,” he informed him cheerily. “You’re Clay, right? Annie says you’re gonna stay with us for a while. Cool. Do you like Elvis?” The boy never waited for answers to his questions, just chattered away as he led the way to the end of the hall.

  By the time they got there, Clay was practically crossing his legs—not an easy feat when walking with a sprained ankle. Was there only one bathroom to serve more than a half dozen people? There were eight bathrooms in his home, and he was the sole inhabitant these days,
except for Doris and George, and they lived over the old carriage house.

  Clay soon found himself in the small bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed tub and porcelain pedestal sink. No shower stall here, just a showerhead and plastic curtain that hung from an oval aluminum rod, suspended from the ceiling and surrounding the tub on all sides. At least there was a toilet, Clay thought, releasing a long sigh of near-ecstasy after relieving himself.

  He’d barely zipped up his pants when there was a knock on the door. “You decent?” a male voice called out.

  Define decent. Hobbling around barefooted, decent? Wearing nothing but a knot on my head the size of a fist and a pair of wrinkled slacks, decent? Caught practically midleak, decent? Under the influence of drugs, decent? “Yeah, I’m decent.”

  The door creaked open and the oldest brother, the father of the baby, stuck his head inside. He apparently hadn’t showered yet because he still had the Elvis hairdo, though the St. Joseph outfit was gone, in favor of jeans and a sweatshirt. “Hi. My name’s Chet. Annie told me to give you these.” He shoved a pair of jeans, a white undershirt, a blue plaid flannel shirt, socks, and raggedy sneakers at him. “You look about the same size as me.”

  Clay took the items hesitantly. He was about to tell him that he wouldn’t need them, since he intended to go back to the hotel, ASAP. And call his lawyer. Before he could speak, though, the man—about twenty-five years old—asked with genuine concern, “How ya feelin’? Your body must feel like a bulldozer ran over it.”

  “Do you mean your sister?”

  Chet threw his head back and laughed. “Annie does have that effect sometimes, doesn’t she? No, I meant the boink to your head and your twisted ankle.”

  Clay shrugged. “I’ll be all right.”

  Just then Clay noticed the black satin bra hanging on the doorknob. The cups were full and feminine to the nth degree. He was pretty sure the wispy undergarment didn’t belong to Aunt Liza. Hmmm. It would seem the scarecrow Madonna was hiding something under her virginly robes.