Page 60 of The VIP Doubles Down

“It seems ...”

When she didn’t finish, he said, “Strange that I would propose a warm, fuzzy story? Believe me, Julian wasn’t baking Christmas cookies.”

“I’m sure he was on the outside looking in. You would make the reader feel how lonely his spy’s life is, how alienated he has to be from normal people to protect our Christmases.” She looked at his capable hands resting on the keyboard with such familiarity. “Why didn’t you finish it?”

She waited through a lengthy silence before he said, “I guess I owe you an answer. It might even help with my, er, issue. I started the novella when I got stuck on a scene in the book I’m supposed to be writing. Sometimes a change of direction helps shake loose new ideas.”

He lifted his hands and leaned back in his chair, making it creak on its wheeled base. “Then my father had a heart attack. I needed to deal with his medical situation because my stepmother isn’t good in a crisis.”

She couldn’t stop herself from offering the comfort of touch, so she laid a hand on his forearm where it rested on the arm of his chair. “No wonder you didn’t feel Christmassy.”

He shifted his gaze to the window. “I’d spent all my life trying to prove something to my father, and all of a sudden he’d been struck down. I had no one to brace myself against.”

“What about your stepmother?”

He gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “She tried to deny me access to my father in the hospital, but he overruled her. So I could make sure he was getting a high level of care. However, at the funeral service, she barred me from the family pew.”

Fury made Allie tighten her grasp on his arm. “She really is evil.”

He brought his other hand to cover hers, reminding her to ease her grip on him. “I never felt like I was part of the family after my father married Odelia anyway. But when she tried to exclude me from the burial ceremony, that ... was a problem. One I dealt with more forcibly than was perhaps necessary.”

Allie tried to imagine how it would feel to be kept from saying a final good-bye to her parents.

“I didn’t do her bodily harm, although it was close,” Gavin said. “However, I expressed my opinion of her at full volume in front of the priest and the entire assembly of mourners.”

She could picture him marshaling all the linguistic skill at his disposal to give his evil stepmother what she deserved. “I bet you were brilliant.”

He flinched at her last word as a shadow of guilt crossed his face. “Whether she loved my father or not, she had lost her husband of twenty-odd years. We were two animals in pain, tearing at each other.”

“She was supposed to stand in as your mother. To protect you.”

“That ship sailed almost the moment my father announced they were getting married.”

“Why would he marry a woman who couldn’t love you?”

Gavin interlaced his fingers with hers. “The housekeeper retired. He hired her after my mother ... left. Mrs.Knox and I got along fine for three years while my father spent all his waking hours at the family store. But her husband wanted to move to Florida.” He shrugged. “My father couldn’t find another housekeeper, so he found a wife instead. Odelia was a widow with three young daughters, so I suppose Dad thought she would be maternal.” His tone turned bitter. “There weren’t a lot of prospects in Bluffwoods, Illinois, and my father wouldn’t leave his precious store long enough to search farther afield.”

Allie heard the reverberations of the aching loneliness that had enveloped a small boy. A mother who deserted him. A distant father. Even the housekeeper had abandoned him. She wanted to gather the grown man into her arms and rock him like that lost child. “Your mother just ... left?”

He blew out a long breath and looked down at their entwined fingers. “I think that’s a story for another day.” He lifted their hands to kiss the back of hers. “You should have been a psychotherapist, not a physical therapist.”

But he’d written some of it into Julian Best’s past. “Now I know why you became a writer.”

“To punish my father?”

“I imagine that was a bonus. No, to make things come out right in the end.”

“You are far too clever, my dear.” He disentangled their fingers. “Now I have papers to critique.”

“You teach?” She couldn’t imagine the impatient, snarky Gavin guiding a classroom of students.

“You sound surprised.”

“Well, you’re not the most tolerant of people.”

He laughed. “I lead a creative-writing class in genre fiction at NYU. The students expect me to be bad tempered. Remarkably, I rarely am with them.”

“I’d love to see you teach.”