Page 124 of The Holiday Gift

Right now he couldn’t think much beyond the next meal he had to fix for the kids. Christmas dinner. She went to all that trouble?

Against his will, warmth seeped through him. Her thoughtfulness astounded him and he didn’t quite know what to say.

“Thank you,” he finally managed to say. “Wow. Just...thank you.”

She smiled and the sweetness of it nearly took his breath away. “You’re welcome. Shall I put it in the refrigerator?”

He stirred himself to reach for the bags. “That would be great.”

Caidy Bowman astonished him. She had endured unimaginable horror and pain. Despite it, she was a nurturer, doing her best to make the world around her a little brighter.

For the next few moments, he pulled out package after package. It was more than just ham and potatoes. She had sent a jar of homemade strawberry jam, some frozen bread dough with instructions for thawing and baking written on them, even a small cheese ball and a box of crackers.

He was sure he would have muddled through some kind of dinner with the children, but the fact that she had thought far enough ahead to help touched something deep inside him.

I just want to help lift your burden a little,she had said earlier in the evening. He couldn’t remember anybody ever spontaneously offering such a thing to him. Mrs. Michaels helped him tremendously but he paid her well for it. This was pure generosity on Caidy’s part and he was stunned by it.

“Shall we get started with wrapping?”

He wasn’t sure he trusted himself right now to spend five minutes with her, but because she had come all this way—and brought Christmas dinner to boot—he didn’t know how to kick her out into the snow.

“I’ve brought everything down, including all the wrapping paper I could find.”

“Perfect.”

She took in the pile of presents with a slight smile dancing across that expressive mouth. “Looks like the children will have a great Christmas.”

He hurried to disabuse her of the notion that he ought to win any Father of the Year awards. “Mrs. Michaels did a lot of the shopping, though I did buy a few things online. So where do we start?”

“I guess we just dive in. You know, I can handle this, if you have something else to do.”

Did she want him to leave? For an instant, he was unbelievably tempted to do just that, escape into another room and leave her to it. But not only would that be rude, it would be cowardly too, especially when she had gone to all this trouble to walk down in the snow—and carrying a sumptuous meal too.

“No. Let’s do this. With both of us working together, it shouldn’t take long. You might have to babysit me a little.”

“Surely you’ve wrapped a present before.”

He racked his brain and vaguely remembered wrapping a gift for his grandparents that first Christmas after they had taken him in, a macaroni-covered pencil holder he had worked hard on in school. His grandfather hadn’t even opened it, had made some excuse about saving it for later. Christmas night when he had taken out a bag of discarded wrapping paper, he had seen it out in the trash can, still wrapped.

“I probably did when I was a kid. I doubt my skills have improved since then.”

“How can a man reach thirtysomething without learning how to wrap a present?”

“I rely on two really cool inventions. You may have heard of them. Store gift-wrapping and the very handy and ubiquitous gift bag.”

She laughed, and the sound of it in the quiet kitchen entranced him. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take care of all the oddly shaped gifts and you can handle the easy things. The books and the DVDs and other basic shapes. It’s a piece of cake. Let me show you.”

For the next few moments, he endured the sheer torture of having her stand at his side, her soft curves just a breath away as she leaned over the table beside him.

“The real trick to a beautifully wrapped present is to make sure you measure the paper correctly. Too big and you’ve got unsightly extra paper to deal with. Too small and the package underneath shows through.”

“Makes sense,” he mumbled. He was almost painfully aware of her, but beneath his desire was something deeper, a tenderness that terrified him. He meant his words to her earlier in the evening. She was an amazing person and he didn’t know how much longer he could continue to ignore this inexorable bond between them.

“Okay, after you’ve measured your paper, leaving an extra inch or two on all sides, you bring the sides up, one over the other, and tape the seam. Great. Now fold the top and bottom edges of the end on the diagonal like this—” she demonstrated “—and then tape those down. Small pieces of tape are better. Can you see that?”

Right now, he would agree to anything she said. She smelled delicious and he wanted to pull her onto his lap and just nuzzle her neck for a few hours. “Okay. Sure.”

“After that, you can use ribbon to wrap around it or just stick on a bow. Doesn’t it look great? Do you think you can do it now on your own?”

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