Page 100 of Her Christmas Wish
And one with visitors, too, he realized as he heard a knock on the front door.
Figuring one of the residents of Ocean Breeze for giving him some kind of housewarming, he’d just gotten to the part where no one but Sage knew he’d just decided to start sleeping there yet, as he pulled open the door.
His gaze locked with Sage’s first. Seeing happiness glowing there, he grinned down at her sidekick. To see the little girl holding a tiny puppy.
“We ’cided that you could keep him,” Leigh said. “Him’s name’s Puppy.”
Eyes wide, but still, surprisingly, smiling, he glanced up at Sage, who said, “I’m babysitting him for a colleague. Just overnight. And after I told Leigh that you were going to be sleeping in your cottage instead of Uncle Scott’s, she thought you needed the company.” She kind of grimaced, looking like there was more to the story.
“He pooped on my shoe,” Leigh announced, pushing past them to walk around the cottage, still carrying the three-to-four-pound poodle in her arms.
“And I figured, with you...” Sage started in again.
And he interrupted with, “Not having flooring in yet...”
“No, with you moving in, we’d keep Morgan. She was...a little territorial of Leigh...and kept the poor thing cornered in the living room, yapping anytime Puppy tried to move.”
Gray frowned. “How long have you been home?” He’d driven by less than an hour before.
“Fifteen minutes,” she told him, with another grimace. And a smile. “Seriously, I can keep him. I’ve already got the laundry room gated off for him.”
Gray shrugged. “I don’t mind keeping him,” he told her. Maybe, at some point, he’d even get a dog of his own. The thought had occurred enough times over the past month that he figured it would happen at some point.
“You don’t got a bed!” Leigh called from one of the bedrooms. Gray figured she’d already been in all three. One thing was for certain, from the first time the four-year-old had been inside his cottage, she’d made herself at home there.
And had paid careful attention to his rules, too. No getting near any wires of any kind, for any reason, or close to walls without paper over top of them.
“And you don’t got a kissmas tree, either.”
Sage looked at him. “You didn’t get a mattress out of storage?”
Still in the dress pants he’d worn all day, he shrugged again. Looked first to Leigh, and said, “I still have time to get one. Christmas isn’t for another almost two weeks.” He’d already opted out of decorating inside the house. But no way he was going to disappoint that little girl.
Deciding he’d pick up some pre-decorated and lighted thing, he turned to Sage.
“I didn’t actually decide to stay here until the last minute. And it’s not like I haven’t slept down here without a bed before.”
Both times in the sand. Not on hard floors.
“I’ve got a blow-up mattress,” Sage said then. “I’ll run and get it.” Looking toward Leigh, she asked, “You okay with her for a couple of minutes?”
The question had come so naturally but stopped them both. Her probably for different reasons than him. “You don’t trust me with her?”
“Of course I do. Completely.”
“Then you think I might not want to be entrusted with her?”
“No. I just...”
Tilting his head, brow risen, he stared her down. She was the one who’d said if he took on the one, he had to take on the other. Something he’d have figured out on his own, anyway. Just made sense in terms of Leigh’s adjustment. And Lord knew he was not going to be responsible for ruining that little girl’s childhood.
“You’re right,” Sage said then. “Though not like you’re thinking. I’ve been doing it alone a long time,” she told him. “It’s just going to take some time to realize that...I don’t have to. All the time.”
Her words struck right at the core of him.Doing it alone a long time. I don’t have to.Almost as though she’d been speaking for him. Trying to get him to see. But she hadn’t been. The stark look on her face was proof to him of that.
Gray was still thinking about that look on Sage’s face when Leigh came into the great room a minute or so after Sage left. “Why you just standing here?”
He came up blank. “I was deciding what to do next,” he shot from the hip. Leigh, with the dog in her arms, seemed satisfied.
