Coming Home for Christmas by Carla Kelly Page A

try. She clung to him, her face muffled against the bib of his surgeon’s apron, wailing as though her heart would break. It was foolish to expecther to speak rationally; Scottish women did not behave like this. He held her just as tightly as she held him, knowing by now that her apparently fragile construction was an illusion. She was as strong as steel, every bit his equal.
    He had no idea how long they clung together. When he opened his eyes, the fisherman was back coiling his nets, ignoring them as would any man who was “born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” So it was with Job; so it was with these citizens living in paradise on the Alta California coast, where the earth moved without warning.
    His wife’s wails ceased finally. She sagged against him and Thomas realized they were holding each other up.
    â€œDear heart, what is it? You didn’t even know those men.”
    She raised her tearstained face to his, cupping it with her shaking hands. “Tomás, you could have been on that ship!”
    Dumbfounded, he stared at her. She was right; he hadn’t even thought of that, so horrified was he by the death of friends and the agony that the Americans at Fort Astoria would never even know how badly their assistance was needed by the Royal Navy, farther down the coast. He was stranded in California for the foreseeable future.
    Selfish man. He had only thought of himself and not of his lovely, sudden wife. His father would have been ashamed.
    Laura sat down in the sand then, and he slumped beside her. He put his arm around her, swarmed by more emotions at once than he was capable of processing through his tired brain. Death on land and sea surrounded them both and here was this precious gift: Laura Ortiz, descendant of grandees and Spanish nobility, who loved him. She loved him so much that even the mere thought of his death rendered her inconsolable. He didn’t deserve such devotion.
    She was saying something else, but there was that roaring in his ears. He breathed deeply and slowly until the noise went away. The sound of water lapping against the fishing boats, a sound he was familiar with, restored his equanimity. He was able to listen to what his wife was saying.
    â€œI don’t know when it happened,” she was saying, her voice soft. She rubbed his chest. Her voice changed, and he could hear the shyness now. “Maybe it was even when you…when you did not take me at once, as was your right, once I was your wife.”
    â€œI would never have done that, Laura,” he said.
    She nodded. “I know. You were kind and you never had to be.”
    He pulled her on to his lap because beside him wasn’t close enough. “Probably the populations of large countries would not say I have been kind to drag you into…into this hell that is San Juan Capistrano.”
    â€œProbably not,” she agreed and her Spanish practicality made him smile. “If you will recall, señor, I did not ask. I told you I was coming.”
    â€œSo you did, my love.”
    He kissed her then, mindful of nothing except her. There was nothing tentative in his urge and nothing shy in her response. He kissed her lips, her neck and the warm space between her breasts, where her heart pounded. By God, he would have taken her right there on thebeach, if it hadn’t been broad daylight. The fisherman was ignoring them—wise man—and Laura was breathing as heavily as he was. He owed what little restraint remained to him to his Presbyterian upbringing.
    He held himself off from her. “I don’t even pretend to understand any of this,” he told Laura, when he could sling foreign words together.
    Was she always going to be better than he, in fraught situations? “Let us get on the boat and go back to your bed in San Diego,” she whispered in his ear. “Earthquakes can wait.”
    So they could. While she waited on the fishing vessel, Thomas gathered