Callie's Christmas Wish
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Merline Lovelace
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Chapter One
It started with the fountain.
That damned Trevi Fountain.
Callie and her two best friends had to take a long-dreamed-of trip to Italy this past September. Then she and Dawn and Kate had to defy the tradition that said just tossing a coin in the fountain would bring them back to Rome someday. Oh, no. The centuries-old tradition wasn’t good enough. They had to make separate, secret wishes.
Kate’s came true while the three friends were still in Italy, when she and her husband reconciled mere weeks away from a divorce. Dawn didn’t realize her wish had been granted until she was back in the States and acting as surrogate nanny for a lively six-year-old. A few short weeks later, the laughing, flirtatious redhead had made the surprising and completely unexpected leap from carefree bachelorette to deliriously happy mother to Tommy and wife to hunky Brian Ellis.
Callie had made a wish in Rome, as well. One she hadn’t shared with anyone. Not even her BFFs. It was too silly, too frivolous. And so not in keeping with her usual level-headed self.
That ridiculous wish was coming back to haunt her now. Every part of her thrummed with nervous anticipation as she helped Dawn and Tommy loop fresh pine boughs into Christmas wreaths for the doors of the Ellises’ home. Luckily, the determined efforts of Tommy’s three-month-old wheaten terrier pup to get into the action kept both the boy and Dawn so amused that neither noticed Callie jump when the doorbell rang.
The sound of the bell sent the pup into an immediate frenzy. His butt end whipped around. His claws skittered on the pine plank flooring. High-pitched yelps split the air as he careened out of the kitchen and down a hallway fragrant with the scent of the cloves and cinnamon and oranges in the Christmas potpourri.
“That’ll be Joe.”
Pushing to her feet, Dawn dusted the pine needles from the moss-colored turtleneck that clung to her generous curves and made her eyes appear an even deeper shade of emerald.
“His message said his plane would touch down at three and he’d be here by four.” She slanted Callie a sly look. “Tall, dark, handsome and punctual. What more could a girl ask for?”
Nothing, Callie agreed, her stomach fluttering. Not a single, solitary thing.
Except...maybe...
There it was! That absurd coin toss again. How juvenile to wish Joe would let just a tiny smidgen of romance sneak through his solid, masculine, don’t-mess-with-me-or-mine exterior. Hadn’t he put his highly lucrative business interests on hold for her? Devoted considerable time and expense to tracking down the source of the ugly emails she’d begun receiving a few weeks before the trip to Italy? Shaking her head at her own foolishness, Callie followed Dawn, the wildly yipping terrier and Tommy down the hall.
“Joe promised he’d bring me a real, live boomerang from Australia,” the boy reminded them as he charged for the door. “Hope he remembered it!”
He would. Callie didn’t doubt it for a second. In the few short months she’d known Joe Russo, she’d come to realize that nothing ever escaped the steel trap of his mind.
They’d first met during a never-to-be-forgotten jaunt to Venice. At the time Joe headed a highly specialized personal security team guarding Carlo Luigi Francesco di Lorenzo, aka the Prince of Lombard and Marino, who also happened to be one of Italy’s most decorated air force pilots. Carlo, Kate’s husband, Travis, and Dawn’s now-husband, Brian, had been involved in testing some hush-hush, super-secret modification to NATO special ops aircraft flying sorties from a base in northern Italy.
Callie and Joe had met again in Rome, when Travis surprised Kate with an elegant ceremony to renew their marriage vows. At that damned fountain! It must have been the stars in Kate’s eyes as she reaffirmed her love. Or the mischievous sparkle in Dawn’s when she announced she was flying home with the Ellises to assume duties as Tommy’s stand-in nanny. Whatever the impetus, Callie gave in to her friends’ urging that they all toss one last coin over their shoulders. Which was when she’d made that stupid, stupid wish.
Not ten minutes later, she’d found herself separated from her friends and yielding to Joe Russo’s quiet but relentless interrogation. As she’d soon discovered, the man hadn’t transitioned from military cop to soldier of fortune to head of one of the world’s most exclusive personal protection agencies without learning how to extract secrets from even the most reluctant interviewees.
He’d watched her, Joe had revealed. Saw how her shoulders braced every time she checked her email. Noted, too, how her eyes would flicker with distress before she withdrew even farther into her seemingly serene shell.
Callie tried to deny it. Tried to shrug aside his laser-sharp perceptions. She was too used to safeguarding the privacy of the children she’d represented as an ombudsman for the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate to spill their—or her—secrets. At that point Joe reminded her that she’d walked away from her job some weeks ago. He also pointed out that he could tap into any legal and/or law enforcement agencies necessary to resolve whatever was scaring the crap out of her.
Callie still couldn’t believe she’d broken down and told him about the threatening emails before she’d shown them to Kate and Dawn. Neither could her two best friends, for that matter. They’d let her know what they thought about that in some pretty forceful terms. But they got over their snit in short order and promptly threw a protective shield around her.
First, Kate insisted Callie stay with her in DC after their return from Italy. Then, when Dawn married and moved out of the elegant gatehouse designed for Tommy’s live-in nanny, she’d insisted Callie take up residence there while Joe investigated the emails. And when the emails escalated from ugly to really scary, Joe tried to hustle her into protective custody.
Callie had drawn the line at that. She was staying in DC, hundreds of miles from her Boston home. She had four fierce watchdogs in the persons of Kate and Dawn and their spouses guarding her day and night. She’d turned over every threatening communication to the authorities, and Joe had exercised the legal system to gain access to the juvenile court cases she’d worked.
Enough was enough.
But her heart had still pounded each time she checked her emails. It pounded even harder every time Joe called or flew in to update her on his investigation. The kiss he’d laid on her last time he was in DC might also have something to do with the fact that she was holding her breath while Tommy yanked open the front door.
“Hi, Joe. Didja bring the boomerang? Didja?”
“You bet.”
One of Joe’s rare smiles flickered across his face. His cheeks creased, almost hiding the scar slashing down the left side. All Callie knew was that it was the legacy of a mission he wouldn’t talk about to anyone, not even to Brian, Travis or Carlo. The angry red slash had faded in the past few months but still drew occasional startled glances.
Callie barely noticed it anymore. The rest of the package was too compelling. The broad shoulders now encased in a leather bomber jacket that had seen its share of wear, the square chin, the ice-gray eyes, the dark brown hair with its barest hint of a curl.
“Don’t forget what I told you,” Joe instructed as he stepped through the door and handed over a package wrapped in brown paper. “It’s not a toy.”
“I remember! Boomerangs are more than ten thousand years old. The aber...um...abra...”
“Aborigines.”
“Yeah. The aborigines used to hunt with ’em.”
While the boy tore at the brown paper, Joe nodded hello to Dawn before shifting his gaze to Callie. In their short time together, she’d discovered that his silvery eyes could turn as opaque and impenetrable as a Massachusetts coastal fog when he wanted, which was most of the time. But they glinted now with a triumph so clear and sharp that she knew instantly his sudden trip Down Under had yielded results.
“The emails!” she exclaimed. “You nailed the sender.”
“To the wall,” he replied with such savage satisfaction that Dawn whooped and flung up a palm for a joyous high five.
“All riiiight, Russo!”
The exuberant exclamation startled Tommy and the pup. Blue eyes wide, the boy clutched his boomerang to his chest and demanded to know what was going on while his pet made indiscriminate lunges at any and all adults.
“Down!”
Joe’s low command caught the terrier in midlunge. It dropped instantly onto its haunches, looking as uncertain as a cuddly, curly-haired puppy could.
“Let me take your jacket,” Dawn said in the sudden, blessed silence. “Then we’ll go into the kitchen and you can tell us every detail.”
“Mooooom.”
Tommy stretched the single syllable into a mile-long protest that stopped Dawn in her tracks. Despite the butterflies in her stomach, Callie had to smile at her friend’s goofy expression. The bubbly, irrepressible Dawn still wasn’t used to being a mother to anyone, much less a blue-eyed imp with the face of an angel and enough energy to propel the Hubble Space Telescope into extended orbit.
“Joe’s gotta show me how to make my boomerang come back,” Tommy insisted. “Or...” He assumed an air of patently false innocence. “I guess I could take it outside and figure out how it works myself.”
“Yeah,” Dawn snorted. “Like I’m going to turn you loose with an ancient hunting weapon.”
The Ellises’ home was in an older part of Bethesda, just over the Maryland border from Washington, DC. The neighborhood consisted of gracious brick and stone houses set on large, tree-shaded lots. Their backyard was enclosed in mellow brick and graced by a fanciful gazebo now dusted with a light snow. It was also overlooked by a half dozen plate-glass windows, all of which were at risk despite Tommy’s assurances that he would be real careful.
“We want to hear Joe’s news,” Dawn told the boy firmly. “Then we’ll all put on our jackets and go out with you.”
His lower lip jutted mutinously. “But...”
“Chill, dude.”
Always a man of few words, Joe got his point across without raising his voice. Dawn flashed him a rueful smile as she created a diversion for boy and dog.
“Why don’t you go into the den and get on the computer? You can pull up that website on the aerodynamics of boomerang flight your dad bookmarked for you. I bet Joe would like to see it after we talk.”
Reluctant but outnumbered, Tommy caved. “’Kay. Just don’t talk too long.”
Still clutching his prize, he scampered off with the pup hard on his heels. Joe shrugged out of his jacket and raised a brow as Dawn hooked the well-worn leather on the hall coatrack.
“Aerodynamics of flight, huh?”
“What can I say? Brian and his first wife were both engineers. It’s in Tommy’s genes.”
It was a measure of Dawn’s basic warmth and security in her two-month-old marriage that she didn’t want Tommy to forget his birth mother. Caroline Ellis had died of a brain tumor less than a year after her son’s birth. Tommy had no real memories of her except those captured in the exquisite digital book Dawn had made for him using all her skills as a graphic designer.
“C’mon. I’ll brew you some coffee while you tell us all.”
Dawn turned to lead the way down the hall, so she missed the casual hand Joe laid at the small of her friend’s back. Callie, on the other hand, felt the light touch right through her baggy purple sweater and cotton camisole.
When Joe called to say his plane had touched down, she’d almost dashed to the gatehouse to change, slap on some lip gloss and drag a brush through her mink-brown hair. She’d been thinking about taking Dawn’s advice and getting the shoulder-length mass shaped at one of DC’s elegant salons. With her life pretty much on hold these past weeks, though, she’d settled for just pulling it back in a ponytail or clipping it up.
She made a futile effort to tuck back some of the wayward strands as she and Joe settled in high-backed stools at the kitchen counter and Dawn plugged a fresh, single-cup, dark arabica blend container into the coffeemaker. As hot water steamed through the cup, the coffee’s rich aroma competed with the sappy tang of the fresh-cut pine boughs on the kitchen table.
“Okay,” Dawn demanded when the super-fast appliance delivered a steaming mug. “Talk! We’ve all been speculating like crazy since you took off so suddenly for Sydney. Tell us who the creep is who’s been sending those emails and why.”
Joe swiveled to face Callie. “Do you remember acting as ombudsman for a girl named Rose Graham?”
Frowning, she flipped through a mental filing cabinet of the cases she’d worked in her six years with the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate. Some files were slender; others were fat and crammed with tragic details. Still others were truly horrific. As best Callie could recall, though, Rose Graham’s case file was one of the thinner ones.
“I remember the name.”
“She was five when her parents duked it out in divorce court.”
From the corner of her eye Callie saw an all-too-familiar mask slip over Dawn’s normally expressive face. Her friend had been a young teen when her parents’ increasingly bitter arguments led to an even more acrimonious divorce, with their only daughter caught smack in the middle. Kate and Callie had acted as buffers as much as possible, but sharing Dawn’s heartache had been a significant factor in Callie’s decision to pursue a master’s degree in family psychology and accept an appointment as a children’s advocate.
“The mother worked as a paralegal,” Joe prompted. “The father was a software developer at one of Boston’s ultra-high-tech medical research companies.”
The details seeped back. Callie could visualize Rose Graham—fair-haired, small for her age and very bright.
“I remember the case now.” Her forehead crinkled. “As best I recall, it was pretty open-and-shut. The child was well adjusted, doing fine in preschool and clearly adored by both parents. Judges are predisposed to leave a female child that young with the mother unless there’s evidence of gross neglect or abuse. But...” Her frown deepened. “I’m pretty sure I recommended generous visitation rights for the father.”
“You did, which was why we didn’t give the Graham case as much scrutiny as some of the others. Only after I had my people go back and do a second scrub did we learn the father’s company transferred him to their Australian office earlier this year.”
“Uh-oh.”
With a sinking sensation, Callie sensed what was coming. Otherwise amicable divorce and custody agreements could turn ugly when overseas travel was involved. The cost of the travel itself was often prohibitive, and the court couldn’t discount the possibility a child taken outside its jurisdiction would not be returned. For that reason, Callie’s report to the judge had contained the standard caveat requiring review if either of the parents should relocate outside the US.
“Rose’s mother flat refused to let her daughter fly all the way to Australia,” Joe confirmed.
“And the law firm she worked for tied her ex up in legal knots,” Callie guessed. She’d seen that too many times, too.
“The father had to come back to the States so often for hearings and court appearances that he wiped out his savings and was forced to take out huge loans. As a result, he fell behind on child support.”
Callie grimaced. “And that in turn led the state to institute proceedings to garnish his wages from his home company in Boston, only adding to his legal woes and burden of debt.”
“He asked his company to transfer him back to Boston. He’s been waiting for six months for a position to open up.”
“In the meantime, his anger at the system festered.”
“And then some.” Joe shook his head in disgust. “I can’t believe it took my people so long to break through the series of firewalls he erected. The man’s damned good at what he does.”
“But your people are better,” Dawn commented.
“That’s why I pay ’em the big bucks.”
“So what happened when you confronted Graham?” she wanted to know.
“Pretty much what I’d expected. He acted astonished, then indignant. Then, when the Aussie cybercrimes detectives who accompanied me to his place of employment laid out the electronic evidence, he wouldn’t say another word without an attorney present. After his lawyer showed up it still took some persuasion,” Joe said with what both women suspected was considerable understatement, “but he finally admitted to fixating on the caveat in Callie’s report as the root cause of his problems.”
“Right,” Dawn snorted. “Not the judge who signed the visitation order. Not his ex-wife or her team of lawyers. And of course not himself.”
“Of course.” Joe’s silver-gray eyes frosted with icy satisfaction. “Bastard’s in a world of hurt now. He’ll be sitting in a cell for months while the US and Australia work out jurisdictional issues. Years, maybe, since the investigation and prosecution of terror-related cybercrimes takes far higher precedence in both countries than his threats.”
Callie might have felt sorry for Rose’s father if his vicious emails hadn’t disrupted her life for the past three months. She’d have to pick up the pieces and get on with it, she realized. But first...
“Thank you.” Reaching across the counter, she laid a hand over Joe’s. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me. More than I can ever say. I hated involving you in the mess, but...”
“Hated me butting in, you mean.”
“Well, yes. At first.” She had to smile. “After all, we barely knew each other.”
“A situation I’ve been trying to remedy.”
He had. He most definitely had. Just remembering the hard press of his mouth on hers the evening before his sudden trip to Australia brought a wash of heat from the neck of her sweater. The heat surged even higher when Joe turned his hand, enfolded hers and brushed his thumb over her wrist in slow, easy strokes.
Callie didn’t dare glance at her friend. Dawn wasn’t the least bit hesitant to dish out advice or offer opinions. She and Kate had both already suggested—several times!—that strong, silent, super-macho Joe Russo had a serious case of the hots for the quiet, seemingly demure member of their trio.
Thankfully Dawn refrained from commenting on either Joe’s thumb movements or the heat now spreading across Callie’s cheeks. Instead she invented a quick excuse to depart the scene.
“I’d better go make sure Tommy isn’t trying to test those aerodynamic principles in the den. Give a shout when you’re ready to, uh, take the action outside.”
The door to the den swished shut behind her, and a sudden silence descended. Callie was the first to break it. Her hand still in Joe’s, she tried to ignore the skitter of nerves his stroke was generating and smiled up at him.
“I meant what I just said, Joe. I’m really, really grateful. And so relieved it’s finally over.”
“Me, too. It’s been keeping me awake at night.”
“I’ve lost sleep, too,” she admitted. “I can’t ever repay you for the man-hours you and your people put into the investigation.”
“If it gets the shadows out of your eyes, I’ll consider the debt paid.”
His gaze locked on hers. “Your eyes are the damnedest color,” he said after a small pause. “Not purple, not lavender. Sort of halfway between the two. First thing I noticed about you.”
Well, Callie thought with an inner grimace, it wouldn’t have been her ebullient personality or luscious curves. Dawn had the corner on those. And any stray male glances the flamboyant redhead didn’t instantly capture, Kate’s lustrous, sun-streaked blond hair and mile-long legs would.
“Thanks,” she said for lack of a better response.
“I tried to find the right way to describe the color when I gave my folks your vitals,” he said with a rueful grimace. “Couldn’t bring myself to go with hyacinth or heliotrope. Their jaws would’ve smacked their chests.”
Callie’s own jaw almost took a trip south. These were the most words she’d heard Joe string together in one sitting. They were also the most surprising.
“So what did you go with?”
“Pansy.”
Her nose wrinkled. “Lovely.”
“Yeah, they are.”
His hand tightened and tugged her closer. His other hand came up to slide under her hair. His palm felt warm on her nape, the skin hard and ridged in spots. She’d once read that expert marksmen fired thousands of rounds weekly to maintain their skills and developed shooter’s calluses as a result.
Okay. She’d read that just a few weeks ago. When she was trying to weave a more complete picture of Joe Russo from the scant threads of his past that he’d shared with her. She was thinking of the still-gaping holes in that picture when he reclaimed her attention with a gruff admission.
“Those damned emails weren’t the only thing keeping me awake.”
He lowered his head but didn’t swoop in and catch her by surprise, as he had the night before his abrupt departure for Australia. He gave her plenty of time to pull away, to ease out of his loose grip. So much time she was the one who leaned into the kiss.
That was all the encouragement he needed. With a low grunt, he pushed off his stool. She came off hers eagerly. The hand still wrapped around her nape moved up. He tipped her head back for a better angle and used his other arm to fit her against him. She strained even closer while his mouth worked hard, hungry magic on hers.
Within moments, Callie was aching for more. She wanted him out of his shirt. Out of his worsted-wool slacks and his Italian leather boots and...
“Caaal-lee.”
She jerked her back and looked over her shoulder to find Tommy glaring at them with equal parts indignation and accusation. His pup wedged through the door with him and yipped, as if wanting to add his two cents to whatever was going on.
“Mom said you guys were still talking. But you’re not. You’re kissing ’n’ stuff.”
They hadn’t actually gotten to the “stuff” part, but Callie was thinking about it. Thinking hard. So was Joe, judging by the wicked tilt to his mouth.
“Yeah,” he admitted, “we are.”
Scowling, Tommy planted his fists on his hips. “When are you gonna be done?”
Joe slanted Callie a wry look. “How about we finish our...discussion...later? Somewhere private. Inaccessible to kids and dogs.”
“Deal.”
“All right, kid. Get your jacket and your boomerang and we’ll go outside.”
