Maid Under The Mistletoe. Maureen Child

lisp brought a reluctant smile even as he moved toward her. She’d stopped in front of a vise that probably looked both interesting and scary to a kid.

      “It’s a wood vise,” he said. “It holds a piece of wood steady so I can work on it.”

      She chewed her bottom lip and thought about it for a minute. “Like if I put my doll between my knees so I can brush her hair.”

      “Yeah,” he said grudgingly. Smart kid. “It’s sort of like that. Shouldn’t you be with your mom?”

      “She’s cleaning and she said I could play in the yard if I stayed in the yard so I am but I wish it would snow and we could make angels and snowballs and a big snowman and—”

      Amazed, Sam could only stare in awe as the little girl talked without seeming to breathe. Thoughts and words tumbled out of her in a rush that tangled together and yet somehow made sense.

      Desperate now to stop the flood of high-pitched sounds, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

      She laughed and shook her head so hard her pigtails flew back and forth across her eyes. “I go to pre-K cuz I’m too little for Big-K cuz my birthday comes too late cuz it’s the day after Christmas and I can probably get a puppy if I ask Santa and Mommy’s gonna get me a fairy doll for my birthday cuz Christmas is for the puppy and he’ll be all white like a snowball and he’ll play with me and lick me like Lizzie’s puppy does when I get to play there and—”

      So...instead of halting the rush of words and noise, he’d simply given her more to talk about. Sam took another long gulp of his coffee and hoped the caffeine would give him enough clarity to follow the kid’s twisty thought patterns.

      She picked up a scrap piece of wood and turned it over in her tiny hands.

      “What can we make out of this?” she asked, holding it up to him, an interested gleam in her eye and an eager smile on her face.

      Well, hell. He had nothing else to work on. It wasn’t as though he was being drawn to the kid or anything. All he was doing was killing time. Keeping busy. Frowning to himself, Sam took the piece of wood from her and said, “If you’re staying, take your jacket off and put it over there.”

      Her smile widened, her eyes sparkled and she hurried to do just what he told her. Shaking his head, Sam asked himself what he was doing. He should be dragging her back to the house. Telling her mother to keep the kid away from him. Instead, he was getting deeper.

      “I wanna make a fairy house!”

      He winced a little at the high pitch of that tiny voice and told himself that this didn’t matter. He could back off again later.

      * * *

      Joy looked through the window of Sam’s workshop and watched her daughter work alongside the man who had insisted he wanted nothing to do with her. Her heart filled when Holly turned a wide, delighted smile on the man. Then a twinge of guilt pinged inside her. Her little girl was happy and well-adjusted, but she was lacking a male role model in her life. God knew her father hadn’t been interested in the job.

      She’d told herself at the time that Holly would be better off without him than with a man who clearly didn’t want to be a father. Yet here was another man who had claimed to want nothing to do with kids—her daughter in particular—and instead of complaining about her presence, he was working with her. Showing the little girl how to build...something. And Holly was loving it.

      The little girl knelt on a stool at the workbench, following Sam’s orders, and though she couldn’t see what they were working on from her vantage point, Joy didn’t think it mattered. Her daughter’s happiness was evident, and whether he knew it or not, after only one day around Holly, Sam was opening up. She wondered what kind of man that opening would release.