“Very funny.”
He held out the first strand. “It’s all yours.”
Jessie’s enthusiasm faltered slightly as her gaze traveled up the towering tree. “You have to do the first strand. I can’t reach the top.”
“I brought in a ladder.”
She shot him a baleful look. “Never mind. Heights make me dizzy.” So did Luke, but that was another story entirely. She was finding the powerful nature of her reactions to him increasingly worrisome.
“Are you sure you can trust me to do it right?” he teased.
“Of course,” she said blithely. “I’ll be directing you.”
To his credit, he actually took direction fairly well. He seemed to lose patience only when she made him shift an entire strand one level of branches higher. “It’ll be dark there, if you don’t,” she insisted.
“There are going to be a thousand lights on this tree at the rate we’re going,” he argued. “Nobody’s even going to see the branches.”
She turned her sweetest gaze on him. “The baby will like the lights.”
The argument worked like a charm. Luke sighed and moved the strand.
“I’d better check the fuses before we turn this thing on,” he complained. “It’ll probably blow the power for miles around.”
“Stop fussing. It’s going to be spectacular. Let’s do the ornaments next.”
“Where did you intend to hang them? There’s no space left.”
She hid a grin at the grumbling. “Lucas, I could do this by myself.”
He actually chuckled at that. “But you’d miss half the fun.”
Jessie narrowed her gaze. “Which is?”
“Bossing me around.”
“You have a point,” she said agreeably. “But admit it, you’re getting into the holiday spirit.”
The teasing spark in his eyes turned suddenly serious. There was an unexpected warmth in his expression that made Jessie’s pulse skitter wildly.
“I suppose I am,” he said so quietly that she could practically hear the beating of her heart. “Can I tell you something?”
Jessie swallowed hard. “Anything.”
“It’s the first Christmas tree I’ve ever decorated.”
She stared at him incredulously. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “Mother always hired some decorator, who’d arrive with a new batch of the most stylish ornaments in the current holiday color scheme. We were never even allowed to be underfoot. By January second, it was all neatly cleared away, never to be duplicated.”
“That’s terrible,” Jessie said. “I just assumed...”
“That we had some warm family tradition, like something out of a fairytale,” he concluded. “You were there. You saw the fuss Mother made over choosing the design for the tree.”
“I thought maybe it was something she’d started to do after you were all older and the family started doing more formal entertaining during the holidays.”
“Nope. Not even when we came home from school with little handmade decorations. Those went on Consuela’s tree. I think she still has them all. Mother paid a fortune for the perfect tree. She wasn’t about to have the design marred by tacky ornaments made by her children.”
Jessie’s heart ached for the four boys who’d been deprived of the kind of tradition she’d always clung to. When she looked his way again, Luke’s thoughtful gaze was on her as if he was waiting for her reaction to having one of her myths about his family shattered.
“Where are those decorations now?” she asked, clearly surprising him.
“In Consuela’s suite, I suppose. Why?”
“Can you find them?”
He gave her an odd look. “Jessie, there’s no need to get all sentimental about a bunch of construction paper and plaster of paris decorations.”
“I want them on this tree,” she insisted.
Luke shook his head at what he obviously considered a fanciful demand. “I’ll take a look later.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” He played along and solemnly crossed his heart. “What about you, Jessie? What was it like at your house?”
“Quiet,” she said, thinking back to those days that had been a mix of happy traditions and inexplicable loneliness. “There were just the three of us. By the time I was adopted, my parents were already turning forty. There were no grandparents. I always thought how wonderful it would be if only there were aunts and uncles and cousins, but both of my parents had been only children.”
“Is that why you were coming back to White Pines this year? Did you want to maintain the ties so your baby would eventually have the large family you’d missed?”
“That was part of it. That and wanting her to know she’s an Adams. I don’t have that sense of the past that you have. I suppose it can be a blessing and a curse—Erik certainly saw it that way—but I envy it more than I can tell you.”
“Why didn’t you ever search for your biological parents?”
She recalled how badly she’d once wanted to do exactly that. “I thought about it right after I learned I was adopted,” she admitted. “But my parents were so distressed by the idea that I put it aside.”
He paused in hanging the decorations and studied her from atop the ladder. “Is it still important to you?”
Jessie felt his gaze on her and looked up at him from her spot on the floor amid the rapidly emptying boxes. “I think it is,” she said quietly. “It’s as though there’s a piece of me missing and I’ll never be whole until I find it. It’s funny. I thought Erik and your family could fill that space, but I was wrong. It’s still there.”
Luke climbed down from the ladder, then hunkered down in front of her and rested his hands on her knees. His gaze was even with hers and filled with compassion. “Then do it, Jessie. Find that missing part. I’ll help in any way I can.”
Something deep inside her blossomed under the warmth of his gaze. And for the first time she could ever recall, it seemed there was no empty place after all.
7
Though it tested her patience terribly, Jessie agreed with Luke’s idea that they not turn on the tree lights until evening. The decision to wait left her brimming with an inexplicable sense of
