The McRae Series 01 - Twelve Days Sam and Rachel

side of the bed and caught the faint scent of him there on the sheets and a hint of the warmth of his body. He had been here.
    And Sam McRae loved her at one time. If he had once, maybe he still did, or maybe he could again.
    She wished he were still here. That she'd woken up with him beside her, the way he used to be. She wished she'd come awake to him kissing her, his big, warm body on top of hers, his body already hard with need, him slipping inside of her when she was still warm and boneless with sleep. Mornings had been like that once. That dreamlike quality. The ease of long-time lovers. The need that could come so quickly and be so strong, they'd both be in a frenzy in moments, her body shuddering and her crying out and him lying heavily on top of her fighting for air. Sometimes the whole thing seemed like a dream.
    She realized she hadn't needed him like that in a long time—in a strongly sexual way. It was like her body had been in a deep, deep sleep, her emotions frozen over, out of pure self-preservation, and now she was coming back to life.
    He'd brought her back. Him and these children.
    She felt everything now. She smiled. She laughed. She looked forward to each new day, even though the closer they came to Christmas the closer she came to the day Sam was supposed to leave.
    She had hope for the first time in ages. What a wondrous gift. Hope.
    It was going to get her through the day and maybe all the ones that came after. Hope that she could still fix this with Sam, and that maybe these children could stay.
    * * *
    They decorated the tree without Sam, popping popcorn, which Zach ate and Rachel and Emma strung onto thread to make a garland to hang on the tree. It went on first, then the lights, and then the little red balls.
    "Do you have any more ornaments?" Emma said, standing back and surveying it critically. "It looks a little empty, like it needs more."
    "We do, but they don't go up until Christmas Day," Rachel explained. It was a tradition in her family, one she would share with them if they were still here at Christmas. And then she thought about something else. "How are we going to keep Grace from pulling it all off and trying to eat it?"
    Emma frowned. "I don't know."
    "How did you keep Zach from pulling the whole tree over on himself?"
    "We didn't," Emma said. "He did that once."
    "Did not," Zach said.
    "Yes, you did. Don't you remember?"
    "No," Zach said.
    "You were little, Zach."
    He frowned up at the tree, his little brow wrinkling in concentration. Rachel could picture him lying on the floor, a decorated Christmas tree on top of him, and she started to laugh. Emma did, too, and finally Zach joined in.
    Sam came in in the middle of that and hovered in the doorway watching them, the way he often did, and Rachel wondered what it would take to draw him inside, to keep him from lingering there on the edge. She wanted him with them, always.
    "What's going on?" he asked finally.
    "I didn't pull the tree over," Zach insisted.
    "Well, that's good to know," Sam said.
    "Emma says he did that when he was little, and we're wondering how to keep Grace away from this one," Rachel said.
    The baby was napping at the moment, but she crawled all over the downstairs, fast as she could go, and she hated the playpen Rachel's neighbor, Mrs. Doyle, had brought over for them to use. So far, they'd mostly been chasing her all over the house.
    "We could confine her to the family room, with a few more baby gates, like the one on the steps," Sam said.
    "She'll hate that," Emma said.
    "Probably," Rachel agreed. Already, she hated the one on the steps. She crawled up to it, pulled herself up so that she was standing, grabbed the gate, and shook it and fussed. "We can't let her eat the tree and all the stuff on it."
    And then Rachel laughed again. She feared she had a Christmas-tree-eating toddler on the loose in her house, and they needed to cage her to keep her from pulling the tree over on herself, like Zach had one year.
    When she looked up, everyone was smiling and her house rang with laughter, just the way it had when she was a girl.
    Rachel caught a glint of light out of the corner of her eye and when she looked up, sunshine was streaming in through the diamond window. The bevels in the glass turned the light this way and that, and as the sun set the light did seem to dance across her living-room floor.
    Magic, she thought. There was magic streaming into her house on this day.
    * * *
    Sam didn't sleep in her bed