Tied With a Bow

what clothes to pack. At first Rule had suggested he ask Arjenie, but Benedict had explained that he didn’t need to know what was appropriate. He needed to know what cultural messages his clothes were sending. Rule understood things like that.
    It seemed strange that he ended up wearing pretty much what he would have on any other day, except for the jacket. Somehow adding a leather sports jacket changed the message of his jeans and dark blue T-shirt from “I didn’t bother to dress up” to “I’m a casual person but want to honor our meeting.”
    “. . . not that you’ve heard a word I said. Which is okay, because I’m babbling to an insane degree, but you’re supposed to nod or say ‘uh-huh’ now and then, anyway.”
    Promptly Benedict nodded. “Uh-huh.”
    She laughed.
    “You wish your nana and papa could be here,” he added. “It seems strange for them to be gone at Yule, but they’re having such a good time backpacking in Europe and it seems to be helping them heal after Samuel’s death.”
    “Oh.” She squeezed his hand. “Oh, I do love you. A lot.”
    He glanced at her, pleased but baffled. He hadn’t done anything special.
    Just then the road finished curling around a low hill and the tree tunnel vanished. Ahead the Delacroix home place snuggled into a sunny meadow backed by woods. The house was tall and white and sturdy and wore its black roof like a British gentleman’s bowler. A veranda ran the length of the front. There were two outbuildings visible from the road, both set well away from the house. The barn was relatively new construction and currently housed four horses. The Delacroix family had long been horse lovers; Robin Delacroix was a large-animal vet who’d met her husband when she came to treat one of his family’s horses. The other building was local stone, at least as old as the house, and held Clay Delacroix’s forge and workshop. On the far side of the barn, five vehicles were parked in a recently mown field.
    There was a detached garage, too, though Benedict couldn’t see it from this angle. That’s where his guards should have been bunking. He’d been overruled on that, however. Robin Delacroix did not want guests sleeping in an unheated garage.
    They were his guards, not her guests, and would be exterior guards at that. Having them bunk in the garage offered an extra layer of security. Even a sleeping lupus was hard to sneak up on. But Arjenie said that her aunt would not budge about this, so Benedict had been forced to agree to her terms.
    The gravel road split well back from the house, with one track veering for the field while the other looped in front of the house. Benedict put down his window and signaled Josh, who would park and wait until Benedict summoned him and Adam. It was not exactly normal to bring bodyguards along on a holiday visit; Benedict wanted to keep them as inconspicuous as possible. He kept going. Arjenie had said he was supposed to pull up in front of the porch and unload their bags before moving the car out of the way.
    “Oh, look—there’s Uncle Hershey coming around the side of the house!” She waved, then twisted around to grab the green wool coat he hadn’t seen until she dug it out of her closet at her old apartment. She hadn’t needed it in San Diego.
    The man she was waving to waved back and broke into a jog. He was under fifty and powerfully built, with a silver streak in his dark hair and a big grin. “They’re here!” he hollered, presumably to those in the house.
    Before Benedict got the car stopped, people boiled out the front door—three kids, two dogs, two men, and one woman. Everyone but the dogs wore jackets. The woman was nearly a foot shorter than Arjenie, a couple decades older, and had Arjenie’s hair. She’d knotted it on top of her head at some point that day, but like her niece’s hair, it sneered at attempts at restraint. Escaped strands frothed and fluttered as she skipped down the veranda steps as lightly as a girl.
    One of the men was well over six feet and lean, with wavy brown hair and glasses. The other was shorter, broad and strong, with a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard. That would be Clay Delacroix, blacksmith and sculptor and everything Arjenie knew about fathers.
    The dogs barked excitedly. The smallest child—three or four with freckles and a missing front tooth, too young to be the Emily Arjenie once tended—tripped and fell. The brown-haired man scooped her up and parked her on