Laughter erupted from the kitchen again just as Rosemary connected with a cross-stitched ornament and yanked. Needles sprayed across the huge piles of presents beneath the tree. Branches rocked. Michael held his breath.
Rosemary held up the ornament with a proud grin.
“Uncle Michael! Uncle Michael!” Jenny, bundled up in her winter coat and snow pants, cheeks red from the cold, came tearing into the room.
Michael turned just in time to catch the child with his semifree hand as she hurtled herself against his back. “We’re home!” the child cried. “I get to watch Zack and Rosemary now.”
“They’re all yours.” He handed his daughter carefully to the eager girl.
“How was the sledding?” he asked Seth and Jeremy as they followed Jenny into the room.
“Here, let me get him,” Jeremy said, hurrying over to take Zack from his sister. “You hold her.”
She gave in, but only because she couldn’t possibly carry both of them, Michael suspected. Carefully, Jenny handed over one of her cherished cargo.
“Sledding was great.” Pulling off his gloves, Seth stopped beside the tree that dwarfed the Kennedys’ living room.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, aiming the words over one shoulder. “Uncle Brady came over and brought Paul, and Paul showed me the coolest trick. We made it all the way down the hill on our shoulders, both of us on one sled.”
Raising his brows he looked to Seth for confirmation—and for verification that his brother-in-law hadn’t lost his mind allowing the boys to take such a risk.
“I tried it first,” Seth defended himself, shrugging his shoulders. “Once you’ve got your balance, there’s nothing to it”
“Except breaking your neck,” Michael muttered. He’d been remarried to Susan for more than a year—remarried to her and divorced from his work—and he still wasn’t used to the Carmichael physical prowess. He’d known they were highly athletic. He just hadn’t realized there was no sport they couldn’t conquer. It was only one of the things he’d missed learning the first time around. He’d found many more over the past year. Things he’d been too busy working to notice before. Like the fact that his wife liked to wallow in bubble baths for hours. She read something nonfiction every day, too.
And her father was addicted to chocolate.
“How’s Paul doing?” Michael asked softly as Jenny and Jeremy led the babbling Rosemary and grunting Zack down the hall to the playroom.
“Good.” Seth looked satisfied as he shrugged out of his coat. The boy had left Brady’s group home for disadvantaged kids a few months before. “He’s living with his grandparents, taking to his new school, even made the junior varsity basketball team.”
“Jeremy still following him around like a lost puppy?”
Seth grinned. “Every chance he gets.”
Silently watching the fire flickering in the fireplace across the room, Michael couldn’t help but admire his brother-in-law. Seth had done it all. Married Laura, become a great father to her kids, kept his job, and he still found the time to see the kid he’d volunteered with the previous year, when he’d been estranged from Laura and her kids.
“So you really shut down the office for the week?” Seth asked, joining Michael on the floor. He lay on his side, head propped on one hand.
“Yep.”
Seth stared at Michael, lifted Michael’s hand. “Hold it there,” he said, letting go in midair.
Holding his hand out in front of him as instructed, Michael stared at his brother-in-law. “Why?”
“You’re not shaking,” Seth said, as though he were a doctor searching for a diagnosis. “You been drinking?”
“No!” Michael laughed and dropped his hand.
“You’re sitting still, doing nothing, no bobbing knees or jittery joints. I’d say that means you’re relaxed!” Seth crowed, and then, just as quickly he grew serious. “I’m glad.”
“Yeah, me too.” All in all, the year 2000 had been one of the best yet.
Getting up to put another log on the fire, Seth asked, “So how’s business?”
“Great. Better than I projected.”
“You might think about hiring some help.”