Home Run Read online

  Home Run

  Savannah Martin Holiday Novella

  Jenna Bennett

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  About the Author

  Christmas Time is Here…

  …and it’s back to Sweetwater to celebrate the holiday with the Martin family, and what’s left of the Colliers.

  This time, Savannah and Rafe have their infant daughter with them, and everyone’s cooing over the new addition. But Carrie isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Several other people have news, and some of the directions things are going might alter the course of several lives, including Rafe’s and Savannah’s, for the foreseeable future.

  Join the Martins and the Colliers, with their friends and relatives, for another Christmas in the Martin Mansion in Sweetwater!

  One

  The first month after the baby was born passed in a blur. I’d wake up, nurse, change the baby’s diaper, and go back to sleep. Everyone was telling me to sleep when the baby slept, so I did. As a result, I spent the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas getting about twelve hours of sleep a day, in between bouts of crying and eating. The baby’s, mostly, but I tried to remember to eat, and did my own share of crying, too.

  I spent the first week in Sweetwater in my mother’s house, where she and my sister Catherine and Mother’s best friend Audrey and Audrey’s aunt Tondalia—who also happens to be my husband’s grandmother—fussed over me and the baby. The next weekend, Rafe drove down and picked me up, and took me back to Nashville with him. And I spent the three weeks after that mostly sitting around at home, when I wasn’t sleeping. My young friend Alexandra Puckett came by to visit, starting to look pretty pregnant herself. And a couple of agents from the real estate firm where I work stopped by: Heidi Hoppenfeldt to coo over the baby—she’s pushing thirty with no boyfriend in sight, so her biological clock was probably starting to tick more loudly—and Timothy Briggs to drool over Rafe.

  And then Christmas rolled around again, as it does every year.

  “We don’t have to drive to Sweetwater if you’re too tired,” Rafe told me on Christmas Eve morning.

  I stared at him. “Why would I be tired? I’m sleeping sixteen hours a night.”

  “You’re getting up a lot, too.”

  “So are you,” I pointed out, since he was. I tried to take most of the burden off him, since he was going to work every morning and I wasn’t, but he still got up sometimes when the baby cried in the middle of the night. And even if he didn’t physically get up, he woke up, and that wasn’t much better.

  “Not as much as you.” He grinned at me over her fuzzy head. “I don’t have nothing she wants.”

  Not entirely true. Sure, I might have what it took to feed her. But I’d seen her snuggle up on her daddy’s chest and go to sleep while he hummed to her, too, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have anything at all to contribute.

  That’s where she was right now, as a matter of fact. A small—very small—lump in footed pajamas, curled up with her head on Rafe’s chest while he supported her with one big hand on her fuzzy, pink butt. Her eyes were closed, with long, dark lashes—inherited from her daddy—fluttering against her cheeks, and her little mouth pursed. She was blowing spit bubbles in her sleep, and leaving a wet spot on Rafe’s T-shirt.

  “She’s drooling,” I said.

  “It’ll wash.” He sounded so calm he was positively zen. It was hard to reconcile the guy I’d met just over a year ago—convicted ex-con, undercover special agent for the TBI: tall, dark, and dangerous—with the doting daddy slouched on the sofa cuddling his month-old daughter. Most of the people he’d dealt with in his life probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them. It would take photographic evidence, and even that might not be enough.

  We’d come a long way in just over a year.

  “Is there a reason you wouldn’t want to go to Sweetwater for Christmas?” I asked.

  Like me, he’d grown up there, in the small town just over an hour south of Nashville. Unlike me, he didn’t really have the best memories of childhood. He didn’t like to go back.

  But things were different now. We were married. My mother adored him. The rest of my family loved him. And Audrey and his grandmother were there. The only family he had in the world, other than a son named David, who lived with his adoptive parents on the other side of Nashville. David would be spending Christmas with his own family, the people who had raised him. We had dropped off Christmas gifts and shown off the baby—David’s little half-sister—a few days ago.

  Rafe shook his head. “I just don’t wanna tire you out. The baby’s a lot of work.”

  She was. But— “Everyone’s expecting to see us.”

  Or her, more accurately. Caroline. Now that we were parents, nobody cared what we did anymore. It was all about the baby. People stopped by to see the baby. My mother invited me home so she could spend time with the baby.

  Rafe nodded. “I just wanna make sure you’re up for it.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll only stay a couple of days. For the party tonight and dinner tomorrow. And then we’ll go home. You want to see your grandmother, don’t you?”

  Of course he did.

  “Then it’s settled.” I got to my feet. “I’ll pack and get us ready to go.”

  He nodded. “We’ll just stay right here.”

  The last thing I saw before I left the parlor and went into the hallway, was him closing his eyes.

  * * *

  Packing for the two of us was no problem. Two dresses for me—I still wasn’t back in my pre-pregnancy wardrobe, so they were maternity dresses—plus some leggings and oversized sweaters for traveling and hanging out. Jeans and T-shirts for Rafe, along with a pair of dress slacks and a jacket and shirt he could wear for the party tonight. Last year, he had found a hideous Christmas sweater under the tree, courtesy of my mother—who didn’t adore him near as much then as she does now—and I tossed that in the suitcase, too. Just in case he wanted to make a point of wearing it. Add underwear, socks, and toiletries, and we were ready to go.

  Packing for the baby was a much bigger production. She needed sixteen changes of clothing, eight for each day to be safe, plus a couple of different party dresses, just in case she spit up on one of them and I’d have to change her into another. My mother has an open house at the mansion every Christmas Eve—I grew up in the Martin Mansion on the outskirts of Sweetwater; there have been Martins in residence for going on two hundred years—and half the town shows up to pay their respects. This would be their first opportunity to see Carrie, and I wanted her to shine. Not just because she was my daughter and proper appearances for the Martin girls are important, but because she was Rafe’s daughter, and Rafe had spent a lot of years being the scourge of Sweetwater. I wanted everyone to see the perfect little creature he’d had a part in creating.

  But for that she’d have to look perfect. And a spittle-stained party dress just wouldn’t do.

  The baby’s luggage ended up taking up twice as much room as ours, even though her outfits were a fraction of the size. In addition to clothes, she needed diapers, and spit-up cloths, and bibs, and blankets, and a bouncy seat, and a porta-crib, and a stroller, and a basket full of toys—she didn’t really play with toys, other than sucking on the ears of the stuffed animals, but what if the next two days were when that changed?

  Rafe slept through it all, and only woke up when I accidentally slammed a corner of the porta-crib into the edge of the doorframe when I tried to drag it outside so I could load it in the trunk of the car.

  He blinked at me. “You�
��re not supposed to be doing that.”

  True. I wasn’t supposed to carry anything too heavy, or so the doctors had said. However—

  “It doesn’t weigh any more than she does,” I panted, “and I carry her around most of the day.”

  “Well, come take her now, and I’ll do that.” He rolled to his feet and handed over the baby, whose face was starting to pucker as she realized she was awake and hungry. “Sit. Feed her before she starts to cry. I’ll take this out.”

  I dropped onto the sofa. “Most of the luggage is already in the car. I was getting close to the end.”

  He gave me a look. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “The two of you looked cute,” I said. “And you must have been tired, if you fell asleep at ten in the morning. Besides, it was nice to have someone else hold the baby for a while.”

  I loved her, but sometimes it felt like she was this weird sort of appendage I couldn’t put down, or she’d start to cry.

  “Sorry.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t mean anything by it. You hold her plenty when you’re home. You can’t help it that you have to go to work.” And that that work often took him away from home at weird hours of the day, or night. “Besides, I doubt either of us will get to hold her much the next couple of days. Once we get to Sweetwater, the rest of the family will descend on her, and we’ll be lucky to get to see her at all.” Unless she was hungry or needed her diaper changed. Then, they’d be happy to hand her back, I was sure.

  Rafe nodded. “I’ll be right back.” He hefted the porta-crib—that did, truth be told, weigh rather a lot more than Carrie. She was still under ten pounds. The porta-crib was probably closer to forty.

  He hauled it out the door and down the stairs to the car. I got the baby situated for her midmorning snack, and looked up at him when he came back inside. “Did you look at what was in the trunk? Can you think of anything more we might need?”

  “Other than a couple of shotguns for the zombies?” He shook his head. “The trunk looked like you were getting ready for the apocalypse, not two days in your mother’s house an hour away.”

  “I just want to make sure we have everything we need.”

  “Hard to imagine we don’t. Everything we own’s in that trunk, pretty much.” He dropped down next to me on the sofa and contemplated the baby, suckling happily. Her round, little cheek was a couple shades darker than my breast, and rosy. She snuffled. His lips curved. “We should call her Piglet.”

  “I don’t think my mother would find that appropriate,” I said. He grinned.

  We sat in silence a moment, broken only by the little sounds Carrie was making. Outside the window, a siren came closer and closer. Rafe’s face turned grim. I felt him gather himself to get off the sofa to see what was going on. But then the sirens went past the house and kept going, fading into the distance in the other direction.

  “Not for us,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not this time.”

  Hopefully never. Although given what he does for a living, we’ve had our share of close calls, so maybe that was too hopeful. I cuddled the baby a little closer. It’s amazing how being responsible for someone else, especially someone who can’t yet be responsible for themselves, can change a person’s outlook.

  We sat in silence another minute, but the mood was broken.

  “I almost forgot the Christmas presents,” I said, although between you and me, I hadn’t really. I just wanted to give him something else to think about, and do. “They’re upstairs on the third floor.”

  “What’re they doing there?”

  “It was a convenient place to put them,” I said, which was nonsense, really. It hadn’t been convenient at all to haul them up two flights of stairs while I listened for sounds of the baby from downstairs. But they were out of the way up there. I suppose I could have stacked them in the spare bedroom, the one that we and Carrie didn’t use, since she wasn’t old enough that I needed to hide anything from her yet. But schlepping them all the way up to the ballroom on the third floor had seemed like a good idea at the time. “They’re all wrapped and ready to go. Would you make a couple of trips up and down and get them in the car?”

  He shrugged and got to his feet. “Sure.”

  “And don’t forget to change your shirt. You don’t want to show up at my mother’s house with drool spots on your chest.”

  He arched a brow, but didn’t answer. I knew what he was thinking, though. It was just a matter of time before the baby drooled on him again.

  But he headed up the stairs, and came down again two minutes later with a stack of brightly wrapped presents in his arms.

  “Careful,” I told him, since it was hard to imagine how he could see anything past them.

  “Shoulda told me that two staircases ago.” His voice was muffled. But he made it through the door and onto the porch all right, and thirty seconds later he came back in and headed up the stairs for another stack.

  Two

  We headed out just before lunch. By then, Carrie was ready for another nap, which she could take in the car while we drove, and we had enjoyed some time with her while she was awake and aware.

  She was a beautiful baby, if I do say so myself. To me, she looked like Rafe, but with just enough of me that hopefully people wouldn’t wonder whether I was her mother. She had, as I mentioned, her daddy’s eyelashes—long and sooty—and her coloring was more like his than mine. Her hair was the same espresso color that Rafe’s is when he lets it grow. Usually he keeps it so short that it looks black, and it’s only when it gets a little length to it that the brown highlights come out. Carrie had those, and these cute, little curls that fit perfectly around my finger. And she’d been born with dark blue eyes, that everyone told me would probably change to brown as she got older. So far they hadn’t, and I kept wishing they wouldn’t, since my eyes are blue, and it would be nice to see a little of myself in her, too. And besides, they were amazing with her skin.

  But she looked like a perfect little doll, with those big eyes, and that pink rosebud mouth, and a cute little nose. And truth be told, I was treating her kind of like that, too. Like we were playing dress-up with girly outfits and bows in her hair. She was making the trip in a tiny pink-and-white dress with white leggings, pink Mary Jane shoes, and a winter-white coat with puff-ball buttons. Rafe had rolled his eyes when he saw her—“That’s gonna last just until we get there,”—but at least she’d make a good impression when we carried her inside.

  It’s a quick trip. The last-minute Christmas Eve shopping traffic made things slightly complicated until we’d passed the Cool Springs mall north of Franklin, but after that, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way. We got off at the Columbia exit and headed away from the interstate and south. Rafe drove, comfortably slouched back with one hand on the wheel. The baby snoozed in her car seat next to the presents. Christmas carols played softly on the radio, and I was looking around, at the blowup Santas and elves lying flat in the yards we passed.

  “It looks like a massacre, doesn’t it? Like someone came in with an Uzi and mowed them all down.”

  “I’m sure they’ll get inflated again when the owners come home,” Rafe said.

  Well, of course they would. But in the meantime, they looked pitiful out there on the dry grass, among the dead leaves someone hadn’t raked.

  We don’t usually have snow in Middle Tennessee for Christmas, and this year was no exception. It had snowed once, about a week ago, but the ground hadn’t been frozen enough for anything to stick, so while it had been nice to watch the snowflakes swirl in the air for the twenty minutes or so that the blizzard lasted, once they hit the warm ground, they melted.

  We hadn’t done much in the way of decorating ourselves this year. Rafe had hung lights on the porch, and we had a wreath on the front door and electric candles in the windows, but that was pretty much it. We didn’t even have a tree. Rafe had asked me whether I wanted him to go get one, but since I hadn’t had the energy to
deal with anything other than Carrie, I’d told him no.

  “It’s going to be nice to see the mansion all decorated.”

  He nodded. “Your mama always does a good job.”

  “Next year, we’ll do more ourselves, too. Carrie will be old enough by then that she’ll notice what goes on around her. And I won’t be so tired all the time.”

  He reached over and took my hand. “It’s all right, darlin’. I’ve got the two of you. I don’t care about a tree.”

  Awww. I turned my hand and laced my fingers through his. And thought that yes, I had him and Carrie, too. But still, a tree might have been nice. I was looking forward to seeing my family’s trees, that I wouldn’t have to worry about taking down after the holidays.

  About halfway between Columbia and Sweetwater, we passed the old Beulah’s Meat’n Three, a small cinderblock restaurant that had been there as long as I could remember. Until a couple of months ago, anyway, when Beulah Odom passed away one night. She left a will leaving the restaurant to her employee, Yvonne McCoy, an old friend of Rafe’s, and Dix’s, from high school.

  However, Beulah’s sister-in-law and niece, Otis Odom’s wife and daughter, contested that will, and so the place had ended up being closed a lot longer than I think anyone wanted. I wasn’t sure exactly how the case stood at the moment. Between you, me, and the sleeping baby in the back seat, I suspected the Odoms of having poisoned Beulah to get their hands on the place, but as far as I knew, no charges had been filed. Maybe the police and sheriff’s office were still investigating. The Columbia chief of police had lost his job at the same time as all of this was going on, so things had been up in the air in that area for a while now. Columbia is the biggest town in Maury County, where Sweetwater is also located, and the Maury County sheriff, my mother’s boyfriend Bob Satterfield, had been filling in as interim chief of police since then. He might have been too busy juggling two jobs to have time to go after the Odoms.