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ways of women. In any case, he was in way over his head with Nest. He had no idea what he was letting himself in for by pursuing her, and she was not about to encourage him by spending Christmas at his home with his children. In this instance ignorance was bliss. Let him tie up with someone normal; he would be far better off.
    She caught sight of Robert Heppler across the room. “Larry, I see someone I need to talk to. Thank you for the invitation.”
    She hurried past him before he could respond, anxious to forestall any other misguided offers he might be inclined to make. Larry was a nice guy, but she had no interest in him at all. Why he couldn’t see that was a mystery to her, but it was the sort of mystery commonplace in relationships between men and women.
    She came up to Robert with a grin. “Hey,” she said.
    “Hey, there you are,” he replied, grinning back.
    She reached out and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Still rail thin and towheaded, still looking very much like a mischievous little boy, Robert might have been mistaken by those who hadn’t seen him in a while for the same smart-ass kid he had been all through school. But Robert had grown up when no one was looking. Right out of graduate school, he had married a small, strong-minded young woman named Amy Pruitt, and Amy had set him straight. Forthright, no-nonsense, and practical to a fault, she loved Robert so much she was willing to take him on as a project. Robert spent most of his life with his head somewhere else, developing codes, languages, programs, and systems for computers. Always convinced of his own brilliance and impossibly impatient with the perceived shortcomings of others, he had gotten as far as he had mostly on grades and the high expectations of his professors that one day they could point to him with pride in cataloging their academic accomplishments. But the real world has an entirely different grading system, and Amy was quick to recognize that Robert was ill equipped to succeed in the absence of a serious attitude adjustment.
    She performed the surgery with flawless precision. Nest could hardly believe the difference in Robert between the time he met Amy and the time he married her, scarcely ten months later. Robert seemed totally unaware of the transformation she had wrought, believing he was just the same as he had always been. But after getting to know her a little better, Nest was quick to realize that Amy was the best thing that could have happened to her old friend.
    Now they had one child, a boy of two who was clinging to Robert’s leg playfully, and another on the way. Robert had a family and a life. He was a real person at last.
    “Hey there, Kyle,” she said, bending down to ruffle the boy’s blond hair. “We missed you downstairs today.”
    “Was ’n churtch,” the little boy mumbled, then blew her a kiss.
    “I kept him with me,” Robert admitted, shrugging. “I wanted some companionship. Amy stayed home. Not feeling so good this morning when she woke. This pregnancy has been a little rough.”
    “Is everything okay?”
    “Yeah, sure. You know Amy. Tough as nails. But she’s being careful. She’s a little over six months. Kind of a touchy time.”
    “You’ll let me know if I can do anything?”
    Robert laughed. “I’ll let you know if
I
can do anything. With my parents and my sister and her husband hovering over her twenty-four hours a day, I can’t get close enough to find out!”
    He glanced over at Larry Spence, who was watching surreptitiously from behind his coffee cup. “I see you can still draw bees like honey. Or maybe
horseflies
would be a better choice of word.”
    She arched one eyebrow. “I see you still haven’t lost your rapier-like wit, Robert.”
    He shrugged. “I’m just being protective. He reminds me a little of that guy who kept coming on to you the summer before we entered high school, the one I would have decked if you hadn’t hypnotized him into falling over his own