Snowbound Bride-to-Be (17 page)

T
WENTY-TWO
gallons of hot chocolate.

Ten of mulled wine.

Four hundred and sixty-two painstakingly decorated Christmas cookies.

And it was not going to be nearly enough.

“If you lift that kettle of hot chocolate, I’m throwing you over my shoulder and taking you home,” Ryder told Emma, irritated.

“I love it when you’re masterful,” she said, clearly not seeing how serious the situation was.

“I’m not joking, Emma.”

“Ha. As if you could pick me up right now.”

“I could,” he said threateningly. He still felt this thrill when he looked at her and used the word
wife
. This woman had come into herself so completely it nearly made him dizzy that she had chosen to love him. Emma was sassy, confident, radiant, strong, on fire with her love of life. And of him.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Tim, could you get this hot chocolate for me? Ryder has decided I’m delicate.”

Tim, Jr., came over and lifted the pot of warm liquid easily. “You
are
delicate,” he told her sternly. “Keep an eye on her, Ryder. I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

“And that would not be very far,” Emma said giving her huge belly a satisfied pat.

The truth was Ryder had tried to talk her out of White Christmas at the inn this year.

The doctor had told them to expect a New Year’s baby. What if they got snowed in, like the year they met?

But Emma had gotten that mulish look on her face and he’d known there was no sense arguing with her. He’d call a helicopter if they got snowed in. He had his cell phone with him, just in case.

Besides, there would have been no living with Tess if he had cancelled their yearly Christmas trip to White Pond Inn.

She was four now, a young lady who knew her own mind. He looked for her—Emma had dressed her in neon pink so they could spot her in the crowds. She was down on the pond, in her new skates, shuffling along between Sue and Peggy. This year, their little sister, born about nine months after Tim had returned home from his tour of duty—was in the sled being pulled behind the girls.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Tim said, following Ryder’s gaze to the four little girls on the pond, “but I hope that’s a boy in there.”

“Chauvinist,” Emma accused him, but her eyes twinkled with the shine of a woman well-loved.

“Healthy is good enough for me,” Ryder said.

He decided, as long as he could keep an eye on Emma and keep her from lifting anything too heavy, it was good to have come to White Pond this year after all.

She had sold the White Pond Inn to Mona and Tim shortly after she’d agreed to marry Ryder. The younger Fenshaws didn’t run it as a bed-and-breakfast, the inn was now their family home. But every year they held Holiday Happenings, though Mona, Ryder thought thankfully, had renamed it
Home for the Holidays. The Christmas Day Dream event had gotten bigger, and it was called Coming Home for Christmas.

Ryder suspected they kept both activities going mostly for him and Emma.

Because, as the friendship had grown between the two couples, they’d learned about each other’s histories and heartbreaks. The Fenshaws knew this was always going to be a hard time of year for Ryder, a good time to stay busy, to give to others.

“You don’t have to,” he’d said to Emma when she had announced she planned to sell. Tim, Jr., wanted the inn not to run as a bed and breakfast, but to farm, as his father farmed, and his grandfather had farmed before that.

Ryder had not been looking for a brother, just as he had not been looking for love that night a storm had stranded him.

But in Tim he’d been given a brother anyway.

“No,” Emma had said firmly, “the house and land need what they have to give. It’s falling down and in need of the kind of repairs Tim can give it and I can’t. Mona has always loved that house. Tim is home now.”

“If you want it, I’ll fix it up for you as a wedding present.”

“Ryder,” she said, smiling at him. “You don’t seem to get it. I don’t need it anymore. It was like my dreams, falling down and in need of repair. I wanted White Pond to give me a family, and a feeling of belonging. But I have a better dream now, and I know better than to think a house can make you
feel
things.”

And the way she looked at him when she said that made him feel, not ten feet tall and bulletproof, but as if he was enough.

“Mama, Papa, look at me.”

Tess’s voice rose high over the sounds of the crowd and he and Emma both turned to look.

Tess’s pronunciation of Emma had been close to
Mama
all those years ago. And somehow he had become
papa
.

When he showed Tess the pictures of Drew and Tracy, they were Mom and Dad, and he was achingly aware of never wanting to take their place. At the same time he wanted to do a job that would make them so proud of him.

If Tess’s level of confidence was any indication, he and Emma were doing just fine.

For a moment, watching Tess strut proudly across the ice, he felt the spirit of it all.

His brother and sister-in-law.

Christmas.

And he believed. He believed that things had a reason.

Once upon a time, he’d been a man trying to outrun Christmas, finding exactly what he needed en route to where he thought he was going, and had not been going there at all.

With each year that passed, Ryder was able to see more clearly that the fire had taken things from him. But it had given him things, too.

It had put him on the road that had led him to Emma. And it had made him a man capable of feeling deeply for others, capable of forgiveness of failings. He was a better man than he had been before, worthy of love.

That made him wonder, sometimes, if he could find meaning in that, of all things, was there meaning in everything? Even in the things his mind, limited and human, could not grasp?

He was an architect, trained to think in terms of mathematical precision. But he knew, as an architect, that there was a place where planning and precision left off and inspiration began. Often inspiration came as the result of a problem that seemed insoluble, a hardship that did not seem as if it could be overcome.

The greatest buildings came from that place.

And maybe the greatest men and women did, too.

Look at Lynelle. How could someone like her produce someone like Emma?

His mother-in-law had chosen not to be a part of their lives at all. She did not come at Christmas; she said she would have come for the wedding if they’d held it anywhere but at White Pond.

But he didn’t believe it. She was as indifferent to Tess and the coming baby as she had been to Emma.

But even his fury at that had been distilled by the love he lived in.

When he looked at Emma and saw her compassion for others, he knew it came from all those years when she had tried to win attention and approval from Lynelle that never came.

Emma showed him that good could come from bad, good people from bad parents, good things from bad situations. It was the fire that tempered the steel.

She showed him every day that love was not a destination he had arrived at, but a journey he had embarked upon. It was full of peaks and valleys, challenges and rewards, but most of all, it was stronger than anything else.

Christmas represented that.

It represented all the things that, for awhile, he had lost belief in.

Goodness.

Hope.

Faith.

Light.

“Papa!”

Life.

Suddenly, Emma’s hand flew to her belly, and her eyes widened and then met his. She inhaled sharply and deeply.

“The books don’t get you ready for how that feels,” she marveled. “Do you think we’re going to have a Christmas baby, Ryder?”

The calmness in her face, her absolute trust in him made him remember the other belief love had restored—his belief in himself.

A child would be born and he would be enough to welcome another life into this world, enough to accept the responsibility as well as the joy. It was another thing to celebrate during the season, his list of things to celebrate slowly outgrowing his things to grieve.

And wasn’t that really what Christmas represented? An evolution of thought, man’s belief that everything in the end had a reason, and that everything in the end was for the greater good.

Somewhere in the last years, with Emma and Tess making his good outweigh his bad, Ryder had realized he could surrender. He could trust himself, but know that when his own strength flagged, or was not enough, that was when the real miracle happened.

The truth was that something greater than him ran the show.

Isn’t that what Christmas really celebrated?

The birth of a child that would bring a message to the world.

Love is the most powerful.

Love is the thing that cannot be destroyed.

And it went on and on, even after death.

It went on in a little girl down there a flash of neon pink, shouting “Mama! Papa! Watch me.”

And it would go on in a new baby, a new life, a brand-new messenger of the power of love to bring hope and to heal all.

Despite her saying he couldn’t possibly lift her, Ryder swept his wife into his arms and headed for the car. “Tim,” he called, “she’s going into labor.”

“Stop it,” she insisted. “Ryder, really! I’m too heavy. I can walk. It was only the first pain.”

But the thing was, she didn’t feel heavy to him at all.

She felt light. And he felt light. And all of it, the skaters on the pond, Tess, the Fenshaw girls, the laughter, the scrape of blades on ice, Tim racing toward them with a look on his face that reminded Ryder of the soldier he had been, all of it suddenly seemed as if it was swirling together, becoming one immense energy.

Ryder realized, suddenly, his heart swelling until he thought it would break, that he really
believed
.

And in that shining second of pure love, his breath, his bone, his life, his whole world, became a reflection of the Light.