Snowbound Bride-to-Be (5 page)

It formed fuzzy dreadlocks and tortured corkscrews. There was a clump at the back that looked like it might house mice, and two distinct hair horns stood up on either side of her head.

“No nanny for the last two days,” he explained, feeling the deep sting of his own ineptitude. “And in Tess’s world, Uncle is not allowed to touch the goldilocks.”

Emma looked skeptical, as if he might be making up a story to explain away his own negligence.

“I know,” he said dryly. “It’s shameful. A twenty pound scrap of baby controlling a full grown man, but there you have it.”

Emma still looked skeptical, so he demonstrated. He reached out with one finger. He touched Tess’s hair, feather-light, barely a touch at all.

The baby inhaled a deep breath, and exhaled a blood
curdling shriek, as if he dropped a red-hot coal down her diaper. He removed his finger, the shriek stopped abruptly, like a sentence stopped in the middle. Tess regarded him with her most innocent look.

“Ha,” he said, moved his finger toward her, and away, shriek, stop, shriek, stop. Soon, he stopped as soon as her mouth opened wide, so she was making O’s and closing them, like a fish.

Emma snorted with laughter. Not that he wanted to get her laughing again or explore the intrigue of shadows that danced away when she laughed, and flitted back when she didn’t.

Again, he wondered what he was doing. He had not wanted Emma to cry. He wanted this even less.
Firsts
.

There was something tempting about being with someone who did not know his history, as if he could pretend to be a brand-new man. He contemplated that, being free, even for a moment a man unburdened, a man with no history.

But he wasn’t those things and Ryder hated himself for thinking he should be free of the mantle he carried. His brother had died because he was, quite simply, not enough.

The fact that Emma could tempt him to feel otherwise made him angry at her as well as at himself, as irrational as that might have been.

I
NSTEAD
of moving toward the temptation, the
pretense
, of being a man he was not, Ryder mentally reshouldered his burdens, and stopped playing the little game with Tess, but not before he felt that small sigh of gratitude that his niece did bring some lightness into a world gone dark.

“Can she have a cookie?” Emma asked, coming back to her original question.

“I’ll try her with a little baby food first.” He dug through the bag, and a bottle dropped to the floor. He watched it roll downhill, another indicator the house was hiding some major problems.

Which were, he noted thankfully, none of his concern. He fetched the bottle back, and got out a jar, which he heated in the microwave for a few seconds.

But, of course, the baby food proved impossible, Tess wiggling around in the high chair Emma had unearthed and focused totally on the cookies that surrounded her. She swatted impatiently when he tried to deliver pureed carrots to her.

“Certified organic, too,” he said, finally quitting, wiping a splotch of carrot off his shirt. “She had a bottle in the car a while ago, so go ahead, give her a cookie.”

Unmindful that the baby was now covered in carrots, including some in the tangle of hair he was not allowed to touch, Emma swooped her up from the high chair.

“Which one, Tess?” Emma asked, stopping at each plate, letting his niece inspect.

Tess chose a huge gingerbread man, picked a jelly bean off his belly and gobbled it up.

“You must be hungry, too,” Emma said to him. “I can’t offer anything fancy. I have hot dogs for Holiday Happenings.”

No! After all his work at distraction, they were right back to this? The shadow in her eyes darkened every time she mentioned her weather-waylaid event.

“If you’d like a glass of mulled wine or hot chocolate, I have several gallons of both at the warming shed.”

Several gallons of wine sounded terribly attractive.

An escape he did not allow himself. Tess needed better.

“A couple of hot dogs would be perfect.” He watched Tess polish off the jelly-bean buttons and take a mighty bite of her gingerbread man’s head. Disappointment registered on her face as she chewed.

“YUCK.” Without ceremony she spat out what was in her mouth, tossed the headless gingerbread man on the floor and reached for a different cookie.

Emma thought it was funny, but these were the challenges in his life. What was best for Tess? Was she too young to try and teach her manners? Did he just accept the fact she didn’t like the cookie and let it go? Or by doing nothing was he teaching her the lifelong habit of smashing cookies on the floor?

Serial smasher.

Ryder rubbed at his forehead. He could convince himself he did okay on the big things for Tess: providing a home,
clothing, food, a lovely middle-aged nanny who loved his niece to distraction. But it was always the little things, cookies and bonnets, that made him wonder what the hell he was doing.

People had the audacity to hint he needed a partner, a wife, a feminine influence for Tess, but to him the fact they suggested it only meant he had become successful at hiding how broken he was inside. What little he had left to give he was saving for Tess, and he hoped it would be enough.

Suddenly he felt too tired and too hungry even to think.

Or to defend himself against the thought that came.

That he was alone in the world. That all the burdens of the past and all the decisions about the future were his alone to carry and to make.

The warmth of the White Christmas Inn was creeping inside him, despite his efforts to keep it at bay, making him feel
more
alone.

Emma had said Christmas transformed everything and made it magic, and she had said there were spirits here who protected all who entered. But the last thing he needed was to be so tired and hungry that her whimsy could seep past the formidable wall of his defenses.

So what if he didn’t have what most people were able to take for granted? So what if life was unfair? He already knew that better than most. So, he didn’t have someone to ask about the baby spitting out a cookie, he didn’t have a holiday season to look forward to instead of dread, he didn’t have a place to belong that was somehow more than walls and furniture. He had made his choice. Not to rely on anyone or anything, because he of all people knew that those things could be taken in an instant.

Loss had left him weakened, more loss would finish him. He had a responsibility. He was all Tess had left in the world.
He wasn’t leaving himself open to the very forces that had nearly destroyed him already.

Ryder Richardson needed desperately to be strong for the little girl who had fallen asleep in Emma’s arms, one mashed half-eaten cookie still clutched in a grubby fist.

He felt his strength returning after he ate the hot dogs and about two dozen of the cookies. But inside he felt crabby about this situation he found himself in. He had made himself a world without tests, and he felt as if he was being tested.

Make that
crabbier
.

“Thanks for the meal,” he said, formally. “If you could show me our room, Tess needs to be put in a bed, and I need to check the weather.”

“I don’t quite know how to break this to you,” whatever she was about to break to him delighted her, he noticed with annoyance, “but the only way you’ll be checking the weather from your room is by sticking your head out the window.”

For a moment he didn’t quite grasp what she was saying. And when he did, the sensation of crabbiness, of his life being wrested out of his control, intensified.

No television in the room. No escape, no way of turning off everything going on inside him. He considered the television the greatest tool ever invented for numbing wayward feelings, for acting as anesthetic for a doubting mind.

“People come here to get away from it all,” she said cheerfully.

“To feel the magic,” he said, faintly sarcastic.

“Precisely,” she said happily, he suspected missing his sarcasm deliberately.

“You have a television somewhere, right?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“No buts. Lead me to it. Or face the wrath of man.”

She didn’t seem to find his pun funny at all. And he was
glad. He really didn’t need to experience Emma’s laughter again. Especially if he was going to stay strong.

The wrath of man
. Funny. Except he meant it. And there was something in him, something fierce and closed, that reminded Emma of a warrior. There was no doubt in her mind he would lay down his life for the baby that so obviously held his hardened heart in the pudgy pink palm of her hand.

The baby had clearly—and gleefully—demonstrated her power with the hilarious hair show.

But whatever moment of lightness he had allowed himself then was gone from Ryder’s face now. He was practically bristling with bad temper.

It would be a foolish time to let him know that television was not part of Emma’s vision for the White Pond Inn, and it certainly didn’t fit in with its incarnation as the White Christmas Inn.

But she had already told him she believed in spirits and magic, risking Ryder’s scorn because she had vowed, after Peter, there would be no more trying to hide who she
really
was from other people, no more giving opinions that they wanted to hear.

What an expert she had become at reading what Peter wanted from the faintest purse of lips, giving that to him, making him happy at her own expense. How many times had she swallowed back what she really wanted to say so as not to risk his disapproval, his patronizing suggestions for her “improvement”?

“I consider the inn a techno-electro-free zone,” she said, and could hear a certain fierceness in her own voice, as if somehow it was this man’s fault that even after she had nearly turned herself inside-out trying to please Peter, he had still searched for someone more suitable. And found her.

“Techno-electro,” he said, mulling over the word, which she was pretty sure she had just invented.

“Television is not on the activities agenda, not even on the bad-weather days.”

“I’m dying to know what you do on the bad-weather days.”

Even though he clearly wasn’t, she forged on, determined to be herself. “I bring out board games, and a selection of jigsaw puzzles. I always have tons of books around. I encourage guests to shut off their cell phones and leave the laptops at home.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, daring him to find her corny while almost hoping he would. Because if he judged her the way Peter had judged her she could dismiss the somewhat debilitating attraction she felt for him.

She realized she was a little disappointed when he didn’t even address her philosophy.

“Since I’m here by the force of fate, instead of by choice, you’re going to make an exception for me.”

It wasn’t a question, and he was absolutely right. He had not come here looking for what her other guests came here looking for. He was not enchanted, and he had no intention of being brought under the spell of the White Christmas Inn.

Which was good. What would she do with a man like that under her spell?

“I do have a television in my room,” she admitted reluctantly.

What she didn’t admit to was the DVD player. They were guilty pleasures she indulged in when she was just too exhausted to do even one more thing. There was always something to be done when you ran an establishment like this: windows to be cleaned, bedding to be laundered, floors to be polished, flower beds, lawns, paint-touchups. And that was
just the day-to-day chores and didn’t include the catastrophes, like the time the upstairs bathtub had fallen through the floor.

Sometimes, it was true, on those bad-weather days while her guests played games, she watched a growing collection of romantic movies. She saw them as a replacement for emotional entanglement, not a longing for it.

“Your room? That’s the only television in the house?” The thought of entering her bedroom clearly made him as uncomfortable as it made her.

The very thought of those dark warrior eyes taking in the details of her room made her heart beat a fast and traitorous tempo. Her room matched the theme of Christmas: white, though that was how her room was year-round. The walls were the color of rich dairy cream, there was a thick white duvet on the gorgeous bed, an abundance of white pillows in delicious rich textures and fabrics.

When she walked in, the room always seemed soft to her, as comforting as a feather pillow.

But when she saw it through his eyes, she wondered what he would see. And the thought came to her: virginal.

A warrior and a virgin.

She nearly choked on the renegade thought, told herself she had been reading a few too many of the romance novels, more replacements, so much safer and more predictable than real-life romance. She kept a nice selection in tidy stacks on her bedside table, right beside the much-watched DVDs.

But it would make her feel altogether too vulnerable for him to see that, since he might misinterpret her fascination with a certain style of book and film as longing rather than what it was.

“I’ll go get the television for you. You’d be more comfortable watching it down here than in my room.” And then she blushed as if discussing her room was akin to discussing her
panties. Which might be lying on the floor, one of the relaxed slips of the single life.

“I can carry it for you.”

“No, no,” she protested, too strenuously, “it’s tiny.”

“That figures,” he said, still grouchy, having no problem at all being himself. Which was grouchy and cynical and Christmas-hating. It really balanced out the formidable attraction of his good looks quite remarkably.

“Make yourself comfortable.” She handed the sleeping baby back to him, dislodging the cookie from the fist first. “Go into the great room. Through there. I’ll be down in a sec.”

She hoped her room would have the calming effect on her that it always did. But it didn’t. There were no panties on the floor, of course, because she liked the room to look perfect, but even still, instead of being her soothing sanctuary, her sea of textured white softness seemed sensual, like a bridal chamber.

She realized she had been reading too many books, watching too many glorious movies, because totally unbidden her mind provided her with a picture of what he might look like here, lying on that bed, naked from the waist up, holding his arms out to her, his eyes holding smoldering welcome. She shivered at the heat of the picture, at the animal stab of desire she felt.

Your mother was a wild child
, Tim had told her sadly, when she had been crushed by Lynelle’s absence at her own mother’s funeral.
It was like an illness she was born with. Nothing around these parts ever interested her or was good enough for her
.

Peter’s mother had not warmed to Emma when they had finally met on that disastrous Christmas Day last year. Emma had felt acutely that when Mrs. Henderson looked at her, she disapproved of something. Make that everything.

“Stop it,” Emma ordered herself sternly. Just because you had a wild child in you didn’t mean you had to be owned by it, the way her mother had been. It was not part of being herself. In fact, it was something she intended to fight.

So she swept the romance novels off the bedside table and shoved them under the bed. Then, realizing it could just as easily be another symptom of make-yourself-over-so-other-people-will-like-you, as of fighting-the-wild-child, she fished them back out and stood holding them, not sure what to do.

This is what a man did! Disrupted a perfectly contented life. She set the books on the table and planted the DVDs right on top of them.

Ryder Richardson was not coming into this room. Why was she acting as if he would ever see this? He was a stranger, and despite the harsh judgments in Mrs. Henderson’s eyes, and despite her mother’s example, Emma was not the kind of woman who conducted dalliances with strangers, no matter how attractive they were. No matter how attractive their helpless devotion for a baby.