Snowbound Bride-to-Be (7 page)

“We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” he said solemnly, as if he had touched it only to make that point. “I won’t wreck your Christmas, Emma.”

She saw something desolate in his eyes, and was taken aback by the realization that he was trying to protect her from that.

“If you’ve had good Christmases, don’t you want that for
Tess?” she asked, quietly. “I had a mother who thought Christmas was a nuisance. It was awful.”

And maybe it wasn’t just Christmas, but parenthood in general, that her mother had found bothersome.

That’s what had made Emma so eager to please, to prove somehow she was a good person. Worthy. Was she still trying to prove that? Was that what Holiday Happenings and Christmas Day Dream were really about?

She
hated
that she was questioning the purity of her motivations.

“Emma, I’m doing my best,” he said quietly. “Just leave it.”

But she couldn’t. “And what if your best just isn’t good enough?”

“Don’t you think I ask myself that every day?”

She studied him, saw the torment in his face, went from being angry with him and with herself and with Peter and her mother and the world, to feeling something far more dangerous. Empathy.

“If you’ve had good Christmases, why do you hate it so much now?” she asked him.

The pause was very long, as if he considered telling her something, fought with it, won.

“Emma, I’m just passing through. I’m not leaving my burdens here when I go.”

He said it almost protectively, as if they would be too heavy for her to handle. He was right. They were strangers.

That was not changed by the fact he had touched her hair.

Or by the fact that he had an adorable baby.

It was not changed by the fact that they were marooned here by the storm, like shipwreck survivors on a desert island.

He had his baggage and she had hers, and he was right not
to share it, to keep his boundaries high. It was a reminder of what she needed to do, as well.

“I’ll find a flashlight,” she said, moving away from the emotional minefield they were treading so lightly, realizing the only thing they had to share was how to get through a night without electricity.

She sighed. “If the power stays out, in very short order this room will be the only truly warm one in the house. I have a crib upstairs, and we can haul a mattress down here for you. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I hope the power is going to come back on,” he said.

So do I, but the way my luck is running, I doubt it
. “I’ll show you where the crib is.”

Moments later, Emma, holding the sleeping baby, was watching him take the crib apart. Despite her resolve that they be nothing more than strangers, she couldn’t help but admire how comfortable he was with tools, the man-thing.

It had taken her the better part of an afternoon to put that crib together, studying instructions, putting A into B. He had the whole thing dismantled and downstairs in a matter of minutes.

While he was reassembling the crib, Emma went back upstairs to get a mattress off the bed in the room closest to the staircase.

“Tess didn’t even know I’d moved her,” he commented, coming up behind her.

“She sleeps like a log.”

“I’m envious,” he said. A man who carried burdens so heavy they affected his sleep?

Don’t pursue it
, she told herself.

“It’s already chilly up here,” he said.

“Well, you know these old wrecks. The insulation is in about the same shape as the foundation.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I have a tendency to be way too sensitive. I know there’s lots wrong with the old place. It’s foolish to love her anyway.”

“What
do
you have for insulation?”

A pragmatic question. He didn’t want to know anything about what she loved. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t want to know what he loved, either.

A lie. She did. Despite all her resolve, both wild-child and woman-scorned were supremely interested in what a man like him loved.

The baby was obvious, of course.

She stuck to her resolve and the relatively safe topic of her old house. “ I found old newspapers in the walls when I redid the bathroom.” She didn’t mention how the tub falling through the floor had necessitated the renovation before she really had the funds to do it. “New insulation is on my to-do list.”

“Big list?” he asked, conversationally.

But Emma already felt foolish enough for blurting out about her Christmases. She was saying nothing else to him that could be interpreted as self-pitying.

The insulation fell into that category. If she was going to borrow money, wouldn’t that have been the sensible choice? New insulation? A new roof?

Oh, no, dreamer that she was she had been spending money on gifts for needy families, and redoing this bedroom in preparation for her mother’s visit.

Was she still trying to prove herself worthy? Emma shut the thought off fast and focused on problems she could solve.

If she didn’t become more prudent, next year she would probably be heading the “needy” line, not jetting off to Hawaii!

She had gambled everything on the success of Holiday
Happenings. How many days of her Christmas moneymaker could she lose before she was in real trouble?

“Oh,” she said, breezily, not letting any of those concerns leach into her voice, “it’s a big list, but nothing I can’t handle.”

She was trying to regain ground as a complete professional.

They were in the room at the top of the steps that she called the green room. Once it had been her grandmother’s, stuffed from top to bottom with clutter, a dusty-rose wall-to-wall carpet covering the beautiful aged hardwoods.

Now, in preparation for her mother’s arrival, it was the most beautiful room in the house. The carpet had been ripped out, the faded layers of wallpaper stripped. The room had been restored to historical correctness and decorated in her mother’s favorite color. It was her loveliest room, and Emma felt it not only showcased her abilities as a competent and professional innkeeper, but would convince her mother that White Pond was not such a bad place.

And that her daughter isn’t such a bad person?

Where were these thoughts coming from? Still, she glanced at Ryder to see if he was suitably impressed, and saw he was looking at a huge crack in the wall that was opening above the window. That figured.

She really didn’t want to hear what
that
meant, so she directed the flashlight beam to the focal point of the room, a beautiful antique four-poster with a lace canopy, layered with luxurious silk bedding and pillows in subtle shades of green.

“Nice piece of furniture,” he said. Trying to gain ground for his “old-wreck” remark? Not wanting to let her know what the crack meant, either? Feeling sorry for her because she had never had a good Christmas?

She had shown dozens of guests to their rooms and never felt like this before.

As if the bed was a strangely intimate piece of furniture, and she was tempting something to be in here alone with him.

“It’s not really a nice piece of furniture,” she said, trying to sound as if she was not strangling. “The first night I put guests in it, it broke.”

She had meant it to sound funny but it sounded pathetic, lost her any ground she had gained at presenting herself as a competent professional. Instead, she felt her own failing.

But he didn’t notice. “Hmm. That sounds interesting. What were they doing?”

That strangling sound in her throat intensified. She refused to answer him or even look at him. Wild-child had a few ideas about what they might have been doing, but Emma was ignoring wild-child. She redirected the flashlight beam and hurried to the bed.

“Do you think we can just leave it made up?” She didn’t wait for her answer, lifted a corner of the mattress, struggled to swing it off the bed frame and retain her grip on the flashlight.

“Stop it,” he said. “You take the bedding and light the way for me. I’ll get the mattress.”

“I can clearly see if I let you get away with bossing me around once, you’ll turn into a complete horror.”

“As if I’m not already,” he muttered. “Emma, I’m being reasonable. The mattress is too big for you.”

“You are looking at a woman who refinished every inch of flooring in this place by herself. I’ve knocked down walls. I’ve repaired plumbing. I’ve been up on the roof. I’ve—”
failed to pay the bills, failed to impress my mother, lost my fiancé over this place
…

He held up his hand before she could rush on with her list. “Stop,” he said dryly. “I’m having a heart attack thinking
about it.” But he was obviously thinking about it, because that familiar scowl creased his brow. “I hope you didn’t put those Christmas lights on the peak of the roof yourself.”

Tim had already given her a very thorough lecture about that. She wasn’t listening to another one.

“I’m just making the point—I can handle my end of the mattress.” She turned the flashlight beam on the floor so he couldn’t see her face, which was blushing as if she had said something about sex.
Couldn’t I have worded that differently?

“Why do I have a feeling that what you think you can handle and what you really can handle are two entirely different things?”

“Because you’re a chauvinist pig?” she asked, keeping her voice deliberately sweet, glad he couldn’t see her face because his statement could sum up her knowledge of sex, too.

“Gee, and a minute ago I was worried you were going to fall down the steps and have the mattress and me land on top of you. Now I’m thinking if you fell, could you at least bite your tongue? Preferably off.”

“You charmer, you.”

Was a desert-island camaraderie developing between them? Wild-child was jumping up and down at the desert-island possibilities.

“At least let me take the end that’s going down the stairs first.”

“No,” she said stubbornly. Woman-scorned, who didn’t need a man taking charge of anything, took over. She picked up the foot of the mattress and began dragging it along the floor, leaving him with no choice but to pick up the other end. She was trying not to grunt as they headed for the stairs, but the mattress was an awkward bundle, hard to get a grip on, heavier than she had thought it would be.

As it turned out, he’d been right about the bedding, too.
They should have made two separate trips. Because as they neared the middle of the stairway, the silk caught in the holly on the railing.

She paused to untangle it before it pulled the whole garland down or tore the silk. She dropped the flashlight, and they were in darkness.

It happened fast after that.

“Wait a sec—” she cried as she felt the mattress pressing against her. But it was too late. The mattress squeezed by her, sweeping her along with it. Emma grabbed a fistful of something before being plunged downward into complete darkness.

“A
RE
you okay?” Ryder called.

Emma couldn’t answer at first, the wind knocked temporarily out of her.

“Are you hurt?” he asked again. She could hear him trying to get past the mattress that blocked the stairs.

“Fine,” she managed to get out before he made a hole in the wall, bumping against it like that. The walls were admittedly flimsy in an “old wreck” of a house like this.

She couldn’t help it. Emma began to giggle and then to laugh. But he mistook the muffled howls of her laughter for cries of pain and came hurtling down to her. Predictably, he got caught up where the mattress blocked the step, and he crashed down on it beside her.

They lay there, side by side, on the mattress that blocked the staircase. Their legs and feet were up the stairs, their heads and backs on the floor of the foyer. They were only faintly illuminated by the shadows the firelight in the next room was throwing against the wall.

The laughter died in her throat as Emma became aware of how solid he felt beside her, how his presence here in the house during the storm was somehow reassuring.

Even if he was an ass who thought her house was a wreck and who was going to deprive Tess of Christmas.

“Emma, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him again, though as she drank in the scent of him she wondered how true that was. “Are you?”

She felt him get up on his elbow, stare through darkness made only a little less black by the slight light leaching in from the other room.

He lay back down, sighed. “I guess I’m okay. Providing jest for the gods tonight. So, did one of your spirits push you down the stairs?”

“Oh, no, just made sure the mattress was there when I hit the floor.”

“Ah.”

Was his cynicism slightly tempered? Ryder had altered his position slightly, and Emma could feel the solidness of his shoulder touching hers, make out the strong line of his nose, the sensuous curve of his mouth.

“I want you to know I’m not the kind of girl who ends up on a mattress with a guy on such a short acquaintance,” she teased, trying to reduce with humor the tension she felt in her belly.

“I already guessed,” he said softly.

And her humor left her. What did that mean?

“Remember when I said I didn’t think things could get any worse?” Ryder asked softly.

“Yes?”

“Around you they can. And they do.”

“I know,” she agreed, “The White Christmas curse.”

“Maybe it’s not a curse,” he said softly. “Maybe it’s magic, just like you said. And I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of.”

And then he was laughing. It was a rusty sound, self-deprecating and reluctant, as if he had not laughed for a long, long time and did not particularly want to laugh now.

For all that, it was a sound so lovely, so richly masculine and so genuine, that it made her want to stay in this place, on a mattress jammed half on the stairs and half off, with this man beside her for as long as she could, to rest a moment in this place that was as real as any place she had ever been before.

Woman-scorned
tsked
disapprovingly.

Well, why not laugh, Ryder thought? His situation was absurd. He was trapped at a place dedicated to Christmas corniness, the power was out, the storm raged on. He could hear it rattling the windows and hounding the eaves. He was lying in the pitch darkness on a crashed mattress, with Emma so close to him he could smell the scent of lavender on her skin.

Life was playing a cosmic joke on him, why not laugh?

Why keep fighting this? He was stuck, she was stuck, they were in this together, whether he liked it or not. The powerful surge of intensity he was feeling toward her was only because of the crisis nature of the situation. People in situations like this tended to bond to each other in way too short a time.

He could not act on that. Maturity was being required of him. A certain amount of cooperation was going to be needed to get them through this, but nothing more.

There was no sense railing against the unfairness of life. He’d already done that, and it made no difference. It never changed what was, it only made the experience more miserable than it had to be.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice still light with laughter. “I should have listened to you. I should have taken the bedding off, let you take the mattress, followed meekly behind—”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “I can certainly picture you in the meek position. Submissive, even. Would that be before or after you strung lights on the roofline and knocked out a wall or two?”

“Hmm,” she said, pretending thoughtfulness. “Let’s make it before. I might be too tired after to be properly meek.”

Then they were laughing again, and he noticed her laughter was sweet, uncomplicated, real, like when Tess laughed.

“I’m sorry, too,” he said, finally, “for taking out my frustration at having my plans interrupted on you. And for calling your house an old wreck. It isn’t really. It’s a Victorian, probably built at the very end of the eighteen-hundreds or in the early nineteen-hundreds.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m an architect. Though I have to admit, I avoid old-house projects like the plague. People are never realistic about what it’s going to cost to restore an old building.”

“Don’t you think old buildings are romantic?” she asked.

Given the startling intensity between them, he did not want to discuss anything about romance with her.

“Not at all,” he said. “You get in and the walls aren’t square, the floors aren’t level, the fifty-year-old addition is being held up by toothpicks. I prefer new construction, and my real preference is commercial buildings.”

She was silent for a bit, and he hoped she was contemplating getting out of this old place before it ruined her financially, but naturally that wasn’t what she was contemplating at all.

“We could start over,” she decided.

“Could we? How?”

“Like this.” Her hand found his in the darkness. And shook it. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Emma White, the meek, submissive owner of the White Christmas Inn.”

Her hand was soft in his, and again he felt something when he touched her that went beyond the sizzle of chemistry. Quiet strength. He turned his head to see her in the faint shadows being cast by the fireplace in the other room.

“I’m Ryder Richardson,” he played along, despite the fact
he knew this was a somewhat dangerous game, that he was incredibly aware of the loveliness of her hand and her scent.

Still, he was reluctantly amazed by how good it felt to play along with her, to let go of his legendary self-control, just a little bit.

She was silent for a while. “Do you think,” she said hesitantly, “just in this new spirit of cooperation, you could tell me what a really good Christmas feels like? You said you’d had good Christmases. Just so I know exactly what to do for the Christmas Day Dream.”

She was moving him further and further behind enemy lines.

“Come on,” he said, “you have some good Christmas memories.”

Her silence nearly took what was left of his heart.

Ryder was amazed to find his carefully walled world had a hole in it that she had crept through. He was amazed that he
wanted
to go there, to a good, good Christmas, to share it with her, to make it real for her, but for himself, too. To relive such a wonderful time proved to be a temptation too strong to resist, even as he wondered if he was going to regret this later.

“You wouldn’t think this would be the best Christmas ever,” he said, slowly, feeling his way cautiously through the territory that had once been his life, “but when I was twelve my dad was out of work, the only time I ever remember that happening while I was growing up.”

He told her about how his dad and his mom had snuck out every night into the backyard and shoveled and leveled and sprayed the garden hose on sub-zero nights until they had a perfect ice rink to unveil to him and Drew on Christmas morning.

He and his brother had woken up to secondhand skates that
didn’t fit, and instead of turkey they’d had a bonfire in the backyard and cooked smokies and marshmallows.

They had skated all day. Pretty soon all the neighbors had drifted over, the neighborhood boys unanimously voting the Richardson brothers’ skating rink as the best gift of the year. At midnight there had still been people around the bonfire, kids skating, babies sleeping.

“And then, our neighbor Mrs. Kelly, who sang solos at all the community weddings and funerals started singing ‘Silent Night,’ and everybody gathered at the bonfire and started singing, too.” Ryder’s parents had been dead now for more than a dozen years, but as he talked about them, he could feel their love for him and Drew as if it had all happened yesterday.

Maybe she had been right about ghosts living here. His parents had always been determined to make the best of everything.
Life gives you lemons, you make lemonade
, his mother had always said. He wondered what they would think of him, and how he was coping with the lemons life had handed him.

And suddenly reliving that memory didn’t feel fun anymore and already he felt regret, and felt the shadows pulling at him, trying to take him back.

Fast forward to spending last Christmas Eve with Drew and Tracy, opening his gift from them. A gag gift, as always, a huge stuffed marlin, possibly the ugliest thing Ryder had ever seen, mocking the deep-sea fishing trip he and Drew had taken off the coast of Mexico earlier in the year. Was that the last time he had laughed, really laughed, until tonight?

Come on, stay
, his brother had said, at the door, “Silent Night” playing on the stereo inside the house.
We’ll put you in the guest room. You can watch Tess open her presents tomorrow.

Since Tess had been a cute and occasionally smelly little lump of a person at the time, incapable of opening her own presents, and probably oblivious to what they contained, Ryder had failed to see the attraction of that. He could clearly see the baby was going to have no appreciation whatsoever for the signed football he had gotten for her.

But he had stayed, something about the magic of family being stronger than any other kind of magic.

It was the last night he had ever experienced joy. It was the last time he had laughed. Until tonight.

And he did not feel ready to invite those kinds of experiences into his life again. He had built his barricades for a reason—he was not nearly done beating himself up for his failure to save them all. But also to keep this out: longing for what could not be, ever again.

A man had to be whole, unencumbered, to welcome experiences like those into his life. He was not that man. The easygoing young man he had been only a year ago was scarred beyond recognition.

And knew he would not be that man again.

Emma seemed to sense his mood shifting, changing, even though she could barely see him. He let go of her hand abruptly. She felt the faint tensing, his energy drawing away from her. She tried to draw him back.

“Would you like to hear about Christmas at the inn?”

He wanted to tell her no, to grab back the things he had just told her, but that seemed too sour, even for him, and it seemed to be going against the new spirit of cooperation he had promised, so he grunted instead.

She took the grunt as interest, and she told him about Holiday Happenings and her neighbors helping her get ready, about the skating and the sleigh-riding, the craft sales, the wreaths, the amount of food they hoped to sell.

“I hope it’s as wonderful as the night you just described to me,” she said, “if it happens. What am I going to do with four thousand hot dogs if it doesn’t?”

“Four thousand?”

“I always think big,” she said ruefully. “I was thinking if a hundred people showed up every night for ten days and each ate two hot dogs, I would need two thousand. And then I started thinking, what if two hundred people showed up every night? Or what if a hundred and fifty showed up, but a few of them were teenage boys?”

Her math and her hopeless optimism were giving him a headache. Or maybe that was the thinly disguised worry in her voice.

“You already bought everything?” he asked. Despite the fact he’d commanded himself not to encourage her with interest, to stop this, he hated that she’d apparently invested more than she could afford to lose in singlehandedly bringing the Christmas spirit to Willowbrook.

Now, no one was coming.

At least not tonight. “You still have nine days to recoup your losses,” he said. But he wasn’t sure if he believed it. What if the storm lasted longer, or if it was like 1998 and the Atlantic seaboard was shut down for days? What if the power didn’t come back on for weeks?

Just because he was stranded here with her, lying on a mattress with her, that didn’t make it his problem.

He didn’t care
. No, that wasn’t the whole truth. He didn’t
want
to care.

“Where are the hot dogs now?” he asked reluctantly.

“Freezer.”

“If the power doesn’t come on by tomorrow, you could put them in a snowbank.”

She said nothing.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. Hey, he’d get home and send her a check to cover her hot dogs.

“It
has
to be,” she said, and he didn’t like what he heard in her voice one little bit. As if her whole life depended on Holiday Happenings working out.

“What do you mean it
has
to be?” Ryder knew from experience you had to be careful about throwing challenges like that at fate. It had a way of never giving people what they thought they wanted.

She told him about inviting the needy families, the gifts under the tree, the perfect Christmas Day she had planned for them.

He could feel himself closing his eyes, trying to steel himself against her
goodness
.

Suddenly she went silent. “Look at me chattering on and on,” she said, embarrassed, probably figuring out that being stranded gave the illusion of camaraderie, but it didn’t really make him worthy of hearing her dreams, sharing her confidences.