We stared into each other’s eyes again. I agreed. That had probably been one of the best days of my life too. Lighthearted, I pondered his question. What makes me tick?
“In regard to your initial question, I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said.
After a long pause, he whispered, “Me too.”
Our confessions were our first dive into the well of emotional trust. We talked about money and how having a lot of it had never brought either of us true happiness. I revealed how lonely I’d felt growing up with Amelia Christmas as a mother. He shared that after all these years, he was trying to figure out what sort of person his mother truly was, but he never said more than that about her. I talked about all the schools I’d been kicked out of. He was a straight-A student and high school valedictorian. I shared that when my father would dispatch me to do my Christmas-daughter duties by showing up to some silly event attended by ladies and daughters who lunched, I would pretend to have an accent that came from no particular country. Jamison found that very funny. As night turned to morning, we made love once more. When he left, we planned on seeing each other soon at the campaign office. Of course, that had never happened. But even after learning of Jamison’s betrayal, I’d wondered if he was the soul mate who got away.
“Hi,” the flight attendant said cheerily.
I opened my eyes and stopped smiling as if I was high on good drugs. “Um, yes.” I shifted in my seat. I must have looked ridiculous.
He served me the cappuccino I’d ordered before takeoff and gave the girl next to me, who hadn’t taken her eyes off her phone, another Coke.
After a quiet sigh, I decided not to think about Jamison Cox ever again. Instead, I focused on the lovely wedding weekend that had just passed. My twin brother, Asher, was now the husband of intimidatingly sexy Dr. Penina Ross. I never could picture him having a wife. I couldn't picture myself as any man’s blushing bride either. Despite trying so hard to have healthier relationships, I couldn’t shake the belief that I was too damaged to enter a partnership that was built to last a lifetime.
But maybe I wasn’t too damaged. Maybe I just didn’t know how to go about the business of meeting and mating forever and ever. Regardless, the redesign of our childhood home was a hit with my family. A house that carried the energy of a castle torture chamber and imprisoned the meanest, dirtiest, angriest ghosts had been torn down. The historical society wanted off with my head for demolishing the structure without their permission. The old white stone Christmas mansion had been built during the Gilded Age, and many sightseeing tour buses would pause outside the iron gates to get a look at it while listening to an account of our family’s lineage that started out palatable but ended with the guide mentioning my sister-in-law Holly’s book, The Dark Christmases. Fortunately, Jasper got the history police off my back. I respected historical relics, but not in the case of our personal hell on earth that was the mansion we’d grown up in. I never asked what Jasper had done to make my problems go away, and frankly, I didn’t care.
I hired Rina Ito, an architect who married East Asian and Scandinavian contemporary styles, to redesign our home. The new mansion had three levels, each separated by hip and gable roofs like Shinto shrines. The new home felt light and open, a stark difference from the bulky old colonial structure.
It took four months for the frame, walls, windows, and flooring to be erected. The builders worked long hours to get it done. The final seven months were spent on the interior. My goal was to make sure those who entered couldn’t experience a stitch of what it used to feel like to walk inside the Christmas manor. For inspiration, I took a trip with Rina and her friend Yana to Greyson Highland State Park in Virginia. Rina had suggested the excursion. As we strode along the pathways through meadows and emerald forests, we spoke very little. I remembered everything I could about each of my brothers—who they’d been when we were younger and the men they’d become after Randolph passed.
Truthfully, none of us had liked who we were when Randolph was alive. We were like lab rats, always racing in multiple directions with nowhere to go and always part of a furtive lab experiment. What happened when the rats were set free? They scattered, and that was exactly what we’d done. When we came back together again, we were all different. We had evolved.
When designing the interior, my goal was to convey our transformations. We used to be bloodred, black soot, and shadowy gray. With Randolph out of the picture, we’d become precious metal for strength, softened by fire and molded into fine human beings.
So I hired Mendes Lee, an LA-based artist famous for her metalwork. Mendes flew up to Newport and stayed with me in the guesthouse for two months. Together, we moved from the bottom to the top floors, crafting with our theme in mind. Thoughtful design went into the tiniest details—knobs, handles, lightbulbs, types of glass and wood. We even considered the light flowing in from the sun, moon, and stars when selecting window frames, paint, wall art, and other design features. In the end, we had an ultramodern and stylish yet comfortable place to live. Gone were the depravities of the past, all replaced by hope for the future.
Mendes was so proud of the scope of what we’d been able to accomplish that she contacted two of the most popular art-and-design publications in the world. After Mendes had hosted house tours with several journalists, the story “The Monstrous Mansion Reformed” caught on like wildfire.
Mendes never failed to give me most of the credit for the majority of the interior design concepts. “Bryn Christmas was very detail oriented,” she would say. “Bryn was thoughtful about how art merged with use in every part of the house, from the windows down to the bathroom medicine cabinets.”
I hadn’t realized I’d been so immersed in the project until she mentioned it. What I liked most about the renovation was the idea of destroying the old and ushering in the new.
Then, one day, Mendes called and asked if she could hire me to help with the design of her London flat. The theme would be Standing firm against the raging wind. I already knew a lot about Mendes from the days we spent living in the guesthouse. That job led to another and then another, each as enjoyable as the last. When I became certain I wanted to make interior design a career, I went to see Jasper at the CFI—Christmas Family Industries—office in Lower Manhattan to seek his assistance for coming up with a solid business plan. Jasper listened to me attentively, asked questions about my goals, and wanted to know about the challenges I’d faced during some of my past projects. His expression remained stern as I gave my answers. After a final brisk nod, he typed feverishly on his keyboard. Seconds later, his secretary entered his office with a complete business plan. He went over it with me. It was amazing how he could come up with a solid blueprint in a matter of minutes.
“Then you want to implement it?” he asked.
“For sure,” I said, and Mindful Interior Notable Design—MIND by Bryn Christmas, for short—had been added to the CFI portfolio for the small-business sector.
That meant my employees were privy to a complete benefit package, which included all the bells and whistles. Their salaries were extremely competitive too. I had seven employees—one project assessor, three craftsmen, and three associate designers. Four of my employees lived in LA, and they were finishing up two projects in the county. I was on my way to start a third job. My associate designer Alana and the builder, Alex, who lived in New York City, were scheduled to fly into Vail, Colorado, the next afternoon. I liked to spend the first day on the job alone with my client to get a better feel for the house with the person inside it. After that, I would figure out how to bring our theme to life.
In the case of Eden Newell, she couldn’t think of a theme. I’d promised to help her come up with one. Manuel, my assessor, had traveled to her vacation home in October of last year, two weeks after Eden and I met in person. He’d taken pictures of each interior and exterior space and uploaded them into a design app that CFI’s technological team had made for me—another perk of being in the conglomerate. The a
pp allowed me to shop catalogs and virtually insert products into the spaces. It made my job a whole lot easier.
I was working on preliminaries of the first-floor spaces when the stewardess returned to take my coffee cup and ask if I wanted another cappuccino. Remembering that once the airplane landed, I had a long drive ahead of me, I said yes. Then dinner was served. Absorbed by my work, I had no space in my head to think about my surprise encounter with Jamison Cox. He was out of sight and out of mind, forever forgotten, and that was exactly how I preferred it.
“You don’t need the receipt, Miss Christmas. I have your reservation in the system,” the guy behind the counter said.
I was standing at the car-rental counter, rifling through my purse. My cell phone had to be in there somewhere. I hated when I misplaced my things, especially my cell phone. I froze, trying to remember the last time I’d seen my device.
Then I sighed. Shit, I left it on top of the bar at the airport in Providence. “Thank you,” I said wearily.
It had been a mentally taxing day, so I had no energy to kick myself for losing my phone. I had just enough left in me to make it to the finish line, which was the two-hour drive to Vail.
We finished our transaction at the counter, and once I was in the large SUV, I shuffled through pop music stations on satellite radio and took a quick listen to the songs that were being played. I knew how my mind worked. I would obsess over losing my phone and running into Jamison if I didn’t keep my thoughts occupied by something like music I knew and could sing along with.
None of the songs were doing the trick, so I took my iPad out of my briefcase and used Bluetooth to hook it up to the car stereo. Ding! My iPad rang, letting me know I had messages. Gripped by relief, I remembered that I could lock my lost phone from my iPad. But first I saw that I had one message from J. Cox: I have your phone. When can I return it?
I flopped back in my seat, palm pressed over my overly beating heart. “What the hell?” I whispered.
At least my cell phone was in safe hands. However, it was being safeguarded by the last man in the world I wanted to see—or at least, I was trying to convince myself that I felt that way about him.
I gripped the steering wheel, wondering what to do next. I wasn’t ready to reply to Jamison’s email. “When can I return it? Is he serious?” His face. Those lips. His seductive eyes.
I shook my head like a rattle and started the engine. “No more Jamison Cox,” I whispered and turned up the volume on a song by Sam Smith and sang along.
It wasn’t the first instance in which I’d driven from Denver to Vail, although I hadn’t planned to make the journey so late in the day. My flight had been scheduled to arrive seven hours earlier, which would have allowed me to make the drive in daylight. Snowflakes struck the windshield, but my handy-dandy wipers shoved the ice off the glass. Snow-covered fields were illuminated in the darkness, making navigating the large SUV with snow tires feel less intimidating. In fact, I felt as snug as a bug in a rug.
I wasn’t a music buff, but over the years, I’d acquired a collection of songs by my favorite artists. Sam Smith and Adele topped my list. As their songs played and my heart connected, all I wanted to do was fall in love with Jamison. I needed a different effect, a reminder that I should always protect my heart when it came to him, so I called up Siri on my iPad and asked her to play “Uninvited” by Alanis Morissette. Once the dramatic beginning of the song had rolled, I let myself think of Jamison again, but in a different way.
It was evident that he was still working for his corrupt father, Richard “Boomer” Cox. Boomer had no ethical barometer when it came to business. He struck me as the sort of human being who not only knew he could get away with murder but would attempt the act just to prove it. Even after learning that his father had tried to smear Asher and me with a lie, Jamison had stayed with him. The fact that he hadn’t chosen to separate himself from that kind of person, father or not, spoke volumes about his own character. I needed to believe that in order to keep myself from giving him a second chance to break my heart.
I still owed Jamison a response to his message, though. But first, I had to remember that he was uninvited and not allowed back into my heart. And so I sang the words, putting all my heart and soul into them. When the song ended, I told Siri to play it again. When I stopped in front of the resort’s lobby, I could barely keep my eyes open, but I felt like a mighty warrior, dressed for battle and ready to resist Jamison’s charm and good looks.
After finishing the formalities with the valets, I stepped out of my car into the icy air. Exhaustion and the altitude made me slightly dizzy. I could have enjoyed all that the resort offered, and more, by staying at our family’s Vail estate. Also, I wouldn’t have had to go through the process of checking in at the front desk and ordering the early risers’ breakfast to be brought to my room in the morning. However, ever since the mansion had been built, I’d learned how much it cost to maintain the utilities and caretaking for properties as large as the ones owned by my family. Upkeep cost tens of thousands of dollars a month. I’d also purchased my own homes: a luxury but not overwrought apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a cute mid-century modern home—less than a quarter of the size of the one I’d grown up in—on Mulholland Drive in LA. With a full-time chef who came with the property, along with groundskeepers and housekeeping, the Christmas estate was not only more convenient than the resort but closer to the job site too. However, the resort was easy enough and far more cost-efficient. I couldn’t believe I’d become so sensible when it came to money. Becoming cash conscious was easy for an heiress like me, who never felt as if her father’s money came without strings attached. There were no strings attached to what I’d earned on my own.
When I walked into my suite, which was suited for long-term stays, I tipped the bellhop, lugged myself to the bedroom, and plopped down on the bed. The moment I’d been anticipating had finally come. I took my iPad out of my briefcase, called up Jamison’s message, and replied: Thanks for securing my cell phone. Could you send it to me by mail, please?
I added the name and address of the resort. Then I sat still, waiting for his response. Minutes ticked by, and I became sleepier. Jamison was either away from his phone or asleep. As I remembered, he was the sort of person who went to bed early and rose early. Figuring I should have his response by morning, I followed his lead—I set my alarm and went directly to bed.
Chapter Three
Bryn Christmas
I rose before the alarm sounded. I’d gotten a solid seven hours of sleep, and other than the fact that I was starving, I felt ready to tackle my day. I was extra thrilled about the possibility of seeing Jamison’s response to my message. It was stupid and reckless of me to be so excited to hear from him, but regardless, I was. Wrapped in a towel, I trotted out of the bathroom and into the bedroom to check my iPad. Disappointed, I sighed. He still hadn’t replied. I checked again after my shower—nothing. I couldn’t pout, though—time was breathing down my neck.
I dressed for comfort and warmth, putting on a loose-fitting pair of jeans and a soft light-blue cotton T-shirt under a thick cable-knit sweater that I could easily take off, since walking through the home, along with the reaching and squatting my work demanded, tended to make me warm. I gave myself a final once-over in the bathroom mirror, and I approved of myself for being comfortable and quite stylish in the West Coast manner that I’d adopted when I’d moved to LA after my father died.
I trotted into the bedroom to check and see if Jamison had finally responded. Still nothing. I pursed my lips. I needed my phone because it was my lifeline to my family and work. I decided to give Jamison until the end of the day to respond before driving into town to shut off service on my cell phone and buy a new one.
As I was considering this plan, I was surprised to hear a doorbell ring. I hadn’t realized the suite came equipped with one. The sound was akin to a meal bell. Knowing exactly who the caller was, I rushed to the foyer. I’d scheduled a se
ven thirty breakfast delivery. When I opened the door, the aroma of an egg white, spinach, feta, and roasted roma tomato omelet with home-style basil, citrus sweet potatoes, and a hot pot of Columbian coffee made my stomach growl.
It felt as if time was speeding up faster than I could manage it. I ate while racing around the room, making sure I’d brought the correct flash drives—sorted according to design styles—which contained catalogs of vendors for lighting, furniture, and appliance vendors that worked with MIND’s design app. Alana and Alex, my assistant and craftsman, were flying in from New York and bringing the trunk loaded with textiles, fabrics, woods, metals, cements, porcelain, and other tangible samples. By the time I did another time check, I had only ten minutes to be at Eden Newell’s house. I sent her a quick message to let her know that I’d misplaced my cell phone and that I was on my way.
Her response came immediately: Take your time. Would you like breakfast?
If only Jamison had replied that quickly. I answered: I’ve already eaten. Thanks for offering. I promise we’ll hit the ground running as soon as I get there.
She texted back: Can’t wait.
With the bag full of modules on one shoulder, my purse and computer case hanging from the other, a briefcase in one hand, and keys in the other, I paused to make sure I hadn’t left anything else. Satisfied that I hadn’t, I hurried out into the hallway and toward the elevator. When I reached the porte cochere, I was further delayed because I’d forgotten to call downstairs and let the valet know I was leaving.
When I was finally on the road, I was flustered and could have used another cup of coffee. Also, I rarely drove to work in the morning without answering a barrage of phone calls. I was anxious about not having my cell phone, being late for the first day on the job, and Jamison’s silence. To calm my nerves, I focused on my surroundings. Tall, thin pines rose up out of the snow-layered ground and mountains. A light mist settled in the atmosphere. The place was freezing cold, and I was wondering if it was feasible to start an interior design project in a high-altitude mountain town.
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