A Christmas Bride

by Hope Ramsay

  David enjoyed this solitude for more than half an hour before Dusty disturbed it. “Hey,” Dusty called from the stream’s bank.

  The real world returned with an unpleasant rush as David looked over his shoulder. Dusty stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his gray fishing pants, a frown on his normally happy face. Dusty had a day job as a nursery foreman, but he was also one of the best fishing guides in Jefferson County. He knew the location of every good fishing spot on the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers and could tell you what kind of fly to use in any possible situation.

  David fished with him often, and it was a known fact that you could spend a whole day with Dusty and not have to worry about any conversations lasting more than two minutes. But not today, apparently. Today Dusty squinted at David from underneath the wide brim of his fishing hat and said, “I was hoping to find you out here. I need to talk to you about something important.”

  “What’s up?” David asked.

  “I need the advice of a lawyer.”

  Crap.

  David reeled in his line and waded to shore. “What’s the matter?”

  Dusty unzipped one of his pants pockets and pulled out an envelope marked with a certified mail sticker. His hands trembled as he passed the letter to David. “I got this letter on Friday. Can the County Council do this to me?”

  David pulled a sheet of Jefferson County Council stationery from the envelope and several other documents that appeared to be real estate plats. The main document was a notice from the Jefferson County Council of its intention to hold a hearing on December eighth to accept public comment on a plan to develop the historic site known as Liberty Forge into a county park. The plan, according to the document, included demolishing the old foundry building and restoring the eighteenth-century forge in order to turn it into a historic interpretative site that would be managed by the Jefferson County Historical Society. The county also wanted to take all the land surrounding the forge in order to turn it into a day-use park with picnic tables, athletic fields, and public fishing access.

  “Can they?” Dusty’s voice cracked with emotion. “I’m not opposed to a new park, David, but you know I’ve had plans for this land for years. They can’t take my land, can they?”

  The breadth of the county’s intentions was nothing short of stunning. They wanted Dusty’s fishing access, his land, and his personal heritage all in one fell swoop. It was akin to the county deciding to make Charlotte’s Grove one of those publicly open plantation houses like Mount Vernon or Montpelier or Monticello.

  When had the county hatched this plan, and why hadn’t David or Dusty heard anything about it before this? Something wasn’t right. Was Bill Cummins pushing this thing now because he knew Dusty was David’s friend?

  It wasn’t all that far-fetched a notion. People would flock to this idea like cats to catnip. And any local politician lining up against a park was likely to be unpopular. “I’m afraid the county has the authority to take anyone’s land if they plan to use it for the public good,” he said.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  Dusty turned, took a few steps, then slapped his hat against his thigh. A long stream of linked-together expletives followed.

  When Dusty had finished venting, David spoke again. “Look, this is far from a done deal. There are a bunch of hoops the county has to jump through. For a start, they have to hold this public hearing. Unfortunately, a lot of people are probably going to say that tearing down the warehouse is a great idea. But—”

  “You know I plan to take that building down. I just need to build a little more capital.”

  “I know, Dusty. But the county’s got the jump on you now. Of course they’ll have to appropriate funds, and God knows where they’re going to get the money. When I was on the council, we didn’t have enough money to manage the parks that were already in the system.”

  “Yeah, but with this hanging over my head, no one will invest in my plan. I’m dead. The county has destroyed me.”

  “Dusty, calm down. It might be nothing. And besides, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution protects you. The county will have to pay you for the land.”

  Dusty pivoted and gave David an angry glance. “Really? I always thought the Fifth Amendment was the one that crooked politicians hid behind.”

  “Well, that too. But it’s also there to protect private landowners from the government unjustly taking their property.”

  “You call that protection?” He pointed at the letter.

  “Well, it’s public notice, which is more than a lot of people get.”

  “Can you help me stop this?”

  David didn’t want to answer that question. Heather and Hale would tell him to stay the hell away from this controversy. But how could he?

  Before he could say another word, a familiar female voice called out, “Dusty McNeil, your momma is so old her birth certificate says expired.”

  He and Dusty turned toward the wooded area to the southwest where Willow Petersen, wearing an ancient floppy hat and carrying an even older bamboo rod and fishing creel, waved.

  Willow had obviously come up from the Appalachian Trail, where there were no fences, just a bunch of faded no-trespassing signs that she had obviously ignored. From Serenity Farm, the walk was close to five miles. If she picked up the trail on Route 7, it was about a mile and a half. David knew part of that route well. As a boy, he’d walked two miles down the trail from Charlotte’s Grove every time he came here to fish with his friends.

  Dusty let out a hoot. “Willow Petersen,” he hollered, “I heard you were back in town.” The worried expression left Dusty’s face. He jogged through the meadow grass toward Willow. When they met, Dusty picked her up, swung her around, and gave her a kiss.

  It wasn’t a super-erotic kiss or anything like that, just a friendly peck on the lips—not much more than the kiss she’d given David on Wednesday. The kiss that he’d revisited many times over the last several days.

  There had been nothing but friendship in Willow’s kiss. They had been talking about Shelly. They’d been sharing their grief.

  So why couldn’t he get that kiss out of his head?

  And why did he suddenly resent the fact that she’d kissed Dusty?

  Dusty and Willow had always been tight—so tight that David had often wondered if Dusty’s inability to settle down with one woman had something to do with Willow. Well, she was back in town now. So maybe the two of them would finally hook up.

  He hated the idea. A slow resentment boiled in his gut as he watched Dusty and Willow walk with arms linked and heads together.

  “You beat me to the stream,” Willow said with a grin as she and Dusty approached. “Don’t you go to church anymore?”

  “Not so much,” David said.

  “Guess I’ll have to get up earlier, then. I never let you beat me to the stream when we were kids.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “It’s a glorious day, especially for November.” She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and faced the sun. Her old hat fell to the ground, and the sun lit up her hair with gold. The tomboy had grown into a graceful, poised woman. She wasn’t the same girl he’d once known. There were so many new and interesting facets to her.

  She retrieved her hat and plopped the old thing on her head. In that instant, the girl she’d been melded with the woman she’d become. And something deep in David’s chest hitched.

  She winked at Dusty. “I hope I can still fish here. I ignored your no-trespassing signs. Those are new.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. Probably a dumb idea. I was trying to discourage some of the kids who’ve decided it’s easier to splash around in the run down here than to take the hike up to the falls. They leave beer cans and crap all over the place. I’ll bet some fisherman got their panties in a wad, and that explains the trouble I’m in.”

  “What trouble?” Willow asked.

  Dusty took the letter from David�
�s hands and showed it to Willow. She read it, a frown folding her forehead. She looked up, her green eyes bright with ire. “Oh my God,” she said in a tone laced with outrage. “We can’t let this happen. We need to organize a protest or something.”

  The fire in Willow’s eyes and voice ignited the dry, dead debris that was David’s libido. It flamed to life. And like one of those Liberty Stoves that Dusty’s ancestors had once built, it warmed him down to his toes.

  He wanted her naked right there on the grass. He wanted to run his fingers through her incredible hair. He wanted to cup her breasts.

  He wanted her. And wanting her was completely unacceptable.

  “What do you think?” Dusty asked David. “You know the council. If we organized some kind of big protest, could we change their minds?”

  David took a deep breath and tried to jettison all of the forbidden ideas and images that had just sprung to life in his mind. “Look, I don’t know,” he said. “Let me call some of the county councilors and see where this is really heading. If the county doesn’t have the money for this plan, then it’s not going to happen.”

  Willow gave him an appraising look that almost turned him inside out. She didn’t say one word. Instead she turned back toward Dusty and gave him a warm smile that David didn’t like. Not one bit. The idea of Willow and Dusty hooking up seriously upset him.

  Wow. Not good.

  He touched his wedding band, and it reminded him that he’d loved Shelly with all his heart.

  “I don’t know if a protest will change their minds,” Willow said, pulling David back from the brink. “You know how people can be in this town. But Mom would tell you that silence is your worst enemy. God knows I’ve heard her say that about every issue she’s ever protested. Even Holy Cow.”

  Dusty laughed. “I never, ever thought I’d hear you quote your mom. Isn’t she the one who’s so old she rode dinosaurs to school?”

  “Yeah, and your momma was so dumb she thought a quarterback was a refund.”

  Dusty laughed and gave her another irritatingly warm hug. “I’m sure glad you’re home,” Dusty said with that wide smile that the single women of Jefferson County found so irresistible. And apparently Willow wasn’t at all immune.

  * * *

  Dusty McNeil had always been easy—easy on the eye, easy to like, easy to be with. Not that Willow had ever entertained any sexual fantasies about him, because Dusty was a buddy—a stand-in for the brother she’d always wanted but never had, sort of like Shelly had been her sister from another mother.

  Dusty was as much an orphan child as Willow, so they understood each other. Growing up, they had constantly swapped “your mother” jokes, but the truth of it was that Dusty had never known his mother, and his old man had been a mean, nasty drunk.

  With Willow’s father MIA and her mother the subject of endless local gossip, it was natural for them to form a bond. They were the outcast kids who’d created their own special place together in each other’s company. They had been fishing buddies for years before David Lyndon strolled down from the hill the summer they’d all turned sixteen.

  And now here they were again, the three of them, all grown up, fishing three separate pools along the run. For Willow, the day might have turned peaceful and even spiritual were it not for the fact that every time she looked up to admire the scenery or the beauty of Dusty’s cast, she found David watching her.

  Willow didn’t for one minute believe any of the crap Juni dished out about auras, but there was no mistaking the fact that something had changed in the way David looked at her.

  And something had changed in the way she reacted to those looks.

  There hadn’t been one thing remotely carnal about the kiss she’d given David at the Jaybird the other day. And yet her lips remembered the texture of his stubble. Her tongue remembered the taste of his skin. That one, innocent kiss had been enough to turn Willow slightly adolescent when it came to David Lyndon.

  But she wasn’t an adolescent. She was a grown-up. And she was smart enough to know that his attention and her reaction were something to avoid.

  He was a Lyndon; she was a Petersen. That pretty much summed up the problem.

  There was also the fact that she’d come off a relationship with a well-known CEO who had shattered her trust on so many levels. She needed time to process that. Jumping into bed with a man who was equally well-known and equally entitled would be just plain stupid.

  Finally, of course, was the fact that David was Shelly’s husband. Shelly might be gone, but that didn’t mean a thing. David was still grieving for her, still wearing the ring she’d put on his finger. He almost never stopped touching it with his thumb.

  There was no place for Willow in that duet, and she wasn’t interested in being part of a love triangle that included a ghost.

  * * *

  A few days later, Willow found herself sitting at the small butcher-block table in the kitchen at Serenity Farm. It was the third night in a row that Willow had dined with Mom so, naturally, Linda had jumped to the conclusion that Willow was trying to cleanse her body of all those toxins she’d been consuming along with her red meat.

  In reality, Willow was eating at home every night so as not to run into David at the diner or the Jaybird or any other place. In fact, although she worked daily at Eagle Hill Manor, she’d taken to carefully timing her arrivals and departures in order to avoid him. After fishing with him on Sunday, she no longer trusted herself around him.

  Mom plunked down a plate filled with baked squash with apples and quinoa, seated herself across the table, and said, “So I heard David Lyndon staged a protest at Daniel Morgan Elementary yesterday.”

  And, right on cue, the minute Mom said David’s name, Willow’s body sparked in a totally adolescent manner. She needed to nip this silly thing in the bud. Right now.

  She looked up from her plate of quinoa. “What kind of protest?”

  “Well, from what Pippa Custis told me this morning, he called every single parent in Natalie’s class to find out if that old witch Mrs. Welch had been giving their kids a hard time about penmanship.”

  Warmth pooled in Willow’s midsection. “Really?”

  “That’s what I heard. Pippa knows because her granddaughter, Ilene, is in that class. Ilene has beautiful handwriting, but I gather there are other kids who don’t—mostly the lefties, and I guess Natalie is one of them. Pippa said David organized a meeting with the principal, and every one of those parents came down to demand a change.”

  Good God. David had taken her suggestion.

  Right then Willow knew that something fundamental had changed in the way she thought about David. Something that had the potential not only to ruin her relationship with Shelly’s husband, but also her growing attachment to Shelly’s daughter.

  A couple days of playing princess and American Girl with Natalie, and Willow was completely and utterly smitten. Why had she stayed away so long? She’d missed so much of Natalie’s childhood. But she was here now. And she had no intention of ever straying again. She had a responsibility to Natalie, and she couldn’t allow something stupid, like her libido, to mess it up.

  “Eat,” Mom commanded, giving her a sharp look.

  Willow picked up a forkful of the unappetizing meal and managed to choke it down. The texture was disgusting, and the whole sweet-and-sour thing didn’t excite her taste buds.

  “I gather the new principal is way smarter than that old bat I tussled with for years,” Mom continued. “Pippa told me that Mrs. Welch was told—not asked—to start grading spelling and handwriting separately.”

  “Good for David Lyndon.”

  “Well, the way I see it, the principal had to make a change. I mean, it was a Lyndon asking for it, you know?”

  Yeah, she knew. Willow let go of a long sigh.

  “That sigh sounded mournful. What’s on your mind, baby girl?”

  Time to change the subject. “Nothing much,” Willow said, “except finding a painting con
tractor for Eagle Hill. I’ve got everything else figured out. I hired Dusty’s landscaping company to do the outside cleanup. And Dusty has a few friends who are plumbing and electrical contractors who were willing to squeeze our work in before the wedding. I’m sure he bribed them with access to his fishing hole, but I’m looking the other way on that. To tell you the truth, I’m ready to bribe one of the half dozen painting contractors I’ve interviewed who’ve told me they are scheduled right through Christmas. Who paints their house in December, anyway?”

  “Why do you need a painter?”

  “Because the paint on the front facade is all cracked and peeling, and the inside really needs a sprucing up.”

  “Okay, so? You don’t need to hire a painter for that.”

  “Well, I’m not going to paint it myself. It’s a huge building, and I’m afraid of ladders,” Willow said.

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you paint it yourself. I was suggesting that you round up a bunch of volunteers—like Jeff and Melissa’s friends. You could have a paint-in.”

  Willow nearly choked on the second bite of baked squash.

  “It would be fun,” Mom continued. “You know, like one of those HGTV shows where they redo someone’s house in two days with the help of their friends and family.”

  “Okay, maybe. I’ll think about it.” Willow chugged down several swallows of water.

  “So,” Mom said, “has Dusty learned anything more about this historical park idea?”

  “Not much. He told me that David made a few phone calls for him and discovered that the county doesn’t have the funds to buy Dusty out or convert the land to parkland. But if they ever do get the money, they could force him off his land.”

  “We should organize a protest.”

  “I told David and Dusty the same thing last Sunday, but David said protesting wouldn’t help.”

  Mom gave Willow one of her sharp, political looks. “Of course he said that. He’s running for Congress, and I’ll bet Commissioner Cummins is going to come out with flags flying in support of the park proposal. David probably doesn’t want to hurt Dusty’s feelings, you know? But he’s going to have to support it too.”