“You have something you want to get off your chest?” she asked him.
“Do you?” he shot back.
She poured herself the last of the coffee and sat down at the island beside him.
“We handled that night all wrong,” he said. Alice nodded.
She swallowed, so clearly carrying such a load on her shoulders. He’d grown used to living with women after so many years of just him and his brother and dad, and he knew the therapeutic importance of hugs.
But Alice wasn’t a hugger.
He covered her hand with his and she immediately grabbed him, holding on tight.
“They loved each other.”
“I know.”
“A real and honest love.”
Shit. “I know.”
“And even if it never became anything more, they deserved a chance to have that first real love. That first love is how you learn to love. And how you learn who you are in love. And how to live inside it. And we…we took that away from them.”
“We broke up their friendship. And they needed each other,” he said. “Josie…I feel like Josie has been so alone since he left.”
“And it feels like Cameron has just put everything that happened before he left…away. We started a five questions interview yesterday and I brought up his mom and it was like…” She shook her head. “…I’d smacked him.”
“I asked for his help last night and he said he wasn’t my employee anymore.”
“He may never forgive us.”
“But what about Josie?”
“They left here together to deliver the food.”
“They did?” In his chest he felt a flicker of hope. He had a lot of reasons to both trust and distrust hope. It was fickle and could turn on a person on a dime. But if he’d learned anything in these years with Delia, making a family, building a home, it was that if you didn’t have hope—even when you feared its eventual extinction—you had nothing.
“They were smiling.”
He blew out a breath. “That’s something.”
“Let’s not start congratulating ourselves yet. We still have a mess to clean up.”
JOSIE
There was always a lot of mayhem at Haven House. And even though the school and offices were officially on break, there were a lot of families there.
A lot of kids.
And it was like Christmas had barfed all over the place. Kids’ drawings and paper chains and holiday lights covered every square inch of wall.
“I forgot about this part!” Josie said as she and Helen and Cameron carried food into the dining room while kids rushed by. She lifted a tray of lasagna up so it didn’t bean a kid in the head.
“Hold up!” Daniella, an older Black woman who was once a resident and was now the day-to-day manager of the kitchen, stopped the kids at the end of the hallway. “You turn yourselves around and go help them bring in the food.”
The kids turned, faces beaming, and started running back toward them. “Walk!” Daniella shouted, and the kids immediately slowed down.
“That is a superpower,” Cameron murmured.
“Oh, it smells so good,” Daniella said. “Bring it in. Bring it on in.”
They stepped into the kitchen, which was a larger version of the one in the Riverview since the remodel a few years ago. It looked big enough to hold all the cooking classes it could run.
They set down the lasagna and the kids came running in after them with foil-wrapped loaves of bread in their arms.
Helen brought up the rear with the salad. “There’s still more in the van.”
Cameron and Josie walked out of the kitchen and into the hall, their shoulders bumping each other, and Josie shifted away, suddenly self-conscious, and stepped behind him.
“You okay?” he asked.
Just completely and totally in my own head and making a fool of myself. “Just fine!” she said over-brightly, deeply rattled by what had happened in the truck. He shot her a quizzical grin and opened the door to the snowy cold outside. They brought in the last of the food. And Helen and Daniella were strategizing in the kitchen, figuring out the timeline for dinner and delivery to the church.
“Are we going to deliver food in town?” Cameron asked.
“The roads are too bad,” Daniella said. “We’re gonna feed everyone here tonight and hopefully deliver tomorrow.”
Cameron nodded, though he was undoubtedly imagining what Alice would have to say about the shape her salads would be in by the next day.
“But don’t you worry,” Daniella said with a bright twinkle in her eyes. She was the kind of short woman who always seemed taller on account of all her personality and power. “I’ve got a job for you.”
“Wrapping,” Cameron said. “I knew it.”
“It won’t be that bad,” Josie said, reaching over to push on his arm.
“You know, you say that every time, and every time it is paper-cut city.”
“Well, come on,” Daniella said, leading them from the kitchen down another hall to the meeting room that always got taken over for presents and wrapping.
“You coming?” Josie asked Helen over her shoulder.
Helen shook her head, a smile teasing her lips. “I think you two have it covered.”
Josie stepped back into the kitchen.
“Don’t,” she said in a low voice.
“Don’t what?” Helen asked innocently.
“Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” Josie said. “This could have gone another way entirely.” She thought of Max and Cameron, and the tension between them, and the tension she still had with Alice. “It still could.”
Helen sobered. “You should have been friends all this time. I was just trying to make something that was really wrong a little bit right.”
Yeah. Josie knew that. And, frankly, she was glad her friend had staged this reunion. Whatever happened next. Seeing him again was so sweet. “Thanks,” she said, squeezing her friend’s hand. “It is really good to see him.”
“See him?” Helen asked, waggling her eyebrows.
“It’s not like that,” Josie said, not quite able to hide her blush.
“Oh, honey,” Helen said. “Between you two, it’s always like that.”
Uncomfortable with that insight, Josie left the kitchen and walked into the meeting room where Cameron was sitting on the floor surrounded by red and white wrapping paper and silver bows and long silver ribbon. Bows the size of Josie’s hands. And on one side of the room were stacked presents. Presents for the kids and moms in Haven House and other presents for families in town that needed help getting something under a tree.
“That…that’s a lot of gifts,” she said.
“Paper-cut city,” he said, shaking his head. “We better get to work.”
The system was simple. Kids got green paper. Grownups got red paper. Silver ribbon for men. White ribbon for women. The kids’ ribbons were differentiated by age, not gender. Lots of Legos. Lots of books. Lots of science kits and bubbles and new hats and warm mittens. Jumping ropes and art supplies.
“Didn’t you come up with this ribbon system?” Cameron asked as they got down to business. They sat cross-legged beside each other, just like they always had. Knees touching. Reaching across each other for paper and tape.
“I did. Probably my single greatest achievement. Do you have the tape?”
He gaped at her. “You seriously just had it.”
“I know, but—”
“It’s under your knee.”
She stuck her tongue out at him like they were kids, and they settled into a rhythm she hadn’t felt in years.
“I was engaged,” he said. And it was like a needle scratching over a record. She felt those words in the back of her brain. “And my fiancée’s mother used to make these tiny, incredibly intricate dolls out of paper. She tried to teach me once but got so frustrated she had to walk away. ”
He taped the paper down on a box of Legos and, without measuring, cut the paper to cover th
e rest of it. She gasped in horror.
“What?” he said.
“You’ve got to measure.”
“What? It’s fine…” He folded the paper over the rest of the box, but it didn’t come close to matching up and most of the Lego logo was visible. “I’ll just cover that up with another piece of paper.”
“Or you could do this totally revolutionary thing and measure the paper around the box before you cut.”
“Yes. I could do that.”
“But you’re not going to?”
He untaped the cut paper and measured it around a smaller box and started wrapping that. Josie shook her head, laughing at him.
Silence settled down around them and it didn’t seem like he was going to bring up the fiancée. She told herself not to do it. What good could come of knowing the kind of woman he’d loved enough to want to marry? “Who was she?” Internally she winced. “Your fiancée?”
He blew out a breath. “A doctor in Kenya. We met about nine months after I left the States. And we had a few months of being pretty happy before we realized we’d made a mistake and we split up, amicably.”
“Really?”
“No. She broke my heart but good.” He smiled at Josie and she saw that he was joking, but it was true, too. And she forced her face to smile.
“I had been traveling for a year when we met and I was ready to settle down. I wanted children and a house, and I thought she wanted the same.”
“She didn’t?”
“She’d gotten a four-year grant to study retinoblastoma in children living in remote villages in Burundi.”
“You didn’t want to go?”
“No, I would have gone. But it was painfully obvious she didn’t want me to. She wanted to focus all her energy on her work and…” He shrugged. “I respected her for it. And bowed out.”
“And you’ve never gotten close again?” she asked.
“No.” He set the wrapped present in the stack of gifts with green ribbons. “What about you?”
“Me what?”
“Come on, now, Josie. I told you.”
“No one. Really.” She focused all of her attention on the pretty, warm slippers she was wrapping for some lucky mom.
“I’m not believing that. Smart and beautiful and kind and funny—you had guys mobbing you in high school.”
“I was just so busy, I guess.”
“Too busy to date?”
“I don’t know, Cameron. I had a crush on you in high school, graduated and developed a complex that I’d sexually harassed you and gotten you kicked out of the only home you ever had, so I didn’t really know how to be…casual. Or even available for any of that.”
His silence was stunned and she didn’t look at him for a long time. Her plan had backfired. Magnificently. But soon his silence became unbearable and she glanced up to see his open-mouthed astonishment.
“What?” she asked, not liking the way he was looking at her. “I should have been different? I should have handled you leaving better? I was mourning you, Cameron. I was—” Oh god, she was going to cry. She pressed her fingers to her eyes and wished she had a tissue for her nose that was suddenly dripping. Great. Just great.
“Hey,” he whispered. And he was right there. She could feel him there. The warmth of his body and his breath. His heart.
“I’m fine.” She took a deep breath and did what she did best—smiled her way through it. As long as she didn’t look at him or…touch him, she’d be fine.
“Josie?” And then the jerk had to go and touch her, his fingers against her chin. Pulling her face up so she had to look into his eyes while bearing the incendiary heat of his hand.
Stop, she wanted to say. Stop making this so hard.
But when her eyes met his she saw clearly what he saw. What the family didn’t see. Her friends and coworkers.
“Have you been alone all this time?” he asked.
14
JOSIE
She pushed his hand. “You know something? Screw you. Screw you and your doctor fiancée. And your judgment. You left. You left me. Without one word, Cameron.” She smacked at his hand and got to her feet.
“What are you…Josie!”
She was at the door, her hand on the knob. No plan but to get away from him. Tears burning her eyes and words burning in her throat.
He grabbed her again, her hand in his, and she pulled away but he wouldn’t let her go.
“Cameron,” she snapped, not wanting to yell. Just wanting to leave.
She pushed him, but he didn’t let go and she toppled forward as he stepped back and then…god, if she wrote it, it wouldn’t be believed…she collided into his body.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I am. I am so—”
Her hand curled into a fist and her plan, her instinct, was to smack him right across the face. The way he’d taught her when she was sixteen and was going on a date she didn’t want to go on with Tom Pinkton. But at some point the electric impulse in her brain to slap him changed, shifted.
Ignited.
“You asshole,” she breathed.
And she kissed him.
She kissed him like a smack. Like she wanted to do violence. And he received the kiss like he knew. Like he was going to absorb all her anger and turn it into pleasure. Give her back some of the things he’d taken away when he left.
Things he didn’t even know about.
“Breathe, Josie,” he whispered against her mouth, and she realized she was holding her breath. She gasped and then went back for more, wrapping her hands in the fabric of his T-shirt and pulling him toward her. Their lips met like they’d never been apart. And maybe he’d been dreaming of this kiss for as long as she had. Replaying those messy teenage fumbles until the memories were threadbare. His fingers clenched in her hair and he slipped his tongue into her mouth. She moaned, the anger leaving. Fading. Dissipating to mist in the heat between them.
This, her body sighed.
This, her brain marveled.
This, her heart warned.
This was what she’d been missing. What she’d kept hoping she would feel anytime another man kissed her. This full body shiver and delight. This deep from her belly craving.
She dated actors and athletes, men who routinely showed up on lists of New York’s hottest bachelors. And they left her cold.
How ridiculous that the only man who’d ever made her feel this way was him.
Cameron.
There was a knock on the closed door of the room and she pushed him away hard. And so fast, he nearly fell over. Adrenaline made her shaky and she bent down to gather up the presents they’d wrapped so she wouldn’t have to look at Helen as she came in.
“Hey,” Helen said. “The snow is really coming down and Maria just came back from town and said the roads are really slick.”
“Yeah?” Cameron said. “Josie, we should maybe—”
“Go. Before it gets worse,” Helen said.
“Okay,” Josie stood, projecting the unkissed, unruffled version of herself. “We’re mostly done with the presents.”
“Alice has canceled dinner tonight,” Helen told them, looking down at her phone. “Did you get her text? Everyone is fending for themselves. Cinnamon rolls in the morning.”
“I guess I know what I’ll be doing tonight,” Cameron said and then read the text from Alice.
Everyone is staying in homes tonight because of storm. Make cinnamon bun dough tonight? All the stuff in the usual places.
“It’s like nothing has changed,” Helen said, and Cameron, still smiling at his phone, nodded.
Josie and Cameron put on their coats, pulled on their hats, and made very, very sure they never actually looked at each other.
And then they were in the truck. The doors slammed. The silence an echo.
“Josie,” he said.
“Just drive,” she said.
CAMERON
The sky was dark, and the snow was thick and wet on the ground. He pushed the
truck into four-wheel drive, grateful the old lady still had it where it mattered. He took tiny glances at the stone-cold woman sitting next to him. Looking at her he couldn’t believe that five minutes ago she’d been holding onto him hard enough to leave bruises.
Hard enough to make him think she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
“I can drop you at your parents’,” he said.
“My laptop is at the lodge,” she said.
He felt, suddenly, like a teenager, reading into what she was saying. Finding codes and messages in the tilt of her head. The clench of her hands in her lap.
The thing was, in his head, the closure of sex wasn’t as easy now. Now that he imagined her, for the last five years, alone. Sex, which usually felt like the most balanced, natural thing in the world, now felt…loaded and unfamiliar.
The lodge was quiet when they got there. Alice wasn’t in the kitchen. The fireplaces were cold. Through the back windows he could see Alice and Gabe’s cottage nestled into the V of the rolling hills, partially hidden by trees. The windows were lit up against the gloom, smoke rose from its chimney.
Snow was coming down hard and fast, gathering in the corners of the windows.
“Hello?” he cried. No one answered.
They were alone. And he didn’t know what to do. A grown-ass man completely thrown into chaos by this woman the girl he’d loved had turned into.
“Grab your laptop,” he said. “And I’ll take you home.”
Behind him she was silent and he turned, not wanting to hope. But she stood there, her desire plain on her face. He realized that seven years ago she’d said everything, pulling her confessions and feelings up by the roots to present to him. And he’d stayed silent. Or made promises about a day that had never come.
It was his turn to tell her a few things. Things he never got to say.
“You’re so beautiful,” he told her, and the corner of her mouth lifted.
He crossed the room to stand in front of her. Close enough to touch if she wanted it. He watched as he got nearer how her breath came in tighter and smaller, how she fisted her hands and then relaxed them at her sides, only to do it again like she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with them.
Christmas At The Riverview Inn Page 14