by Cara Colter
“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.
Why had he allowed himself to be sucked into this?
Not just alone, a voice answered him, lonely.
He hated that admission, the weakness of it. He had failed his brother and his sister-in-law. He deserved to feel the way he felt.
Still, something in him that was still human said to her, and meant it, “It’s good that
you believe.”
There was that word again, creeping around the edges of his life, looking for a way to sneak past his guard and into his heart.
So it would be ready to break again.
I don’t think so, he said to himself.
“Oh,” she said, and laughed self-consciously. “I didn’t mean to sound like that. Saint Emma.”
“Don’t forget—of the meek and submissive school of saints.” Giving in, just a little bit, to that temptation to play with her.
But giving in a little bit was probably just a forerunner to giving in a lot. And in the end she was going to get hurt. He needed to pull back from this now, not just to protect himself. To protect her.
He got to his feet, hesitated, and then reached back a hand for her when the mattress was thwarting her efforts to get up. The momentum of that tug pulled her into the length of him. He could feel her slightness, her softness, the delicious hint of curves. The enveloping lavender scent of her that would make it so easy to lose his head.
The devil told him not to bother being a better man, not to bother protecting her. It told him to outrun the terrible loneliness reliving his memories had stirred up inside him.
She was an adult. Kiss her. See what happened.
He could almost taste her lips when he thought of that. A wanting, compelling, tempting, tantalizing, swept through him.
More than a year since he had connected with another human being.
But not her, he told himself sternly. You could not kiss a girl like Emma White without thinking it all the way through. Following an impulse could have far-reaching ramifications.
Emma wanted to be fiercely independent, knocking down walls and climbing all over the roof by herself. She wanted to send the message, I don’t need a man.
But she struck him, with her Christmas fantasies, with her wistfulness, with her desire to bring something to others, as not just old-fashioned and decent, but romantic. Emma was the type of woman who might think a casual kiss meant things it did not mean. She might think that he wanted to get to know her better or was looking for a mommy for little Tess, a future that involved her.
The truth was Ryder Richardson did not look to the future at all.
Ryder just got through every day to the best of his ability. And that, he told himself sternly, did not involve doing damage to others. And how could he not damage someone like her? Vinegar and milk, he reminded himself.
“I’ll get the mattress pulled into the great room, if you want to go find some bedding to make up the couch.”
“Yes, boss,” she said.
The temptation rose again. To play along with her. But this time he said nothing in response to her jesting.
In fact, he made up his mind he was leaving at first light.
You’d leave a woman alone with no power? a voice inside him asked.
For her own good, he answered it back.
But maybe she had been closer to the truth than he wanted to admit when she had called him mean and selfish.
It was himself he was protecting, not her. Protecting himself from these uncomfortable feelings, something thawing in him that allowed him to see his world as too stark, too masculine. Too lonely.
But getting to know someone was a minefield that rarely went smoothly, especially now that he carried so much baggage, so many scars, so much damage.
What started with a curious kiss could all blow up and leave her with another Christmas in shambles.
Not one good Christmas memory? How was that possible? And yet he could tell she was honest to a fault, and that if she could have dredged one up, she would have.
He dragged the mattress into the living room, rearranged the bedding, stoked the fire. The thought of sharing this room with her for the night seemed uncomfortably intimate given his vow not to encourage anything between them.
She came back down the stairs, loaded down with bedding, the duvet a plump eiderdown, whiter than a wedding night and just as sensual.
“Where’s the woodpile?” he asked, looking everywhere but at her lips, needing a moment’s breathing space.
She told him, and he put on his shoes and grabbed the flashlight. He went out the back door into the storm to her woodshed. The night, bitter and dark, the flashlight beam, frail against the wicked slant of white sleet, were in sharp contrast to the cozy intimacy inside, but Ryder welcomed the wind, the sharded sleet on his face slapping him back to reality. The sleet was freezing as it hit the ground, forcing him to focus intensely to keep upright, especially once his arms were loaded with wood.
He made five or six trips to the shed, filling the wood box beside the fireplace. Each time he came in, he would think enough, but the picture Emma made cuddled up on the couch inside her quilt, her hair every which way, would make him think not one good Christmas, as if he could or should do something about it. And that would send him back out the door, determined to cling to his vision of life as a cold and bitter place.
But going out into the weather again and again turned out to be one of those impulses he should have thought all the way through.
His clothes were soaked. He made one more trip—out to his vehicle, to bring in the luggage he had not wanted to bring in. Another surrender, he thought, shivering. The old house only had one bathroom, upstairs, and it was already cold. He noticed the tub seemed new, and the flooring around it did, too. He inspected more closely.
Her tub had fallen through the floor at some point in recent history. This place was way too much for her, and he killed the fleeting thought that she needed someone to help her. He hurried into a pair of drawstring plaid pajama pants, a T-shirt.
When he came back down, he noticed she was in pajamas now, too, soft pink, with white-and-pink angels on them, flannel, not, thankfully, the least bit sexy. Her blanket was a soft mound of snow on the couch, but she was up doing something at the fire.
He saw then that she was pouring steaming water from a huge cast-iron kettle she had put in the coals of the fire. She came to him with a mug of hot chocolate.
It was just a little too much like a pajama party, and he had talked enough for one night. Yet chilled to the bone because of his own foolishness, he could not refuse. He took the mug, wrapped his hands around its comforting heat. He took a chair across from her as she snuggled back under her blanket, one hand coming out of the folds to hold her hot chocolate.
Home.
The scene, straight out of a magazine layout for Christmas, had a feeling of home about it: fire crackling, baby sleeping, the pajamas, the hot chocolate, the tree in the background.
“Is it hard?” she asked softly. “Looking after Tess? How long have you done it for?”
That was the problem with letting his guard down, telling the one story. For a whole year he had avoided any relationship that required anything of him, even conversation. It was just too hard to make small talk, to pretend to care. Being engaged with another human being felt exhausting and like a lie.
His failure had killed his brother. Hardly a conversation starter, and yet how long could he know someone before he felt compelled to tell them that? Because that had become the biggest part of him.
But now that he had confided one deeply personal memory to her, it was as if a hole had opened in the dam that held his loneliness, and the words wanted to pour out of him.
“I was appointed her guardian three months ago.” Ryder did not want to tell her the circumstances, Tracy’s long fight ending, nor did he want to tell her how hard those first weeks had been. Thinking about them, loneliness and longing threatened to swamp him again.
But his voice was carefully neutral when he said, “I have a nanny. That helps. She’s an older lady, married, her own kids grown up. She misses children.” So much easier to talk about Mrs. Markle than himself.
But Emma persisted. “And when she’s not there?”
“There’s the hair thing,” he admitted. “I do pretty good at everything else. The first few diaper changes I felt like I was sc
aling Everest without oxygen, but now it makes me feel oddly manly. Like I look at other guys and think, I can handle stuff you can’t even imagine, pal.” He was still aware he was hiding in humor, but Emma’s appreciative chuckle made it seem like a good tactic, so he kept going.
“Shopping for her is a nightmare. It’s like being at a pigeon convention. You’ve never heard so much cooing. It’s like I’m transformed from six-foot-one of highly-muscled, menacing man to this adorable somewhat helpless teddy bear.”
“You do have kind of a menacing air about you, Ryder.” Her eyes slid to his arms to check out the muscle part. He was pretty sure she wasn’t disappointed. The gym was one of the places where he took it all, sweated it out, pushed himself to a place beyond thought.
“A much-needed defense against cooing, not that it works in the baby store. I go in for a new supply of pajamas with feet in them, the entire extent of Tess’s wardrobe, and women come out of the woodwork. I get shown little diaper covers with frills and bows on them, and white dresses that Tess would destroy in thirty seconds flat, and the worst thing of all—hair paraphernalia.”
“I noticed you bought the little diaper cover.”
“I know,” he admitted. “I get the hair junk, too, and more ridiculous shoes than you can shake a stick at, too.”
“Ah, the boots with the penguins.”
“I learned to just let them load me up, and I can get out of there quicker.”
“Maybe underneath the menace, they see something else.”
He could tell her. He could tell this stranger about his last year in hell, leave his burdens here when he walked away. It was pushing away at the damaged dam within him, wanting out.
Instead he said, coolly, “Something else? Not that I’m aware of.”
“Hmm,” she said with patent disbelief. He bet if he met up with her in the baby department, she’d be cooing along with the rest of them.
“Maybe they see a man doing his best in a difficult situation. Maybe they admire the fact you said yes to being put in that situation.”
“It’s not like I had a choice.”
“I bet you did,” she said.