by Cara Colter
“Do you have power at your place?” Ryder asked, changing the subject. He tried to sound casual. In actual fact, he hoped the fresh-made bread meant the Fenshaw house had power because he would feel better if Emma went there when he left.
“No,” Mona said. “I have a great old wood-burning stove, the kind the pioneers had. You can cook on it, it has an oven. It’s fantastic. It heats the whole house, though the house isn’t as large as this one.”
Again, there was the sense of needing to go, the momentary helpless frustration, and then surrender.
He wasn’t going anywhere until they got the driveway cleared. He might as well enjoy the mouthwatering bread, the homemade jams, the hot coffee. He might as well enjoy the innocence of those children, the fact that they liked him without any evidence that they should.
“Would you like to hold Bebo?” Peggy asked him.
He heard Emma laugh again as he tried to think of a diplomatic response, and then she rescued him by saying, “I’d like to hold her, Peggy.”
“Me,” Tess yelled, and Peggy surrendered her doll to the baby even though Tess was covered in jam.
Of course, surrendering to enjoyment was like surrendering to the magic that was wrapping itself around him, trying to creep inside him. Somehow as he filled up on breakfast and giggles, he became aware something was changing. He felt not trapped, somehow. Not ecstatic, either, but not trapped.
“Water’s fine so far. What do you think we start clearing first?” Tim asked Emma, coming back into the room. “Pond or driveway?”
“Driveway,” Emma said.
And Ryder might have appreciated how practical she was being—since no one could even get to the pond without the driveway, except that she looked right at him, and smiled sunnily. “Mr. Richardson is anxious to go.” She didn’t say it, but she might as well have, And we’re anxious to have him leave.
He felt stung. Because for some reason he had thought she was anxious to have him stay. But she wouldn’t look at him, and he remembered he had seen heartbreak in her devotion to this house.
His leaving was what was best for everyone, some sizzle in the air between him and Emma was not going to pass if it was tested by too much time together.
“Let’s see what I remember about using a chain saw,” Ryder said, and got up when Tim moved to the door.
At the door he saw the older man pause, smile at the commotion. “Look at them girls with that baby. It’s like Christmas came early for them.”
Ryder looked back, and his heart felt as though a fist was squeezing it. Tess waddled back and forth between the two girls, Peggy’s doll in a grubby death grip. The girls clapped and encouraged her every step.
The sense of his own inadequacy, from which he had taken a quick break, languishing in the warmth of Emma’s approval, came back with a vengeance.
Ryder felt, acutely, the thing he could not give Tess.
This.
Family. She needed the thing he was most determined not to leave himself open to ever again.
He wondered if Emma was right about there being only one right decision, or if only the most selfish of men would think he could possibly know what was best for that baby, think that he could give her everything she needed.
Not because it was what was best for her. But because he loved her. Hopelessly and helplessly and she was all that was left of his world.
Tess normally kept a sharp eye out for any indication of a good-bye. When he left for work in the mornings, she would arch herself over Mrs. Markle’s arms in a fit of fury. But this morning, covered in jam from her fingers to her ears, she did not seem to notice he was preparing to leave her in the care of strangers.
He was relieved that she was not making a fuss about the fireplace, either, though every now and then she would cast it a wary look, then look to the girls to see if they noticed the fire-breathing monster in the room with them.
It wasn’t really as if he was leaving her with strangers. Somehow in one night Emma was not a stranger, and he seriously doubted the Fenshaws remained strangers to anyone for more than a few seconds.
He turned away from the play of the children and went out to his car to retrieve the boots and gloves he had packed for the cottage because Tess loved to play in the snow. He didn’t even go back in to put them on, refusing to subject himself to the warmth of that scene again. He slid his winter clothes over what he was wearing.
Tim put him to work straight away.
Two huge trees and several smaller ones had fallen over the driveway. Branches littered the entire length of the road.
Ryder soon found himself immersed in the work of cutting the trees, bucking the branches off them. The pure physical activity soothed something in him, much like the punishing workouts he did at the gym.
Plus, working with a chain saw was tricky and dangerous. There was no room for wandering thoughts while working with a piece of equipment that could take off a limb before you blinked.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Emma leave the house and come down the driveway to join them.
“They kicked me out. Mona said I can’t even be trusted in a kitchen with full power, but I think the truth is they wanted the baby to themselves. Pigeon convention in full swing.”
It was only a mark of how necessary it was that he leave that he appreciated how carefully she had listened to him last night.
“Oh, and I buried the hot dogs in a snowdrift outside the back door.”
Emma was dressed casually, in a down parka, her crazy hair sticking out from under a red toque. She had on men’s work gloves that made her hands look huge at the ends of her dainty wrists.
“Tess okay with you leaving?” he asked her, idling the chain saw, worried that the incident with the fire could be repeated now that both he and Emma had left the house.
But Emma reassured him. “Tess appears to be having the time of her life. They’ve heated up some water. Mona is showing Sue and Peggy how to bathe a baby. They’re using a huge roasting pan for a tub, in front of the fire. I nearly cooed myself it was so darned cute. I told them to take some pictures for you. I can e-mail them to you. After.”
After. After he was gone. Setting up a little thread of contact, making his leaving not nearly as complete as he wanted to make it. He wanted to leave this place—and all the uncomfortable feelings it had conjured up—and not look back.
“Watch for the ice,” he told her, not wanting to encourage her to send him pictures. “Every now and then it breaks off the wires or the trees and falls down like a pane of glass.”
“You watch out, too,” she said.
“For?”
She scooped up a handful of snow, balled it carefully, hurled it at his head. It missed and hit him square in the chest.
Don’t do it, he ordered himself. Despite her acting as if she was as eager for him to leave as he was to go, she was looking for that hole in his defenses again. Intentionally or not?
Despite his strict order to himself, he set down the chain saw, idling, scooped up a handful of snow, formed it into a solid ball. She was already running down the driveway, laughing, thinking she’d escaped.
He let fly the snowball. It missed. And for a moment, without thought, without any kind of premeditation, without analysis, he was his old self again, just an ordinary guy who couldn’t stand the fact he’d missed. He scooped up another handful of snow, went down the driveway after her. She laughed and scooted off the road, ducked behind a tree. His snowball splatted against it.
“Na, na,” she said. She peeked out and flagged her nose at him.
He let fly again, she ducked behind the tree. Splat. He scooped snow, moved in closer, she darted to another tree. A snowball flew out from behind it, and hit him squarely in the face.
It was a damned challenge to his manhood! He wiped the snow away and made ammunition. When she showed herself again, he let fly with one snowball after another, machinegun-like. He thought she’d run, or better, beg for mercy, but she didn’t
. She grabbed an armload of snow, ran right into the hail of his fire and jammed the white fluffy stuff right down his pants!
He burst out laughing. “You know how to put out a fire, don’t you, Emma?”
“Were you on fire?” she asked, all innocence.
No. Not yet. But if he was around this kind of temptation much longer he was going to be.
He shook his head, moved away from her, ordered himself again to stop it. But he didn’t. “Watch your back,” he warned her.
But she just laughed, moved past him down the driveway. He went back to his chain saw, still idling, and stopped for a moment to watch her pulling branches off the road, blowing out puffs of wintry air as she applied herself to the task.
He frowned. She was tackling branches way too big for her.
“Save your breath,” Tim said, following his gaze. “If you tell her it’s a man’s work she’ll be trying to find her own chain saw. Stubborn as a mule.”
But he said it with clear affection.
“It runs in her family.” That was said without so much affection.
Don’t ask, Ryder said. He hoped to begin the process of disengaging himself, but somehow he had to ask.
“What’s her family like?”
“There’s just her and her mother now that her grandmother died.” He hesitated, stared hard at Ryder, weighing something. “Lynelle ain’t gonna be takin’ home the Mama of the Year award.”
“But she’s coming for Christmas, right?” Why did he care? Why did it feel as if it relieved him of some responsibility? He had to get out of here. He was not responsible for Emma’s happiness. How could he be? He couldn’t even be responsible for his own anymore. He was broken. Broken people couldn’t fix things, they could only make them worse.
“Humph,” Tim said crankily, “Emma’s mother, Lynelle, doesn’t give a lick about this place, never will.”
“It’s not about the place,” Ryder said, aggrieved. “It’s about her daughter.”
Tim looked troubled, and Ryder could clearly see in his face he wasn’t sure if Lynelle gave a lick about her daughter, either, though he stopped short of saying that.
“Ah, well,” Tim said. “You can’t choose your family.”
Since Tim clearly didn’t feel that way about his own family, it was a ringing indictment of Emma’s. Ryder had fished for more information about Emma, but now he was sorry for what he’d found out. She was as alone as he was. Maybe more so. She didn’t have Tess.
Tim’s revelations made Ryder see Emma’s need to make a perfect Christmas in a new light. It was as if she thought that if she could create enough festive atmosphere, help enough people, she could outrun her own pain and loneliness.
In a way, he and Emma were doing the very opposite things to achieve the same result.
Troubled, he focused on the tasks at hand, but despite working steadily they had made almost no headway on the driveway by noon. A bell rang, and Ryder realized Mona was calling them for lunch, and that he was famished.
“Mama!” Tess crowed when she saw him. She was seated in her high chair in front of the fire, both little girls standing on chairs beside her, patiently working combs and gentle fingers through Tess’s wet hair. She had obviously had a bath, been dressed in fresh onesies from her baby bag, and was proudly sporting a pure white Christmas bow in the center of her chest.
Emma came in behind him stomping snow off her boots.
“Isn’t that cute?” she asked. “She looks like a pint-sized queen commanding her attendants.”
He kicked off his own boots, walked in and inspected Tess’s ’do. The worst of the tangles were out of her hair. Experimentally, he reached out and touched.
Tess screeched.
The older girl said sternly, “Tess, that is enough of that!”
And Tess stopped, just like that. He touched her hair again, and the baby gave her captors a sly look and made a decision. She cooed, “Mama.”
“He’s not your mama, silly,” the older girl, Sue, said again. “Papa.”
“I’m her uncle.”
“Uncle,” the child said, not missing a beat, pointing at him. “That’s your uncle, Tess.”
“Ubba.”
Three months he’d been trying to coax his niece to call him anything but Mama.
And he hadn’t been able to.
Girls, women, knew these things. They knew by some deep instinct how to deal with babies. How to raise children. What did he know of these things? How could he ever do this job justice?
Really, in the end he just wanted to know he was doing a good enough job, and for one moment Emma had made him feel that way. Made him feel that he didn’t have to be an exquisite baby hairdresser, or nominated for guardian of the year.
In Emma’s eyes in that moment this morning when he had rescued Tess from her fire-breathing dragon, he had felt certainty. His love for the baby was enough.
Or was it? What about moments such as these that his brokenness, his unwillingness to reengage in the risky business of loving others would deprive Tess of?
And he wondered, even if he never gave Emma his e-mail address, just how completely he was going to be able to leave this behind.
Peggy, the smaller of the girls, approached him while they ate.
“Would you like to see my drawing?”
“Uh, okay.”
She handed it to him. A little blobby baby, obviously Tess because of the hair, smiled brightly in front of a Christmas tree.
“That’s very nice,” he said awkwardly. “I like the way you did Tess.”
“It’s before we fixed her hair.” Peggy beamed at him as if he had handed her a golden wand that granted wishes. As if he was enough.
Then he had to admire Sue’s drawing, too. Sue had drawn a picture of a man in a uniform in front of a Christmas tree.
“That’s my dad,” she said.
Something about the way she said it—so proud, so certain her dad could make everything right in her world—made him ache for the moment he had not made right and could never bring back. It made him ache for the moments of fatherhood his brother was never going to have, for the moments Tess was never going to have. His sorrow fell over the moment like a dark cape being thrown over light.
It was light that Emma, with her innate sense of playfulness, her ability to sneak by his defenses with falling mattresses and flying snowballs was bringing to his world.
He got up quickly, without looking at Emma, went outside and back to the soothing balm of hard, physical, mind-engaging labor.
“No Holiday Happenings again tonight,” Emma said, as they finally reached the base of her driveway. They had spent the whole afternoon clearing it. It was now late in the day, the sun low in the sky, a chill creeping back into the air.
She was so aware of Ryder, the pure physical presence of the man, as he stood beside her surveying her driveway where it intersected with the main road. The sun had been shining brilliantly up until a few minutes ago, and he had stripped down to his T-shirt. His arm muscles were taut and pumped from the demands of running that chain saw. She could smell something coming off him, enticing, as crystal-clear and clean as the ice falling off the tree branches and telephone wires.
From the way he’d been dressed when he arrived last night, she had assumed he was a high-powered professional, and he had confirmed that when he had told her he was an architect. But seeing him tackle the mess in her driveway, his strength unflagging, hour after grueling hour, she had been awed by the pure masculine power of the man.
The way he worked told her a whole lot more about him than his job description. Even Tim, whose admiration was hard-won, had looked over at Ryder working and when Emma went by with a load of branches, had embarrassed her by saying, a little too loudly, “That one’s a keeper.”
So she’d said just as loudly, “And what would you keep him for?” But then she’d been sorry, because Tim missed his son, and could have used another man around to help him with his own place, never
mind all that he had taken on at hers.
Ryder was leaving as soon as he could. And that was wise. She realized he was right to want to leave. She realized it was in her best interests for him to go. Something was stirring in her that she thought she had put away in a box marked Childish Dreams and Illusions after the devastation of Peter’s fickleness.
Now she stared up the main road. It was as littered with debris, broken boughs and fallen trees as her driveway had been. In the far distance, she listened for the sounds of rescue, chain saws or heavy equipment running, but she heard absolutely nothing.
“I guess Tess and I aren’t going anywhere today,” Ryder said.
She cast a look at his face. He looked resigned, like a soldier who had just been told he had more battles to fight. It wasn’t very flattering.
But the way his gaze went to her lips was, except that he took a deep breath and moved away from her.
Emma watched him go, and despite the fact she was exhausted after the hard day of physical labor, she felt a little tingle of pure awareness that made her feel alive, and as though her life was full of possibilities.
Stop it, she ordered herself. Be despondent! No Holiday Happenings for the second night in a row? And the road closed. For how long? She needed to get that bus ticket to her mother.
It was a disaster! A harbinger of another Christmas disaster.
And yet, despite the fact this year was shaping up about the same way, the road to her inn obviously impassable, something inside her was singing! And it wasn’t wild-child, either, though she had definitely perked up at the way Ryder had looked at her lips moments ago.
No, it was another part of her, singing because of flying snowballs and the way he had looked so awkward and adorable studying the girls’ drawings.
The rational part of her knew that saying good-bye would be the best thing, but how quickly her own life—Holiday Happenings, even her Christmas-day celebrations—were taking a backseat to rationality.
That was her weakness, and it ran in the family. After watching her mother toss her life to the wind every time a new and exciting man blew in, Emma had done the very same thing with Peter! She had tried to make herself over in the image Peter Henderson had approved of.