Snowbound Bride-to-Be

by Cara Colter

  His voice grew unbelievably gentle. “Maybe it’s time for both of us to move forward. Instead of trying to fix what’s done, we need to build the future, not rebuild the past.”

  His voice was low. “Emma, I don’t want to be lonely anymore. Or bitter. Or closed. That’s no way to honor the gift of love my family always gave me. My mom and dad, my brother Drew, my sister-in-law Tracy. I need to be the man they expected me to be when they made up a will that gave me guardianship of Tess.

  “I need to be a man,” he said softly, “who can show a girl who has never had a good Christmas just what that feels like.”

  Her tears came then, and he reached out and caught them with his thumb.

  And Emma was amazed that she didn’t give one hoot what Christmas felt like. Nothing could hold a candle to the way she felt right now. Nothing.

  Not even the most perfect Christmas in the whole world.

  And maybe it was because she let go of it, that it finally, finally happened.

  Christmas became a dream.

  With Ryder right beside her, the next morning as the bus pulled up, they welcomed fifty-one guests to the inn.

  How shy and awkward those poorly dressed people looked as they got off the bus and looked toward the house.

  And how quickly that awkwardness melted away as the unofficial greeting “elves,” Tess, Sue and Peggy, rushed forward to meet the children and to shoo them toward the house that smelled of the turkey that had been in the oven since early this morning.

  Mona had a hilarious game set up, an ice breaker, that helped everyone meet each other and get to know their names. Then there was buffet breakfast laid out at the dining-room table.

  Soon they were all crowded into the great room, plates empty, coffee and cocoa mugs full, the laughter and warmth flowing easily, the children quivering with anticipation at what was under the tree.

  Tim handed out gifts until the room was awash with paper and shouts of glee and exhilaration. There were new snow boots and warm jackets, fuzzy pajamas, mittens and hats. There were toys for the young children—dolls and fire trucks—and electronics for the older ones, portable DVD players and personal stereos.

  “Not bad goodies for the techno-electro-free zone,” Ryder teased her.

  After the gifts, there were skating and sleigh rides, and then after naps for the younger ones, a dinner feast fit for kings.

  Then they gathered around the fire once again. Strangers just this morning, they were a family now. A family of babies and old people, teenagers and young moms and dads. Mona had more games, and it was nearly midnight as they all began to reboard the bus, the children clutching their favorite toys, packages being loaded into the cargo hold under the bus. There were hugs and expressions of gratitude and tears.

  Mona and Tim packed up the girls, and Tess was put to bed in a crib in the green room.

  Emma and Ryder were alone in front of the fire.

  “I’m exhausted,” she told him, stretching out her legs. “And exhilarated. It was better than anything I planned.”

  He touched her hair, ran his fingers through it.

  “You know the weird part?” she said, quietly, “it wasn’t really Holiday Happenings. And not even today, as beautiful as it was.”

  He nodded. “I know, Emma.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It’s this, what we’re feeling right here, right now, isn’t it?”

  “That’s it exactly,” she said. “Exactly. When I stopped expecting the world, overlaying reality with my dreams, it was as if I could enjoy it for the very first time.”

  And that feeling didn’t go away because Christmas had, and neither did Ryder. He stayed.

  She woke up most mornings with a kink in her neck from falling asleep on him.

  And she woke up eager for the next day, to see what love brought.

  A touch of hands, a moment stolen to share a hot dog, an afternoon while the Fenshaws kept Tess.

  Ryder and Tess left on New Year’s Day.

  And that was when the romance began in earnest. He sent flowers. He e-mailed. They talked on the phone as late into the night as they had every day since Christmas.

  He came for the weekends, but more and more Emma went to the city, aware that she had missed the city and loved it. Sometimes they would take Tess with them as they explored little coffee shops and antique markets, other times they left her with Miss Markle while they went to the theatre, or out for a quiet grown-up dinner.

  The passion between them grew until it flared, white-hot. Every touch, every look, a promise.

  But it was Ryder who would never let the passion culminate.

  “Hey, I have to be an example for Tess. I don’t want her to think it’s okay to give in without committing.”

  For Emma’s birthday, in the spring, Ryder gave her an engagement ring, and asked her to marry him.

  In the summer, at White Pond Inn, they married, a quiet, small outdoor ceremony with the people they cared about most in the world. Tim, Sr., was there, and so was Tim, Jr., in his uniform. Mona and Sue and Peggy had on matching burgundy dresses.

  Tess, in a snow-white dress that somehow had a big smudge down the front of it, was supposed to be the flower girl, but she sat down on her way up the grassy aisle beside the pond, and started picking dandelions and couldn’t be persuaded there was something more interesting than those little yellow flowers.

  And to Emma it didn’t matter. She had given up expectations. And perfection.

  And yet, when she saw Ryder waiting for her at the end of that aisle, she stepped around Tess and kept going. She didn’t once look to see if Lynelle had made it after all.

  They were writing their own history now. Beginning today.

  And Emma could clearly see that it was not Christmas that transformed everything; it was love. And it was love that made all things magic.

  And that the man waiting for her, with such a tender light in his dark eyes, was all the perfection she ever needed.

  EPILOGUE

  TWENTY-TWO gallons of hot chocolate.

  Ten of mulled wine.

  Four hundred and sixty-two painstakingly decorated Christmas cookies.

  And it was not going to be nearly enough.

  “If you lift that kettle of hot chocolate, I’m throwing you over my shoulder and taking you home,” Ryder told Emma, irritated.

  “I love it when you’re masterful,” she said, clearly not seeing how serious the situation was.

  “I’m not joking, Emma.”

  “Ha. As if you could pick me up right now.”

  “I could,” he said threateningly. He still felt this thrill when he looked at her and used the word wife. This woman had come into herself so completely it nearly made him dizzy that she had chosen to love him. Emma was sassy, confident, radiant, strong, on fire with her love of life. And of him.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Tim, could you get this hot chocolate for me? Ryder has decided I’m delicate.”

  Tim, Jr., came over and lifted the pot of warm liquid easily. “You are delicate,” he told her sternly. “Keep an eye on her, Ryder. I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

  “And that would not be very far,” Emma said giving her huge belly a satisfied pat.

  The truth was Ryder had tried to talk her out of White Christmas at the inn this year.

  The doctor had told them to expect a New Year’s baby. What if they got snowed in, like the year they met?

  But Emma had gotten that mulish look on her face and he’d known there was no sense arguing with her. He’d call a helicopter if they got snowed in. He had his cell phone with him, just in case.

  Besides, there would have been no living with Tess if he had cancelled their yearly Christmas trip to White Pond Inn.

  She was four now, a young lady who knew her own mind. He looked for her—Emma had dressed her in neon pink so they could spot her in the crowds. She was down on the pond, in her new skates, shuffling along between Sue and Pegg
y. This year, their little sister, born about nine months after Tim had returned home from his tour of duty—was in the sled being pulled behind the girls.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Tim said, following Ryder’s gaze to the four little girls on the pond, “but I hope that’s a boy in there.”

  “Chauvinist,” Emma accused him, but her eyes twinkled with the shine of a woman well-loved.

  “Healthy is good enough for me,” Ryder said.

  He decided, as long as he could keep an eye on Emma and keep her from lifting anything too heavy, it was good to have come to White Pond this year after all.

  She had sold the White Pond Inn to Mona and Tim shortly after she’d agreed to marry Ryder. The younger Fenshaws didn’t run it as a bed-and-breakfast, the inn was now their family home. But every year they held Holiday Happenings, though Mona, Ryder thought thankfully, had renamed it Home for the Holidays. The Christmas Day Dream event had gotten bigger, and it was called Coming Home for Christmas.

  Ryder suspected they kept both activities going mostly for him and Emma.

  Because, as the friendship had grown between the two couples, they’d learned about each other’s histories and heartbreaks. The Fenshaws knew this was always going to be a hard time of year for Ryder, a good time to stay busy, to give to others.

  “You don’t have to,” he’d said to Emma when she had announced she planned to sell. Tim, Jr., wanted the inn not to run as a bed and breakfast, but to farm, as his father farmed, and his grandfather had farmed before that.

  Ryder had not been looking for a brother, just as he had not been looking for love that night a storm had stranded him.

  But in Tim he’d been given a brother anyway.

  “No,” Emma had said firmly, “the house and land need what they have to give. It’s falling down and in need of the kind of repairs Tim can give it and I can’t. Mona has always loved that house. Tim is home now.”

  “If you want it, I’ll fix it up for you as a wedding present.”

  “Ryder,” she said, smiling at him. “You don’t seem to get it. I don’t need it anymore. It was like my dreams, falling down and in need of repair. I wanted White Pond to give me a family, and a feeling of belonging. But I have a better dream now, and I know better than to think a house can make you feel things.”

  And the way she looked at him when she said that made him feel, not ten feet tall and bulletproof, but as if he was enough.

  “Mama, Papa, look at me.”

  Tess’s voice rose high over the sounds of the crowd and he and Emma both turned to look.

  Tess’s pronunciation of Emma had been close to Mama all those years ago. And somehow he had become papa.

  When he showed Tess the pictures of Drew and Tracy, they were Mom and Dad, and he was achingly aware of never wanting to take their place. At the same time he wanted to do a job that would make them so proud of him.

  If Tess’s level of confidence was any indication, he and Emma were doing just fine.

  For a moment, watching Tess strut proudly across the ice, he felt the spirit of it all.

  His brother and sister-in-law.

  Christmas.

  And he believed. He believed that things had a reason.

  Once upon a time, he’d been a man trying to outrun Christmas, finding exactly what he needed en route to where he thought he was going, and had not been going there at all.

  With each year that passed, Ryder was able to see more clearly that the fire had taken things from him. But it had given him things, too.

  It had put him on the road that had led him to Emma. And it had made him a man capable of feeling deeply for others, capable of forgiveness of failings. He was a better man than he had been before, worthy of love.

  That made him wonder, sometimes, if he could find meaning in that, of all things, was there meaning in everything? Even in the things his mind, limited and human, could not grasp?

  He was an architect, trained to think in terms of mathematical precision. But he knew, as an architect, that there was a place where planning and precision left off and inspiration began. Often inspiration came as the result of a problem that seemed insoluble, a hardship that did not seem as if it could be overcome.

  The greatest buildings came from that place.

  And maybe the greatest men and women did, too.

  Look at Lynelle. How could someone like her produce someone like Emma?

  His mother-in-law had chosen not to be a part of their lives at all. She did not come at Christmas; she said she would have come for the wedding if they’d held it anywhere but at White Pond.

  But he didn’t believe it. She was as indifferent to Tess and the coming baby as she had been to Emma.

  But even his fury at that had been distilled by the love he lived in.

  When he looked at Emma and saw her compassion for others, he knew it came from all those years when she had tried to win attention and approval from Lynelle that never came.

  Emma showed him that good could come from bad, good people from bad parents, good things from bad situations. It was the fire that tempered the steel.

  She showed him every day that love was not a destination he had arrived at, but a journey he had embarked upon. It was full of peaks and valleys, challenges and rewards, but most of all, it was stronger than anything else.

  Christmas represented that.

  It represented all the things that, for awhile, he had lost belief in.

  Goodness.

  Hope.

  Faith.

  Light.

  “Papa!”

  Life.

  Suddenly, Emma’s hand flew to her belly, and her eyes widened and then met his. She inhaled sharply and deeply.

  “The books don’t get you ready for how that feels,” she marveled. “Do you think we’re going to have a Christmas baby, Ryder?”

  The calmness in her face, her absolute trust in him made him remember the other belief love had restored—his belief in himself.

  A child would be born and he would be enough to welcome another life into this world, enough to accept the responsibility as well as the joy. It was another thing to celebrate during the season, his list of things to celebrate slowly outgrowing his things to grieve.

  And wasn’t that really what Christmas represented? An evolution of thought, man’s belief that everything in the end had a reason, and that everything in the end was for the greater good.

  Somewhere in the last years, with Emma and Tess making his good outweigh his bad, Ryder had realized he could surrender. He could trust himself, but know that when his own strength flagged, or was not enough, that was when the real miracle happened.

  The truth was that something greater than him ran the show.

  Isn’t that what Christmas really celebrated?

  The birth of a child that would bring a message to the world.

  Love is the most powerful.

  Love is the thing that cannot be destroyed.

  And it went on and on, even after death.

  It went on in a little girl down there a flash of neon pink, shouting “Mama! Papa! Watch me.”

  And it would go on in a new baby, a new life, a brand-new messenger of the power of love to bring hope and to heal all.

  Despite her saying he couldn’t possibly lift her, Ryder swept his wife into his arms and headed for the car. “Tim,” he called, “she’s going into labor.”

  “Stop it,” she insisted. “Ryder, really! I’m too heavy. I can walk. It was only the first pain.”

  But the thing was, she didn’t feel heavy to him at all.

  She felt light. And he felt light. And all of it, the skaters on the pond, Tess, the Fenshaw girls, the laughter, the scrape of blades on ice, Tim racing toward them with a look on his face that reminded Ryder of the soldier he had been, all of it suddenly seemed as if it was swirling together, becoming one immense energy.

  Ryder realized, suddenly, his heart swelling until he thought it would break, that he really bel
ieved.

  And in that shining second of pure love, his breath, his bone, his life, his whole world, became a reflection of the Light.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-4470-7

  SNOWBOUND BRIDE-TO-BE

  First North American Publication 2009.

  Copyright © 2009 by Cara Colter.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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