Christmas In Snowflake Canyon

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “I want that, too,” Gen said.

  “I hope you mean that,” Charlotte said. For being the sweet owner of a candy store and someone Gen had always considered quiet and unassuming, the other woman’s voice was suddenly as sharp as the edge of a newly waxed ski.

  “If you hurt him, Gen Beaumont, I swear to you I will find some way to make you pay. I don’t know how yet, but I’ll figure something out.”

  The very sincere threat might have made her shudder if she wasn’t so touched at the love Charlotte had for her brother.

  She wanted to tell the other woman Genevieve didn’t think she had anything to worry about. There was little danger of Dylan ever giving her any power to hurt him, not when he kept his feelings so tightly locked up and pushed her away at every opportunity.

  “Is that the reason you invited me to the Christmas party tonight?” she asked, more amused than offended. “You want to befriend me so you can keep an eye on me and make sure I’m not going to break your brother’s heart?”

  Charlotte gave a surprised-sounding laugh. “I wish I were that clever. I’m afraid I had planned to ask you to the party before I saw the two of you together yesterday afternoon.”

  “Ah. Well, don’t worry about Dylan. For one thing, I’m pretty sure he can take care of himself.”

  “He thinks he can, anyway.”

  She smiled but quickly grew serious, a sudden ache in her chest that had nothing to do with the little weight resting against it. “For another, even if I had feelings for him—which I’m not saying I do—he’s made it quite clear he doesn’t feel the same. We’re friends. That’s all.”

  Charlotte looked as if she wanted to discuss the issue further, but to Gen’s relief, Tonya Brooks came in with a tired-looking Marisol. By some rather spooky instinct, Claudia awoke upon her mother’s approach, and the moment was gone.

  The fIrst burst of panic didn’t hit until Charlotte parked her little SUV on Main Street.

  “Where is this party?” Genevieve asked.

  She suddenly didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “At Dog-Eared Books & Brew,” Charlotte said nonchalantly, opening the hatch of her SUV then walking around to lift out a basket of Sugar Rush treats. “Our book club has a big Christmas party every year, and this year we’re each supposed to bring someone new.”

  Dog-Eared Books & Brew. Maura McKnight Lange’s store.

  Dread lodged in her stomach, hot and greasy. Oh, she was an idiot! Why hadn’t she bothered to ask before? She should have figured it out! She had no real explanation for such airheaded negligence, except she had been flattered at the invitation and very much wanted Charlotte to be her friend.

  She knew Charlotte was friendly with the McKnights. That was the very reason she had declined her dinner invitation the week before, because she had worried about going to Brazen and having to face the owner, Alex McKnight.

  She should have known, darn it. Her mind raced as she frantically tried to figure a way out of this without completely alienating Charlotte. Maybe she could feign illness. It wasn’t a complete lie—she was feeling fairly nauseous right now and her head was beginning to throb.

  She was bound to see Maura Lange there—and perhaps even her daughter, Sage.

  She shivered from more than the chill of a December evening. She didn’t know how to face them, not after the way she had acted.

  The whole thing made her feel so small and stupid and she hated it. Yes, Sage had slept with her fiancé just months before their wedding, knowing perfectly well he was engaged. Yes, she had become pregnant with Sawyer’s baby. It still infuriated her, humiliated her.

  Deep inside, some terrible, narcissistic part of her couldn’t help wondering what Sage had that she hadn’t. She couldn’t deny Sage was pretty in a granola-eater sort of way. She had dark curly hair, dimples, the pretty green eyes all the McKnights seemed to share. But she wore hideous clothing designed more for comfort than fashion—Birkenstock sandals, leggings, loose T-shirts with funny, tacky little sayings on them. She hardly ever bothered with makeup and she always had her nose in a book. And she was young! Not even twenty when she and Sawyer slept together.

  That horrible night when Gen found out Sage was pregnant and that Sawyer was the father, she hadn’t doubted the girl’s story for a moment, even though her mother tried to convince her Sage and the rest of the McKnights were lying.

  Sawyer had never denied sleeping with her, and Sage had been too miserable about the whole thing, acting as if she would have preferred any other man on the planet to be her child’s sperm donor.

  Genevieve hated thinking of her reaction. She had been angry, yes, but that burning, aching humiliation had been paramount. She had done everything she could

  to give the man a perfect wedding, to prove she would be the ideal wife for someone with political aspirations beyond Colorado.

  Her efforts had been for nothing. Despite doing all she could to show she could make him happy, Sawyer had still preferred a little Hobbit granola-eater who probably didn’t even shave her legs—and worse, her very public pregnancy ensured that every single person in town knew it.

  How could she go inside that bookstore and be polite to Sage’s mother and aunts and grandmother, when she had spent nearly two years being hateful and small to all of them?

  “I should have asked where the party was and who might be there,” she finally said. The best basis for a friendship was honesty, right? “You know the McKnights won’t want me in there.”

  Charlotte glanced over with a startled look. “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Genevieve said dryly. “We haven’t been on the best of terms since Sage McKnight gave birth to my fiancé’s child.”

  Charlotte gave that a dismissive wave of the hand not carrying the basket of goodies, a sort of oh, that little thing kind of gesture. “It will be fine. You’ll see. Alex and Mary Ella and Maura are wonderful. I promise, everyone will be happy to have you there.”

  For a moment, she let herself believe in the pretty picture Charlotte painted, but the reality wasn’t quite as rosy. Otherwise good people could still hold grudges— and in this case, they had reason to be upset with her.

  “Just come for a while,” Charlotte said. “If you’re having a terrible time, I’ll take you home, I promise.”

  She looked down the sidewalk at the small, puffy flakes under the streetlights. Surely she was tough enough to handle a few raised eyebrows, wasn’t she? She liked Charlotte and admired—and envied—the way she had reinvented herself. Gen wanted to be friends with her, for reasons that had nothing to do with the woman’s frustrating brother.

  If she gave in to her fears and asked Charlotte to take her home, she had a feeling she would be shoving the door closed on any chance of friendship between them.

  “You’re right. I’m probably overreacting. Let’s go.”

  She held the door open for Charlotte and followed her inside.

  The warmth of the store embraced them. Dog-Eared smelled of coffee and ink, quite an appealing combination. She was reminded of a favorite bookshop in Le Marais, a crowded little place on Rue St. Paul.

  Charlotte led her through the store to a corner where various plump armchairs had been gathered together to make a private seating area. The chairs were all filled. As she expected, her appearance there was met with a few shocked stares—notably from Ruth Tatum, Claire McKnight’s mother, and from Alex McKnight, Maura’s younger sister and Sage’s aunt.

  Maura looked shocked, too, but she hid it quickly and gave a welcoming smile that Genevieve assumed was meant more for Charlotte than her. A quick look around told her Sage wasn’t present.

  “We’re supposed to bring a friend, right?” Charlotte said cheerfully. “Genevieve has been doing such great things at A Warrior’s Hope. She’s been amazing. After all her hard work, I thought she could probably use a night out.”

  She hadn’t felt this socially awkward ever.

  “Come in. Grab a plate of
food,” Mary Ella Lange, recently married to Harry Lange, insisted to both of them.

  “I hadn’t heard you were back from your honeymoon,” she said politely to Mary Ella.

  To her astonishment, her retired high-school English teacher blushed like one of her students. “Yes. We had a wonderful two weeks in Southern France. It was so sunny and beautiful. Harry would have liked to stay longer, but we both wanted to be here to spend Christmas with our family.”

  She relaxed a little. France, she could discuss. “I love that area. I do hope you spent time in Paris while you were there. You can’t visit France without wandering through the Arènes de Lutèce or Le Jardin du Luxembourg.”

  “We spent a few nights there, but Paris is a bit crowded and noisy for Harry’s taste.”

  She wanted to say something derogatory about Harry’s taste if that were truly the case, but she decided that probably wouldn’t go over well with his new bride.

  “It can be. But it can also be wonderful,” she said. She and Mary Ella spent a few more moments discussing favorite spots in France. Evie Thorne chimed in about places she had visited, and after the first few moments, Genevieve could feel the tension in her shoulders begin to relax. Everyone was being surprisingly kind to her.

  “I understand William has you fixing up Pearl’s house to sell,” Katherine Thorne, Evie’s mother-in-law, said after a few moments. “How is it going?”

  “I’m finding there’s a little more to it than I expected.” She launched into a description of how many layers of wallpaper she had steamed away, like a time capsule of her grandmother’s various tastes and moods at the moment. Katherine even laughed at a few spots and asked her questions about her plans for the house and she relaxed further.

  This wasn’t so bad, she thought. In fact, she was actually enjoying herself. The rolling music of female conversation reminded her of long afternoons in her favorite café, talking with her Paris friends about anything and everything.

  Genevieve was enjoying herself—that was, until she walked over to the refreshment table for more of the fantastic brownies Alex McKnight had brought—she figured she could work it off with painting—and bumped right into Maura Lange, who had just emerged from a back room with a new plate of party food.

  The other woman did a bit of a double take before she bustled around the table, making room for the new plate and straightening up the other dishes.

  Finally, Genevieve decided to just shoot the elephant in the room.

  “How is Sage these days?”

  Maura tensed, freezing for a moment before picking up a few stray napkins. “Wonderful,” she said shortly. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  Some small, petty part of her wanted to ask if she had slept with anyone else’s fiancé lately, but that would just be rude. And beneath her.

  “How’s the baby?” she asked instead. She hadn’t given much thought to the child that came from Sage and Sawyer’s one-night affair but after playing with the sweet Claudia all day, little creatures were on her mind. Maura didn’t appear to appreciate the question. “My son is now eighteen months,” she said, her tone sharp. “His name is Henry and he is very, very loved by his parents and his older sister.”

  Of course. Maura and her husband, Jack Lange, had adopted Sage’s baby as their own. It couldn’t have been an easy situation for any of them. She knew Sawyer had signed away any rights. After she stopped taking his phone calls, he had emailed her to tell her so, as if that might make some difference in his own culpability.

  Did Sage view the boy as her own or as a younger brother? When she looked at Henry, did she see the smarmy, cheating son of a bitch Gen once thought she would spend the rest of her life with?

  For an awkward moment, Genevieve stood at the refreshments table, not knowing quite what to say. Finally, she decided to follow the example of Charlotte, who seemed unfailingly kind.

  “I’m glad he could have a good home, with people who love him,” she said softly. None of what had happened was the child’s fault.

  Maura seemed startled by that, enough that she seemed to thaw a little. “We’re the blessed ones. He’s a complete joy.”

  She should probably stop there, take her plate of appetizers back to her seat and let the matter drop. But she had come this far. She was actually having a civil conversation with Maura Lange, and neither of them was throwing any food at the other. Yet.

  “I believe I owe you and your family an apology,” she said quickly, before she could lose her nerve.

  “Oh?”

  “After…I canceled the wedding, I guess I needed a scapegoat. It was easier to, um, blame your daughter than to admit my own mistakes. I wasn’t very subtle about my anger.”

  “No. You weren’t.”

  At Maura’s discouraging expression, Genevieve faltered and would have let things rest there. Her mother would have brazened through the whole thing, acted all these months as if nothing had ever happened between them. That was probably what she had done while Gen had run away to Paris, just carried on as normal.

  Genevieve wasn’t Laura. She never would be, she realized. She needed friendship and respect and suddenly wanted to do whatever necessary to earn it.

  “I was wrong and…I’m sorry. Will you please convey my apology to Sage? Contrary to the way I may have acted, I don’t believe she was completely responsible for the whole mess. Sawyer certainly played a huge role and…I did, as well.”

  Well, she had at least succeeded in surprising Maura. The other woman stared at her warily, as if trying to figure out what angle she was playing.

  “I was wrong to say what I did about her, publicly and privately. Will you please let her know?”

  “I… Yes. Of course. I’ll tell her what you said.” “Thank you.”

  She was about to return to her spot on the edge of the sofa when Maura, in turn, surprised her.

  “I couldn’t help noticing your bag when you came in.”

  Heat washed over her. The bag. Oh, no! She had completely forgotten she’d grabbed one of her hand-sewn pieces since the accent color of it so perfectly matched the salmon of her sweater. Maura was bound to recognize it as the same general style of the dozen or so bags she had anonymously shipped to Dog-Eared Books & Brew to sell.

  “Did you?” she said, trying for a casual smile. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I have one myself that’s very similar. May I ask where you found it?”

  Again, her mind did a frenzied workout as she tried to come up with an answer that wasn’t a complete fabrication. “Paris,” she finally said, honestly enough, though she didn’t add exactly where: in her apartment, in the tiny spare bedroom/craft room where she hung all the others she had created.

  “You don’t happen to know where I could find more, would you? I had a few for sale in my store a few months ago and everybody wanted one.”

  Gen could feel her cheeks turn pink with pleasure and pride. She wanted to tell Maura she had made them but she didn’t dare. Not now, when things were still awkward between them.

  “I…I don’t,” she stammered. “I’ll keep an eye out and let you know if I see any.”

  “Yes. Please. I made a nice profit from them and would definitely be open for more.”

  “Okay.”

  Flustered and off balance now, she decided she didn’t have any appetite. She set her plate back on her chair, grabbed the bag in question and escaped to the restroom.

  She fixed her hair quickly and applied a new coat of lipstick. Mostly, she just used the moment to collect her composure again. When she was ready, she left the ladies’ room and headed through the shelves toward Charlotte’s book-club party.

  The sound of someone saying her name halted her footsteps.

  “What were you thinking to invite Genevieve Beaumont?”

  Gen’s stomach contracted suddenly at the condemnation in the voice, which she now recognized as Ruth Tatum, Claire McKnight’s mother.

  “Ever
ybody agreed to bring someone new, remember? Maura brought her pediatrician. Evie Thorne brought Brodie’s new office manager. The whole point was to make the book club more inclusive.”

  “That was a stupid idea in the first place. Whoever thought of it? Probably Claire.”

  “Yes, it was my idea, Mother,” Claire said. “It’s been wonderful to have fresh faces to talk to, new stories to hear. I think we sometimes tend to stick with our own little group and don’t always make others feel welcome.”

  “Why do we need to? Things were fine,” Ruth groused. “Anyway, couldn’t you find anyone better to bring than Genevieve Beaumont?”

  Any warm glow she might have been feeling at trying to make things right with Maura—at holding her own at this party and even trying to form tentative new friendships—seemed to shrivel and die a painful death.

  “Stop it, Mom.”

  “I’m only saying what everyone else is thinking,” Ruth Tatum protested. “You all know what Genevieve’s like. She’s an ice-cold bitch. It’s no wonder her fiancé slept around. He was probably desperate for a little warmth.”

  “That’s enough,” Claire said sharply, but Genevieve didn’t wait to hear more. All the remembered humiliation and hurt of that terrible time after her engagement ended came surging back and she thought she might truly be sick.

  Trying not to give in to the further mortification of tears, she pushed around the bookshelf. “That’s right,” she said bitterly. “I’m the coldest bitch in Hope’s Crossing. Sawyer couldn’t wait to sleep with anyone who wasn’t me.”

  Why had she even tried to be friends with these small-minded, provincial women who refused to think maybe a person could change?

  She wanted to stomp and yell and throw books off the shelves at them. I never wanted to come to your stupid bookclub meeting anyway. You’re a bunch of insulated, illiterate rustics who look at Paris and see crowds and noise instead of light and beauty and magic. I feel sorry for all of you.

  Instead, she swallowed down all those words—most of them not even true—and tried for some small semblance of the dignity and strength she wished she had shown after her engagement ended.