Before she could disappear into the crowd, he stepped over to her and grabbed her hand. “You promised me a dance,” he whispered in her ear.
She turned that bright smile on him and followed him into the fray.
IPad DJ obliged with a slow song, and he pulled Emma close. He wrapped one arm around her back and the other hand held hers close to his chest. She put her arm around his shoulder and swayed in time with him.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.
She nodded. “The barn looked amazing. I can’t believe it was even a barn.”
He pushed her hair back and kissed her neck.
“That song you played when they walked up the aisle . . .”
“Mmm-hmm?” he said into her neck. She smelled good. Like cloves and cinnamon.
“I didn’t recognize it.”
“I wrote it.”
She pulled back in his arms. “You did?”
“Don’t act so surprised! I am a musician, you know.”
“I know, I just . . . wow. It was beautiful.”
“Thank you.” He pulled her close again and she wrapped her arm around him.
The song was over, way too quickly, and a fast old song took over. He wasn’t ready to let her go.
“Woo!” Granny Sue came spinning by, followed quickly by Pete.
“Do you want to—”
“Get out of here?” Emma asked. “Yes, please.”
He clasped her hand and practically dragged her off the dance floor. He heard her say good night to her friends. He waved to Daniel. They got out of there.
* * *
Emma started to get nervous as soon as Abe unlocked his door. She shouldn’t be nervous. She’d done this before. She’d almost done it with him before. She wanted this, maybe more than she’d wanted anything in her life.
It was just that she knew it was going to mean something.
It would mean something, and then it would be over. She’d go back to ignoring her dissertation, he’d go back to Nashville.
Well, they’d always have Froggy Rock.
Besides, once she stepped into the room, Abe had her head between his hands and he kissed her, deep and steady, and she decided the future could wait until the future. Tonight, there was just this. She pushed his jacket off his shoulders and he let it fall to the floor. She wanted him to hold her tight and kiss her lights out, but she also wanted to feel him. She untucked his shirt and felt the smooth muscles of his back. Then she felt him fumble with the zipper on her dress and before she knew it, they were flat on his bed wearing nothing but each other’s bodies. She closed her eyes and soaked in every moment, every touch, every breath that skimmed over her skin. She commanded her fingers to memorize the curve of his shoulders, the ridges of his stomach, the muscles of his thighs. As the moon crossed the sky, she memorized the feel of all of him, over her, inside her, around her, and she cried out and held him as he shuddered, and she fell asleep, smiling, in his arms.
Chapter Eighteen
They decided to let Liam drive to the airport. (Not that they gave him a choice.) Emma had a long drive back from Charleston, and she wanted to put off getting behind the wheel for as long as possible. Besides, she didn’t think she could focus on the road right now.
It was Abe’s fault. Waking up in his arms—for the second time—felt so right. Seeing him smile down at her felt so right. Having him kiss her fully awake felt so, so right.
But then she had to pack and take her friends to the airport and go back to worrying about her miserable future in academia. She would so much rather be canoodling with Abe.
She had his number and his e-mail address, and as they came down off the mountain, she saw that she had three texts from him.
Hey beautiful
Indiana isn’t too far from Nashville
What are you doing this weekend?
You, she wrote back.
She smiled. This was going to work. They could make it work. Abe was right; they weren’t so far apart. A few hours. Not bad for a weekend. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to see him this weekend. It was Christmas and she was due at her family’s. And then the semester would start, and she had two classes to TA and all those articles to read....
“Emma. Emma! What’s wrong!”
“I think I’m having a panic attack.” She rolled down her window and gulped big lungfuls of mountain air. “I think I’m having a panic attack. Is this what a panic attack feels like?”
“I don’t know,” said Becky. “How do you feel?”
“I just feel like I can’t really breathe and I’ll probably throw up any minute.”
Liam looked back. “Do you think you ate something bad?”
Emma shook her head. She pressed her lips together, as if that would keep the tears from ruining her mascara.
“Oh.” She leaned forward and Becky rubbed slow circles on her back.
“What’s going on?” Bernie turned around in the front seat. “Oh my God, Emma, are you crying?”
“No,” said Emma. “It’s just . . . It’s Abe and . . . last night . . . and he’s so . . .”
“Did he hurt you?”
Emma jerked her head up at the anger in Liam’s voice. “No, no, it’s just . . .” It was hard to get the words out with all the hiccupping. Her mascara was shot for sure.
“It’s just that you really like him?”
She nodded at Becky.
“You like the hot fiddler? Dang, what’s wrong with that?” Bernie asked.
Emma shook her head. Nothing was wrong with that. Just . . . well . . . everything was wrong with that. “He makes me really happy,” she whined. Great, now she was whining.
“The bastard,” said Bernie.
“I don’t understand what’s going on here. If he makes you happy, why are you crying?” Liam looked like he wanted to be anywhere but driving three emotional women off a mountain in West Virginia.
Becky shushed him.
Emma threw up her hands. “I haven’t been happy in a long time.”
“Oh, honey.” Becky wrapped her in as much of a hug as their seat belts would allow. “You’re lucky, then.”
“Yeah,” Bernie added. “Who’d’ve thought you’d meet a great guy at a gay wedding?”
“No, it’s not that he makes me happy. It’s that . . . why haven’t I been happy? I feel like I’ve been doing my life all wrong. I’ve been doing what I thought would make me happy and I think I was wrong.”
“So, you should’ve been doing hot fiddlers the whole time?” Bernie asked.
“Are you talking about your dissertation?” Becky asked.
Emma shook her head. “I think so.”
“I have no idea what’s going on here,” said Liam. “The hot fiddler makes you happy, so you’re going to give up your PhD?”
“I think so.”
“Hold on.” Bernie looked like she was going to climb over the front seat. “I know he’s hot and all, but you’re not giving up years of work for him!”
Emma shook her head and took the tissue Becky offered her. “No, that’s not it.”
“It sure sounds like it.”
“Bernie,” Becky said. “She means that she forgot what it felt like to be happy, and the hot fiddler reminded her.”
“He has a name!” Emma shouted. “He’s not the hot fiddler! His name is Abe!”
“This airport seems farther away than last time,” said Liam to the trees.
“Do you have plans to see the hot—Abe—again?” Becky asked.
“Wait, what about her PhD?”
Becky shushed Bernie and looked at Emma.
“We’re going to try to see each other over New Year’s.”
“That’s romantic,” Bernie said. “A new beginning. Very appropriate. I like it.”
“Thanks.”
“And then what’re you gonna do?” Bernie demanded.
“I don’t know! That’s why I’m crying!”
“Here’s what she’s gonna do,” Liam said,
with more force than they thought he had in him. “She’s gonna stop crying so I can drive the car. Then she’s gonna drive home, then bone the hell out of Abe the Fiddler, then she’s gonna take some time to figure it out. You’ve always wanted to work in a library,” Liam added, much more gently.
“You should have seen Granny Sue’s library,” Emma told them. “It’s my dream.”
“Well, there are plenty of Coral Bottoms in the world,” Becky said. “Okay, that’s probably not true. But there are plenty of Coral Bottomesque places in the world. It’s worth looking into.”
“Yeah,” Emma agreed. “I’ll look into it.”
* * *
“Hey, Abe, I’m glad I caught you.”
Abe was just tossing his backpack in his trunk when he turned to find Gary Loshe pulling up next to him, his front window rolled down.
“You sounded real good yesterday.”
“Thanks, Gary.”
“That one of yours?”
Abe knew Gary meant the song he’d written for Kevin and Daniel. Everyone was talking about it. “Yup.”
“You plannin’ on recording it?”
“I’d like to.”
“Well, you remember what I said, will you? About you young people coming back? Making the traditional music scene a scene?”
“Sure.”
“Abe, I’m not just blowin’ smoke. You’ve got a gift, son. I remember what it’s like in Nashville. It’s hard to get a quiet voice like yours heard over all the shoutin’. You decide to come on home, we’ll find a place for you.”
Gary gave him a wave and drove off. Abe sat behind the wheel and thought about his long ride back to Nashville. He had New Year’s to look forward to, when he was going to drive to Indiana to see Emma. Beyond that, well, he hadn’t thought much beyond that, except that he was going to try to figure out how to spend as much time with her as possible. But Coral Bottom was about the same distance from Indiana as Nashville was, just in a different direction. He watched Gary’s truck turn out of the parking lot. He’d definitely look into it.
Chapter Nineteen
Just about one year later
When Emma finally dug her phone out of her purse, she saw that she had two voice mails. One was from Granny Sue, and it was short and sweet, just like her: “Emma, I’m retiring. Call me.” The second was from Abe, and it was also sweet, but not short at all. In fact, he was cut off just as he was telling her how much he missed her and that he couldn’t wait to see her again.
She sat down at her desk.
She knew what she had to do.
* * *
As Abe pulled into the parking lot of Emma’s building, he couldn’t stop the goofy smile from splitting his face. He knew he was doing it. Emma told him he always did it when he first saw her. Well, what did she expect? Sometimes they went weeks without seeing each other, and then he had that whole long drive to anticipate what it would be like to smell her hair again and hold her close—two things that Skype could not yet replicate—so by the time he saw her, she was lucky he was grinning. Otherwise he’d be panting like a dog, and who wants a boyfriend who can’t keep his tongue in his mouth?
But after a year, this long-distance thing was getting old. Maybe he was just getting antsy because he was starting to feel like he knew where he was headed. It still felt funny, that he’d found his direction as soon as he turned right around and came back to Coral Bottom, but, as Granny Sue said, he’d just found where he belonged.
The problem was, he’d also found where he belonged with Emma, and she was very much not in Coral Bottom. He was starting to feel like it didn’t much matter where she was, as long as he was with her. But he couldn’t help but think about how much she liked visiting him (and not just for the anticipating-and-panting reasons). She loved Coral Bottom, strange little town that it was. She spent as much time with Granny Sue at the library as she did with him.
And now he had a surprise for her. To the surprise of everyone in town, Granny Sue was retiring. Ever since she’d announced it, people had been bugging Abe to get “that nice librarian gal of yours” to come down and take her spot. It’s not that simple, he told them. Sure it is, they said. Heck, the mayor all but offered him the job on Emma’s behalf.
So there was a job opening in Coral Bottom. And Gary Loshe was having his hip replaced, so Abe was going to step in as the first-ever guest host of Up the Holler. And his record was just about finished, and he was working on a video series with the Division of Tourism and he was going to be teaching traditional fiddle classes at the Heritage Center. He wouldn’t have time to drive up to Indiana nearly as often.
The only thing for it was to bring Emma down to Coral Bottom. It might take some convincing. She loved to visit, sure, but it was still the middle of the middle of nowhere, especially for someone who was working so hard on her academic career. And even if Emma had been talkin’ about how that might not be the direction she wanted her career to go in, that didn’t mean she’d just drop everything for him and the mountains. Besides, Granny Sue would never forgive him if he just brought Emma down and left her to find her own way in town.
No, he’d have to make sure Emma understood how serious he was about it. How serious he was about her. He was seriously in love with her. And he had a ring burnin’ a hole in his pocket to prove it.
All he had to do was ask.
* * *
Emma hung up the phone with Granny Sue, wishing her ears were farther apart so she could grin bigger. It felt right. A little scary, but right. Going into her PhD program had felt natural, like the next note in a totally boring, predictable piece of music. It felt like what she was supposed to be doing. No, it felt like what was expected of her. But she didn’t want that. She didn’t want a life in academia. She didn’t want to be studying when she could be doing.
Bernie would probably kill her. Emma was officially ABD—all she had to do was write her dissertation, and defend it, and she would be Doctor Librarian, PhD, and spend the rest of her life scrambling to publish or perish. Trouble was, her heart just wasn’t in it. And if there was one thing she’d learned at Kevin and Daniel’s wedding, it was that you have to follow your heart. It had led her to Abe, hadn’t it? And that was working out pretty well.
She smiled. She couldn’t help it. Whenever she thought about him . . . well, there were some things that Skype just could not replicate. And now he was on his way here and she was gonna smooch on him till he couldn’t breathe, and then she’d surprise him with the news.
She was going home with him, if he’d have her. Oh, she knew he’d have her. He had never made her doubt him for a second, not when he was uprooting his life in Nashville, not when he was figuring things out in Coral Bottom, not ever. And now he was doing so well for himself, like he’d really found his place.
Emma liked to think that she’d have found her way to Coral Bottom even if she and Abe hadn’t worked out. And maybe that was true. Certainly Granny Sue would have kept in touch, and probably Emma would have had the courage to drop it all and move down there to manage that tiny little library of her dreams. But it didn’t matter, did it? She did have him.
She was so moony that she almost didn’t hear the knock at her door. She looked at the clock—Abe was early. But then, he was always early to see her, except when he got a speeding ticket. She opened the door, and there he was, her handsome, bearded fiddler with melty chocolate eyes, smiling that big smile of his, the one that was just for her.
She threw herself into his arms, and he caught her and spun her around and kissed her, and she forgot all about PhDs and Granny Sue and even the Christmas present she had waiting for him in her bedroom.
She forgot about everything but Abe.
He felt just like home.
An Apple Valley Christmas
Shirlee McCoy
Chapter One
He was dead, and Emma Baily wasn’t sorry.
She wasn’t sad.
She wasn’t anything but empty and tired.
Still single.
Still working in the same little town she’d grown up in.
Apple Valley, Washington.
Where young women became spinster and crotchety, mean-spirited old men lived the high life until they died.
She sounded bitter.
She felt bitter. Not about devoting years of her life to caring for a guy none of her siblings would even speak to. No. She wasn’t bitter about that. She was bitter about the house. The one she’d inherited.
Everything to Emma. That’s what her father’s lawyer had said the will specified. Whatever money was left after her father’s care, whatever assets were still there when he died, Emma would get them.
She didn’t want them.
And, she especially didn’t want the house.
Her father had known that. That was probably why he’d left the place to her.
Daniel Burns Baily was like that.
Mean.
Spiteful.
Dead.
The finality of that settled like lead in her stomach. She wasn’t sad for the loss, but maybe she was a little sad for what had never been. For all the sweet childhood memories that her mother had tried to make. For all the wonderful holidays her mother had tried to create. For all the things Daniel had ruined with his drinking and his temper and his hate.
The Most Wonderful Time Page 25