Snowflakes and Silver Linings

by Cara Colter

  It was better he didn’t go. He was still feeling oddly battered and bruised from the snowman building thing. And not physically, either.

  It was as if being around her took a run at all his hard-earned cynicism, uncovered longings that he had not been aware he had.

  Not to mention threatened his ability to be in control.

  He liked being in control, living by his motto, If It’s Out Of Your Control, You’re In Trouble.

  And part of remaining in control was not getting sucked in by the fairy-tale vow renewal and Christmas unfolding at the inn. It wasn’t reality. It was a manipulation of reality.

  To tell the truth, he regretted whatever altruistic motivation had led him to knock on Casey’s bedroom door yesterday and coerce her to come out and build snowmen with him.

  He probably could have kept it all very big-brotherly and “Let’s help poor solemn Casey have fun” if she would have kept her damned hat on and her luscious lips to herself.

  “We making cookies now,” Tessa insisted. “For the wedding.”

  He opened his eyes and scowled at her. “You’re still here?”

  The little mite didn’t seem the least intimidated by him. She smiled and nodded.

  He sighed. “What wedding?”

  “Aunt Emily’s.”

  It wasn’t a wedding, exactly, but explaining the distinction to a six-year-old was not in his skill set. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know how to tell time.”

  “Didn’t your...” He stopped. She didn’t have a mom, and because of that he managed to strip a fragment of the unfriendliness out of his voice. “Didn’t your dad tell you not to talk to strangers?”

  She took his hand and tugged. “You’re not a stranger, Uncle Turner!”

  He was not her uncle, and he was tempted to tell her so to dampen her enthusiasm, but again he remembered life had been mean enough to her without him chipping in.

  The dog, who had also noticed his opening eyes, was thumping her tail with adoration. Tessa’s trust in him, like the dog’s, was making Turner feel off-kilter.

  He was a warrior, for goodness sake. One look at him and the dogs were supposed to turn and run, tails curled between their legs. People were supposed to hide their children.

  “Come make cookies. Please...?”

  “Why me?” he said out loud.

  “I like you,” Tessa declared with utter sincerity.

  “Sheesh.”

  Turner had a niece a little younger than this that he had never met. His brothers had never said he wasn’t welcome home for Christmas, but they’d never told him he was, either.

  He tried to disengage his hand from Tessa’s, but that just made her hang on more mulishly. He closed his eyes again. Was he getting a headache? His mission had originally been to get Casey to lighten up. Why was it shifting? Now he wanted her to face reality?

  “Uncle Turner...!”

  Oh, definitely a headache.

  “I want to make cookies now. Gingerbread, like in the story. That’s my favorite story.”

  The child’s voice was becoming more strident. She looked as if she planned to start yelling if she didn’t get her own way. Explaining a screaming child to her buff daddy, the fireman, wasn’t in his skill set, either.

  “I wanted the big one,” Tessa said, and the stridency was gone. Her lower lip trembled. “The big gingerbread man in Andrea’s store, but he’s gone.”

  She was two seconds away from crying. Turner’s aversion to tears was as strong as ever.

  So even though it wasn’t in his nature, he’d surrender. And while he was in the kitchen, he’d just have a little peek at Casey. If they were making cookies, no doubt she would be in the thick of it.

  Maybe he’d say a few words to her, just to find out if she’d discovered cutting down trees was damned hard work, not the stuff of fairy tales at all.

  “Okay, okay.” Turner sat up, swung his legs off the couch and stood. The dog got on shore with him, and the little monkey was still attached to his hand. Tessa pulled him through the swinging door into the kitchen. Harper sneaked in, too.

  Turner stopped and suppressed a groan. “Wrong turn. North Pole.”

  It did indeed feel like Santa’s workshop. A spicy aroma permeated the air. Christmas music was playing and the kitchen was a flurry of colorful activity. Cole, Emma, Rick, Andrea and Casey were all here. Each had on a Christmas apron, and they seemed to be on an assembly line of cookie production.

  “I thought you guys would still be busy with the tree.”

  Cole looked up at him. “That was hours ago, buddy. You’ve been out like a light.”

  Turner contemplated that a little uneasily. He had slept, which was good, but so deeply? On a couch in the middle of a house full of people? What had happened to his soldier’s gift for sleeping with one eye open?

  It occurred to him something was changing. He was being plunged into the things he feared most: sleeping, Christmas, tears. It was like tossing a person who was terrified of water into a lake.

  Sink or swim.

  And he was swimming. He was not sinking. And it was because of her.

  He glanced at Casey. Her cheeks were glowing and pink from being outside; her vigorously straightened hair was clipped back sternly for work in the kitchen. Little curls were escaping the clip, and she did that thing she did—blew them out of the way—without having any idea at all how sexy it was.

  So he felt an increasing sense of safety, and about as unsafe as he had ever felt, at the very same time. His mission no longer felt clear. Oh, yes, that was definitely a headache of major proportions developing. He made himself look at something besides Casey.

  Cole, high powered businessman, was working a food processor, his tongue caught between his teeth in fierce concentration. Rick, the fireman, was using the considerable strength in his arms to roll out sheets of dark, sugary looking dough.

  The women were using cookie cutters, though really, it felt as if, despite his efforts to look at everyone else, Turner could see only Casey, who was moving the freshly cut cookies onto baking sheets.

  Gingerbread men, big surprise.

  Her hair being pulled back so severely only served to show off the amazing height of her cheekbones, the tender curve of her neck.

  “So, what woke you up?” Cole said, grinning at him. “I thought you were going to sleep for a week.”

  “I had a little nudge from my friend,” Turner said, looking down. Tessa was still tugging on his hand, trying to get him to move along.

  “Tess, I told you to leave him alone,” Rick said sternly.

  “I want him to make cookies with me,” Tessa said, unrepentant. She let go of his hand, finally, and climbed up on a stool beside Andrea. Grabbing a cutter, the little girl began to press out cookies randomly from the sheet of dark dough.

  “Are you ever making cookies,” Turner said. He noticed Casey would not look at him, bent over those cookies as if they were one of her research projects.

  So she, too, wanted to take a step back from the intensity of what had leaped up between them yesterday.

  The sleep must have made some defenses come down, because when he saw her avoiding looking at him, it was achingly apparent to him he had hurt her all those years ago, so wrapped up in himself that the possibility she might have pined for him had never occurred to him.

  He remembered that night so well. Fresh out of training, he’d known he was leaving on his first assignment. It was the first time he had experienced the predeployment intensity, a sense that he was about to embark on a mission that was highly dangerous and probably life threatening. It had given him a heightened awareness of being alive. Each breath had felt exquisite, each encounter lit from within.

  And most especially that applied to his
encounter with bridesmaid Casey. The few days they had spent together after the wedding had had an almost magical quality. Though they’d stopped well short of physical intimacy, Turner had never felt so alive or so connected to another human being.

  Since then, he had experienced that predeployment high on many occasions. True, never quite as sweetly as that first time.

  He studied Casey, and knew despite the fact she was a professional, a doctor, a research scientist, at her core was still that sweet, deep-thinking girl who had captivated him that night.

  Could he make up for his insensitivity to her? Should he try?

  Probably not. Yesterday, playing in the snow with her, should have been a lesson to him. He might not be able to control where the fire went once it started burning.

  Besides, it would ask him to be something he was not. His brothers perceived him as colossally insensitive and self-centered, and he had no proof that they were wrong.

  Leave that girl alone, he ordered himself.

  He had his own wounds to nurse, his own demons to battle, his own hard choices that needed to be made.

  But standing here in this kitchen, with good smells all around him, feeling safe, surrounded by people who were cheerful and uncomplicated, he had a sudden memory.

  A long time ago, back when the world had worked the way it was supposed to, his dad had shown him over and over what it was to be a good man.

  When he was twelve, Turner hadn’t made the rep team for hockey that year. He’d been sulking and stewing, breaking things, snapping at his mother and his brothers a whole two weeks after the cut, which was probably a week after he should have been over it.

  His dad, without explanation, had ordered him into the car one Saturday morning. Without a word he had driven him to the children’s hospital in a neighboring community. Still without a word, his father had gathered packages from the trunk, handing some to Turner to carry.

  Once inside it had become clear to Turner, that this was not his dad’s first visit. He knew some of the kids by name. He had books and small gifts tucked into his pockets, puzzles and coloring books and NERF toys in the packages.

  He’d introduced Turner as a hockey player, and little boys who would never skate plied him with questions loaded with curiosity and envy.

  “Do you get it, son?” his dad had asked him as they drove home.

  “Yeah, I do.” He got it. That he lived a privileged life. That he was fortunate to be able to lace up skates and take to the ice.

  His dad hadn’t said a word, just reached across and rested his hand on his shoulder, leaving it there for the rest of the trip home.

  But Turner realized, since the death of his father, that his life had not felt quite so privileged. He was not always surrounded by good fortune and luck. He had experienced loss.

  What would his father have thought if Turner used that as an excuse not to be a good man? His dad had been a good man. Genuinely, and to the core. He hadn’t been good because he needed the approval of others, or to be showy. Being good had come as naturally to him as breathing. Once, Turner had aspired to be just like him. Now?

  Was there anything left in him that could be?

  Wasn’t that what he was here to find out, as he stood at this crossroad, wondering which road to take?

  He moseyed up to Casey, saw that she planned to act cool, but then she did a double take.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong?” He didn’t like being read. He thought he probably sounded defensive.

  “You look like you have a headache.”

  “I do,” he admitted, mulling over how he had been able to keep his vulnerabilities successfully to himself for a long, long time. “Shouldn’t have fallen asleep during the day.”

  “You want something for it?”

  Just like he was not used to children and dogs, he was not used to this. Tenderness.

  “I’ll suck it up.” To prove he was strong, not weak.

  “Very manly,” she said, with a roll of her eyes.

  “You know what you look like with your hair like that?” he said, anxious, suddenly, to get her to stop gazing at him with that expression that made him want soft things—a shoulder to put his head on, a soothing hand on his brow.

  It worked. She looked wary instead of compassionate. Wariness he could handle.

  “Olive Oyl.”

  “Olive oil?” she said, puzzled.

  “Popeye’s girlfriend.”

  “Just because you kissed me yesterday,” Casey whispered, casting a glance around her, “don’t get any ideas about me being your girlfriend.”

  Oh, yeah, he had done an imitation of Popeye!

  “I kissed you?” he sputtered in an undertone. “You started that! And don’t worry. I don’t have any ideas about you being my girlfriend.”

  Even though she’d said it first, now she looked slightly wounded.

  Sorry, Dad. Turner’s attempt to be a good man had lasted about fifteen seconds. “Not that that’s about you,” he said hastily, under his breath.

  “Thanks, you educated me about the nature of cads and my good fortune around them yesterday,” she hissed back.

  “Look, it’s not about you. I don’t do attachment. That’s my favor to the world. And you.”

  She looked perplexed. “What?”

  Stop talking, he ordered himself. “I do the kind of work where people come home in bags,” he said quietly, for her ears only. “It’s not fair to let people love you when you take those kinds of risks.”

  And he knew. Burned into him, as badly as Ken’s blood, were the sobs of the man’s wife, the cries of his children.

  Turner braced himself. Casey had a perfect opportunity to say she would never love him, anyway. That he had nothing to worry about in that department, at all.

  Instead, she did what he least expected.

  She reached up and cupped her hand tenderly along his jawline. She looked at him so softly it felt as if his armor was melting.

  “Oh, Turner,” she said, as if her heart were breaking for him. “Oh, Turner. Now I see what it is about you that children and dogs love.”

  She glanced at the ever faithful Harper, and kept her hand on his cheek, oblivious to the other occupants of the room.

  “That’s ridiculous. I probably smell like a hamburger.”

  “You don’t,” she said, and then blushed and took her hand away. He thought she would look around to see if anyone had noticed, but she didn’t. She didn’t seem at all perturbed that she might have been caught in that easily misinterpreted act of pure tenderness.

  Turner felt as if his very survival depended on backtracking, on lightening things up between them. “Hey, I thought that was Harper sniffing my neck while I was sleeping on the couch.”

  Then Casey blushed and smiled. That was a knockout combination.

  “Come on,” she said. “You showed me how to make snowmen. I’ll show you how to make gingerbread men.”

  He had the perfect excuse to beg off. He had a headache.

  Had had a headache. Her touch seemed to have erased it. Was that even possible?

  It seemed to Turner that the thing called love—the thing he had most tried to avoid, that he had denied needing at every turn—was right here in the kitchen.

  With these people that were his friends.

  In the uncomplicated affection of a dog. And a child.

  In Casey’s angel-soft touch against the whisker-roughened surface of his cheek.

  It was what he had been running from since the day his father had died. It was what had failed him, and what he had failed, too. He wanted to run from what suddenly seemed to him to be an invitation he did not want to accept.

  Turner had complete confidence in
himself as a courageous man. He had stood beside buddies in shadowy battles, had stood his ground when others would have run, had said yes a thousand times when other men would have said no.

  But now he understood he had only scraped the surface of the meaning of courage.

  Suddenly, he couldn’t have left the kitchen if he wanted to. He needed to be here. He needed to be here if there was any hope at all for him to ever be the man his father had hoped he would become.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “HOW WAS THE hunt for the perfect tree? Hokey?”

  Casey knew something had just happened. Something unexpected. And important. Turner had told her things about himself that bordered on sacred.

  He had set an impossible mission for himself. To protect the whole world from the pain of loving him.

  It was heartbreakingly honorable, and if she ever said such a thing to him, she knew he would run for the door.

  Even now, his staying here seemed tenuous.

  She had to give him room. She had to let him breathe.

  And she had to—in the spirit of Christmas, if nothing else—give him a gift. A break from the self-imposed loneliness he wore around himself like an invisible cloak. She had to become the kind of person she wanted the mother of her child to be.

  She had known why he hadn’t come on the outing for the tree this morning. He hadn’t come so that she would go.

  Now she felt ashamed that she had been so deeply relieved when he’d bowed out so that she could be more comfortable.

  Casey vowed she would not let that happen again.

  “It was such good fun,” she said with a sigh, regretting that he had not been there. “Did your family do things like that when you were growing up? You and your brothers?”

  Somehow, she felt she wanted to reconnect him to what he had lost over the years.

  “Sure, we’d go get a tree from the woods. Did they let you touch the ax?”

  So, he was as determined not to go there as she was to take him.

  “Are you trying to start an argument?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because you’re insinuating I’m incompetent with an ax!”