by Cara Colter
She felt the shock of it.
And the betrayal.
She could feel her eyes filling with tears.
He looked at her coldly. “Yeah, that’s what a woman would get who was stupid enough to fall for a guy like me. A life full of tears. That’s why I left without saying goodbye that morning. I knew you’d cry. And I knew it wouldn’t change anything.
“You deserve better. You deserve a man who can take your tears and treat them with tenderness.
“You deserve a man who looks at Christmas with something other than dread.
“You deserve a man who can go to sleep with a clean conscience, who is not afraid of his own dreams. I’m not that man.
“There’s soup on the stove. It’s still warm. You should probably have some.”
And then he turned from her and yanked on his clothes.
“Don’t you dare leave me here by myself.”
“I’ll be back within half an hour.”
But somehow, she knew he wouldn’t be. Without a backward glance he went out the door and was gone.
The dog dragged herself out of the blanket he had wrapped her in, and went and scratched pathetically at the door.
And then Harper did what Casey wanted to do. She began to howl as if her heart was broken.
Turner didn’t come back.
It was Rick and Emily and Andrea who came to find her. It was embarrassing being found naked, rolled up in her blanket like a sausage in a pastry wrapper.
But Rick was a complete professional, and her friends were full of nothing but tender concern.
Casey was too distraught to pretend she didn’t care. “Where’s Turner?”
“He left. There was some kind of urgent message for him from his brother on his cell phone,” Emily said.
“But is he coming back? For the vow renewal?” For me?
“Cole said he would never let him down,” Emily said.
“But?”
She shrugged and watched Casey uneasily. “But I don’t know. There was something about him when he came back...”
“What happened here?” Andrea whispered.
Casey thought about that. The trading of secrets, the deep trust.
But in the end, what had happened was the very same thing as before. She had fallen in love.
And he couldn’t wait to get away from it!
“Nothing,” she told her worried friends. “I fell through the ice. He saved my life. End of story.”
What she didn’t let on was that if it was the end of the story, she wasn’t sure how she was going to go on, let alone not be a wet blanket for the vow renewal.
* * *
The house was a flurry of activity. A dozen times a day, Casey wanted to leave.
But Turner was already going to let down his friends. She couldn’t let them down, too! So she stuck with it.
She decorated. And delivered cookies. She scrubbed the inn until it shone. She decorated the tree and hung garlands and did paint touch-ups.
And at night, by herself, not able to sleep, she would go down to the lake and put on that old pair of skates.
She taught herself how to skate. She tried. She fell. She dusted herself off, and she fell again. And got up again.
And somehow, it was the skating that helped her come to terms with it.
Life—and love—were exactly like this. There were moments, if you gave it everything you had, and did not hesitate, when you soared. When you floated joyously through ink-black skies, nearly able to touch the stars.
And then you fell.
But you didn’t give up. You brushed yourself off, set your teeth and tried again.
That was what she wanted to teach her child.
A child she suddenly realized she was not ready to have. The greatest gift a mother could give her offspring was to live a whole and healthy existence herself.
When Casey looked at her life, she thought she had played it way too safe. The Gingerbread Girls had been right. She had given her life to a dusty old lab, because there were rules. Because it made her life predictable. And to spice it up she had chosen calligraphy? Yoga? Sebastian, for goodness sake?
She needed to skate. And climb mountains. And jump from airplanes.
She needed to love, fearlessly.
She had come to the inn searching for something she had searched for her whole life. A Christmas miracle.
Her miracle, it seemed, had come with a crash through the ice, a sudden realization that life could be over in a flash. There was no time to waste on self-pity. Or safety.
Life didn’t make any promises. It involved loss and heartbreak.
But, like skating, if you stayed down, if you let the fall cripple you, the joy was gone, too.
She was glad she had laid it all on the line for Turner. She was glad she had risked everything. Because it felt in doing so, she had learned the fall would not kill her.
Not risking at all was what would kill her. In increments, her life getting smaller and smaller as she tried to make it more and more safe and secure.
Casey didn’t feel broken by Turner’s rejection as she had by Sebastian’s. She understood it was about him and not her. She might have risked her heart on Turner, but dammit, she felt as alive as she ever had!
Skating alone, she thought about going through the ice, and the night in the cabin, and she got the gift she had always hoped for.
She knew she was going to be okay. No matter what.
No matter what her mother did. No matter what happened in Emily and Cole’s future, or Andrea and Rick’s, Casey was going to be okay. No matter what Turner decided to do, she was going to be fine.
Her amazing life had given her the tools she needed to live deeply and fully. To embrace it all, and then to get up and soar on.
And so on Christmas Eve, as Casey put the final touches on the snowmen, she felt loss and joy intermingled, as they often were in the tapestry of life. She adjusted the top hats and ties on the snowmen, and let a few tears fall as she remembered the fun she and Turner had had in the snow.
And then she allowed herself to smile at how adorable the snowmen looked, and to be grateful to have made this contribution to her friend’s happiness.
The truth?
Casey had loved her brother. And her father. And her mother. She loved Turner. And even though each of those loves had not been predictable in their paths, each had made her a better person, not a worse one.
Knowing that was her very own Christmas miracle.
And she knew something else. That perhaps she had never loved Sebastian at all. That, in a way even hidden from herself, she had seen him as a means to an end. Perhaps she had seen what she felt for him as safe, because so little of herself had been invested in it.
She had mourned not his loss, but the loss of her own wish for herself: to lead a safe, comfortable, normal life.
And now she saw she had been saved from an unworthy dream. Because love was many things, but “safe” and “comfortable” were not among them.
Real love required people to grow and stretch and become more than they were before, not to stay in a comfortable rut.
“The hairdresser is here,” Andrea called, pulling Casey away from her contemplation of the snowmen.
Despite her pleas to straighten her hair, the hairdresser did it in a regal upsweep. When Casey looked at herself in the mirror, it seemed the way her hair was done reflected the great growth she had experienced since her near-death experience on the ice. Her curls had been tamed into the updo, but wayward strands broke free, and the result was breathtaking.
Tears stung her eyes as she looked at herself in the mirror and felt total self-acceptance. Love was breathtaking.
She walked through the inn and on outside
. Darkness had fallen and the Gingerbread Inn looked as if it had been restored to all its glory.
It looked like something out of a winter fairy tale. The snowmen were a lighthearted touch at the gate. All the Christmas lights were on. The porch railings were covered in garlands of real fir boughs. A huge wreath hung in the doorway. As darkness fell, Carol and Martin lit the candles in white paper bags all over the yard. They looked like fairy lights and the yard looked like something out of a dream.
Not knowing they were being watched, the two of them paused. Tears stung Casey’s eyes for the second time in just a few minutes when Martin swept Carol into his arms and kissed her long and deep.
And then they both turned back and looked at the inn, and whether they were aware of it or not, Casey knew what their future held.
Each other, and the Gingerbread Inn.
The inn had never looked so beautiful as guests began to arrive. Carol and Martin welcomed them and showed them to their seats, arranged in a half moon around the front porch. Carol was glowing with pride and with something else. The joy of a woman who had said yes to love.
Turner wasn’t here.
He wasn’t coming.
Somehow, Casey had thought she might have one last chance.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AS SHE AND Andrea stood, gazing at the fairyland of wonder they had created, a cab shot up the driveway and Turner hopped out, suit bag over his shoulder.
“Turner,” Andrea said to him, hands on her hips. “Turner Kennedy, you have caused me a great deal of stress.”
Casey could feel her heart beating in her throat when she saw him. This was what love felt like, then.
Wanting what was best for him, even if it was not what was best for her. But what if what was best for both of them was the very same thing?
Turner’s gaze was like flint. “You don’t know the meaning of the word stress,” he told Andrea.
He glanced at Casey, and the flintiness did not leave his expression.
But she saw the exhaustion around his eyes, the deep weariness.
“You haven’t been sleeping again,” she noted quietly.
Andrea seemed as if she was going to say something to him, and then stopped, glanced at his face, glanced at Casey beside her, made a sympathetic little clucking noise and flounced into the house, leaving them alone.
Turner brushed by Casey without saying a word. He left her standing on the steps, shaking with so many mixed feelings she felt she might explode. Could love be mixed with so much anger and frustration and confusion?
She went to her room and got ready. The dresses she and Emily and Andrea had chosen were beautiful. Hers and Andreas were navy blue, each with a slightly different cut. With the upswept hairdo and the elegant dress, Casey was not sure she had looked so beautiful at Emily’s first wedding. After a final twirl before the mirror, she went downstairs.
She reminded herself, firmly, that this night was about Emily and Cole. Her personal agendas had to be set aside.
A few minutes later, Turner was also back downstairs, looking unfairly amazing in a beautifully cut suit that showed off the tremendous masculine power of his physique.
He looked at her, his gaze taking in everything. She shivered from the hunger she thought she saw there. But, no, now it was gone, if it had ever been there at all. His face was carefully schooled in a calm mask.
“We need to talk,” she said to him in an undertone.
The grim line deepened around his mouth. “Yeah, we do. About you interfering in my life. You sent a message to my brothers?”
“You won’t have to worry about that happening again.”
“You can’t unring a bell.” But for all the harshness in his tone, for a moment she saw something baffling in his eyes. A woman determined to be dumb might mistake it for regret.
But the flurry of last-minute instructions from Andrea, and their respective duties, drew them apart.
The yard was completely dark now, except for the golden light on the porch, the Christmas lights on the house and the flickering candles, luminescent in the white bags. People were seated in a semicircle around the porch. The wedding party stood inside the door.
Andrea pressed Play on the CD player, and a song by a children’s choir came on. Their voices were soaring and joyful, and filled the night. The song was about love being a light to follow through the darkness.
When it was over, Andrea signaled to Casey and Turner. They went out the door together, then parted, moving to either side of the porch. Andrea, and Cole’s other best friend, Joe, did the same.
And then Cole stepped out, and waited for Emily.
Emily had decided on a simple ivory frock and a matching cashmere sweater. She was carrying a single bloodred rose as she stepped toward her husband.
A collective sigh went up from all assembled.
There was no mistaking the look of exquisite tenderness Cole gave Emily. There was no mistaking her absolute love for him, as she rose on her tiptoes and brushed her lips against his cheek.
They were both shining from within.
In a simple ceremony that took only ten minutes, Cole and Emily took those sacred and ancient vows. Cole did not have to repeat them after the minister, but said them as though they were written on his heart.
“I, Cole,” he said in a voice strong and true, sure and steady, “renew my vow to you, Emily, to love you as my wife, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”
Then Emily, quiet, strong, said those vows also.
It was as if every bit of hard work they had all done to the inn disappeared, and every single person. It was as if Emily and Cole stood alone, wrapped in their love for each other.
When their lips met, for a moment there was only silence.
And then a cheer went up, as those invited realized they had been part of a miracle, the affirmation of love in a world where it could be so hard to find it, so hard to sustain it, so hard to keep its light from going out.
Wasn’t that really what Christmas celebrated, after all? The very thing these two people were reaffirming on this beautiful Christmas Eve?
The way Cole and Emily continued to look at each other—as if each was brand-new to the other—made Casey’s throat close.
Turner put his hand on Cole’s shoulder. It was a gesture of solidarity, and it made Casey glance at him.
And what she saw made her heart stand still.
For one unguarded moment, as he looked at his friend, the remoteness left his face. And in its place was the deepest yearning that Casey had ever seen.
Turner wanted what his friend had just said such a resounding yes to.
But then he glanced at her, and the look was gone. He took his hand from Cole’s shoulder and shoved it deep in his pocket. Turner narrowed his eyes and held hers coolly, daring her to believe what she had just witnessed.
But she did believe it.
It was as if the Christmas miracle she had waited for her entire life had been delivered in that one unguarded second when she’d seen the yearning in a strong man’s face.
But the moment was swept away as people left their chairs and surged around Cole and Emily, hugging, crying, congratulating, laughing.
Everyone was invited in. The house was as it was meant to be, at last. Filled to the rafters with people laughing, and loving each other.
“I can’t thank you all enough,” Emily said, after a while, silencing the mingling crowd with a lift of her hand. “My two best friends, Casey and Andrea, have made this day perfect for me and my other best friend, Cole. And I am humbled that so many of you were willing to spend your Christmas Eve with us.
“There’s skating outside, and hot chocolate by th
e barrel, so I’ll see you out there for our first dance in about ten minutes.”
Casey joined the crowd who watched from the bank. Emily and Cole had elected not to change their clothes. They looked like pairs skaters waiting to take their turn in a fancy competition.
What followed was poetry. A dark night, white snow, Emily and Cole skating hand in hand. And then he pulled her to him, and she twirled into his arms, and they skated seamlessly, a gold medal performance because of the genuine love that shimmered around them.
It was one more beautiful moment in an evening that had strung together beautiful moments like pearls on a thread.
Casey couldn’t help but fantasize that it was she and Turner out there skating, but then jerked herself to reality. He had disappeared as soon as the ceremony was over. But he had arrived by cab, and one hadn’t returned to pick him up.
Was he still here?
She pulled herself away from the crowd and went to change out of the beautiful dress and remove the pins from her hair.
She couldn’t go out there to the rink, and visit and drink hot chocolate and show off her new skating skills, and pretend everything was all right. She couldn’t. She had to find Turner and talk to him now. She wondered if maybe he had slipped away already.
She knocked on the door of his room. At first she was relieved that she could hear him in there, and but then there was sudden silence.
No answer.
She tried the door, and it opened. She took a deep breath and stepped in.
Turner had not changed from his suit, though he had stripped off the jacket, loosened his tie at his throat. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head cradled in his hands. When she entered, he shot up off the mattress, his position defensive.
She knew she had caught him at a vulnerable moment. “We need to talk.”
He shrugged, all his defenses in place now.
“Being found in that cabin, naked except for a blanket, was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life,” Casey said, hoping she had stripped every bit of the hurt and despair of the last few days out of her tone.
“Then you’ve led way too sheltered a life. I am so angry about you sending a message to my brothers. That situation was none of your business. What on earth made you think you should contact them?”