Maybe This Christmas (6 page)

Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed. “You’re a good father. How can you doubt that?”

“I didn’t manage to keep her when she was born, did I?”

“Not because you didn’t try.” She knew how hard the O’Neils had fought to keep baby Jess. Knew what losing had done to them. “Why are you thinking about that now when it was all so long ago?”

“Because she mentioned it earlier.”

“The custody battle?”

“The fact she was an
accident.
Janet obviously said something to her. I’m worried we’ve screwed her up.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’s screwed up, but if she’s been affected by her childhood then you’re not responsible for that. You weren’t the one telling her those things.”

“I’m responsible for what happens from now on though, and that responsibility scares me.”

“I can’t imagine you feeling scared.” Of all the words people might have applied to Tyler O’Neil,
fear
definitely wasn’t one of them. “You’re not scared of anything or anyone.”

“I’m scared of this.” He stopped walking and turned to look at her. For once there was no hint of humor in those blue eyes. “I don’t want to mess this up, Bren.”

His sincerity brought a lump to her throat, and she reached out and put her hand on his arm, her fingers closing around brutally hard biceps. Tyler O’Neil was everything male, but she tried not to think of him that way. Tried not to notice the wide shoulders, the thickness of muscle under his jacket or the telltale shadow on his jaw. She tried to think of him as a friend first and a man second. Today, for some reason, that wasn’t working out so well, and the jolt to her senses woke her up.

For her own sanity, she normally made a point of not touching him, but today she’d broken that rule.

She was hyperaware of him. Shivers ran up and down her spine. Her nerve endings buzzed. The impulsive urge to stand on tiptoe and kiss the sensual curve of his mouth was almost overpowering.

If she did that, how would he react?

He’d die of shock.

And then he’d make some stammered excuse about how he didn’t think it was a good idea because they worked together, whereas what he’d really be thinking was that she wasn’t his type, and he didn’t find her attractive.

She was careful never to cross the line between friendship and something more intimate because she knew once they’d crossed it, they could never go back. Her feelings were her problem. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable or do anything to risk damaging their friendship.

She removed her hand, turned her head and studied the tall trees of the forest, trying to block out the image of that mouth, those sexy blue eyes and that gorgeous hair ruffled by the wind.

He seemed tense, too, but she knew that was because he was thinking about Jess, not her.

He thought of her as a friend first and second. She doubted he was even aware of her as a woman. She was genderless, one of the few people he could trust in a life filled with sycophants, hangers-on and people who wanted something from him, greedy for crumbs of secondhand fame. The downhill circuit had been crazy, she knew that. And through it all, they’d maintained their friendship.

“I think you need to relax. Follow your instincts and do what feels right. There’s no one right way to be a parent.”

“There are plenty of wrong ways.”

Don’t I know it.
“You love who she is, and that’s the most important thing for any child. You don’t wish she were someone different.”

“Are we talking about you here?” His gaze sympathetic, he lifted a hand and brushed snow out of her hair. “How is your mom? Have you entered the dragon’s lair lately?”

The fact he knew instantly what was going through her head was another indication of how well they knew each other.

“I haven’t seen her in a month. I’m due a visit, but I keep putting it off.” Brenna forced a smile. “I have to brace myself to get through an hour of being scolded about how I’m wasting my life here.”

“They’re lucky to have you, Bren.”

No, they weren’t.
“I don’t think they’d agree. I’m a disappointment to them. I’m not the way they wanted me to be.” She’d given up trying to change the facts. Some families, like the O’Neils, were a team, and others stumbled along like a band of misfits, as if they’d been thrown together by an unhappy accident.

“You’re you.” He frowned. “They should want you to be you.”

He had a way of simplifying things.

She knew that many people saw Tyler as a sports-obsessed, superficial bad boy. But that was the surface. Beneath the veneer of carelessness, he was astute and perceptive. “It’s because you understand that, and believe that, I know you’re a great dad. You accept Jess as she is. That’s the best thing a parent can do.”

“She’s crazy about skiing. I’m trying to encourage a little balance in her life.”

She smiled. “Did we have balance at that age?”

“No. We spent every moment outdoors.”

Brenna stooped and picked up a pinecone. “So let her do the same. If you’re caught in a strong current, you don’t try and swim against it. Let her ski in every spare moment, and perhaps if you don’t hold her back, she’ll be more willing to spend a little time on other things. Steer her gradually.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“By the way, you ran off before Kayla could ask if you’d consider running a ski master class.”

“Offering to help out with ski school was enough of a shock to my system for one day.” He checked the time on his phone. “What are you doing now? Are you busy?”

“I was going back to my lodge, and you have family night.” The O’Neils tried to be together one night a month for a meal. It was something she both envied and admired. She had no idea how a family achieved that level of closeness. Hers certainly hadn’t.

“You’re welcome to join us, you know that. I wish you would. I need moral support to face the sight of my two brothers slobbering over their women.”

“They’re in love.”

Tyler shuddered. “That’s why I need you there. We’re the only sane people left.”

“Not tonight.” She pushed the pinecone into her pocket and started to walk again, her feet crunching on the thin layer of snow. If the forecasters were right, she’d be knee deep soon enough. “I have paperwork.” And she needed some space from Tyler to pull herself together.

“Your life is so exciting. It must be hard to sleep at night.”

She breathed in the scent of snow and forest. “I happen to like my life, although I prefer the outdoor part to the indoor part.”

“Do you fancy a quick drink? I need to talk about sex.”

“You—what?” She stumbled, and he shot out a hand and steadied her, his grip hard and strong.

“Careful. I take it back. Maybe you are a little clumsy when you’re not concentrating.” He let go of her arm. “I realized I have no idea how to talk to Jess about sex, and I want to work out what I’m going to say before I have to say it. I don’t want to fumble like I did tonight over the other stuff.”

Jess.

He wanted to talk about Jess.

Her knees felt as if she’d downed a bottle of vodka. “What other stuff?”

“It doesn’t matter, but it got me thinking.”

She was thinking, too, and she wished she wasn’t because those thoughts revolved around him naked. “Thinking about what?”

“For a start, at what age are you supposed to talk to a kid about sex? What age were you when you talked to your mom?”

I still don’t talk to my mom.

“We didn’t talk about stuff like that.”

“Never? So how did you—?”

“I can’t remember!” Feeling as if she was being strangled, she unzipped her jacket. She and Tyler had talked about everything over the years, but never this. As far as she was concerned, he couldn’t have picked a more uncomfortable subject. “Other kids? Books?”

“But other kids say all sorts of stuff that’s wrong. I don’t want to tell her more than she needs to know, but I have no idea how to find out what she already knows. This is what I mean about parenting being a nightmare. I need a book or something. I’d use the internet, but I’m afraid to type
sex and teenagers
into a search engine in case I’m arrested.”

It was impossible not to laugh, but she was grateful for the dark and the biting cold of the winter air because she knew her face was burning. Emotions churned inside her; feelings she’d tried to ignore rose to the surface. She wished she were more like Élise, who viewed sex as a physical act as simple and straightforward as eating or drinking.

Élise would have simply told Tyler how she felt, stripped him naked, had sex with him and then moved on as if all they’d done was enjoy a meal together.

“Tyler, you don’t need a book. You know plenty about sex.” More than plenty, if rumor was to be believed. There had been times when she’d wished she could walk around wearing noise-reducing headphones to block out the gossip.

“Doing it, yes, but not talking about it with teenagers. And to make it worse, she keeps finding all this stuff that’s been written about me, and most of it’s crap. I already have parental control on her laptop, but that’s not going to stop her reading all sorts of stuff that isn’t true.”

Brenna thought about all the
stuff
she’d read about him and wondered which bits weren’t true.

The night after he’d won a World Cup downhill in Lake Louise when it had been rumored he’d spent several hours in a hot tub with four members of the French women’s team? Or the night he supposedly skied semi-naked on part of the
Hahnenkamm,
one of the most notorious runs in Europe, with a whiskey bottle in his hand instead of a ski pole?

Oblivious to her train of thought, he ran his hand over his jaw. “Any ideas? Can you remember being thirteen? What did you think about when you were that age?”

Him.
She’d thought about him. Tyler O’Neil had played a starring role in every dream and adolescent fantasy.

“She probably already knows everything. They teach them pretty young at school.”

“Yeah, but how much do they teach them? I want her to be fully informed, that’s all. I don’t want some guy with a libido on overdrive taking advantage of her.”

“She’s not even fourteen, and all she thinks about is skiing. I don’t think you need to worry about that quite yet.”

“I want to be ahead of the game.” He glanced up at the sky. “It’s snowing again. You’ll freeze standing here. Have a drink with me, and you can tell me what sounds right and what doesn’t.”

She wasn’t freezing. She was boiling hot. She was pretty sure her face was scarlet. “You want to talk about sex?”

“You were a teenage girl once. Help me out here, Bren.”

Should she confess that sex wasn’t exactly her specialist subject? “You’re supposed to be at family night.”

“All the more reason to have a drink. A meeting followed by an evening of O’Neil family togetherness is too much for any man.”

He took it for granted, the closeness of his family, the fact that they were always there in the background supporting each other.

He’d never known anything different.

“If we go to the bar, you’ll be accosted by guests.”

“Which is why we’re going to drink the beer from your fridge. I promise to replenish it tomorrow.”

“My fridge?” Her heart bumped a little harder. “You want to come back to my lodge?”

“Why not? You do have beer?” He slipped his arm around her shoulders, and she was conscious of the weight of his arm, of the power of his body as it brushed against hers.

His touch was casual.

The way she was feeling was anything but. It would have been safer for her pulse rate and her blood pressure if she pulled away, but that would have raised questions she didn’t want to answer, so she decided her cardiovascular system was going to have to take the hit.

“Jess has talent,” she croaked. “You’re too busy to ski with her all the time, so I was thinking that maybe she should join the under-14 class. I’m focusing on mountain free-skiing, bumps, gate training, gate drills and free-ski skills. We’ll mix up the fun with the work. She might enjoy it, and it would be good for building confidence. What do you think?”

“I think she’ll be bored out of her mind. That’s fine for most of the kids, but not Jess. She needs to be stretched.”

“Are you saying my lessons are boring?”

“No. You’re a gifted teacher, but Jess is different. She has something.”

“She’s her father’s daughter.”

Tyler gave a grim smile. “Which is probably why Janet kicked her out.”

They’d reached the steps to her lodge. A single light glowed in the window. “I agree she needs to be stretched, but if you’re going to make the most of that something, it’s important to get the basics right. To focus on style.”

“Style is irrelevant. Speed is what’s important.”

Brenna rolled her eyes and delved for her keys. It was an argument they’d had more times than she could count. “Good style comes before speed.”

“Nothing comes before speed. You want to be the fastest, not the prettiest.” He tugged her hat down over her eyes. Then he stooped and scooped up a handful of snow from the steps and she backed away, her keys still in her hand.

“Don’t you
dare!
Tyler O’Neil if you so much as—
crap.
”
She ducked too late as snow hit her on the chest and exploded into her face. “I am soaking!”

“You shouldn’t have unzipped your jacket.”

“I hate you, you know that, don’t you?”

“No, you don’t. You love me, really.” He was smiling as he scooped up more snow, but this time she was quicker, and the snow in her hand hit him full in the face.

She did love him. That was the problem.

She really loved him, but there was no way she was going to let him know that.

She made the most of her temporary advantage and let herself into the lodge, reasoning that even Tyler wouldn’t dare throw snow indoors.

The lodges were the pride of Snow Crystal. Set in the forest and overlooking the lake, each one felt private and intimate, but Forest was her favorite. “I’d forgotten what good aim you have. I have snow blindness.” Still laughing, Tyler wiped snow out of his eyes, tugged off his boots and coat and left them by the door.