Snowbound Bride-to-Be (15 page)

When had he stopped hoping for, planning his escape? When had he started dreading the opening of the road, because he was committed to a decision he’d already made?

The decision never to love again.

And, despite that decision, and despite the fact this was good-bye—or maybe because of it—he could not stop himself from tasting her lips one last time, as if he could save something of her, hold it inside himself, a secret source of warmth when he returned to a world of coldness.

She tilted her head back, met him halfway, and his lips touched hers. He was not sure what kind of kiss he intended—sweet farewell, perhaps—but he did not have the kind of control to execute that kind of kiss.

From the instant of contact, when he tasted her hunger, felt the passion that lurked just below her calm surface, something in him unleashed. The part of him that wanted things he could not have rose up to greet her, urgent and fierce. Instead of
having an experience he could save, he found himself having an experience he did not want to end.

Instead of the kiss saying a chaste good-bye, her answering fire consumed him and filled him. His hands tangled in her short hair—he knew a startled
ah
of satisfaction that it felt exactly as he had known it would—and his lips claimed her and branded her, even as hers claimed him and branded him. He found his hand at the back of her neck, pulling her closer, wanting to go deeper, wanting
more
.

Her tongue danced with his lips, the edges of his teeth, tangled with his tongue, and he thought he would melt from the inferno she was creating. It felt as if the ice could be banished, as if he could be alone no more—

He pulled away from her, but it took every ounce of power he had left. His armor, made of steel, had melted like butter before her.

And he didn’t want her ever to know that.

“We should go back to the house. I’m going to go start packing my stuff—” His voice was rough with determination that hid his weakness from her. “—tonight, so that Tess and I will be ready to go as soon as the road opens tomorrow.” He hoped to slip out quietly, no long-drawn-out good-byes.

“Stay,” she said quietly. “Ryder, stay for Christmas.”

“Your neediest family?” he said sourly, trying to be what he had been before, a man who could chase others away with his bitterness, trying not to let her see what had just happened to him.

She said nothing.

“I don’t need your pity,” he said sharply, trying again.

“In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I don’t pity you,” she said just as sharply. “If you can’t do this for yourself, do it for Tess.”

“No.” He kept it short. If he engaged her in discussion she might think she could convince him to stay. “I
have
to go.”

Even without the heat of kisses, the ice was melting from around his heart. Deciding to give into her had been his undoing. How could you not care about her?

Despite his every attempt not to, he was falling as in love with Emma White as she was with him.

Ryder Richardson knew that was impossible. He knew that you could not fall in love with someone in such a short period of time.

But he also knew that love was not logical, and that it defied the rules people tried to make around it.

How could this be happening to him? He who knew the exact price of love, he who knew he would be destroyed if he rolled those dice again and lost?

Better not to take a chance at all than to risk so much.

There was Tess to think of, too. How could he ever be what Tess needed if he left himself open to being destroyed by the fires of love again?

He had to go now. While he still had the strength. Before the magic took him completely and did the worst thing of all.

Made him believe.

Just as the letters buried in her wreath had promised that first day.

The next day, the road opened before it was light out.

Emma listened to the snowplow down on the main road. Ryder had packed up the night before, just as he had said he would.

Now, as Ryder tried to get her ready to go, Tess was having a full-blown melt-down, struggling against the implacable strength of her uncle’s arms.

It would serve him right, Emma thought, if she just stepped
back and let him deal with it. But she couldn’t. She had to try and ease Tess’s distress, and that of Sue and Peggy. The Fenshaws had arrived with Tess and their baskets of food and their hearts full of good cheer, just as Ryder was packing the car to leave.

Now they were all in the front doorway of her house, except Tim, who had taken one look at Ryder’s packed bags, sent him a look of disgust and stomped off.

“Shh, sweetie,” Emma said, trying to get the hat on Tess’s head, “please don’t. It’s going to be all right. Everything will be fine.”

In her heart she felt this was patently untrue.

Sue and Peggy were both sobbing quietly, clutching their mother.

“I don’t want Tess to go,” Peggy cried, a little girl who had already said good-bye to her father this year, and was having trouble with one more good-bye. But it was obvious Ryder and Tess were going. Ryder’s face remained impassive and determined.

He took the hat from Emma’s hand, stuffed it into his own jacket pocket.

“Let’s not drag this out,” he suggested, cool and remote, once again the man who had arrived on her doorstep with his devil-dark eyes and wearing his cynicism like a cloak.

He turned and walked out the door and down to his car, the engine already running, the ice and snow scraped off it.

The sad little entourage followed him outside. Tim, who had been standing on the porch, his hands thrust into his pockets, rejoined them, held out his hand.

“Good luck, son,” he said quietly, his eyes searching Ryder’s face. He seemed to find something there that gave him something to believe in, because he nodded. But he was the only one who found it, because as Ryder and the baby reached
the car, Peggy broke away from her mother and thrust Bebo into Tess’s hands.

Emma, hanging on by a thread, bit her lip at the act of selfless generosity from one so young.

The screaming stopped for a blessed second, and then started more intensely than before. Tess threw Bebo, previously beloved to her, on the ground, and arched herself over her uncle’s arm with such fury that anyone less strong might have been taken off guard and dropped her.

Emma found something to believe, too.

That another Christmas would be ruined. No matter what happened now—if Holiday Happenings had a thousand people a night show up, if the Christmas Day Dream was a complete success, if her mother showed up beaming more love than the Madonna, it felt as if it didn’t matter, it couldn’t erase this horrible scene and it couldn’t even touch the place going cold inside her.

Because he was leaving. And if he was leaving—his heart hard to Tess’s shrieks of protest and the heart-wrenching tears of Peggy and Sue—he was not looking back once he left here.

It would be so much easier to accept that if she had not laughed on that mattress with him, held his broken heart under her fingertips on that moonlit night, if she had not given so much of herself into his keeping, if she had not seen his soul last night when they had skated, danced across that golden ice connected to one another, free, joyous.

All that was gone from his face now, as if he regretted what he had allowed himself to feel as much as she had rejoiced in it.

“Good-bye, Emma.” With finality.

She wasn’t giving him the satisfaction of saying goodbye.

“Thank you for teaching me to skate,” she said, instead. It took every ounce of her pride to choke out the words without crying.

And, for a moment, some regret did touch his eyes, but then he turned from her and put the baby in her car seat, ignoring her flailing fists and feet and her cries.

“Tess NOT go.”

Sue picked up Bebo off the ground, wiped a smudge of snow tenderly from the triangle nose and then reached in the open door and shoved the doll back into Tess’s arms. She stepped back from the car and wailed.

Emma watched in a daze as Ryder shut the door, glanced at Tim, accepted Mona’s quick hard hug, and then turned and looked at her.

What did she expect?

Nothing.

Expectations were clearly her problem, the reason she always ended up disappointed by Christmas. And by life. And by men.

He did not even hug her. He had said his good-bye to her last night on that skating rink.

He lifted a finger to his brow, a faint salute, his eyes met hers and he looked quickly away.

No sense thinking she had seen anguish there. No sense at all.

“I hope your mother comes for Christmas,” he said, and then his eyes went to Tim, who had taken a sudden interest in scraping the snow away from his feet with the toe of his boot. He frowned.

As if her mother coming for Christmas would absolve Ryder of something.

“She’ll be here Christmas Eve. Now that the roads are open, I can send her the bus ticket this afternoon.”

He nodded, relieved. She glanced at Tim who was now looking into the far distance, hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels.

Right until the moment his car turned at the bottom of the driveway that he had helped to clear, and then slipped from view, Emma could feel herself holding her breath, hoping and praying he would change his mind.

“Emma,” Tim said uncertainly, “I don’t think you should get your hopes up about—”

She held up a hand. She didn’t want to hear it.
Don’t get your hopes up. About Holiday Happenings. About your mother. About him.

That was her curse.

Not Christmas.

Those damn hopes, always picking themselves up for one last hurrah, even after they’d been dragged through the mud and knocked down and shredded and stomped upon.

Emma turned and walked away from the Fenshaws, her shoulders stiff with pride. It wasn’t until she saw the damned Believe letters in the wreath that she closed the door, sagged against it and cried like a child.

“S
NOWMAN
?” Ryder asked Tess.

She did not look up from Bebo, her new best friend. Ryder had given her the much newer lavender soft-stuffed pony the day they arrived here at the cottage. Why wait for Christmas? He had needed the distraction then.

He now saw it had been a ridiculous effort to win back her affection. The pony lay abandoned under the couch with the pink suede shoes.

He’d given the shoes to her five minutes after the pony hadn’t worked, a desperate man. She had kicked them off in a fit of anger and had not looked at them since.

He sighed, watching her. Tess was sitting on the floor, talking soft gibberish to Bebo, sporting monster hair again, refusing to allow him to touch it.

Anyone who thought a baby was willing to forgive and forget didn’t know Tess.

They had been at his lakeside cottage long enough that the accusing look should have left her face by now. He had lost track of days, and counted them now on his fingers.

Tomorrow was going to be Christmas Eve.

“Let’s go outside and build a snowman,” he said again, thinking she might not have heard him the first time. Building
snowmen had been her favorite thing at home, before the White Christmas Inn had become part of her reality.

“Tess NOT go.” She slammed on the toy piano to make her point. He had also given her the piano in an effort to distract her from her fury with him. It hadn’t worked any better than the pony or the shoes. She didn’t play with it, but used it as emphatic punctuation to her anger with him. The tone of the piano was awful and reminded him of Emma’s doorbell.

He should have fixed that before he left.

Ryder told himself to stop pleading with the child and take charge.

He could bundle her up into her snowsuit, wrestle her boots onto her feet, put her hat on the right way and take her outside, build the snowman, hope to distract her from his treasonous act of removing her from the Fenshaws, from “Eggie and Boo,” from Emma and from the White Christmas Inn.

It would take an hour or so out of a day that seemed to be stretching out endlessly, despite the fact the cottage had a forty-two-inch plasma television set and a satellite that got four hundred channels. He had not found one single thing to watch that could hold his attention, and Tess was suddenly not interested in her old favorite cartoons.

What had he ever been thinking when he had thought coming to the cottage would be a refuge?

Over the last few days, Ryder was discovering he hated it here. He had bought the cottage last summer, a place his brother had never been, no memories. A pleasant place in the heat of the summer, with water sports, along with the satellite dish, to add to the distraction quotient.

But there seemed to be no escaping the dreariness in the winter.

The decor and furnishings, which had come with the cottage, were modern and masculine. The paint was a neutral
frosty white, the furniture ran to sleek black leather, the finishes were stainless steel. The art was large abstract canvases, meaningless brush strokes of red. At the time of purchase, it had all looked sophisticated to him, clean and uncluttered.

Not cold and impersonal, a showroom not actually intended for people to live in. Of course, the cold could be because of the endless damp billowing off that lake.

Or from the way he felt inside.

Like a cold-hearted bastard.
Not just selfish, but mean
. Ask Tess. Ask those little girls who had sobbed as he was leaving. He couldn’t even look at that rag doll without being filled with self-loathing.

Little Peggy had been able to overcome her own distress enough to think of someone else first, to try and bring comfort.

That final scene filled him with shame.

Looking around the ultra-modern bareness of the cottage, Ryder missed the inn. He missed doorknobs coming off in his hands, and the imperfection of the sloping kitchen floor. He missed the fact that everywhere you looked inside or outside that inn, there was something that needed doing.

Not like here.

Unbelievably, he missed all that Christmas clutter, the hokey cheer of wrapped packages and angels in trees, white poinsettias and red cushions. He missed the way the tree smelled, and he found he especially missed the crackle, the warmth, the coziness of the real fire.

He had a gas version here, throwing up phony-looking blue flames behind a stainless-steel enclosure, not beginning to touch the chill.

He missed getting up in the morning and having that sense of urgency and purpose.

He missed Mona’s cooking, and the quiet companionship and wisdom of Tim, he missed the girls fussing over Tess and
jostling for position to show him their drawings and tell him their stories.

Who was he kidding? Certainly not the person he wanted to kid the most. He was not even beginning to kid himself.

He missed Emma. He missed her quirky hair and the ever-changing moss-and-mist of her eyes. He missed her laughter and the mulish set of her jaw. He missed her voice, her ability to have fun, the seemingly endless generosity of her heart.

He missed the subtle scent on her skin, and her hand brushing his at unexpected moments, and he could not get the taste of her mouth out of his mind.

He missed how, against all odds, she held onto hope.

Most of all he missed how he had felt.
Not alone
.

Instead of that he had chosen this. A cottage so dreary and cold that he could not seem to warm it up no matter what he did.

Or maybe it was himself he could not warm up.

That time, the night before she had married his brother, when his sister-in-law had said to him with such honesty and affection, “You and Drew are the rarest of finds. Good men,” now seemed like one of the things he had lost to the fire.

He did not feel like a good man anymore.

A good man would not have left the White Christmas Inn, putting his selfish need to protect himself above the heartbreak of a shrieking baby and two little girls who had the maturity to know that even when you hurt, you still gave, you still tried to make the world better instead of worse.

A good man would not have left Tim to be the sole man to try and get that place ready for the crowds that would be descending on Holiday Happenings.

And Ryder knew there were crowds, because the only call he’d made since he’d got here was to the PR firm that handled all his company’s advertising. He’d had to go and use the pay
phone at the Lakeside Grocery and Ice Cream Palace because he’d so stubbornly left his cell phone at home.

Patrick had promised he would call in all his favors to make sure everyone within a day’s drive of the inn knew about what was happening there, and knew what the proceeds were going to.

“Wow,” Patrick had said before he hung up, “what a great way to shake off the blues from the storm and get back in the Christmas spirit. I’m going to take my wife and kids out. And what would you think if I suggested people arrive with an unwrapped gift for the families that will be spending Christmas with her?”

“Perfect,” Ryder had said.

But it didn’t feel perfect at all. It didn’t take away one bit of the guilt he was experiencing.

Because all Emma had wanted was one Christmas that felt good, and he had walked away from her.

It wasn’t him she wanted, precisely, he tried to tell himself. It was that feeling of family. He thought of his parting words, hoping her mother came for Christmas. As if that absolved him in some way.

Absolved? He didn’t owe her anything!

But a good man would have stayed, not protected himself.

“Well, I’m not a good man,” he said out loud.

Tess shot him a look that clearly said
You aren’t kidding
.

He remembered Tim suddenly not being able to look at him when Emma had said she would be sending the bus ticket that day, that her mother would arrive for Christmas Eve.

He scowled. Tim didn’t think Lynelle White was going to come home for Christmas with her daughter. And, after all Emma had confided in him, could Ryder possibly believe Lynelle would show up?

Ryder could barely stand the thought of one more disap
pointment for Emma. A phone call. He’d just check. That was all.

He wrestled Tess into her coat after all, but not to go and build a snowman. As soon as he tucked her into the car seat, she started to sing happily. Anticipating a return to the inn.

“I’m not going that far,” he said grouchily. “I’m just going back to the pay phone. And that will teach me to leave my cell phone at home, too!”

At the Lakeside Grocery, while watching Tess in the car talking happy nonsense to Bebo, he inserted his credit card in the phone. And then he had to sweet-talk a very cranky operator to get her to check every directory in two provinces before he found the name he was looking for. Thankfully, Lynelle still had the last name
White
.

Finally, determined but his fingers numb from the cold, he called the number he had found.

A raspy voice answered.

“May I speak to Lynelle White please?”

No answer at first, but he could hear loud voices in the background.

“And who wants to speak to her?” The voice became cagey, loaded with suspicion. It sounded like there was a party going on. Not the nice kind, with Christmas music and tinkling glasses. The kind where fights broke out and bottles got smashed.

It occurred to him the words were slurred around the edges.

“Is this Lynelle?” he asked.

“Yup.” There was the distinct sound of a match being struck, followed by the long slow inhale.

He suddenly wasn’t sure what to say.
Go spend Christmas with your daughter. Tell her you’re proud of her. Make a fuss over the inn. Make a fuss over her. Help her have that one good Christmas.

“My name’s Ryder Richardson. I—”

He needn’t have worried what to say, because Lynelle didn’t let him finish. “Look, buddy, whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.” And then she said a phrase he’d heard on plenty of construction sites and slammed down the phone.

He took the dead receiver from his ear, stared at it for a moment. Then, slowly, Ryder replaced the receiver in the cradle. He knew there was no sense calling back.

He knew why Tim had looked away when Emma had said she would send the ticket. And he knew why Emma had never had a good Christmas.

From that extremely short encounter, he knew everything about Lynelle, Emma’s mother, that you could know.

And he knew she wasn’t going to anyplace called the White Christmas Inn for the holidays. In all likelihood, a bus ticket cashed in was what the background noise was all about.

A girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Emma had confided in him, telling him about her botched engagement, bowled over by the attentions of a doctor, probably for no more reason than that the doctor
wasn’t
from the wrong side of the tracks.

Standing there in the cold outside the phone booth, it became very clear to Ryder that he and Emma had something in common.

They both longed for a Christmas that could never happen.

His hopes destroyed by death.

Hers just plain unrealistic.

But at least he’d known what it was to be surrounded by a family’s love at Christmas.

That’s what it was all about for Emma, he realized. All the decorations, all the holiday happenings, all the Christmas Day Dream.

She still hoped.

Despite life giving her all kinds of evidence to the contrary, Emma stubbornly clung to a belief that life was good, people were good, that given enough chances they would eventually do the right thing.

Believe.

And he wondered if he could be the man his sister-in-law had thought he was, a man he had once been. A man who believed, when all was said and done, in himself. It was not the immature belief that he could just use his strength and his will to create the world he wanted, but the deeper belief that when life didn’t go his way and didn’t give him what he wanted, he could count on himself to be strong enough, and to forgive himself when he wasn’t.

If he was such a man, he would go back there, and turn hope into belief, then he would be the man he had once been. Better, maybe. A man worthy of Emma.

But that was one big
if
.

It was nearly ten o’clock, the night before Christmas Eve. Emma could finally abandon her post by the parking lot where she had been collecting admission and stamping hands.

She hurried to the warming shed, where Mona gave her a frazzled look.

“Emma, could you go to the house and see if there are any more of the chocolate-dipped shortbread cookies in the freezer? I sold out the last of them that we had here. And if you could put a few more of the wreaths out, that would be great.”

Emma hiked up to the house, and looked at the long line of cars parked all the way down the driveway. For hours, people had been walking up from the main road, the closest parking, carrying brand-new toys and teddy bears, paying the admission happily.

“Where did you hear about it?” she asked the first family to arrive, the first night Holiday Happenings had finally opened, after they told her they had driven up from Ontario just for this.

“Oh, it’s on the radio.” And then they’d given her an extra twenty to help with expenses for the Christmas Day Dream. They actually called it by name!

“Lovely idea,” the mother had said. “Exactly what I want my kids to know about Christmas.” And then, “Would you mind if I peeked around inside the house? We’re always looking for these charming little out-of-the-way places to spend a few days in during the summer.”

They heard it on the radio? Emma hadn’t been able to afford a radio ad. She’d put up some posters and run a few ads in the classified sections of a few New Brunswick papers. Her budget had not allowed for more than that, certainly not for Ontario.

And who was telling them to bring an unwrapped gift for the Christmas Day Dream?

How did they even know about the Christmas Day Dream?