Читать книгу The Christmas Company - Alys Murray - Страница 10

Chapter Five

Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. He left her with that declaration, and all she could think was: Well, at least I know you can feel something.

No. The thought put him in an unfair light. He’d shown tiny flashes of emotions over the course of their two conversations. Rage. Annoyance. Frustration. Fear.

But the deep, aching loneliness she saw in him when she suggested he didn’t have to spend Christmas alone resonated inside of her. Until now, this entire…spectacle was little more than a means to an end. She assumed he had to be, at least on some level, a lonely man. Does a content, happy, and fulfilled person hate Christmas? No. But she now realized her actions here could serve more than one purpose. She could help him and save the town. She could teach him the true meaning of Christmas while also restoring Christmas for the people she loved most in the entire world.

Despite what countless TV shows and movies had taught her, she really could have it all.

First, she needed to get him to come back into the living room with her. She knew that wouldn’t happen just on its own. Shouting at him from the living room to come back and hang out with her so she could show him the beauty of the season probably wasn’t her best bet.

“Think, Kate,” she muttered to herself, pacing the living room. “Think.”

Pacing the Persian rug, she surveyed the room. It was, in every sense of the word, rich. The house was built in a faux-Victorian style, an American collection of half-British angles and ornamentation, and the inside reflected Mr. Woodward’s inclination to show off his wealth. He presented himself as a gaudy man, to say the least, and he never shied away from spending money or talking about spending money—a trait he clearly didn’t share with his nephew. Kate’s pacing only halted when she heard the movement of a loose tile in the kitchen.

“He’s gone,” she called. “You can come out now.”

No sooner had she spoken than Michael burst from behind the swinging door, which smacked against the nearest wall. He huffed and puffed with the dramatics of an amateur opera singer, as if he’d been shoved into a tiny, airless closet instead of the well-stocked kitchen for the last ten minutes.

“What was that?” he spluttered, pointing at a random place in the room. Kate could only assume he meant to point at somewhere Clark stood, but she had no way of knowing for sure. It was obvious he’d been eavesdropping. She returned to her pacing, rolling over everything she’d learned about the man from their last encounter.

He was so cold. Not just in the way he spoke to her or saw the world, but in his eyes. He was frozen down to his heart. She just hoped a good Christmas fire could be lit and melt the ice and frost away, not just for their sake, but for his.

“That,” she answered, a bit too smug for her own good, “was the first stage of my plan.”

“And you just let him go?”

“Yeah.” She ran a hand through her hair and checked her wrist for a ponytail holder she already knew wasn’t there. Her dirty blonde hair was so long and thick it often broke the thin elastics, leaving her to fuss and fiddle with her locks whenever she got too nervous to think straight. Tugging on one strand of hair, as if to pull some wisdom from her own brain, she tried to lay down her plan. “He needs time to cool off. Nothing was going to get done by needling him.”

“What’s your genius plan now, huh?”

Genius. That was it. When she was seven years old, Miss Cartwright—owner of the music and dance studio near the center of town—told her she could be a genius piano player if she ever put her mind to it. When The Christmas Company said it would pay for her lessons if she used her skills for the festival every year, she’d readily accepted.

And as it happened, the Woodward House’s living room housed the town’s most beautiful and most expensive piano, which sat in the corner across from the Christmas tree, waiting to be played.

Kate wandered over to the ancient Steinway. Her fingers only just brushed the ebony cover. It shot a thrill through her, like touching a holy relic; she needed to approach with reverence.

“We’re going to smoke him out of his room.”

“How?” Michael asked, as she lifted the cover and took her place on the bench. Shaking his head, he immediately began a muttered stream of vain prayers. “Don’t say with song. Please don’t say with song.”

Her fingers touched the keys. Out of tune. She winced, but pressed forward.

“With song,” she confirmed.

It was perfect, really. So much had already been written and spoken about the power of music, Kate didn’t think twice about this stage of her plan. Music spoke to the soul in a language unwhispered by any other tongue. Her screaming after him about the magic of the season wouldn’t work, but her joyful voice raised in song might be enough to coax him out of his hiding place, wherever that might have been.

Michael didn’t share her optimism.

“We’re doomed. We’re totally doomed. This isn’t a song and dance kind of guy, Kate.”

“I know.” She cracked her knuckles. It was going to take a lot of singing to cover the flaws of this piano’s lack of tuning, but she never backed away from a challenge. Besides, she listed “singing Christmas Carols” as one of the Special Skills on her resumé. Without knowing it, she’d trained for this exact moment her entire life. “That’s why this is going to work.”

“And what’s your plan after this, hmm? Make him fall in love with you and the town like one of those movies you love so much?”

“I’m not going to fall in love with Clark.”

“Right. Because you’re going to be an old maid and Miller’s Point and the festival will be your family and your children. I’ve heard this speech before. Besides, I didn’t say anything about you falling in love with him. I said he would fall in love with you.”

“Love doesn’t factor into this plan at all,” she rushed out, eager to be done with this particular conversation. Whenever she and Michael broached the topic of her love life, they played out the same old song and dance. She reminded him that romantic, all-consuming, life-changing love never entered her mind as a possibility for herself. The pickings in town were slim and most of the people they went to high school with were paired off by the summer after senior year. And even if some handsome stranger did ride into town and she did want to fall in love with him, she wasn’t even sure she knew how to go about doing it.

And then, he’d remind her that anyone could fall in love—no one knew how to fall in love; it just happened—and they’d go around and around in circles. She didn’t have time for circles and talk of romance today, especially not in the context of Clark Woodward. “We’re going to do Christmas our way. And…” Her fingers ran along the keys, testing them out one by one in no particular order. She struggled to articulate what about Clark she struggled with or how she planned to get the best of him. “He’s got this thing about him. He’s lonely. I can tell.”

“He’s inherited a corporation worth millions of dollars, at least. I think he cuddles a body pillow stuffed with hundred-dollar bills every night.”

“The money doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean, the money doesn’t matter?”

Before this morning, Kate never would have made such a bold claim. She lived in a two-and-a-half-room apartment above the town’s only bookshop. A broken lock barely kept her door closed and she existed on a steady diet of diner food and gas station salad bowls. If anyone knew the importance of money and the detriment of not having it, it was Kate. But when faced with Clark, she didn’t see a rich man or a happy one. He was someone desperate to hide his own crippling solitary confinement. He believed himself above Christmas because he believed himself above people in general, a fact Kate was out to prove completely false.

“It doesn’t. I mean, I thought it did, but there’s something there. Or, something isn’t there. And if we can give it to him…”

Michael nodded and helped himself to the opposite end of the piano bench as Kate continued to noodle some random melodies. She operated on muscle memory, barely pressing the keys for noise.

“He may just want to give us the festival.”

“And he’ll be a better man for it.”