Читать книгу The Complete Christmas Collection - Джанис Мейнард, Rebecca Winters - Страница 73

INSTEAD of moving toward the temptation, the pretense, of being a man he was not, Ryder mentally reshouldered his burdens, and stopped playing the little game with Tess, but not before he felt that small sigh of gratitude that his niece did bring some lightness into a world gone dark.

“Can she have a cookie?” Emma asked, coming back to her original question.

“I’ll try her with a little baby food first.” He dug through the bag, and a bottle dropped to the floor. He watched it roll downhill, another indicator the house was hiding some major problems.

Which were, he noted thankfully, none of his concern. He fetched the bottle back, and got out a jar, which he heated in the microwave for a few seconds.

But, of course, the baby food proved impossible, Tess wiggling around in the high chair Emma had unearthed and focused totally on the cookies that surrounded her. She swatted impatiently when he tried to deliver pureed carrots to her.

“Certified organic, too,” he said, finally quitting, wiping a splotch of carrot off his shirt. “She had a bottle in the car a while ago, so go ahead, give her a cookie.”

Unmindful that the baby was now covered in carrots, including some in the tangle of hair he was not allowed to touch, Emma swooped her up from the high chair.

“Which one, Tess?” Emma asked, stopping at each plate, letting his niece inspect.

Tess chose a huge gingerbread man, picked a jelly bean off his belly and gobbled it up.

“You must be hungry, too,” Emma said to him. “I can’t offer anything fancy. I have hot dogs for Holiday Happenings.”

No! After all his work at distraction, they were right back to this? The shadow in her eyes darkened every time she mentioned her weather-waylaid event.

“If you’d like a glass of mulled wine or hot chocolate, I have several gallons of both at the warming shed.”

Several gallons of wine sounded terribly attractive.

An escape he did not allow himself. Tess needed better.

“A couple of hot dogs would be perfect.” He watched Tess polish off the jelly-bean buttons and take a mighty bite of her gingerbread man’s head. Disappointment registered on her face as she chewed.

“YUCK.” Without ceremony she spat out what was in her mouth, tossed the headless gingerbread man on the floor and reached for a different cookie.

Emma thought it was funny, but these were the challenges in his life. What was best for Tess? Was she too young to try and teach her manners? Did he just accept the fact she didn’t like the cookie and let it go? Or by doing nothing was he teaching her the lifelong habit of smashing cookies on the floor?

Serial smasher.

Ryder rubbed at his forehead. He could convince himself he did okay on the big things for Tess: providing a home, clothing, food, a lovely middle-aged nanny who loved his niece to distraction. But it was always the little things, cookies and bonnets, that made him wonder what the hell he was doing.

People had the audacity to hint he needed a partner, a wife, a feminine influence for Tess, but to him the fact they suggested it only meant he had become successful at hiding how broken he was inside. What little he had left to give he was saving for Tess, and he hoped it would be enough.

Suddenly he felt too tired and too hungry even to think.

Or to defend himself against the thought that came.

That he was alone in the world. That all the burdens of the past and all the decisions about the future were his alone to carry and to make.

The warmth of the White Christmas Inn was creeping inside him, despite his efforts to keep it at bay, making him feel more alone.

Emma had said Christmas transformed everything and made it magic, and she had said there were spirits here who protected all who entered. But the last thing he needed was to be so tired and hungry that her whimsy could seep past the formidable wall of his defenses.

So what if he didn’t have what most people were able to take for granted? So what if life was unfair? He already knew that better than most. So, he didn’t have someone to ask about the baby spitting out a cookie, he didn’t have a holiday season to look forward to instead of dread, he didn’t have a place to belong that was somehow more than walls and furniture. He had made his choice. Not to rely on anyone or anything, because he of all people knew that those things could be taken in an instant.

Loss had left him weakened, more loss would finish him. He had a responsibility. He was all Tess had left in the world. He wasn’t leaving himself open to the very forces that had nearly destroyed him already.

Ryder Richardson needed desperately to be strong for the little girl who had fallen asleep in Emma’s arms, one mashed half-eaten cookie still clutched in a grubby fist.

He felt his strength returning after he ate the hot dogs and about two dozen of the cookies. But inside he felt crabby about this situation he found himself in. He had made himself a world without tests, and he felt as if he was being tested.

Make that crabbier.

“Thanks for the meal,” he said, formally. “If you could show me our room, Tess needs to be put in a bed, and I need to check the weather.”

“I don’t quite know how to break this to you,” whatever she was about to break to him delighted her, he noticed with annoyance, “but the only way you’ll be checking the weather from your room is by sticking your head out the window.”

For a moment he didn’t quite grasp what she was saying. And when he did, the sensation of crabbiness, of his life being wrested out of his control, intensified.

No television in the room. No escape, no way of turning off everything going on inside him. He considered the television the greatest tool ever invented for numbing wayward feelings, for acting as anesthetic for a doubting mind.

“People come here to get away from it all,” she said cheerfully.

“To feel the magic,” he said, faintly sarcastic.

“Precisely,” she said happily, he suspected missing his sarcasm deliberately.

“You have a television somewhere, right?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“No buts. Lead me to it. Or face the wrath of man.”

She didn’t seem to find his pun funny at all. And he was glad. He really didn’t need to experience Emma’s laughter again. Especially if he was going to stay strong.

The wrath of man. Funny. Except he meant it. And there was something in him, something fierce and closed, that reminded Emma of a warrior. There was no doubt in her mind he would lay down his life for the baby that so obviously held his hardened heart in the pudgy pink palm of her hand.

The baby had clearly—and gleefully—demonstrated her power with the hilarious hair show.

But whatever moment of lightness he had allowed himself then was gone from Ryder’s face now. He was practically bristling with bad temper.

It would be a foolish time to let him know that television was not part of Emma’s vision for the White Pond Inn, and it certainly didn’t fit in with its incarnation as the White Christmas Inn.

But she had already told him she believed in spirits and magic, risking Ryder’s scorn because she had vowed, after Peter, there would be no more trying to hide who she really was from other people, no more giving opinions that they wanted to hear.

What an expert she had become at reading what Peter wanted from the faintest purse of lips, giving that to him, making him happy at her own expense. How many times had she swallowed back what she really wanted to say so as not to risk his disapproval, his patronizing suggestions for her “improvement”?

“I consider the inn a techno-electro-free zone,” she said, and could hear a certain fierceness in her own voice, as if somehow it was this man’s fault that even after she had nearly turned herself inside-out trying to please Peter, he had still searched for someone more suitable. And found her.

“Techno-electro,” he said, mulling over the word, which she was pretty sure she had just invented.

“Television is not on the activities agenda, not even on the bad-weather days.”

“I’m dying to know what you do on the bad-weather days.”

Even though he clearly wasn’t, she forged on, determined to be herself. “I bring out board games, and a selection of jigsaw puzzles. I always have tons of books around. I encourage guests to shut off their cell phones and leave the laptops at home.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, daring him to find her corny while almost hoping he would. Because if he judged her the way Peter had judged her she could dismiss the somewhat debilitating attraction she felt for him.

She realized she was a little disappointed when he didn’t even address her philosophy.

“Since I’m here by the force of fate, instead of by choice, you’re going to make an exception for me.”

It wasn’t a question, and he was absolutely right. He had not come here looking for what her other guests came here looking for. He was not enchanted, and he had no intention of being brought under the spell of the White Christmas Inn.

Which was good. What would she do with a man like that under her spell?

“I do have a television in my room,” she admitted reluctantly.

What she didn’t admit to was the DVD player. They were guilty pleasures she indulged in when she was just too exhausted to do even one more thing. There was always something to be done when you ran an establishment like this: windows to be cleaned, bedding to be laundered, floors to be polished, flower beds, lawns, paint-touchups. And that was just the day-to-day chores and didn’t include the catastrophes, like the time the upstairs bathtub had fallen through the floor.

Sometimes, it was true, on those bad-weather days while her guests played games, she watched a growing collection of romantic movies. She saw them as a replacement for emotional entanglement, not a longing for it.

“Your room? That’s the only television in the house?” The thought of entering her bedroom clearly made him as uncomfortable as it made her.

The very thought of those dark warrior eyes taking in the details of her room made her heart beat a fast and traitorous tempo. Her room matched the theme of Christmas: white, though that was how her room was year-round. The walls were the color of rich dairy cream, there was a thick white duvet on the gorgeous bed, an abundance of white pillows in delicious rich textures and fabrics.

When she walked in, the room always seemed soft to her, as comforting as a feather pillow.

But when she saw it through his eyes, she wondered what he would see. And the thought came to her: virginal.

A warrior and a virgin.

She nearly choked on the renegade thought, told herself she had been reading a few too many of the romance novels, more replacements, so much safer and more predictable than real-life romance. She kept a nice selection in tidy stacks on her bedside table, right beside the much-watched DVDs.

But it would make her feel altogether too vulnerable for him to see that, since he might misinterpret her fascination with a certain style of book and film as longing rather than what it was.

“I’ll go get the television for you. You’d be more comfortable watching it down here than in my room.” And then she blushed as if discussing her room was akin to discussing her panties. Which might be lying on the floor, one of the relaxed slips of the single life.

“I can carry it for you.”

“No, no,” she protested, too strenuously, “it’s tiny.”

“That figures,” he said, still grouchy, having no problem at all being himself. Which was grouchy and cynical and Christmas-hating. It really balanced out the formidable attraction of his good looks quite remarkably.

“Make yourself comfortable.” She handed the sleeping baby back to him, dislodging the cookie from the fist first. “Go into the great room. Through there. I’ll be down in a sec.”

She hoped her room would have the calming effect on her that it always did. But it didn’t. There were no panties on the floor, of course, because she liked the room to look perfect, but even still, instead of being her soothing sanctuary, her sea of textured white softness seemed sensual, like a bridal chamber.

She realized she had been reading too many books, watching too many glorious movies, because totally unbidden her mind provided her with a picture of what he might look like here, lying on that bed, naked from the waist up, holding his arms out to her, his eyes holding smoldering welcome. She shivered at the heat of the picture, at the animal stab of desire she felt.

Your mother was a wild child, Tim had told her sadly, when she had been crushed by Lynelle’s absence at her own mother’s funeral. It was like an illness she was born with. Nothing around these parts ever interested her or was good enough for her.

Peter’s mother had not warmed to Emma when they had finally met on that disastrous Christmas Day last year. Emma had felt acutely that when Mrs. Henderson looked at her, she disapproved of something. Make that everything.

“Stop it,” Emma ordered herself sternly. Just because you had a wild child in you didn’t mean you had to be owned by it, the way her mother had been. It was not part of being herself. In fact, it was something she intended to fight.

So she swept the romance novels off the bedside table and shoved them under the bed. Then, realizing it could just as easily be another symptom of make-yourself-over-so-other-people-will-like-you, as of fighting-the-wild-child, she fished them back out and stood holding them, not sure what to do.

This is what a man did! Disrupted a perfectly contented life. She set the books on the table and planted the DVDs right on top of them.

Ryder Richardson was not coming into this room. Why was she acting as if he would ever see this? He was a stranger, and despite the harsh judgments in Mrs. Henderson’s eyes, and despite her mother’s example, Emma was not the kind of woman who conducted dalliances with strangers, no matter how attractive they were. No matter how attractive their helpless devotion for a baby.

Still, despite the fact Emma was definitely not conducting a dalliance, she quickly divested herself of the long johns under her jeans. They were not making her feel just bulky, but also hot and bothered.

Wait, maybe that was him!

Despite the fact she’d ordered herself not to, she spent a moment more trying to do something with hair made crazier by the Santa hat.

“Tess and I would tie for first place in the bad-hair-day contest,” she told herself, combing some curl conditioner through her hair. The flattened curls sprang up as though she had stuck her finger in a socket, not exactly the effect she’d been looking for.

On the other hand, she was not conducting a dalliance, so the worse she looked the better, right? She was hardly a temptation!

And never had been. When Peter’s old girlfriend, Monique, had reentered the picture, he had gone back to her.

And blamed Emma! Her attention to the inn had caused him to be unfaithful. It hadn’t been his fault, it had been hers.

She left the room, that memory fresh enough that no member of the male species was going to look attractive to her! Then she had to go back for the television she had gone up for in the first place.

Trying to look only composed, indifferent, neither a wild child nor a woman scorned, she moved into the great room, placed the TV on a small rosewood end table and plugged it in.

She needn’t have worried about her hair. Or about being seduced by a warrior. Or about giving in to her own impulses.

A typical man, from the moment that television was plugged in, Ryder was totally focused on it. He made no effort to hide the fact he was appalled by its size.

“That isn’t a TV,” he grumbled. He moved his chair to within a foot of it, the snoozing baby a part of him, like a small football nestled in the crook of his arm. “Oh, wait, it is. Imported from the land of little people, the only place on earth that is known to make a seven-inch screen.” He held out his hand, and Emma slapped the remote into it.

“Nine,” she told him.

He turned on the TV.

“Color,” he commented with faked amazement. “Quite a concession to the times, Emma. Quite a concession.”

Well, at least he hadn’t even noticed the hideous, pathetic effort she had made to fix her hair.

Ryder began grimly switching from channel to channel.

“You should have televisions in the rooms,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the set. “Men like that. A lot.”

“Actually, I know that.”

He gave her a skeptical look, as if somehow she had managed to give him the impression she was the least likely person to know what men liked. A lot.

Her hidden wild child did know. Maybe if she had let that wicked woman out now and then, instead of trying so hard to be circumspect, Peter would still be hers.

“Well,” he said, with a hint of sarcasm, “why pander to what people like, after all? Never mind good business.”

Is it that clear to him, on the basis of our very short acquaintance, that business isn’t exactly my strength? Should she put in television sets next year? She hated herself for even thinking it! For letting her judgment be so influenced!

“I want people to engage in the experience I offer,” she said, aware she was arguing as if she was making a case before the Supreme Court. “The White Pond Inn is about old-fashioned family time. Games in the parlor. Fishing at the pond. Hikes. Reading a book in a hammock. Watching fireflies.”

How wholesome. Not a hint of wild child in that!

But she might as well have spared herself the effort. She had lost his interest. He settled Tess on the long length of his thigh. The baby, her face smudged with cookies, and her hair tangles intact, sighed with contentment in her sleep. She settled onto his leg, her padded, frilly rump pointed in the air, her legs curled underneath her tummy, her cheek resting on his knee. In moments, a gentle little snore was coming from her.

Ryder’s one hand rested on her back, protective, unconsciously tender. It would have made a lovely picture to go with Emma’s decor, except for the fact that his other hand had a death grip on the remote control.

And then there was the unlovely scowl that deepened on his face as each channel reported the same ominous weather.

The storm was not projected to end until the early hours of morning.

Even then, roads reopening were going to depend on highway clean-up. One channel showed a clip of a road outside Fredericton. The scene showed devastation, the road completely blocked by sagging power lines, by trees broken and splintered by the weight of the ice on them.

Ryder snapped off the television. It looked to Emma as though he wanted to hurl her channel changer through the screen.

“Where were you going?” she asked wondering at his desperation to be out of here. “Is someone waiting for you tonight?”

“No,” he said. “No one’s waiting.” It said something about his life—starkly lonely, not that anything about him invited sympathy. Except the baby sprawling along the muscled length of his upper thigh.

“Where were you going?” she asked again. Nothing about him invited her questions, either, and yet something made her ask them anyway. The truth was she wasn’t going to be invisible ever again. Not even if that was safe.

“We were going to my cottage on Lake Kackaticka.”

Emma frowned. She was familiar with the lake and the community of upscale cottages that surrounded it. At this time of year it was pretty much abandoned. A few year-round residents looked after the cottages, but the summer people stayed away. It was cold and dreary around the lake in the winter.

“Who goes there in the winter?”

“No one,” he said, making no attempt to disguise his satisfaction.

“How long were you going for?”

He shrugged.

“The weekend?”

He shrugged again, and she suspected the truth.

“You weren’t going to spend Christmas there, were you?”

“Yes, I was, not past tense, either. Yes, I am.”

“Alone?”

“Not alone. Me and Tess.”

“But what kind of Christmas would that be for her?”

He looked at the sleeping baby, doubt crossing those supremely confident features, but only for a moment.

“She has no idea that it is Christmas.”

It was his right to parent that baby however he wanted, Emma told herself sternly. He was her guest. It really wasn’t her place to argue with him. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she’d invited him here, or called down the weather personally to inconvenience him.

She didn’t think pandering to his bad temper was a good idea, and besides she was committed to expressing her opinion after a year and a half of biting her tongue for Peter’s convenience! And look where that had gotten her!

She’d already voiced her thoughts several times tonight, and apparently there was no stopping her now. In fact, she felt an obligation to render her opinion for the sake of Tess!

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him.

He glared at the empty screen of the TV, then picked up the channel changer and turned the television back on, deciding it was interesting after all. “That just shows you’ve been sheltered up here in your fairy-tale world. You don’t know the first thing about sad.”

There was no point saying anything more. She could tell in the set of his jaw that he was the stubborn type who never would admit he was wrong or change his mind.

And yet there was that little ghost girl again, the one who’d been disappointed by every single Christmas, who insisted she knew everything there was to know about sad and how dare he insinuate otherwise?

It must have been the ghost girl who couldn’t let it go.

Emma said, sharply, “You’re depriving Tess of Christmas, that’s not just selfish. It’s mean.”

The announcer on TV picked that moment to say, voice over a map covered with red lines of road closures that it would be three days before travel resumed on some of those roads.

Ryder Richardson swore under his breath.

“I suppose the baby doesn’t know any better than that, either,” Emma said.

“You know what? I need you to show me to my room.” He stood up, not bothering to shut off the television, lifting the baby with graceful unconsciousness as he stood, tucking her sleeping head into his shoulder. To himself he said, almost musing. “It couldn’t get much worse than this, could it?”

But Emma, dedicated to airing her views, wasn’t letting it pass. Just this afternoon she had been a woman totally content with herself and her circumstances. Totally. And now wild-child and woman-scorned, and wholesome-experienced-innkeeper were all wrestling around inside her in a turmoil because of him, and she found she resented this intrusion on her life.

“No,” she agreed coldly, “it couldn’t.”

But it did.

The lights flickered, dimmed, flickered again, and then the room was plunged into darkness. The television went out with a sputter, the embers from a dying fire threw weak golden light across them.

“It just got worse, didn’t it?”

His voice in the darkness was a sensuous rasp that wild-child loved.

“Yes, it did,” she said coolly.

“Do you ever get the feeling the gods are laughing at you?” he asked, not for the first time that night.

“Yes,” she said sadly, “I do.” Was now a good time to break the bad news to him? “The furnace is electric.”

Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. The firelight flashed gold, on the perfect planes of his face. Wild-child sighed.

It took him a moment to get what she meant.

“Are you saying the only source of heat in this falling-down old wreck is that fireplace?”

“Falling-down old wreck?” she breathed, incensed, pleased that woman-scorned was taking charge, getting the upper hand. “How dare you?”

It felt so good to say that! To stand up for herself! She wished she would have said that to Peter, at least once.

But no, not even when he’d told her, so sheepishly, while still making it her fault he and Monique had been seeing each other, what had she said?

I understand.

“Your front bell sounds broken, the door handle did come off in your hand, there’s frost on the inside of the windows, and when I dropped the baby’s bottle it rolled down the floor.”

“Which means?” she asked haughtily.

“Probably your foundation is moving. The floor isn’t level.”

All her work on creating pure Christmas charm, and he was seeing that?

“Do you always focus on the negative?” she snapped. How much did it cost to fix a moving foundation, anyway?

“I do,” he said without an ounce of apology, even though he followed up with, “Sorry.”

“You aren’t sorry,” Emma breathed. “You’re a miserable selfish man who is intent on spoiling Christmas not just for yourself, but for your niece and anyone else who has the misfortune to cross paths with you.”

“Well, aren’t you glad I won’t be around to spoil it for you?” he said smoothly, completely unabashed by his behavior.

“Huh. With my record, you probably will still be around Christmas Day. Spoiling things.”

Silence, the light softening something in his features, an illusion, nothing more. But when he spoke, there was something softer in his voice.

“What does that mean, with your record?”

Don’t tell him, she ordered herself. Don’t. But another part of her, weary, thought Why not? What difference does it make?

“It means I’ve never had a Christmas that wasn’t spoiled. So why should this one be any different?”

Silence. She’d left herself wide open to his sarcasm, so thank God he was saying nothing.

Only when he did speak, she wished he’d chosen sarcasm.

“You’ve never had a good Christmas?” He seemed legitimately astounded. And legitimately sorry, for the first time. But then his customary skepticism won out. “Come on.”

She remembered last year, excited as a small child, arriving at Peter’s parents’ home. No, not a home. A mansion. A picture out of a splendid movie. The trees on the long drive lit with white lights, every window of the house lit, she could see the enormous tree sparkling through the window.

And that had been the beginning of a Christmas that looked exactly like the Christmases she had dreamed as a little girl, but that felt like an excursion into hell.

“Have you?” she asked Ryder, tilting her chin proudly, knowing his answer. There was only one reason people hated Christmas, wasn’t there? They’d given up trying to make it something it could never be.

Maybe it was time for her to surrender, too, to forget trying to change her fortunes, to abandon that little girl who wanted something so badly. Maybe it all was just an illusion. Christmas had become a corny, commercial package, a dream that no one could ever make a reality.

Maybe the truth was that it was a terrible time of year, laden with too much stress and far too many expectations. Maybe it would be a good time to plan a vacation to Hawaii. It probably would have been a whole lot easier to talk her mother into celebrating Christmas in Hawaii than it had been to convince her to come here.

A trip to Hawaii would be possible after a successful year of business. Maybe I’ll give in and add televisions, after all. If the foundation doesn’t collapse.

After a long time, he surprised her by saying, quietly and with obvious reluctance. “Yes, I have. Had good Christmases.”

She could feel him shifting in the dancing light of the fireplace flames. He came way too close, and peered down at her.

He shifted the baby into the crook of his elbow, and with his free hand he did the oddest thing.

He touched her hair.

“We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” he said solemnly, as if he had touched it only to make that point. “I won’t wreck your Christmas, Emma.”

She saw something desolate in his eyes, and was taken aback by the realization that he was trying to protect her from that.

“If you’ve had good Christmases, don’t you want that for Tess?” she asked, quietly. “I had a mother who thought Christmas was a nuisance. It was awful.”

And maybe it wasn’t just Christmas, but parenthood in general, that her mother had found bothersome.

That’s what had made Emma so eager to please, to prove somehow she was a good person. Worthy. Was she still trying to prove that? Was that what Holiday Happenings and Christmas Day Dream were really about?

She hated that she was questioning the purity of her motivations.

“Emma, I’m doing my best,” he said quietly. “Just leave it.”

But she couldn’t. “And what if your best just isn’t good enough?”

“Don’t you think I ask myself that every day?”

She studied him, saw the torment in his face, went from being angry with him and with herself and with Peter and her mother and the world, to feeling something far more dangerous. Empathy.

“If you’ve had good Christmases, why do you hate it so much now?” she asked him.

The pause was very long, as if he considered telling her something, fought with it, won.

“Emma, I’m just passing through. I’m not leaving my burdens here when I go.”

He said it almost protectively, as if they would be too heavy for her to handle. He was right. They were strangers.

That was not changed by the fact he had touched her hair.

Or by the fact that he had an adorable baby.

It was not changed by the fact that they were marooned here by the storm, like shipwreck survivors on a desert island.

He had his baggage and she had hers, and he was right not to share it, to keep his boundaries high. It was a reminder of what she needed to do, as well.

“I’ll find a flashlight,” she said, moving away from the emotional minefield they were treading so lightly, realizing the only thing they had to share was how to get through a night without electricity.

She sighed. “If the power stays out, in very short order this room will be the only truly warm one in the house. I have a crib upstairs, and we can haul a mattress down here for you. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I hope the power is going to come back on,” he said.

So do I, but the way my luck is running, I doubt it. “I’ll show you where the crib is.”

Moments later, Emma, holding the sleeping baby, was watching him take the crib apart. Despite her resolve that they be nothing more than strangers, she couldn’t help but admire how comfortable he was with tools, the man-thing.

It had taken her the better part of an afternoon to put that crib together, studying instructions, putting A into B. He had the whole thing dismantled and downstairs in a matter of minutes.

While he was reassembling the crib, Emma went back upstairs to get a mattress off the bed in the room closest to the staircase.

“Tess didn’t even know I’d moved her,” he commented, coming up behind her.

“She sleeps like a log.”

“I’m envious,” he said. A man who carried burdens so heavy they affected his sleep?

Don’t pursue it, she told herself.

“It’s already chilly up here,” he said.

“Well, you know these old wrecks. The insulation is in about the same shape as the foundation.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I have a tendency to be way too sensitive. I know there’s lots wrong with the old place. It’s foolish to love her anyway.”

“What do you have for insulation?”

A pragmatic question. He didn’t want to know anything about what she loved. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t want to know what he loved, either.

A lie. She did. Despite all her resolve, both wild-child and woman-scorned were supremely interested in what a man like him loved.

The baby was obvious, of course.

She stuck to her resolve and the relatively safe topic of her old house. “ I found old newspapers in the walls when I redid the bathroom.” She didn’t mention how the tub falling through the floor had necessitated the renovation before she really had the funds to do it. “New insulation is on my to-do list.”

“Big list?” he asked, conversationally.

But Emma already felt foolish enough for blurting out about her Christmases. She was saying nothing else to him that could be interpreted as self-pitying.

The insulation fell into that category. If she was going to borrow money, wouldn’t that have been the sensible choice? New insulation? A new roof?

Oh, no, dreamer that she was she had been spending money on gifts for needy families, and redoing this bedroom in preparation for her mother’s visit.

Was she still trying to prove herself worthy? Emma shut the thought off fast and focused on problems she could solve.

If she didn’t become more prudent, next year she would probably be heading the “needy” line, not jetting off to Hawaii!

She had gambled everything on the success of Holiday Happenings. How many days of her Christmas moneymaker could she lose before she was in real trouble?

“Oh,” she said, breezily, not letting any of those concerns leach into her voice, “it’s a big list, but nothing I can’t handle.”

She was trying to regain ground as a complete professional.

They were in the room at the top of the steps that she called the green room. Once it had been her grandmother’s, stuffed from top to bottom with clutter, a dusty-rose wall-to-wall carpet covering the beautiful aged hardwoods.

Now, in preparation for her mother’s arrival, it was the most beautiful room in the house. The carpet had been ripped out, the faded layers of wallpaper stripped. The room had been restored to historical correctness and decorated in her mother’s favorite color. It was her loveliest room, and Emma felt it not only showcased her abilities as a competent and professional innkeeper, but would convince her mother that White Pond was not such a bad place.

And that her daughter isn’t such a bad person?

Where were these thoughts coming from? Still, she glanced at Ryder to see if he was suitably impressed, and saw he was looking at a huge crack in the wall that was opening above the window. That figured.

She really didn’t want to hear what that meant, so she directed the flashlight beam to the focal point of the room, a beautiful antique four-poster with a lace canopy, layered with luxurious silk bedding and pillows in subtle shades of green.

“Nice piece of furniture,” he said. Trying to gain ground for his “old-wreck” remark? Not wanting to let her know what the crack meant, either? Feeling sorry for her because she had never had a good Christmas?

She had shown dozens of guests to their rooms and never felt like this before.

As if the bed was a strangely intimate piece of furniture, and she was tempting something to be in here alone with him.

“It’s not really a nice piece of furniture,” she said, trying to sound as if she was not strangling. “The first night I put guests in it, it broke.”

She had meant it to sound funny but it sounded pathetic, lost her any ground she had gained at presenting herself as a competent professional. Instead, she felt her own failing.

But he didn’t notice. “Hmm. That sounds interesting. What were they doing?”

That strangling sound in her throat intensified. She refused to answer him or even look at him. Wild-child had a few ideas about what they might have been doing, but Emma was ignoring wild-child. She redirected the flashlight beam and hurried to the bed.

“Do you think we can just leave it made up?” She didn’t wait for her answer, lifted a corner of the mattress, struggled to swing it off the bed frame and retain her grip on the flashlight.

“Stop it,” he said. “You take the bedding and light the way for me. I’ll get the mattress.”

“I can clearly see if I let you get away with bossing me around once, you’ll turn into a complete horror.”

“As if I’m not already,” he muttered. “Emma, I’m being reasonable. The mattress is too big for you.”

“You are looking at a woman who refinished every inch of flooring in this place by herself. I’ve knocked down walls. I’ve repaired plumbing. I’ve been up on the roof. I’ve—” failed to pay the bills, failed to impress my mother, lost my fiancé over this place…

He held up his hand before she could rush on with her list. “Stop,” he said dryly. “I’m having a heart attack thinking about it.” But he was obviously thinking about it, because that familiar scowl creased his brow. “I hope you didn’t put those Christmas lights on the peak of the roof yourself.”

Tim had already given her a very thorough lecture about that. She wasn’t listening to another one.

“I’m just making the point—I can handle my end of the mattress.” She turned the flashlight beam on the floor so he couldn’t see her face, which was blushing as if she had said something about sex. Couldn’t I have worded that differently?

“Why do I have a feeling that what you think you can handle and what you really can handle are two entirely different things?”

“Because you’re a chauvinist pig?” she asked, keeping her voice deliberately sweet, glad he couldn’t see her face because his statement could sum up her knowledge of sex, too.

“Gee, and a minute ago I was worried you were going to fall down the steps and have the mattress and me land on top of you. Now I’m thinking if you fell, could you at least bite your tongue? Preferably off.”

“You charmer, you.”

Was a desert-island camaraderie developing between them? Wild-child was jumping up and down at the desert-island possibilities.

“At least let me take the end that’s going down the stairs first.”

“No,” she said stubbornly. Woman-scorned, who didn’t need a man taking charge of anything, took over. She picked up the foot of the mattress and began dragging it along the floor, leaving him with no choice but to pick up the other end. She was trying not to grunt as they headed for the stairs, but the mattress was an awkward bundle, hard to get a grip on, heavier than she had thought it would be.

As it turned out, he’d been right about the bedding, too. They should have made two separate trips. Because as they neared the middle of the stairway, the silk caught in the holly on the railing.

She paused to untangle it before it pulled the whole garland down or tore the silk. She dropped the flashlight, and they were in darkness.

It happened fast after that.

“Wait a sec—” she cried as she felt the mattress pressing against her. But it was too late. The mattress squeezed by her, sweeping her along with it. Emma grabbed a fistful of something before being plunged downward into complete darkness.