Chapter One
Christmas Eve
IT WAS A WONDERFUL, magical night—for everyone except for Tom Minelli.
For reasons that had nothing to do with the event at hand, he left his best friend’s wedding so angry he wasn’t sure he should drive. He’d arrived the same way, but he’d buried it down deep until the groom—after kissing his bride—noticed something was wrong and dragged the truth out of him.
Now Tom stood on the frosty, snow-lined street in front of Matt and Tasha’s house and glared at the fat, white flakes falling gently through the golden glow of the street light. Somewhere, Chloe was alone tonight, and it was all his fault.
“Hey, are you heading out already?”
Tom turned around. His oldest brother, Zander, was standing on the front porch. He hadn’t even heard the door open and closed. He dragged in a ragged breath. “Yeah. No. I don’t know. I just needed some fresh air.”
“Matt said as much.”
“Did he?” Tom cracked his jaw, then rolled his head from side to side. “What else did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“I doubt that.”
Zander jumped down, his feet crunching on the snow. “He said you shouldn’t be alone right now, but it’s his wedding night, so he had to deputize someone to babysit you. What the hell is going on?”
“I need to go.”
Zander didn’t ask where. He just nodded. “I’ll come with you.”
Tom’s chest ached. “Matt really didn’t tell you?”
“I know nothing.” Zander held his arms out wide. “See? I’m wholly unprepared for whatever Christmas Eve mission we’re about to depart on. Will you stay put while I go back inside, tell my wife I need to go and kick someone’s ass, and maybe grab my coat? It’s freezing out here.”
Tom gave him a tight nod, but inside his chest, his heart thumped harder and faster at the reminder. It was bitterly cold tonight, the first really good freeze all week. The only ass that needed to be kicked was his own.
Where is she?
Matt had told him to trust Zander. His brother had resources and connections. But could Tom confess just how much he’d screwed up?
Zander quietly slipped back inside, leaving Tom alone with his dark thoughts. But when the door opened again, it wasn’t his brother.
It was one of his sisters-in-law. The first sister-in-law, the one who had known him the longest.
“I’m fine,” he said, and Olivia waved her hand, like she knew he was lying and didn’t really care. It doesn’t matter, her hand said.
Unlike Zander, she was already bundled up. Smart woman. It was cold and getting colder by the second. She marched right over to him. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“You led with I’m fine, which is a tell-tale sign that you are not.”
He huffed in frustration. He hated that he was that transparent. “How many people in there noticed that I left?”
“Nobody cares that much about you.” She gave him a good-natured elbow thump. But she wasn’t wrong.
“I’m aware,” he said dryly. “And good. I don’t want to detract from the evening. It was a really beautiful wedding.”
Her face bloomed into a soft, happy smile. “It was, wasn’t it? We really rock the holiday weddings in this family, if I do say so myself.” Olivia and Rafe got married—for the second time—in a similarly intimate ceremony on New Year’s Eve a few years ago.
But before he could pat himself on the back for distracting her from whatever she’d come out to say, the smile dropped and she gave him a serious look. “Is this about Chloe?”
He opened his mouth to deny it, but given the circumstances, lying wasn’t in his long-term best interests. Or Chloe’s.
But the truth wasn’t his to freely share, either.
He pressed his lips together.
Olivia sighed. “Yeah, you guys have really stuffed that whole thing up,” she said softly. “I saw her the other day, you know. She looked pretty miserable.”
No, he didn’t know. He didn’t know anything, and the proverbial knife in his chest twisted a little harder. And the words that would have spilled out a week ago—we’re just friends, that’s her choice, no comment—all died in his throat.
None of that felt true. Hadn’t for a while, but he’d been a fool and hadn’t seen the warning signs. “Where did you see her?” He leaned in, thirsty for any scrap of information Olivia may be able to share. “At work?”
His sister-in-law rolled her lip between her teeth and looked to the side. Evading his searching gaze. “No.”
Heat crawled up the back of Tom’s neck. “The diner?”
She shook her head, then looked up at him, her eyes wide. “No. Don’t ask me anymore about her. She swore me to secrecy.”
“Olivia.”
“If you dumped her—”
“We weren’t dating!”
“You were something.”
“Yeah, we were. And we still are.”
Doubt twisted across Olivia’s face.
Yeah, he knew that feeling, too. Because he’d found Chloe’s apartment empty just before the wedding. When he’d gone to ask her to come with him as his date. But before he could explain any of that, Zander opened the front door, and behind him came Rafe.
The middle brother. Olivia’s husband.
Great, now it was a party. He lowered his voice. “Do you know where she is? I want to fix it, I want to make everything right. Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back, her eyes now as big as saucers. “But Tom—”
“What’s going on?” Rafe stopped behind his wife and gave Tom a concerned look. Concerned for his wife, of course. Not his younger brother.
Nobody was ever concerned about Tom, and usually that was just fine by him.
Olivia looked back and forth between her husband, and Tom, and then Zander. It was hard to read her expression, but not hard to read the way she shook her head after a minute and stepped back. Whatever she knew, she didn’t think it was her place to share it. “Come on, Rafe. Let’s go back to the party. What is our daughter getting up to while we’re both out here?”
Rafe laughed, but Tom cursed under his breath. Olivia wasn’t giving up whatever she knew, because she thought she was protecting Chloe. That was supposed to be his job.
He had so much to fix.
Which left Zander.
I’m sorry, Chloe. But I can’t just let you disappear. Not when I have so much to apologize for. So much to make right.
After Liv and Rafe were back inside, he looked at his oldest brother. “I need you to do something questionable, both ethically and legally. And don’t ask a lot of questions, because time is of the essence.”
Zander tugged on his gloves. “I’m your guy. Where are we going?”
CHLOE HAD THOUGHT OF nearly everything.
Everything, it turned out, except for matches. She’d packed three kinds of hot chocolate mix, more socks than she’d worn in the last month, an entire bag of cozy sweaters, and a stack of books to read in front of the fire.
She just didn’t have any way of making that festive blaze.
She’d been looking forward to this moment for days. Four days, to be precise. From the moment she’d realized she couldn’t stay in Pine Harbour a moment longer, except it was four days before Christmas and how exactly did one move at the last minute during holiday shutdowns?
It turned out, one did it right before a holiday shutdown.
She’d found a moving company that could box up her entire apartment—except for hot chocolate mix, socks, sweaters, and a stack of books—and stow it all in a shipping container for storage.
And in exactly the same moment, she’d found out that this cottage wasn’t going to be occupied over Christmas, because the owners—the Vances, loyal library patrons when they were in Pine Harbour over the summer—were heading south instead.
Mrs. Vance had been a peach when Chloe had called her an
d asked for this favour, breaking all kinds of librarian code rules. Except she’d been an apologetic peach, because while she was happy to let Chloe use the cottage, it was completely empty.
Completely bare.
The kitchen had been swept clean—every shelf, every drawer—in preparation for a renovation that would start in the new year.
So yes, Chloe had the run of the cabin, but she’d been warned to bring everything herself.
She’d forgotten matches.
Tears welled up as she moved back to the couch. Hot, frustrated, definitely hormonal tears. The kind of overwhelmed feeling she vaguely recalled from her teen years, and had been happy to leave behind years ago.
Hello, weirdness, my old friend.
Pregnancy hormones were some kind of crazy, that was for darn sure.
Like the impulse to give notice at the job she loved more than anything.
She pressed her hand to her belly. No, not more than anything. She didn’t love her job more than her baby.
Which was crazy, because she didn’t want a baby. Her head swam, as it always did when she thought about what—who—was growing inside her. The size of a pea now, but it wouldn’t be long before it was a lime. A grapefruit. A little person, cells duplicating over and over until there was a foot jammed into her cervix and all her organs had been completely moved to places they shouldn’t be.
She was pregnant.
Pregnant.
Ms. Take-A-Pill-Every-Morning-At-Seven.
She’d never missed a pill in the past. Never. Because she didn’t want a baby.
Now she had a baby, or the start of a baby, and she loved it. She was still wrapping her head around how she’d gotten knocked up. In hindsight, of course, she knew. She’d missed a couple of pills, by a few hours, because of an early morning booty call the first day, and sleeping in the next day, and she hadn’t really cared.
Not enough to get a morning after pill. She’d gotten comfortable in their non-relationship. And she’d never had a scare in the past.
When her period was late, she’d been genuinely confused.
And then she’d felt profoundly dumb, because what had she been thinking? That it might be okay. That’s what she’d been hoping.
Except it hadn’t been.
And now she knew without a doubt that there were three things that would absolutely not happen.
1. She wouldn’t marry Tom Minelli out of some misplaced sense of family values if he ever came around to suggest that. Fuck that noise.
2. She wouldn’t raise her baby the way she’d been raised. This baby was—now that she’d gotten over her shock—wanted. When he or she or they arrived, Chloe would hold them in her arms and the first thing they would hear in this world was that they were wanted. No afterthoughts. No shuttling back and forth between parents bound by obligation.
3. She wouldn’t put up with any judgement from the tiny town of Pine Harbour, population six hundred, seventy-five percent of whom cast serious side-eye at single moms. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle it. She was a bad-ass and didn’t care what anyone thought of her. But she didn’t want to raise her child somewhere they could get any flack for her choices in life.
Rolling her neck, she tossed up her options. She could go to bed early. This was never her first choice, but the master bedroom had a gas fireplace. It didn’t have a lot of blankets, though. The entire cottage had been stripped clean at the end of the season. She’d had to bring everything with her, and her blanket of choice fit better on the sofa than the king-sized bed upstairs.
Next time she invaded a fancy cottage, she was going to be better prepared. Next time she wouldn’t do it right before an overnight storm was due to arrive, and she couldn’t safely get back across the narrow causeway to the mainland. The last thing she wanted to do was drive into the icy waters of Lake Huron.
Plus right now, all of her earthly possessions were locked up tight in a storage facility an hour away.
For a split-second, she thought of Tom’s flannel covered down-filled duvet, on his big bed in his little cabin, not that far from here. The last time she’d been at his house, she’d burrowed in the flannel, newly added to the bed in honour of the colder weather, because it felt so good. Light and warm and endlessly soft all at the same time.
No more burrowing. No more Tom.
She’d had her fun and now it was time to face the consequences. On her own.
She’d hunker down on the couch with a cup of cocoa, as planned. She could imagine the flickering flames. But when she headed back into the main room, she pulled up short. The outside light was on.
It hadn’t been on when she went into the kitchen, she was sure of it. It was possible the wind had somehow turned the light on. But if she saw evidence of anyone out there, when nobody was supposed to be here, she’d call in a heartbeat.
She crept closer to the door, grateful for it being relatively dark inside the cottage. That helped her see past the well-light porch to the darkness beyond.
Nobody was there.
Holding her breath, she eased back from the door and waited.
Maybe it had been nothing. Maybe there was a motion sensor trigger she hadn’t noticed because she’d arrived in the daylight hours, and the blowing snow had triggered it. Or a bunny. Yes, she’d like that. A snow hare, hopping up onto the porch. Cute.
When the light flicked out, proving her motion sensor theory, she checked the lock one last time and retreated to the couch.
It was only after she curled up in her blanket, as her thumping heart calmed down, that she’d been hoping the light meant she had a visitor. But he hadn’t come to her all week. He wouldn’t be coming now.
She read the same page in her book over and over again, trying her best to ignore the ache in her chest. This was a mess of her own making. She realized that. She’d known exactly what she wanted—and what she didn’t—right up until everything changed. Now she couldn’t fall into the same trap her mother had, hoping for something that would never come to fruition.
At the end of the day, she wanted happiness. For herself, her child, and her child’s father, too. They all deserved that. There were many ways to be happy, many ways to shape a family. No reason to force a square peg into a round hole.
She just needed to protect her baby while she made that clear to Tom.
He would understand, eventually. He didn’t have the capacity to be a full-time partner anyway, she reminded herself. He’d proven that the last time they saw each other.
Chapter Two
A week before Christmas
When it all started to unravel
TOM WRAPPED UP THE monthly Search and Rescue team meeting ten minutes early. When people looked like they might linger, he dumped the coffee urn in the sink and started washing it with a loud clatter.
Take the hint, folks, he thought to himself. Time to beat it, whether you like it or not.
What none of them knew was that Tom had a date.
Not a date, exactly. No, that wasn’t what Chloe was coming over for. But it was something. She’d texted him just before the meeting started. It was a regular thing now, her texting him every few weeks. Often on a Sunday afternoon. Doing anything in a few hours?
The subtext was always, want to do me?
And he did. Endlessly, creatively, breathlessly. They’d been hooking up for months, and each time Tom was quite convinced it was the last. Often she told him it was. A few times he was the one to speak the lie.
It was never the last time, and lately, he’d started hinting that he would want more if she were interested.
She wasn’t.
He knew not to push it, and yet, when she’d texted him, he hadn’t been able to help himself.
Chloe: Doing anything in a few hours?
Tom: I’m on duty this afternoon. Can’t leave the park, but if you want to come visit me, we’d have the training centre all to ourselves.
There was a solid chance she’d pass.
She didn�
�t. In an unexpected and delightfully uncharacteristic move, Chloe accepted his offer (request?) to spend time together somewhere other than the bedroom.
So now he was urging everyone to get the hell out. He had a woman to seduce. Or a countdown to a woman showing up in all her tattooed, pierced glory to seduce him.
He was her willing victim.
Chloe Dawson was the most gorgeous, intriguing woman he’d ever been with. She’d laid out crystal clear rules from their very first night together, and he had no problem following them. But there was a part of him that was hungry for more.
They both knew it. Most of the time, they both ignored it. But today felt like a tiny victory in that direction. If all went well, he’d ask her if she wanted to sleep over at his place on Christmas Eve, after Matt and Tasha’s wedding.
“Hey,” she said from the doorway.
He turned and his heart leapt, thumping eagerly against his ribs. He always had the same reaction to her. It hadn’t settled down over time, and it still took him by surprise. He simply adored everything about her. Her confidence, her intelligence. Her perfect mouth. Her bright eyes.
And her dirty, filthy mind.
In a single glance, he knew she had something special planned for today, and he was a goner. She was dressed for the increasingly cold December days, with a zipped up-down jacket over jeans and tall leather boots, but as he watched, she unzipped and under the jacket she wasn’t wearing much. A tank top that sliced low across the tops of her breasts and bared her shoulders.
Sex at his workplace was not smart at all.
Tom never claimed to be smart. Not when it came to Chloe. He’d always been overwhelmed by her, amazed and impressed and rendered stupid.
He crossed the room, tugged her inside, and locked the door. Then he pressed her against the wall and took her mouth like it had been months since they’d last kissed and not a mere week.
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