She was and insisted that we take the invitation. And that’s how we found ourselves driving out to the Whitman lands just hours after we nearly had to take Andi to the hospital.
“Are you still cold?” I ask her, reminding myself that I should still prioritize that over everything else. It’s not the first thing that springs to mind, though. That comes out next, but only after she sits in silence in the passenger seat beside me for almost a minute. “Are you still pissed off at me?”
More silence.
Shit. I hate this. More than being yelled at, more than being cried at, I hate the long, awkward silences that happen when she’s really thinking something over. They remind me too much of that uncomfortable hour between when I’d said all that shit I shouldn't have and when she’d walked out.
I’m probably about to say way too much again. But this time, I know that admitting my feelings is the right thing to do. Not the comfortable thing and maybe not the safe thing—for all I know it could totally backfire.
But it’s the right and honest thing.
“Look, if you expect me to feel bad because I kissed you, I'm sorry, because I don’t. I really do not, and I don’t regret waking up with you in my arms either.”
That gets me a glare…but then her face softens. She’s still quiet, though.
“Andi…” I trail off, going quiet myself as I navigate past a particularly sharp turn in the road. The Whitmans live high up the mountain, so high that they sit across the valley from the ski resort. Driving there takes focus in this snowy mess.
As soon as it’s back to the bland climb through the woods, I go on. “I can recognize that you want me to keep my distance and keep things as they have been these past year, with us just being friendly. I can even respect your wishes and do it—most of the time.
“But if I kiss you first thing when I wake up, I can’t feel bad about it. It’s what I have wished I could do for years. I can’t turn off how good it feels.”
There. Now it’s out there. It might’ve come out a bit angrier than it should have. And it was maybe even a bit gentler than my angry self wanted it to be. Maybe it means the end of our relationship; I just don’t know.
“I need a minute,” she finally says, a touch of pain in her voice. The anticipation is threatening to kill me, but I simply nod and keep driving for a while.
A minute later, I spy a turn-off up ahead, and I start to slow down so I can pull into it smoothly. I notice her sit forward against the seatbelt a little.
“What are you doing?” she asks in a tone of baffled annoyance.
“You said you needed a minute. I gave it to you. Well, now we need to talk about this, and put it to bed enough that we can focus on the damn interview instead of stewing on it all night. Okay? Can we do that?”
She takes a shivery breath. “Fine. But you had better keep the damn heat on.”
“Of course.”
I pull us into one of the small parking spaces lined up at the inner edge of the turn-off. The view down the mountain is dreary in winter: a slope of bony dormant trees barely broken up by clusters of pine.
Old stone ruins and boundary fences, covered half the year by foliage, are scattered and exposed on the slope like broken teeth. A blanket of snow covers everything, and the blue shadows and pink streaks of the gathering sunset are the only real color in the landscape.
“Look,” she says finally, with a tone of tense resignation that tells me I’m not the only one in the car who is taking an emotional risk. “You know I love you. I tried to love you as a friend, but it has never quite worked out. …and the reason for that is…I never stopped being attracted to you,” she admits, shocking the ever-loving hell out of me.
“Wait, what? You never said anything!” I’m too startled to feel angry. The frustration of the last few years doesn’t seem quite so huge if it’s been shared, even if only in secret.
“I couldn't.” She can't look at me right now, but at least she’s talking. I let her gather her wits while she stares down at her hands beside me. “I couldn't afford to, not for a long time. Both of us had too much growing to do.”
“Well, I’m not gonna argue over that, especially since a lot of that was on my end of things.” It’s only the ugly truth. I just couldn’t face it at the time. “But I’m not the same guy I was at twenty-two, honey.”
“You are, but you’re not,” she murmurs. “I…don’t want us going through that terrible relationship drama again. But that’s different from not wishing we could…” She goes quiet and shakes her head, dropping her face into her hands.
She’s not crying. She is, however, blushing. I watch her quietly until she stops hiding her face.
“You okay?” I ask as she lifts her head. A gust of wind rattles the bare branches outside and sends a dusting of snow to the ground. She nods slowly, but that alarming thoughtfulness is still on her face.
“I’m not entirely the same person either,” she says suddenly. “I’ve got my own regrets. I couldn’t seem to figure out that I wasn’t the only person in the relationship who was too young to have a clue.”
She doesn’t sound like she’s being charitable. That’s one thing about Andi—she too often makes concessions for the sake of keeping the peace. But then again, she’s gotten better at standing up for herself in the last few years. I search her expression with my gaze and see only tired earnestness.
“Well, look, obviously we’re both still a good team on a lot of levels, or we wouldn’t be able to do this work together anymore.” I take a deep breath. “I’ve wanted more than that ever since we broke up. I wanted you—but I knew I wasn’t ready to try again.”
She goes pale, then the blush comes back, and she has that shy look she gets sometimes when she thinks no one is looking. It’s adorable. “I’ve always been scared that trying again will ruin things between us. It was hard enough recovering the first time—I don’t know if we could survive it a second time.”
I swallow and turn to look out the windshield. A fat squirrel hops onto the hood of my car and tucks her paws up against her chest, peering in at us hopefully. Her fur is so thick that she doesn’t even seem to notice the cold.
“Cute little guy,” Andi murmurs warmly, some of the tension broken. The squirrel scrambles off, leaving little paw prints behind. “I never wanted to be just friends. But I thought it was necessary.”
“So did I at the time. But does it have to be just friendship forever, when neither of us wants it to be?” I take a deep breath. “I’ll deal with it if you say no, but…I have to ask.”
That terrible silence again. For a little while I’m absolutely convinced that she’s going to say no. But all she says is, “I’ve got some reservations. I have to guard myself against any more…problems.”
“If you guard yourself forever we’re always going to be in limbo like this, sweetheart,” I protest softly. “Do you think that there’s any chance we can try again?"
She turns a soft smile on me, one that’s full of a lot more promise than those long, unnerving silences. “I’ll think about it,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like she’s putting me off this time.
My heart’s light as hell as we make the rest of the drive up the mountain.
“So where did you two meet?” Dr. Whitman asks a little while later as we settle in his study. Dinner isn’t quite ready yet—the short delay down the mountain didn’t eat up too much time.
I look around the cozy space lined with books and heated by its own fireplace, with an embossed tin ceiling and a wood-inlaid floor. He’s stretched out on one of the couches while we take the other, and Jack sits in a wingback chair near us, examining the contents of Andi’s gear bag.
The room smells of burning pine logs and the mulled wine we were greeted at the door with. It’s been fifteen minutes since that greeting, and so far, it’s felt like we’re the ones being interviewed.
“We went to school together,” Andi says in the calm, cheerful voice she uses when she’s being tran
sparent in the hopes of drawing in an interviewee. “We’ve known each other through our families for…almost two decades now.”
She’s talking with an awkward little smile on her face suddenly, like she’s introducing her boyfriend to an older relative.
He smiles indulgently and nods, squinting with amusement. “So, you were in love all that time?”
“Uh, just friends,” I hasten to correct, and she nods quickly and awkwardly.
“Yeah, best friends.” She takes a deep breath. “We started investigating paranormal events and locations when I was sixteen.”
“Oh, so the love part came later?” His bright blue eyes twinkle at her. I press my lips together and examine the patterns on the ceiling, trying not to let my amusement show. He really has her on the spot. Me too, but I don’t have an uncontrollable blush reflex.
She coughs into her fist. “Um—” she starts.
“Dad,” Jack warns good-naturedly as he looks up from the camera he’s fiddling with. “Be nice. She’s had a long day.”
His father beams. “Of course. So, you went on your first ghost hunt when you were sixteen?”
It’s weird. Normally, around now, I would be holding the camera, and Andi would be asking the questions. But everything’s been turned on its ear. I wonder if the Whitmans had planned it that way. I slide my bag out from under my chair and start unpacking the digital audio recorder we use for interviews.
“I’m sorry, young man, but I thought we said no cameras.” Dr. Whitman lifts an eyebrow at me as I pull out the box, which is chunky, gray, and about twice the size of my smartphone.
I look over at his son, who I swear is recording us, and bite back a retort, smiling instead. “It’s just the audio recorder, as we discussed.”
“Oh!” He laughs a little, taking a swallow of his wine. “I understand. Go on then.” He turns his gaze back to Andi, who takes a deep breath before going on.
“Well, I was sixteen, and I had a crush on David, and—”
“Wait, you did?” I turn a stunned look on Andi and hear Jack snicker slightly. “Sorry. Go on?”
“So, when he told me that we would be recording EVPs at an old New England churchyard, I half believed he actually wanted a particularly creepy make-out spot. But instead, we spent the night huddled together listening to ghosts whispering.” There’s a wistful smile on her face as she reminisces.
I listen in absolute fascination, staring at her as she describes the first night we ever spent together. How she didn’t know if I would make a move, and how she’d been trying to figure out what she would do if I didn’t. Breathless nervousness. And the whole time, I’d been oblivious—because I was dealing with the exact same thing.
“So, did the ghosts actually talk?” Jack sounds genuinely fascinated.
“Yes, they did,” Andi says excitedly.
I smile and speak up, her enthusiasm catching. “One of them said my name. Well, there were some fragments of speech we isolated on the EVP recordings, but the problem was, we had—and still have—no way of proving that they aren’t something else. Someone talking, a radio playing in a car passing by the cemetery…the skeptics can always get us on things like that.” I admit my frustration quietly.
“That’s not the only problem. A lot of the time, we’ll experience a seriously intense paranormal experience—poltergeist activity, voices, sounds of knocking, even a sighting of something,” Andi shrugs animatedly, “but the batteries on the camera will die. It won’t record, and we get nothing to show for it but snow and white noise. Photographs never turn out, either. Almost like something is messing with us.”
“That’s probably the most frustrating part,” I agree. “I’m still a skeptic, but I’m an open-minded skeptic. I want to have that evidence so that I can examine it and have real proof. But I’d estimate we end up being able to use maybe a quarter of what we end up collecting.”
“Yeah, that’s even a little generous,” Andi sighs, reaching over to squeeze my hand.
I almost drop the recorder.
“Uh…yeah.” Stop that, sweetheart, otherwise I’m gonna have to do this interview while hiding an awkward boner—oh, shit. Too late. I squirm slightly in my seat and set the too-small-to-hide-anything recorder on my lap.
“And yet you keep trying.” Dr. Whitman sits back, meshing his fingers over his belly. “Aren’t you ever tempted to give up?”
Andi and I look at each other mutely and then shake our heads. It’s more than finding out what the truth is when it comes to situations like this. It’s our excuse to spend weekends together while doing something cool and interesting.
“Not a chance,” Andi adds, which leaves me feeling much warmer on this cold night.
After their odd little interview of us, we have supper together—and I have to admit, I’m impressed. I didn’t hear the small army of cooks and servers it must have taken to put this feast together, but there is enough food to feed half the town. There’s goose and game fowl, a slab of boar, venison, nut pies, and eggnog with enough booze in it to make my head spin a little.
“This is amazing,” Andi breathes. I nod, my mouth already full of goose and stuffing mere seconds after it hit my plate. There are only two servants: both slim, aging fellows, silent, with pointed beards and long noses. Dressed in green with white piping, they retrieve plates and fill dishes on request and then go back to their posts by the fireplace.
“It’s a lot for just two guests.” I’m wondering if Whitman’s trying to dazzle us, or if this is just how he rolls.
“Oh, it’s not just for the two of you—we’ll have friends dropping by all night. I hold a feast for a full fortnight surrounding Christmas and New Year’s.” He winks, and I realize in the process of swallowing that he just handed us a clue.
“What happens when the last day of feasting ends?” Andi asks, picking up immediately on the slip. Or is it only one? If there’s one thing I can tell, it’s that Whitman has been in control of this interaction from the moment we walked in.
“Oh, the usual things one does once the holidays have fizzled out until Valentine’s. Gather my decorations back up and bundle them into the attic for another year. Fortunately, I have some help. I couldn’t do it all on my own at my age.” He and Jack exchange a conspiratorial look…and I’m really left wondering.
Damn it, they only started giving up details about themselves once we got to the table. Should I just record them secretly? I know it’s the only way I’ll get any kind of record of the interview, but it seems rude.
Surreptitiously, I reach down into my pocket and poke the recorder switch. Maybe it’s a little dirty—and I’m praying I hit the right button. But the Whitmans started playing dirty when they turned our our pre-dinner interview into ten minutes of introductions and getting-to-know-yous with Andi and I the only ones in the spotlight.
So far, all I have been able to do is verify a few things that strengthen our case for the Doc being involved in the mistletoe incident. He’s the big Christmas fan, he and his son are wealthy, well connected and secretive, and he’s been celebrating for the whole two weeks that the mistletoe has been up. But nothing he says gives a clue as to how he’s doing it.
“Do you think that the mistletoe will go away once you stop your nightly celebrations?” I cut in. Andi looks up at me in mild confusion, but then nods. It’s a little shady, but direct questions are getting us nowhere.
“Well, if the people responsible for decking the town have any respect for tradition, it won’t stay up after dawn on the sixth.” His eyes twinkle. It’s the closest he’s come after several tries, to admitting outright that he’s the one behind all of this.
Andi and I exchange excited looks. It took me two hours this afternoon to put up the deer cams around town while she tried again to nap. They’re on continuous record after dark for the next two days.
If something happens tomorrow night, we’re going to catch it.
“You have said that you have nothing to do with this incide
nt, Dr. Whitman, but there are indications that you might not be telling the whole truth.” I offer a polite smile; the one he returns to me is tinged with mischief.
I keep my tone calmly earnest. “But let’s work around that. Instead of asking how you did this, I’ll just ask if you have any idea how it was done.”
Jack lets out a soft laugh and elbows his father gently. Whitman chuckles again, appearing amused by the way I hedged around the question.
I keep my head up and watch him across the table. Please let this thing be recording the conversation properly.
The Doc considers his answer as the moments crawl past. Andi’s hand finds mine under the table, and we clasp them tightly in mutual support.
“Well, from what you have told me, there was no sign of a group large enough to get the job done moving around before dawn on the twenty-third of December. Nor were there any footprints left behind. Nor have footprints been left behind on new snow when a sprig is replaced. It is intriguingly odd.” He tugs on his beard thoughtfully.
“Yes, Dr. Whitman, but how could it possibly have been done if no one was walking on the ground?” Andi’s voice is almost pleading now. “And please don’t say flying reindeer.”
“No, no, no, of course not,” Jack chimes in. “You would have seen the hoof-prints. Unless you didn’t actually examine the rooftops for them?” Jack is really not helping right now. I shoot him a look, and he just grins with feigned innocence.
“Nothing so fancy, I suspect,” Dr. Whitman says musingly. “You can cover snow tracks with a broom, after all, especially when there are layers of fallen snow and blowing wind to help you out. Also, footprints would not be needed or a ladder for the tall eaves, if someone drove past with people standing in the bed of a truck.” The doctor’s smile is infuriating. “It might be implausible, but it’s not impossible.”
I sit back. I know what he’s hinting at, and the disappointment on Andi’s face angers me a little. “Maybe. But that’s a pretty hard sell. This mistletoe appeared inside a locked church and high above its doors and eaves—and it’s all throughout the graveyard, so there was no driving a truck through.”
A Kiss of Winter: A Second Chance Christmas Romance (Dreams Fulfilled Book 3) Page 6
