Now the suitcase was resting in the hallway outside the bathroom, and the pitiful groceries were resting on the kitchen counter.
His work was done. Jo wouldn’t freeze, and she wouldn’t starve. Yet somehow, he was still in the house, adding kindling to a fire that was already blazing merrily.
He heard footsteps on the stairs, then a voice behind him. “Thanks for bringing in my things.”
When he turned he saw she was wearing fleece from neck to ankle, something soft, warm and a pretty shade of green. He was glad she’d had the good sense to bring at least some weather-appropriate clothing in her sleek little suitcase.
“You look a little warmer,” he said.
“I think I’ve stopped shivering.”
“I made coffee. It’s in the kitchen.”
“Perfect. May I get you some?”
He heard the stiff formality in both their voices. How nice of you. Thank you. What can I do? He knew better than to sigh, because what had he expected? That the woman who had been pathetically grateful when he called off their engagement all those years ago would throw herself into his arms tonight?
“I take it black,” he said.
“You never used to.” She immediately looked chagrined, as if remembering a simple preference opened doors.
He examined a speck on the wall to avoid her eyes. “I don’t have time to pretty it up anymore.”
“I guess...well, it’s obvious you still live in the area.”
He wasn’t surprised she hadn’t known. From what he’d heard, she hadn’t been to Kanowa Lake in years. And whenever he had casually asked about her, nobody in the Miller family seemed to have news. Clearly she had never asked about him.
“In the house where I was raised,” he said.
“Your father still has vineyards?”
He took too long to answer. She didn’t know that, either, but—he guessed for a number of reasons—this time he was grateful. “He died. I care for them alone now.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
He thought she probably was. His father had liked Jo, and so had his mother. He was pretty sure the feeling had been mutual. Of course nobody, not his parents, not her family, especially not her mother, had ever known how serious they were about each other, how they had planned to marry after they finished school, how they had chosen universities close enough that they could spend long weekends together.
That in his senior year the whole flimsy house of cards had tumbled to the ground.
“So I stayed a local boy,” he said. “What about you?”
“After I got my master’s degree I moved back to California. I’m a systems analyst with a consulting firm in San Diego.” After clipping the words as short as a boot-camp haircut, she left for the kitchen, and he gave the fire one more poke for good measure before she returned with coffee, handing him the mug, handle turned for him to grasp.
“I couldn’t get inside,” she said. “When I arrived, I mean. That’s why I was shoveling the driveway, so I could turn around. The key wasn’t where Great-Uncle Albert said it would be. I was about to head to town.”
“The key’s been in the same place as long as I can remember. The concrete vase by the back door.”
“Back door.” She shook her head. “I missed that part, I guess.”
“You never would have found it. By now that vase is probably buried. I doubt anybody expected you to arrive in a blizzard.”
“You seem to have expected it.”
“I heard you were coming. I manage a bunch of properties around the lake in the wintertime, and I thought I ought to check, just in case you didn’t know any better than to ignore a storm warning.”
She didn’t seem to take offense. “It’s a different world here in the winter. But I should have known better. I just wanted...”
“To be here?”
“It’s been a long time.”
“I heard about your aunt. I’m sorry she’s gone.”
“Me, too.”
Brody realized he hadn’t taken a sip. Instead he had been drinking in Jo’s lovely, familiar face. Her hair had been longer the last time he’d seen her. Now straight and shiny, it just touched her collar. The oval face, dark brows and lashes and straight nose were the same. So was the wide mouth that once had smiled so easily.
Not so much anymore.
“You probably need a good night’s sleep.” He held up his mug. “And I probably can’t drink this fast enough. Maybe I ought to just go.”
Instead of answering she settled on one of the love seats flanking the fieldstone fireplace and motioned him to the other.
“I still have to warm up hash for dinner, and I’m on California time. Keep me company a few minutes, unless somebody at home is expecting you?”
He thought she had managed that neatly. Was there a wife? Kids?
“In the winter I’m here alone,” he said. “Mom goes to Arizona to stay with Kaye. She and her family live outside Phoenix. It gets Mom out of the cold, and she loves being there.”
“How are they? Your mom and Kaye? Kaye was only, what, sixteen when—” She stopped herself. “She must be, what, twenty-six or so, yes?”
“Happily married, with a two-year-old and another on the way. Mom babysits while Kaye’s at school. She teaches third grade. How about your mom?”
She seemed to relax a little, even smiled. “Still wacky after all these years. Sophie’s on her third marriage, but my stepfather is remarkably patient, adamant she stay on her meds, and madly in love with her. Plus he has money, which means she’ll try harder. I think this one might stick.”
“Does that let you off the hook a little?” He realized how personal the question was, how much it said about how well they had known each other, but it was too late to call it back.
“I’m allowed to have my own life, yes.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. “Does that include a family?”
“I’m not married, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He had always liked the way Jo laid her cards on the table. Of course in contrast, there was another part of her that carefully played the rest of her hand close to the chest. Anything really important stayed deep inside her, but that habit had suited him, since he operated the same way. For survival she had been required to keep a part of herself from her mother. Brody’s traditional upbringing and parents had been very different, but as a boy he had realized that they had many burdens and didn’t need his, as well.
“So why did you come back?” he asked. “At Christmas, too. There must be a hundred better places to spend the holidays.”
She launched into a story about her cousin Olivia’s bridal quilt, her own desire to get away for a while and work on her part of it in peace, and a desire to see if she might find some baby quilts or clothing of Eric’s in the Grants’ attic.
She finished up on that note. “If I was going to do this, I wanted to do it right. I thought the quilt would be that much more special if we had some of Eric’s childhood quilted into it, too. Lydia says there are boxes in their attic I can go through. Once I’m settled I’m supposed to call her about a key. Then I’ll go through them until I find what I’m looking for.”
“I have the key. I look after the Grants’ house, too.”
Jo leaned back. “Well, you’re a busy boy, aren’t you? Nothing to do in the vineyard this time of year?”
“I have a bargain with the owners. For a nominal fee I watch their houses in winter, and in the fall they come to my place and pick grapes. We make quite a party out of it.”
“You don’t have machines for that?”
“We harvest the juice grapes by machine, but these are more fragile. Vignoles grapes for wine.”
“I always loved seeing all those acres of grapes.”
&nbs
p; “And eating them. The summer we met.”
She had been smiling, but that died now. “You know, Pacific time or not, I really am wiped.”
He had been dismissed, so he stood. “The snow’s going to continue through the night. You have some staples in the pantry, a little flour, sugar, salt, that sort of thing, along with some canned soup. But not a lot else. It might be some time before you can shop. I’d ration.”
“Uncle Albert said somebody plows the driveway after it snows.”
“That would be me. But not until the snow stops long enough for it to make sense.”
She uncurled her legs and gracefully rose to follow him to the door. “Thank you for the fire and coffee.” She stuck out her hand.
Surprised, he took it, but the contact was brief. “What are old friends for?”
“I guess we were friends, weren’t we?”
“Maybe we can be again.”
When she didn’t respond he smiled, as if the lack didn’t matter, as if friendship went without saying when, of course, it was probably impossible.
More things left unsaid, their mutual talent.
“Be sure to close the doors on the fireplace before you go to bed,” he said. “The chimney’s just been cleaned, so it’s safe enough, but that’s a hot fire. You don’t want any sparks popping into the room.”
“Thanks, I have a fireplace in my condo.”
“Then you’re an expert.”
She tilted her head. “At lots of things. I’ve been taking care of myself for a very long time.” She paused. “But thank you for taking care of me tonight. I’m not sure where I would be right now if you hadn’t come along.”
He considered those parting words on his way home. She had been talking about tonight and where she would have been without his help. But Jo was a survivor. She would have found a way to keep from freezing even if she’d been forced to dig out the whole driveway to get back on the road.
Now he wondered where she would be if he had never come along at all, if he had never met her the summer she turned sixteen, if they hadn’t made a thousand plans together, all canceled summarily four years later. Had she stopped trusting men after that? Was that why she’d never married? Had she stopped coming to Hollymeade because she had been afraid of running into him? How many choices had she made that stemmed from their past?
How many had he made?
He found himself at the Grants’ house instead of his own. It was more than six miles from Ryan Vineyards, so he hadn’t simply made a wrong turn. No, the wrong turn had come a long time ago. Now there was no telling where this one might lead.
He jumped down and went through his ring of keys on the way to the front door. Inside he took the steps upstairs and then those to the attic two at a time. The Grant house wasn’t as large or lovely as Hollymeade, but it was a pretty Colonial with banks of windows looking over the water and decks all around, well cared for and loved.
Unlike Hollymeade this house wasn’t heated in the winter, and right now the inside temperature was as cold as the outside. He kept his gloves on until he had reached his destination, a pile of boxes in the front. He knew right where they were because he had helped Eric’s father move them to this spot. He’d been impressed at how carefully each one had been labeled, in case the contents were ever needed again.
He spotted the one he was looking for and began to stack the rest along the side until he could get to it.
“Eric’s baby things.” He grimaced at the label and shook his head, but not at the words, at himself for thinking this was a good idea.
He almost left it where it was, but in the end, he carried it across the attic to a pile of boxes that hadn’t yet been sorted, a pile Lydia Grant was probably making her way through each summer.
When he left the house, the box with Eric’s baby things was stored in the very back of the Grants’ attic, six down on an unmarked pile, the label turned toward the wall. It was the least likely place anyone would look for it.
It might buy him the time he needed to get to know Jo again.
CHAPTER THREE
HOLLYMEADE STILL LOOKED much the same. After a breakfast of cold cereal Jo wandered the rooms, a cup of tea from the only tea bag in the house warming her hands. Some things had changed, though. The walls in the living area were a different color now, a silvery sage, and the sofas were new. The armchairs, though? Those she remembered from afternoons curled up with Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, even if the chairs now wore slipcovers.
The kitchen had newer appliances, and someone must have decided that updated laminate countertops were a worthwhile investment. But the pot rack with its copper-bottomed saucepans still hung near the stove. And while the curtains had to be new, they mimicked the ones she remembered, gauzy white and tied back to let in the light.
She was home.
Outside the snow continued, and now it was nearly as high as the windows. Of course there must have been snow on the ground already. Western New York was famous for the stuff. Jo couldn’t believe she had gambled on reaching the grocery store today. But there would be no road trip, not until the skies cleared. While she was still in bed she’d heard a plow on the main road, but she doubted it was easy to travel.
Before breakfast she had inventoried the pantry shelves, hoping Brody had exaggerated, but embellishing wasn’t his style. She could heat a can of chicken noodle soup for lunch, snack on a candy bar midafternoon and eat the remaining hash from the can she had opened last night for dinner. If she followed that pattern, she would be okay for two more days, although she wasn’t looking forward to cream-of-broccoli Tuesday. She supposed if the snow continued longer, she might be able to make pancakes without oil or eggs and eat them with sugar sprinkled on top.
She wrinkled her nose. Of course she could always call Brody to rescue her again.
When hell froze over.
Since she prepared for everything, she’d made plans in advance if she happened to run into him. A chance encounter at the grocery maybe, a few sentences of greeting and catch-up, then both of them heading off to their separate lives. Their relationship had ended a decade ago. They were hardly the people they had been. Through the years she had erased memories of him the way she routinely wiped away outdated files on her computer.
But unless a hard drive was reformatted, old files still left traces. And how did a woman reformat her heart?
As she stared outside at the winter wonderland, snow clinging to evergreen branches and icicles dripping from the roof of the boat shed, she remembered.
After her father’s death, Jo’s mother had resettled herself and her preteen daughter in Hollywood, using a generous life insurance payment. Sophie, darling of their town’s little theater, had decided to bury her grief in an acting career. When that proved impossible, she devoted herself to making the unenthusiastic Jo into a star.
Jo, who preferred auditions to her mother’s handwringing, found work in a few commercials, but when it became clear her daughter didn’t have either drive or talent, Sophie sought work as a makeup artist. Unfortunately money dribbled through her fingers. The rental house gave way to a furnished room, and on the afternoon their landlord threatened to break down their door to collect three months of rent, Jo took over their finances.
As Sophie spiked between elation and despair, Jo covered all the other bases and kept her grades high, because by then she knew that an education and a good job would be her saving grace. Luckily her father had made sure to establish a college fund that Sophie couldn’t tap, and Jo vowed that when the time came, she would use every penny to pursue a degree that promised a job at the end.
Hollymeade and her father’s family faded into the background, because Sophie, fiercely possessive, refused to let her visit the lake house.
The year Jo
turned sixteen, a miracle happened. As she powdered the leading man’s nose on the set of a low-budget film, Sophie caught an associate producer’s eye, and three weeks later they were married in Vegas. Since his next project was in Italy, Sophie and her new husband headed for Milan to spend the summer, and Jo was packed off to Hollymeade.
Jo had been thrilled to fly back to New York and settle into a room in the old house to reconnect with her father’s family and disconnect from her mother. Her grandmother had been thrilled, too, and their quilting lessons had resumed. Unfortunately her cousins, whom Jo hadn’t seen in years, couldn’t join them. Rachel was living in Australia, Ella in Seattle, and Olivia was enrolled in a special summer language program in Salzburg. Members of the larger Miller family came and went, some with children younger than she was, but after the thrill of reunion wore off, Jo began to feel lonely.
Until Brody Ryan showed up.
Brody was seventeen to her sixteen, ready to head off for Cornell in the fall, where he planned to study viticulture. He arrived one afternoon to deliver and split a cord of firewood for the coming winter. Jo was immediately drawn to the serious young man with the golden-brown hair and the fabulous smile, so she stacked as he chopped.
They talked about everything, then as the wood chips flew, and later as they found more excuses to be together.
Jo knew better than to draw attention to their budding relationship. Word might get back to Sophie, who was perfectly capable of flying home from Italy to interfere. Brody, too, was reluctant to share with his family. The Ryans were thrilled he had received a scholarship to Cornell, but finances were tight, and they knew he had to earn enough money to supplement his financial aid. A romance with a high school girl would have made no sense to them. So as Jo and Brody fell in love, they decided to keep their feelings to themselves.
Now she realized how successful they had been. Because when Jo graduated from high school at seventeen and had her pick of colleges, no one guessed that she chose M.I.T. because it would be easy to visit Brody at Cornell and rekindle their romance.
The Christmas Wedding Quilt: Let It SnowYou Better Watch OutNine Ladies Dancing Page 3
