You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology

by Karina Bliss

  Doug and Cassie can’t ignore their attraction to each other, and they both feel they can just get it out of their systems. But as the week draws to a close and their physical attraction turns deeper, they start to wonder if they can turn a vacation fling into something more.

  Buy a copy today!

  Snow-Kissed

  by

  Laura Florand

  About the Book

  In a snow-kissed Christmas cabin, a heart-wrenching tale of love, loss, forgiveness–and new hope.

  After the utter destruction of her marriage and her happiness, Kai knew it was better to shut herself away from the world than to hurt and be hurt.

  Holed up in her mountain cabin, she plans to spend her Christmas alone. Until her not-quite-ex-husband shows up as the first flakes start to fall.

  Now should she send him back out into the cold? Or can she be brave enough to let this winter snow bind them back together?

  Voted Biggest Tearjerker of the Year in the All About Romance Annual Reader Poll (you are warned) and named a Best Book of the Year by Dear Author and Romance Novels for Feminists. An Elite Eight finalist in the annual “March Madness” book tournament, the DABWAHA.

  “If anyone should ask me why Laura Florand is one of my very, very favorite authors, I won’t need to say a word. I will let Snow-Kissed speak for me. It is undoubtedly one of the very best, most moving stories I’ve had the privilege to read.”

  —The Bookish Babe

  “Breath-taking, gut-wrenching. A must read.”

  —Book Junkie

  “One of the best second chance romances I have ever read.”

  —The Reader’s Den

  “Romance at its strongest and most powerful.”

  —Dear Author

  About the Author

  Laura Florand burst on the contemporary romance scene in 2012 with her award-winning Amour et Chocolat series. Since then, her books have appeared in ten languages, been named among the Best Books of the Year by Library Journal, RT Book Reviews, and Barnes & Noble, received the RT Seal of Excellence and starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, and been recommended by NPR, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. In 2015, NPR gave her the enormous honor of naming her Chocolate Kiss to its list of the Top 100 Romances of all time.

  Chapter One

  The snow fell over the black granite counter in a soft hush of white. Kai focused on the sieve she shook as she brought a winter of sugar to the dark world, letting the powder slide across her thoughts the way snow on a falling night would, taking all with it, even her, leaving only peace.

  That peace lay so cold. She had almost forgotten how cold she felt, until he showed up.

  The man who, once upon a time, had always made her so warm and happy.

  Now he stood at the window, looking as cold as she was. Destroying all peace. Past him and the pane of glass, only a few flakes fell against a gray sky, rare and disinterested, nature as usual failing her. Her fall of powdered sugar could not come between her and him, could not blur him to some distant place cut off by the arrival of winter. Could not hush him, if ever he chose to speak.

  No, all she could do was concentrate on the sugar-snow. Looking up—looking at him—undid everything.

  “I don’t think they’re coming,” the man said finally, and she swallowed. It was funny how her whole body ached at his voice. As if her skin had gotten unused to his vibrations running over it. As if she needed to develop tiny calluses at the base of every hair follicle so that those hairs would not want to shiver.

  Light brown hair neatly cut, he stood angled toward the window, shoulders straight, with that long, intellectual fitness he had, the over-intelligent, careful man who had played sports almost like he might study for a test, maintaining perfect physical fitness as just another one of his obligations. She still remembered when he had discovered Ultimate Frisbee, the awkward, unfamiliar, joy-filled freedom in him as he explored the idea of playing something so intense just for fun. It had been rather beautiful. She had gone to all his games and chatted with the other wives with their damn babies and even played on his pick-up teams sometimes, although unwilling to put forth the effort to be part of his competitive leagues.

  Those fun, fun years full of weekends of green grass, and friendly people, and laughter. They had had too many happy days. They clogged in her all the sudden, dammed up too tight, hurting her.

  She had screwed them all the fuck up. Forever.

  She didn’t know what to say to him, after what she had done, so she concentrated on shedding snow, like some great, dangerous goddess bending over her granite world, a creature half-formed from winter clouds, drifting eerily apart from all humanity. She wished he had not come, but the thought of him leaving wrenched a hole in her that filled up instantly with tears.

  Hot, liquid tears that sloshed around inside her and wanted to spill out. That in itself was terrifying and strange; she had thought she had tamed her tears down to something near-solid and quiescent, a slushy of grief that lay cold in her middle but no longer spilled out at every wrong movement, every careless glimpse of happy couples or children laughing in a park.

  She had so hoped that she had reached a point where she could—see him. Where all that long process of coming to peace with herself and her losses would be strong enough to withstand a glimpse of him. But all of her, every iota of strength and peace, had dissolved into pain and longing the instant she saw him step out of his car, a flake of snow catching on his hair.

  Damn it, his mother was supposed to be here. She was supposed to come with her magazine staff for this shoot, a whole entourage to make it easier on both Kai and Kurt. How could they have abandoned her to this reopening of wounds because they were afraid of a few flakes of snow?

  She swallowed, focusing hard. She had to get this sugar exactly right, not too thick, not too shallow, not too even, not too ragged, leaving perfect graceful curves and fades into black at its edges. It was soothing to work on that white against gleaming black. To focus on those tiny grains, almost as tiny as cells of life.

  She could control these grains. She could always get them right. If she worked hard enough. If she really, really tried.

  “The snow is supposed to start from the south and close us off,” Kurt said from the window. “They probably didn’t want to chance it.”

  Now why would Anne Winters’s staff do that to her? Leave her alone with him just to avoid bad roads? Those selfish people, it was almost as if they had . . . families. Reasons to live that were far more important than she was.

  Kurt shifted enough to watch her, but she didn’t look up. She shouldn’t have let him come, but for God’s sake, his mother was Anne Winters. First of all, Anne had only rented the cabin to Kai so affordably on the condition that Kai maintain it for her use in photo shoots when she wanted it. And even without that agreement, Kai was a food stylist who regularly contracted to Anne Winters’s company. She could hardly refuse this photo shoot for next year’s holiday edition, Anne’s biggest. And accepting it, she had to jump through Anne’s hoops, even the famous multi-tasker’s insistence on having her lawyer son with her for the weekend so she could work on contract negotiations simultaneously. Her formidable presence and the bustle of her staff should have helped dissipate all this miasma from their past and saved them from any need to linger in it.

  Besides, Kai was supposed to be strong enough again for this now. She had worked so hard to heal, to grow strong. To still and chill those tears down to something—bearable.

  “Are you ready to be snowed in?” Kurt asked. “Do you want me to run to the store and pick up any supplies while there’s still a chance?”

  Her stomach tightened as if he had just pierced it with some long, strange, beautiful shard of ice. Kurt. Don’t take care of me. You always did that so, so—the ice shard slid slowly through her inner organs, slicing, hurting—well.

  “Why don’t you check your email so that you’ll know for
sure whether they’ve cancelled?” he suggested. “Or find your charger so I can check my phone?” They had matching smartphones; their shared two-year contract still hadn’t expired.

  She didn’t check her email or find her charger mostly because she didn’t dare leave this powdered sugar snow. She had to keep her focus. She had to.

  She hadn’t yet managed to say a word to him. When she had opened the door, she had meant to. It shouldn’t have been so hard. Hello, Kurt. She could say that, right? After practicing it over and over in her head on the way to the door. But the instant their eyes met, his hazel gaze had struck her mute. As the moment drew out, his hand had clenched around his duffle until his knuckles showed white, and his whole body leaned just an inch forward, as it had so many, many times in their lives, when she greeted him after a long day or a trip, and he leaned in to kiss her.

  She had flinched back so hard that her elbows had rapped the foyer wall with a resounding smack, and he had looked away from her and walked quickly into the cabin without speaking, disappearing to find a room for his things. It had been at least twenty minutes before he reappeared, his hands in his pockets, to set himself at that post by the window and watch the road. Probably sending out a desperate mental call to his mother: Hurry up, God damn it. Where the hell are you?

  But the cars hadn’t come, and now he watched her. She could feel his gaze trying to penetrate her concentration on the snow. But she had to get that powdered sugar snow just right. She had to. Even if she had to play at snow for all eternity.

  “Kai,” he said and she shivered. Her name. Her name in his voice. “Can you still not even look at me?”

  The weariness in his voice was like a hook dragging her gaze to him, and she did get her head up, just for a second, because he deserved so much better from her than what she had managed to give him. But he was so beautiful and so distant there against the window that it broke her heart, and her heart was so tired of being broken. It gave up quickly and let her look down at her sugar-snow again.

  “Do you want me to go?” he asked.

  Oh, God, yes. Oh, God, no. Oh, God, she didn’t know. It’s snowing, she wanted to protest, but her lips felt stiff and frozen. Besides, it was snowing more on her counter than it was outside. He could get away still, if he wanted.

  “Kai.” He sounded as exhausted as her heart. But—firm against that exhaustion. Determined to go on through it. He was that way.

  She concentrated as hard as she could.

  “It was the cruelest thing you ever did to me,” he said evenly. “When you cut me off like this. And you never even told me why.”

  Her heart seized. Her eyes stung, as if it was a year-and-a-half ago again. She set the sieve to the side and considered the effect of the sugar.

  “Can you tell me why now?” He had developed that even voice, she imagined, in law school or maybe in boardrooms afterward or maybe just growing up in his mother’s household. No matter what the tensions or what was at stake, he could manage to stay steady, calm. No one who knew him would ever believe the fights they had had, there at the end of all things. Once she had even made him weep. “Or is it still too soon?”

  She grabbed the edge of a wax paper snowflake stencil too clumsily and left her fingerprint in the snow around it. Damn it, she hated it when she messed things up. Once she had been able to tolerate her mistakes, be patient with herself as she fixed them, but then everything had gone to hell and she had to—she had to—at least get something like the damn sugar snow right.

  It was only in the past few months that she had started to calm that raging intolerance toward herself back into something sane again. She had worked so hard for that calm. She had taken so many long walks and deep breaths and forced her mind to think so many beautiful, strong thoughts. Now Kurt at the window had made all her intolerance surge up again, intensely, like its last stand.

  “I just couldn’t,” she said low, to her finger smudge in the snow. Her voice sounded rough, unused. She talked to people up here—her support group, her clients—but it had been a year and a half since she talked to him. Or fought. Funny, a year and a half later, the first sounds out of her mouth sounded as if her voice was still rubbed raw from screaming. “I couldn’t open up anymore, I couldn’t try. I just couldn’t.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. She fought not to bow her body over the granite, not to clutch the edge and ruin all her work, in a plea for forgiveness for something else she had ruined beyond recall.

  She had begged for pardon everywhere, after the second miscarriage. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, what’s wrong with me, what did I do wrong, doctors, tell me what to do.

  Kurt had told her it didn’t matter. He had said that, stroking her hair back from her wet cheeks as if he was trying to do a good thing: “Kai, it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.” Yes, he had said that. It had been true for him.

  The third miscarriage had been the end. The end of her hope. The end of her. The end of them.

  She didn’t even want forgiveness. Forgiveness hurt.

  A moment’s silence. His hands in his pockets, his body long and straight, he watched her, even more intensely contained than she remembered. “I didn’t ask you to try. In fact, I told you to stop trying.”

  That old pain swelled up in her so hard she couldn’t understand why it didn’t just break her. She had begged it, so many times, to break her, to go ahead and split her apart so she didn’t have to be anymore. “I know.”

  She drew a breath. Grief and its pain came in waves; after a time she had learned the grief counselors were right about that. This was just one of those waves, kicked up high by him, her world’s earthquake over there by the window. The calm was on the other side of it and would come back in a moment. Maybe after he left. Oh, God. And the snow would fall, and there she would be, watching it as it cut her off from all the world, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  Three months after she left him—maybe when he finally accepted she wasn’t coming back—he had sold their house, without talking to her about it. It had been in his name, bought just before they met. Half the proceeds had appeared in her bank account, and information on a storage account and the code to access it had arrived in a formal printed letter, as if an email might bring them too close, might encourage a response. She had never gone to look at the storage, because . . . what if, in his over-careful way, he had decided he didn’t have the right to get rid of the baby things for her? Or what if he had packed up their wedding photos? The terror of that had stuffed itself down her throat and choked her.

  For weeks on end after that, she avoided her mailbox, but every time she steeled herself to work through its pile of envelopes, no notice of divorce proceedings had ever arrived. She still braced for it, every time. And it still never came. Maybe for him, too, divorce was a last wrenching, heart-breaking act he couldn’t quite stand to face. When he did finally move to divorce her, it would doubtless mean he had met someone else, a new, fresh love who motivated him to clean up his past so that he could move on from it for the new woman’s sake. At a distance, Kai had gotten used to that idea. She even knew that she should actually want that for him, a new, bright love without all the stains she had left on theirs. She was supposed to want that for him. It was her fault she had made him so unhappy.

  Some of the money from the sale of the house had gone to rent this luxury cabin from his mother, and she had sat up here, with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching the snow fall, so peaceful, so freeing, shutting her off from everything, including him. She had thought the grief would kill her then. That she would literally die and no one find her body until spring. But it hadn’t worked out that easy.

  “But I couldn’t stop,” she said, and her breath came out too hard, skittering sugar across the granite landscape.

  He nodded and looked out the window, hands in his pockets. He had such a beautiful body. It had always worked just right for her, that long, rangy over-analyzed athleticism, the way he could keep it so car
efully fit and yet not quite know how to have fun with it, until he met her. She remembered, still, the first time he had ever burst into laughter for her. It had been their third date, two weeks after they met at his mother’s enormous estate while Kai was setting up a spring flower-food photo shoot for Anne in her beautiful gardens.

  For their third date, Kai had suggested a hike, because Kurt’s carefully planned dinners just weren’t working out the way their instinctive rapport in those gardens had suggested they would. Fascinated though she was by his over-thinking, she had wanted to get him away from it for a little while. They had rested in a glade on that gently sunny afternoon, him stretched out with his arms behind his head, thoughtful and serious, and her sitting with her legs folded, knees nearly but not quite brushing his ribs, fingers just itching to touch that stretched-out body, the body that he so carefully did not offer to her because he was so busy plotting how to get his approach to her just right that he didn’t realize how right for her it already was.

  And finally she had just reached out and dove her fingers with devilish precision into his ribs. He had twisted uncontrollably—she had known someone that careful had to be ticklish—and then burst out laughing. He had grabbed her wrists to stop her and when that pulled her body into a lean over his, looked up into her face with his hazel eyes brilliant with that unexpected laughter and something else, something even more hungry and delighted. It had been the first time they kissed. (Because he was so careful, so courteously respectful when he said good night those first two dinners.) If a couple of hikers hadn’t passed about fifteen minutes later, it would have been the first time they made love, too.

  He’d always liked to make love outside in the grass when he could find a spot, ever after. It just always seemed to make him so happy.