Housekeeper Under the Mistletoe

by Cara Colter

  He was happy.

  The evening broke up, and the poor old horse and carriage could not keep up with people flocking down to the dock, so he and Angie walked along the boardwalk, hand in hand. The night was filled with the laughter and chatter of the crowds. They were not the only ones walking.

  As they turned at the entrance of the dock, a flurry of farewells filled the air.

  “So good to see you, Jefferson. Angie, nice to meet you.”

  “Safe journey over the water, Jeff. Angie, thank you for coming.”

  Finally, he helped her into the boat and settled her in her seat. He went and got the blanket from below and tucked it over her shoulders.

  “They love you,” Angie said, tugging the blanket around herself. She was glowing.

  He contemplated her words. How right it seemed for the word love to have floated into the enchantment that was tonight.

  He started the engine, put on the running lights, backed away from the dock and pointed the nose of his boat toward the dark main body of water of Kootenay Lake. Driving at night was extraordinarily beautiful, but it held some extra challenges.

  “Jefferson?”

  He turned his focus from the water, looked at her.

  “They love you. And so do I.”

  For the second time that night, it felt as if his breath had quit and his heart had stopped. What was he doing? Hadn’t he known all along this is where it was going?

  “They only think they love me,” he told her. “And so do you.”

  “No,” she said stubbornly.

  Rather than respond, he checked for other boats leaving the harbor and, seeing none, opened up the throttle. Everybody only thought they loved him. If only they knew how unworthy he was.

  He realized he could give the boat all the gas he wanted, but he could not go fast enough to outrun what had to be done.

  He had to tell her. He had to put this to a stop right now, before he undid every bit of good the past two weeks had done for her.

  He didn’t respond to her at first. He drove them over the quiet lake—so much of it now held memories of their times together—and pulled into the cove where they had taken refuge from the storm. He stopped the boat and put out the anchor.

  The boat rocked gently. The night air was as warm as an embrace. He could still hear voices and laughter drifting over the lake. Angie sat looking at him, the dress a dream around her, so beautiful it made him ache.

  “It is a perfect night,” she said. “Or would be if I had ice cream.”

  It had been. It had been a perfect night. But it wasn’t going to be anymore. Because every good memory he had of this night would be overridden by what was going to happen next. This was the night it was all going to end.

  “I have to tell you something,” Jefferson said quietly.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I HAVE TO tell you something.

  It seemed to Angie as if every horrible event of her whole life had begun with those words.

  Her mother looking at her with red, swollen eyes, her voice broken. “I have to tell you something. Your father and I are getting divorced. He moved out this morning.”

  Harry, biting his lip and then looking away, before clearing his throat and saying in a firm voice, “I have to tell you something. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I’m not happy. I can’t be happy here. I’ve met someone.”

  Her father had met someone, too, not that she had known it at the time. If she had known, maybe she could have been more prepared for how her life was about to change.

  And then Harry turned out to be exactly like her father, as if she could spot a philanderer across a crowded room, when what she was looking for was the exact opposite.

  So, what did Jefferson have to tell her? Selfishly, she wished he would wait until morning. She did not want to end what had been one of the nicest nights of her life on a sour note! How cruel of him to park the boat in the middle of a lake where she had no option to run and hide once he had told her.

  But that’s what she got for declaring her love. That’s what she got for being fearless when she was the person least inclined that way. Why hadn’t she just accepted who she was instead of pushing her boundaries?

  “I had no right to enjoy tonight as much as I did,” Jefferson announced quietly.

  She felt suddenly panicky. “You can spare me the details,” she said. “I think I can guess. You have a girlfriend tucked away somewhere, don’t you? I should have known, really. A man like you—so gorgeous and so much fun and so successful—could not possibly be alone for so long. I—”

  “Angie. Stop it! Of course I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  Her relief was short-lived. “A horrible ailment,” she decided. “Are you dying?”

  “No. Angie, just let me speak. Please.”

  “I’m trapped on a boat. What choice do I have?” How could she have been so dumb? How could she have declared her love for him? Now, he had to make excuses. She braced herself for it. She could imagine what was coming. He didn’t love her. He was going to try and let her down gently. I like you very much. I hope we can remain friends.

  “Are you listening?” he asked.

  “No, I’m contemplating jumping off the boat. Unfortunately, the weight of the dress, wet, would probably drown me.”

  “As if I would ever let you drown,” he said, annoyed.

  That made her look at him. There was a protective fury in his voice. And there was something tortured in the way he was looking at her.

  “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I’m listening.”

  “Those people, who you so correctly pointed out love me, are trying to help me. They were so insistent I come tonight, because they are trying to bring me back to their world. But I feel their love is with an illusion, because they have no idea who I really am.”

  She stared at him. He was standing at the back of the boat, his weight rocking easily from foot to foot with the boat’s motion. How could he believe people had no idea who he was when he radiated who he was?

  All that quiet confidence and strength.

  “Everybody is trying to make me feel better about what happened that night with Hailey. They’re trying to make me feel better, they want me to get on with my life. But I would have to absolve myself, and I can’t.”

  “Absolve yourself?” she whispered.

  “Here’s the truth no one knows,” he said harshly. “Here’s the truth you need to know before you make your declaration of love.

  “We fought that night. That’s what sent her out onto those terrible roads. We had had a terrible fight. And I was so mad, I didn’t go after her. I knew she didn’t know those roads. I failed her. I failed to protect her. Isn’t that what I swore I would do, when I said those vows to her?”

  “Jefferson, what happened?”

  He looked out over the lake, pensive. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. Angie had to strain to hear it.

  “I could not believe my ears when Hailey said she wanted to build a house on the land I’d inherited from my grandparents. My grandparents’ house had already burned down by the time I met her, so our trips to the property were not exactly successes. We tried camping once. That was a disaster. We stayed at the hotel in Anslow twice, and that didn’t meet her standards.

  “That’s nothing against her—she was a big-city girl, with a high-powered career that was just reaching its pinnacle. I knew that when I married her.

  “I was fine with our life. I loved my wife. We had a swanky apartment in downtown Vancouver. Both of us traveled a lot with our careers. When we were together it was fancy dinners and theater and entertaining friends. I was content with all of that.

  “Until she said she wanted to build a house here, on my land, on Kootenay Lake. And then I knew
how much I had missed it and how much I wanted to come home. Then, I knew I harbored other dreams beyond the amazing success I was enjoying. Of having a family, and of campfires on summer nights and long days on the boat.

  “We started building in the spring. It was a huge undertaking. Summer was the best part of the whole project. We lived in a holiday trailer, but everything seemed exciting—things were happening, the house was taking shape. We’d work all day, then swim and sit around a little campfire roasting hot dogs.

  “But, right from the start, there were disagreements. She picked an impractical location for the house because it would “showcase” her skills. The whole project very quickly seemed to become about showcasing her skills. Budget went out the window with the building of the road to the house site, and it went downhill from there.

  “Double ovens in the kitchen? She didn’t even cook. A craft room? You could not meet a person less interested in being crafty than Hailey.

  “Then the build went into the fall. It was wet and grim. By the time we finished and moved in, Hailey hated it here. It’s cold that close to the water. It’s foggy. Because of where she chose to put the house, it was incredibly difficult to get in and out of it.

  “But, finally, we were nearing completion. That’s when she started picking furniture. Every single thing seemed to be about how it looked instead of how it felt.

  “And that night when we fought, she was placing furniture and it slipped out that she was staging the house. Staging. That’s what you do to manipulate people’s impressions of a space—it’s like you’re creating a fantasy they can walk into. It’s not what you do if you’re planning on living there.

  “So, I pressed her on that, what she meant by staging, and she admitted all of it had really been with an eye to a future sale. The property, by itself, is probably worth millions. With the house on it?

  “She figured with the proceeds of this sale we could buy a piece of property in any big city in the world that we wanted, and she could build our real house there. Our real house, the house for the busy professional couple, with no children. She actually laughed when I asked her where our kids fit into the picture.

  “I’m not proud of what happened next. I lost my mind. I started smashing all her little staging items—her expensive vases and her pictures that didn’t mean anything to anybody. I’m not sure I have ever been so angry.

  “And she left. She left in the middle of a snowstorm and drove away. And I didn’t go after her.

  “No, I sat and brooded over the mistake I’d made, and asked myself how I couldn’t have seen sooner what was coming. I didn’t think—not once—about all the things I loved about her. The way she laughed, and how smart she was, and how she liked to play jokes on me. I didn’t think about all the good years we’d had before we started to build that house, or all the things we had in common. No, I got rip-roaring drunk, and I passed out on the couch.

  “I woke up to a knock at the door. It was the police. She’d made it up our road to the highway. But she had tried to take a corner too fast. It was slippery. She’d gone off the road. She died on impact, when the car hit the water.”

  Angie could feel the tears streaming down her face. She got up from where she had been sitting and stood behind him. She wrapped her arms around him and leaned her head into his back.

  He jerked away from her. He spun and looked at her. His eyes were dark with a fury that made her take a step back from him, even though it was obvious the fury was directed at himself.

  “That’s the me that nobody knows,” he said grimly. “I killed her. She had nowhere to go when I got mad like that. I might as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

  Angie gasped at that, but he wasn’t done.

  “You were right. Those people love me. They’ve loved me since I was a six-year-old boy. But they don’t know me. And I don’t think they’d be trying so damned hard to make something good come out of something bad if they knew the full truth.”

  “Jefferson,” Angie said, her voice a croak of pure pain, “it was an accident. You did not kill your wife. That is a terrible burden you’ve been carrying. You are a good man.”

  He looked at her long and hard. And then he pushed past her and took his seat at the controls of the boat. He flicked it on and gave it full throttle. The nose lifted so quickly, she was thrust into one of the back seats. They shot over the still water like a rocket that had been launched.

  When they arrived at his dock and he helped her out of the boat, his face remained grim.

  “Don’t love me,” he said. And then he turned and walked away.

  Angie watched him go. It was already too late for that. She already did love him, beyond reason. The fact that he carried this terrible burden of guilt, along with his grief, did not make her love him less.

  But it did make her see the truth. Perhaps it was the truth he had already seen.

  She was hiding here. Cowering, really, from what life had handed her. To love him, to lead him through everything that love meant she could not cower.

  She had to face her life head-on.

  She had to show him she did not need his protection. He had set himself up in that role, a role he already thought he had failed at.

  And she had allowed it. She had taken great comfort in it.

  But it had done what it needed to do. It had helped to heal her. Now, to love him, she had to come to him whole, not in fragments of fear and not a hostage to her own history. She had to dig deep within herself and be the person he had shown her she could be. She had to give him back what he had given her. She had to lend him her strength, just as he had lent her his.

  And she could see only one way she could do that.

  Angie had to be fearless.

  * * *

  Jefferson went to his room without waiting to see how Angie would react to all he had told her. In the morning, he expected she would look at him with the disdain of someone who had been shown a truth that was different from what they had believed.

  He expected he might see signs she had been crying.

  Instead, when he ventured out of his room in the morning, he saw Angie was already busy. The muffins were fresh baked, as always. He heard her in the living room.

  “The photographer is coming tomorrow,” she called to him.

  He resisted an impulse to yell he didn’t give a damn about the photographer. Was she going to pretend he hadn’t said anything last night? He grabbed a muffin and went and stood in the door of the living room.

  The princess was gone, and Cinderella was back, her hair hidden under one of her babushka creations, her shorts showing off the slenderness of her legs, her T-shirt clinging. She had a small mountain of pillows on the floor.

  “Where did those come from?” he asked gruffly.

  “I made them.”

  How was it possible to like this as much as the goddess she had been last night? How was it possible to love this as much.

  Love.

  There was that word again. And the truth smashed into him. He loved her. Enough to let her go on to the life she deserved.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  So, she was more distressed by what he had told her than she was letting on. He could see that now. She was avoiding looking at him.

  He stuffed the entire blueberry muffin in his mouth, as if somehow, that could help him stuff back the terrible sensation of loss that was sweeping through him, even though she was standing right here.

  “You need to go see if you can find some flowers,” she said, placing a pillow on the couch. She scowled at it, then karate chopped the top of it. “I should have asked to have the ones from the dinner tables last night.”

  He scowled. He had just laid an earth-shattering truth about himsel
f at her feet, and she was going to talk about flowers?

  Well, fine, he’d go along with that. He’d go find some flowers. He didn’t want to be around her anyway. It caused an ache in him that felt as if it would never go away.

  Grabbing another muffin, he went out the door.

  He made sure he was gone a good long time. He emptied Anslow of flowers and then, as an afterthought, he pulled off the lake and picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the hills. The wildflowers, he somehow knew, would delight her more than the ones he had gotten from the tiny flower shop in Anslow.

  Why, he asked himself, was he picking wildflowers for her.

  Because, at the very core of every man, was a little light that flickered, that would not be put out, not even if you threw pails of water on it.

  That light was hope.

  But that light died in him when, laden with flowers as she had requested, he went back into his house.

  Maybe, subliminally, he had registered that her car was not parked under the tree where it had been since the day she arrived.

  Maybe, subliminally, he had registered there was no movement in the windows, no lights on, as he had come up the staircase from the lake.

  Whatever it was, he knew the instant he walked in the door. He knew before he called her name and walked room to room looking for her. He knew before he took the stairs, two at a time, up to her room and found the closets empty and her suitcase gone.

  The wildflowers fell from his hand and scattered across the bleached hardwood floor.

  He had known before having evidence, because it was as if her essence was gone from the house.

  He walked back through, more slowly. It was strange, because the house was as perfect as it had ever been. As he went from room to room, he saw it looked exactly as Hailey had dreamed it would look. Staged, to give the illusion it was someone’s home.

  There was a throw over the couch, and a wooden apple crate beside it filled with magazines. There was a hardcover book, turned over, open, making it look as if someone had sat here reading and they had just gotten up for a second. The fireplace, that had never been used, was laid for a fire as if it was just waiting for a match.