by Cara Colter
Emma’s disappointment was palpable. He hoped, uneasily and fervently, she wasn’t going to cry. Nothing felt like a threat to him as much as a woman’s tears. Tess already knew, and used it to her advantage at every opportunity.
“Sorry,” he said, gruffly, whether he meant it or because he hoped saying something—anything—could curb her distress, he wasn’t sure.
“Things will be back to normal by tomorrow,” she said, “Holiday Happenings is going to happen.”
This was said fiercely as if she was challenging him—or the gods—to disagree with her. He wasn’t going to, but the gods seemed to enjoy a challenge like that one.
It was Tess who took Emma’s mind off her weather woes. Apparently the baby was tired of looking at the embarrassment of riches around her, and tired of the adult chatter.
She began squealing and pointing at various cookies and nearly wiggled herself right out of Emma’s arms.
“WA DAT.”
“Want that?” Emma guessed, mercifully distracted. “She’s hungry.”
“Or could squeeze in a cookie after demolishing a ten-course meal,” he said, thanking Tess for evaporating the tears that had shone so briefly behind those eyes.
“Can she have one, daddy? Or does she have to have healthy stuff first?”
He frowned. Let it go? He wasn’t going to be here long enough for it to matter, was he? Correcting her meant revealing something more of the private life, fresh with tragedy, that he kept so guarded.
On the other hand, revealing the fact he was not Tess’s father seemed safer than returning to the possibility the weather could ruin her plans for Holiday Happenings.
If he never heard the words Holiday Happenings again, he would be just as happy. It was worth it, even if it revealed a little of himself.
He realized he had not introduced himself.
“I’m Ryder Richardson,” he said, not trying to disguise his reluctance, “I’m Tess’s uncle. Her guardian.”
“Oh.”
It asked questions, none of which he intended to answer. He stuck out his hand, a diversionary tactic to stall questions and to keep her mind off her failed evening.
She juggled the baby, and took his hand. As soon as he felt her hand in his, he knew he’d made a mistake. Her hand slipped inside his, a perfect fit, softness intermingled with surprising strength.
He felt the zing of the physical contact, steeled himself against it.
She felt something, too, because she froze for a moment, stared up into his eyes, blinked with startled awareness. And then she pulled her hand away, rapidly.
His eyes went to her lips. Once upon a time, a long time ago, when he was a different man in a different life, he had known other diversionary tactics. Most of them involved lips. His and hers.
Now as profoundly committed to taking his wandering mind off lips as he was to taking Emma’s mind off personal questions and the weather, he held out his arms, and Emma gave Tess back to him.
Babies were the grand diversion when it came to women. One look at Tess’s hair should take Emma’s mind irrevocably off her crushed hopes for the evening, and maybe off that sizzling moment of awareness that had just passed between them.
He propped Tess on the edge of the plank table, removed the blanket, pulled Tess’s little limbs from the car coat he’d had her in. Last he fumbled with the ridiculously hard-to-reach snap on the stupid snow hat that he had put on the baby out of a sense of wanting to do the responsible thing before they left on their road trip.
That was the worry part. A snow hat inside the car. In case. Well, that, and to cover the mess of her hair in case they stopped anywhere along the way. The cop might have even looked at him differently if he had spotted the baby’s hair.
If you can’t even look after her hair, how can you be trusted with the larger picture?
“I hate this hat,” he muttered, though what he really hated was that question.
“Why’s that?”
“It never seems to go on right.”
“Ah.” It was a strangled sound.
Ryder shot her a look. She was smiling, biting back a giggle.
He glared at her. He disliked merriment nearly as much as Christmas, especially when it was at his expense and made him feel self-conscious about his baby skills. “Is something funny?” he asked, annoyed.
She held up a finger, letting him know that soon she would be in control of herself. Really, she looked like an evil elf, gasping. The more she tried to stop laughing, the more she couldn’t, as if his disapproval was making her nervous. Which was good.
“You…have…it…on…backwards.”
He could look at it in a different way. Not that she was laughing at him, but that he’d succeeded. The sparkle of tears were gone from her eyes, replaced, that quickly, with the sparkle of laughter.
Only he hadn’t really succeeded. Because he could clearly see she didn’t look like an evil elf, after all. The laughter chased some shadow from her eyes, making them even prettier, and the smile made him even more aware of the sensuous lilt of those puffy lips.
He’d been here less than ten minutes, long enough to know he hated the White Christmas Inn and everything about it.
Ryder looked away from her, frowning. He stepped back from Tess and studied the hat. “I’ll be damned. It is on backwards. No wonder it was so hard to work with.”
A respected architect and he couldn’t get a hat on right. He was learning babies were an exercise in humility. Experimentally, he turned the headgear around the right way, admired it, allowed a small whisper of pleasure at this tiny discovery.
“It was the placement of the pom-pom that threw me,” he decided gravely.
“Of course,” she said, just as gravely.
“Now I won’t have to buy another hat,” he said, allowing that little whisper of pleasure to deepen.
He saw Emma’s look, and was astounded at how his pride was stung at her misinterpretation. “Not because I can’t afford another one,” he said sharply, “because you cannot imagine how terrible it is being the sole man shopping in the baby department.”
Tess was crankily trying to pull that hat back off.
“It doesn’t look like she likes hats, anyway,” Emma said.
“Until she lets me comb her hair, she wears hats.” He took the hat back off and stepped aside, letting Emma see for the first time what was underneath.
If she started laughing at him again, he was going to pick up the baby and head back into the storm, knock on the door of the first house in Willowbrook that had no Christmas decorations and beg for sanctuary from the storm.
But Emma didn’t laugh. Her gasp of dismay was almost worse.
Hey, it’s not as if your hair is all that different.
But Emma’s hair was different from Tess’s. Emma’s curls looked as if she had tried, maybe too vigorously, to tame them. He felt that inexplicable urge to touch again, focused on his niece’s hair instead.
Tess’s white blonde hair did not look as if it had been combed since the day she was born, even though it had only been two days. Her hair looked like it belonged to a monster baby.
It formed fuzzy dreadlocks and tortured corkscrews. There was a clump at the back that looked like it might house mice, and two distinct hair horns stood up on either side of her head.
“No nanny for the last two days,” he explained, feeling the deep sting of his own ineptitude. “And in Tess’s world, Uncle is not allowed to touch the goldilocks.”
Emma looked skeptical, as if he might be making up a story to explain away his own negligence.
“I know,” he said dryly. “It’s shameful. A twenty pound scrap of baby controlling a full grown man, but there you have it.”
Emma still looked skeptical, so he demonstrated. He reached out with one finger. He touched Tess’s hair, feather-light, barely a touch at all.
The baby inhaled a deep breath, and exhaled a bloodcurdling shriek, as if he dropped a red-hot coal down her diap
er. He removed his finger, the shriek stopped abruptly, like a sentence stopped in the middle. Tess regarded him with her most innocent look.
“Ha,” he said, moved his finger toward her, and away, shriek, stop, shriek, stop. Soon, he stopped as soon as her mouth opened wide, so she was making O’s and closing them, like a fish.
Emma snorted with laughter. Not that he wanted to get her laughing again or explore the intrigue of shadows that danced away when she laughed, and flitted back when she didn’t.
Again, he wondered what he was doing. He had not wanted Emma to cry. He wanted this even less. Firsts.
There was something tempting about being with someone who did not know his history, as if he could pretend to be a brand-new man. He contemplated that, being free, even for a moment a man unburdened, a man with no history.
But he wasn’t those things and Ryder hated himself for thinking he should be free of the mantle he carried. His brother had died because he was, quite simply, not enough.
The fact that Emma could tempt him to feel otherwise made him angry at her as well as at himself, as irrational as that might have been.
CHAPTER THREE
INSTEAD of moving toward the temptation, the pretense, of being a man he was not, Ryder mentally reshouldered his burdens, and stopped playing the little game with Tess, but not before he felt that small sigh of gratitude that his niece did bring some lightness into a world gone dark.
“Can she have a cookie?” Emma asked, coming back to her original question.
“I’ll try her with a little baby food first.” He dug through the bag, and a bottle dropped to the floor. He watched it roll downhill, another indicator the house was hiding some major problems.
Which were, he noted thankfully, none of his concern. He fetched the bottle back, and got out a jar, which he heated in the microwave for a few seconds.
But, of course, the baby food proved impossible, Tess wiggling around in the high chair Emma had unearthed and focused totally on the cookies that surrounded her. She swatted impatiently when he tried to deliver pureed carrots to her.
“Certified organic, too,” he said, finally quitting, wiping a splotch of carrot off his shirt. “She had a bottle in the car a while ago, so go ahead, give her a cookie.”
Unmindful that the baby was now covered in carrots, including some in the tangle of hair he was not allowed to touch, Emma swooped her up from the high chair.
“Which one, Tess?” Emma asked, stopping at each plate, letting his niece inspect.
Tess chose a huge gingerbread man, picked a jelly bean off his belly and gobbled it up.
“You must be hungry, too,” Emma said to him. “I can’t offer anything fancy. I have hot dogs for Holiday Happenings.”
No! After all his work at distraction, they were right back to this? The shadow in her eyes darkened every time she mentioned her weather-waylaid event.
“If you’d like a glass of mulled wine or hot chocolate, I have several gallons of both at the warming shed.”
Several gallons of wine sounded terribly attractive.
An escape he did not allow himself. Tess needed better.
“A couple of hot dogs would be perfect.” He watched Tess polish off the jelly-bean buttons and take a mighty bite of her gingerbread man’s head. Disappointment registered on her face as she chewed.
“YUCK.” Without ceremony she spat out what was in her mouth, tossed the headless gingerbread man on the floor and reached for a different cookie.
Emma thought it was funny, but these were the challenges in his life. What was best for Tess? Was she too young to try and teach her manners? Did he just accept the fact she didn’t like the cookie and let it go? Or by doing nothing was he teaching her the lifelong habit of smashing cookies on the floor?
Serial smasher.
Ryder rubbed at his forehead. He could convince himself he did okay on the big things for Tess: providing a home, clothing, food, a lovely middle-aged nanny who loved his niece to distraction. But it was always the little things, cookies and bonnets, that made him wonder what the hell he was doing.
People had the audacity to hint he needed a partner, a wife, a feminine influence for Tess, but to him the fact they suggested it only meant he had become successful at hiding how broken he was inside. What little he had left to give he was saving for Tess, and he hoped it would be enough.
Suddenly he felt too tired and too hungry even to think.
Or to defend himself against the thought that came.
That he was alone in the world. That all the burdens of the past and all the decisions about the future were his alone to carry and to make.
The warmth of the White Christmas Inn was creeping inside him, despite his efforts to keep it at bay, making him feel more alone.
Emma had said Christmas transformed everything and made it magic, and she had said there were spirits here who protected all who entered. But the last thing he needed was to be so tired and hungry that her whimsy could seep past the formidable wall of his defenses.
So what if he didn’t have what most people were able to take for granted? So what if life was unfair? He already knew that better than most. So, he didn’t have someone to ask about the baby spitting out a cookie, he didn’t have a holiday season to look forward to instead of dread, he didn’t have a place to belong that was somehow more than walls and furniture. He had made his choice. Not to rely on anyone or anything, because he of all people knew that those things could be taken in an instant.
Loss had left him weakened, more loss would finish him. He had a responsibility. He was all Tess had left in the world. He wasn’t leaving himself open to the very forces that had nearly destroyed him already.
Ryder Richardson needed desperately to be strong for the little girl who had fallen asleep in Emma’s arms, one mashed half-eaten cookie still clutched in a grubby fist.
He felt his strength returning after he ate the hot dogs and about two dozen of the cookies. But inside he felt crabby about this situation he found himself in. He had made himself a world without tests, and he felt as if he was being tested.
Make that crabbier.
“Thanks for the meal,” he said, formally. “If you could show me our room, Tess needs to be put in a bed, and I need to check the weather.”
“I don’t quite know how to break this to you,” whatever she was about to break to him delighted her, he noticed with annoyance, “but the only way you’ll be checking the weather from your room is by sticking your head out the window.”
For a moment he didn’t quite grasp what she was saying. And when he did, the sensation of crabbiness, of his life being wrested out of his control, intensified.
No television in the room. No escape, no way of turning off everything going on inside him. He considered the television the greatest tool ever invented for numbing wayward feelings, for acting as anesthetic for a doubting mind.
“People come here to get away from it all,” she said cheerfully.
“To feel the magic,” he said, faintly sarcastic.
“Precisely,” she said happily, he suspected missing his sarcasm deliberately.
“You have a television somewhere, right?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“No buts. Lead me to it. Or face the wrath of man.”
She didn’t seem to find his pun funny at all. And he was glad. He really didn’t need to experience Emma’s laughter again. Especially if he was going to stay strong.
The wrath of man. Funny. Except he meant it. And there was something in him, something fierce and closed, that reminded Emma of a warrior. There was no doubt in her mind he would lay down his life for the baby that so obviously held his hardened heart in the pudgy pink palm of her hand.
The baby had clearly—and gleefully—demonstrated her power with the hilarious hair show.
But whatever moment of lightness he had allowed himself then was gone from Ryder’s face now. He was practically bristling with bad temper.
It woul
d be a foolish time to let him know that television was not part of Emma’s vision for the White Pond Inn, and it certainly didn’t fit in with its incarnation as the White Christmas Inn.
But she had already told him she believed in spirits and magic, risking Ryder’s scorn because she had vowed, after Peter, there would be no more trying to hide who she really was from other people, no more giving opinions that they wanted to hear.
What an expert she had become at reading what Peter wanted from the faintest purse of lips, giving that to him, making him happy at her own expense. How many times had she swallowed back what she really wanted to say so as not to risk his disapproval, his patronizing suggestions for her “improvement”?
“I consider the inn a techno-electro-free zone,” she said, and could hear a certain fierceness in her own voice, as if somehow it was this man’s fault that even after she had nearly turned herself inside-out trying to please Peter, he had still searched for someone more suitable. And found her.
“Techno-electro,” he said, mulling over the word, which she was pretty sure she had just invented.
“Television is not on the activities agenda, not even on the bad-weather days.”
“I’m dying to know what you do on the bad-weather days.”
Even though he clearly wasn’t, she forged on, determined to be herself. “I bring out board games, and a selection of jigsaw puzzles. I always have tons of books around. I encourage guests to shut off their cell phones and leave the laptops at home.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, daring him to find her corny while almost hoping he would. Because if he judged her the way Peter had judged her she could dismiss the somewhat debilitating attraction she felt for him.
She realized she was a little disappointed when he didn’t even address her philosophy.
“Since I’m here by the force of fate, instead of by choice, you’re going to make an exception for me.”
It wasn’t a question, and he was absolutely right. He had not come here looking for what her other guests came here looking for. He was not enchanted, and he had no intention of being brought under the spell of the White Christmas Inn.
