by Cara Colter
Which was good. What would she do with a man like that under her spell?
“I do have a television in my room,” she admitted reluctantly.
What she didn’t admit to was the DVD player. They were guilty pleasures she indulged in when she was just too exhausted to do even one more thing. There was always something to be done when you ran an establishment like this: windows to be cleaned, bedding to be laundered, floors to be polished, flower beds, lawns, paint-touchups. And that was just the day-to-day chores and didn’t include the catastrophes, like the time the upstairs bathtub had fallen through the floor.
Sometimes, it was true, on those bad-weather days while her guests played games, she watched a growing collection of romantic movies. She saw them as a replacement for emotional entanglement, not a longing for it.
“Your room? That’s the only television in the house?” The thought of entering her bedroom clearly made him as uncomfortable as it made her.
The very thought of those dark warrior eyes taking in the details of her room made her heart beat a fast and traitorous tempo. Her room matched the theme of Christmas: white, though that was how her room was year-round. The walls were the color of rich dairy cream, there was a thick white duvet on the gorgeous bed, an abundance of white pillows in delicious rich textures and fabrics.
When she walked in, the room always seemed soft to her, as comforting as a feather pillow.
But when she saw it through his eyes, she wondered what he would see. And the thought came to her: virginal.
A warrior and a virgin.
She nearly choked on the renegade thought, told herself she had been reading a few too many of the romance novels, more replacements, so much safer and more predictable than real-life romance. She kept a nice selection in tidy stacks on her bedside table, right beside the much-watched DVDs.
But it would make her feel altogether too vulnerable for him to see that, since he might misinterpret her fascination with a certain style of book and film as longing rather than what it was.
“I’ll go get the television for you. You’d be more comfortable watching it down here than in my room.” And then she blushed as if discussing her room was akin to discussing her panties. Which might be lying on the floor, one of the relaxed slips of the single life.
“I can carry it for you.”
“No, no,” she protested, too strenuously, “it’s tiny.”
“That figures,” he said, still grouchy, having no problem at all being himself. Which was grouchy and cynical and Christmas-hating. It really balanced out the formidable attraction of his good looks quite remarkably.
“Make yourself comfortable.” She handed the sleeping baby back to him, dislodging the cookie from the fist first. “Go into the great room. Through there. I’ll be down in a sec.”
She hoped her room would have the calming effect on her that it always did. But it didn’t. There were no panties on the floor, of course, because she liked the room to look perfect, but even still, instead of being her soothing sanctuary, her sea of textured white softness seemed sensual, like a bridal chamber.
She realized she had been reading too many books, watching too many glorious movies, because totally unbidden her mind provided her with a picture of what he might look like here, lying on that bed, naked from the waist up, holding his arms out to her, his eyes holding smoldering welcome. She shivered at the heat of the picture, at the animal stab of desire she felt.
Your mother was a wild child, Tim had told her sadly, when she had been crushed by Lynelle’s absence at her own mother’s funeral. It was like an illness she was born with. Nothing around these parts ever interested her or was good enough for her.
Peter’s mother had not warmed to Emma when they had finally met on that disastrous Christmas Day last year. Emma had felt acutely that when Mrs. Henderson looked at her, she disapproved of something. Make that everything.
“Stop it,” Emma ordered herself sternly. Just because you had a wild child in you didn’t mean you had to be owned by it, the way her mother had been. It was not part of being herself. In fact, it was something she intended to fight.
So she swept the romance novels off the bedside table and shoved them under the bed. Then, realizing it could just as easily be another symptom of make-yourself-over-so-other-people-will-like-you, as of fighting-the-wild-child, she fished them back out and stood holding them, not sure what to do.
This is what a man did! Disrupted a perfectly contented life. She set the books on the table and planted the DVDs right on top of them.
Ryder Richardson was not coming into this room. Why was she acting as if he would ever see this? He was a stranger, and despite the harsh judgments in Mrs. Henderson’s eyes, and despite her mother’s example, Emma was not the kind of woman who conducted dalliances with strangers, no matter how attractive they were. No matter how attractive their helpless devotion for a baby.
Still, despite the fact Emma was definitely not conducting a dalliance, she quickly divested herself of the long johns under her jeans. They were not making her feel just bulky, but also hot and bothered.
Wait, maybe that was him!
Despite the fact she’d ordered herself not to, she spent a moment more trying to do something with hair made crazier by the Santa hat.
“Tess and I would tie for first place in the bad-hair-day contest,” she told herself, combing some curl conditioner through her hair. The flattened curls sprang up as though she had stuck her finger in a socket, not exactly the effect she’d been looking for.
On the other hand, she was not conducting a dalliance, so the worse she looked the better, right? She was hardly a temptation!
And never had been. When Peter’s old girlfriend, Monique, had reentered the picture, he had gone back to her.
And blamed Emma! Her attention to the inn had caused him to be unfaithful. It hadn’t been his fault, it had been hers.
She left the room, that memory fresh enough that no member of the male species was going to look attractive to her! Then she had to go back for the television she had gone up for in the first place.
Trying to look only composed, indifferent, neither a wild child nor a woman scorned, she moved into the great room, placed the TV on a small rosewood end table and plugged it in.
She needn’t have worried about her hair. Or about being seduced by a warrior. Or about giving in to her own impulses.
A typical man, from the moment that television was plugged in, Ryder was totally focused on it. He made no effort to hide the fact he was appalled by its size.
“That isn’t a TV,” he grumbled. He moved his chair to within a foot of it, the snoozing baby a part of him, like a small football nestled in the crook of his arm. “Oh, wait, it is. Imported from the land of little people, the only place on earth that is known to make a seven-inch screen.” He held out his hand, and Emma slapped the remote into it.
“Nine,” she told him.
He turned on the TV.
“Color,” he commented with faked amazement. “Quite a concession to the times, Emma. Quite a concession.”
Well, at least he hadn’t even noticed the hideous, pathetic effort she had made to fix her hair.
Ryder began grimly switching from channel to channel.
“You should have televisions in the rooms,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the set. “Men like that. A lot.”
“Actually, I know that.”
He gave her a skeptical look, as if somehow she had managed to give him the impression she was the least likely person to know what men liked. A lot.
Her hidden wild child did know. Maybe if she had let that wicked woman out now and then, instead of trying so hard to be circumspect, Peter would still be hers.
“Well,” he said, with a hint of sarcasm, “why pander to what people like, after all? Never mind good business.”
Is it that clear to him, on the basis of our very short acquaintance, that business isn’t exactly my strength? Should she put in televis
ion sets next year? She hated herself for even thinking it! For letting her judgment be so influenced!
“I want people to engage in the experience I offer,” she said, aware she was arguing as if she was making a case before the Supreme Court. “The White Pond Inn is about old-fashioned family time. Games in the parlor. Fishing at the pond. Hikes. Reading a book in a hammock. Watching fireflies.”
How wholesome. Not a hint of wild child in that!
But she might as well have spared herself the effort. She had lost his interest. He settled Tess on the long length of his thigh. The baby, her face smudged with cookies, and her hair tangles intact, sighed with contentment in her sleep. She settled onto his leg, her padded, frilly rump pointed in the air, her legs curled underneath her tummy, her cheek resting on his knee. In moments, a gentle little snore was coming from her.
Ryder’s one hand rested on her back, protective, unconsciously tender. It would have made a lovely picture to go with Emma’s decor, except for the fact that his other hand had a death grip on the remote control.
And then there was the unlovely scowl that deepened on his face as each channel reported the same ominous weather.
The storm was not projected to end until the early hours of morning.
Even then, roads reopening were going to depend on highway clean-up. One channel showed a clip of a road outside Fredericton. The scene showed devastation, the road completely blocked by sagging power lines, by trees broken and splintered by the weight of the ice on them.
Ryder snapped off the television. It looked to Emma as though he wanted to hurl her channel changer through the screen.
“Where were you going?” she asked wondering at his desperation to be out of here. “Is someone waiting for you tonight?”
“No,” he said. “No one’s waiting.” It said something about his life—starkly lonely, not that anything about him invited sympathy. Except the baby sprawling along the muscled length of his upper thigh.
“Where were you going?” she asked again. Nothing about him invited her questions, either, and yet something made her ask them anyway. The truth was she wasn’t going to be invisible ever again. Not even if that was safe.
“We were going to my cottage on Lake Kackaticka.”
Emma frowned. She was familiar with the lake and the community of upscale cottages that surrounded it. At this time of year it was pretty much abandoned. A few year-round residents looked after the cottages, but the summer people stayed away. It was cold and dreary around the lake in the winter.
“Who goes there in the winter?”
“No one,” he said, making no attempt to disguise his satisfaction.
“How long were you going for?”
He shrugged.
“The weekend?”
He shrugged again, and she suspected the truth.
“You weren’t going to spend Christmas there, were you?”
“Yes, I was, not past tense, either. Yes, I am.”
“Alone?”
“Not alone. Me and Tess.”
“But what kind of Christmas would that be for her?”
He looked at the sleeping baby, doubt crossing those supremely confident features, but only for a moment.
“She has no idea that it is Christmas.”
It was his right to parent that baby however he wanted, Emma told herself sternly. He was her guest. It really wasn’t her place to argue with him. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she’d invited him here, or called down the weather personally to inconvenience him.
She didn’t think pandering to his bad temper was a good idea, and besides she was committed to expressing her opinion after a year and a half of biting her tongue for Peter’s convenience! And look where that had gotten her!
She’d already voiced her thoughts several times tonight, and apparently there was no stopping her now. In fact, she felt an obligation to render her opinion for the sake of Tess!
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him.
He glared at the empty screen of the TV, then picked up the channel changer and turned the television back on, deciding it was interesting after all. “That just shows you’ve been sheltered up here in your fairy-tale world. You don’t know the first thing about sad.”
There was no point saying anything more. She could tell in the set of his jaw that he was the stubborn type who never would admit he was wrong or change his mind.
And yet there was that little ghost girl again, the one who’d been disappointed by every single Christmas, who insisted she knew everything there was to know about sad and how dare he insinuate otherwise?
It must have been the ghost girl who couldn’t let it go.
Emma said, sharply, “You’re depriving Tess of Christmas, that’s not just selfish. It’s mean.”
The announcer on TV picked that moment to say, voice over a map covered with red lines of road closures that it would be three days before travel resumed on some of those roads.
Ryder Richardson swore under his breath.
“I suppose the baby doesn’t know any better than that, either,” Emma said.
“You know what? I need you to show me to my room.” He stood up, not bothering to shut off the television, lifting the baby with graceful unconsciousness as he stood, tucking her sleeping head into his shoulder. To himself he said, almost musing. “It couldn’t get much worse than this, could it?”
But Emma, dedicated to airing her views, wasn’t letting it pass. Just this afternoon she had been a woman totally content with herself and her circumstances. Totally. And now wild-child and woman-scorned, and wholesome-experienced-innkeeper were all wrestling around inside her in a turmoil because of him, and she found she resented this intrusion on her life.
“No,” she agreed coldly, “it couldn’t.”
But it did.
The lights flickered, dimmed, flickered again, and then the room was plunged into darkness. The television went out with a sputter, the embers from a dying fire threw weak golden light across them.
“It just got worse, didn’t it?”
His voice in the darkness was a sensuous rasp that wild-child loved.
“Yes, it did,” she said coolly.
“Do you ever get the feeling the gods are laughing at you?” he asked, not for the first time that night.
“Yes,” she said sadly, “I do.” Was now a good time to break the bad news to him? “The furnace is electric.”
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. The firelight flashed gold, on the perfect planes of his face. Wild-child sighed.
It took him a moment to get what she meant.
“Are you saying the only source of heat in this falling-down old wreck is that fireplace?”
“Falling-down old wreck?” she breathed, incensed, pleased that woman-scorned was taking charge, getting the upper hand. “How dare you?”
It felt so good to say that! To stand up for herself! She wished she would have said that to Peter, at least once.
But no, not even when he’d told her, so sheepishly, while still making it her fault he and Monique had been seeing each other, what had she said?
I understand.
“Your front bell sounds broken, the door handle did come off in your hand, there’s frost on the inside of the windows, and when I dropped the baby’s bottle it rolled down the floor.”
“Which means?” she asked haughtily.
“Probably your foundation is moving. The floor isn’t level.”
All her work on creating pure Christmas charm, and he was seeing that?
“Do you always focus on the negative?” she snapped. How much did it cost to fix a moving foundation, anyway?
“I do,” he said without an ounce of apology, even though he followed up with, “Sorry.”
“You aren’t sorry,” Emma breathed. “You’re a miserable selfish man who is intent on spoiling Christmas not just for yourself, but for your niece and anyone else who has the misfortune to cross paths with you.”
“Well, aren’t you glad I won’t be around to spoil it for you?” he said smoothly, completely unabashed by his behavior.
“Huh. With my record, you probably will still be around Christmas Day. Spoiling things.”
Silence, the light softening something in his features, an illusion, nothing more. But when he spoke, there was something softer in his voice.
“What does that mean, with your record?”
Don’t tell him, she ordered herself. Don’t. But another part of her, weary, thought Why not? What difference does it make?
“It means I’ve never had a Christmas that wasn’t spoiled. So why should this one be any different?”
Silence. She’d left herself wide open to his sarcasm, so thank God he was saying nothing.
Only when he did speak, she wished he’d chosen sarcasm.
“You’ve never had a good Christmas?” He seemed legitimately astounded. And legitimately sorry, for the first time. But then his customary skepticism won out. “Come on.”
She remembered last year, excited as a small child, arriving at Peter’s parents’ home. No, not a home. A mansion. A picture out of a splendid movie. The trees on the long drive lit with white lights, every window of the house lit, she could see the enormous tree sparkling through the window.
And that had been the beginning of a Christmas that looked exactly like the Christmases she had dreamed as a little girl, but that felt like an excursion into hell.
“Have you?” she asked Ryder, tilting her chin proudly, knowing his answer. There was only one reason people hated Christmas, wasn’t there? They’d given up trying to make it something it could never be.
Maybe it was time for her to surrender, too, to forget trying to change her fortunes, to abandon that little girl who wanted something so badly. Maybe it all was just an illusion. Christmas had become a corny, commercial package, a dream that no one could ever make a reality.
Maybe the truth was that it was a terrible time of year, laden with too much stress and far too many expectations. Maybe it would be a good time to plan a vacation to Hawaii. It probably would have been a whole lot easier to talk her mother into celebrating Christmas in Hawaii than it had been to convince her to come here.
