The Winter Berry House

by Caroline Flynn

  ‘What?’

  Kait would have thought he hadn’t heard her if his dark eyes hadn’t widened, staring at her like she had lost her ever-loving mind. ‘It looks like it would fit you,’ she explained, smoothing out the garment to show its true size. ‘Come on, try it on. Just over your T-shirt.’

  ‘No, it’s …’ He trailed off.

  It’s Grandpa Duke’s. That was what he had been about to use as his fighting argument, she could see it in his eyes. ‘It’s yours now, Branch.’ She spoke softly, letting her hand fall comfortingly onto his forearm. ‘He wanted you to have it. Go on, try it on.’

  Slowly, his mortified expression transformed into one Kait couldn’t quite read, but she was relieved when Branch began to undo the brass-looking buttons. She wasn’t surprised when he turned his back to her as he shuffled cautiously into the jacket, being just as careful to hide his bubbling emotions as he was not to ruin the uniform. Kait let him have his moment, remaining silent and still until he chose to turn around and show her how it looked.

  In many ways, it was just a jacket. Just durable fabric and buttons and threads covering a grown man’s upper body. But the jacket did something to Branch, transforming him from the casual and calm man she knew into a taller, stronger, and steadier version of himself, somehow. It didn’t make sense that the contours of his jaw looked more defined, or that his shoulders became broader, or that Branch carried the air of a man suddenly prepared to take on anything and everything this world wanted to throw at him. But that’s what Kait saw as she stared at him. Authority, strength, and loyalty. A man who could, and would, do it all in the name of what mattered most. She was pretty sure that if she could uncover a picture of Grandpa Duke in his uniform more than seven decades ago, the resemblance would be striking.

  ‘It fits you perfectly,’ she managed to choke out, unable to look away.

  ‘Yeah, I guess it does.’ He smoothed the fabric out, running his hands down his chest before he worked on doing up the line of buttons.

  ‘Isn’t there supposed to be a hat or something?’ Kait was suddenly scrambling toward the pile of boxes where the jacket had emerged from, following the same obstacle course of a path Branch had earlier. She wasn’t aware Branch followed her until he spoke, his voice close behind her.

  ‘There. It was wrapped in the jacket.’ He pointed over her shoulder, and Kait stretched out to reach for it, barely able to pinch the visor of it between her fingers. She wiggled them, desperate to gain another inch to reach the hat, then squealed when suddenly Branch’s hands were on her hips, holding her steady and giving her that extra bit of length to reach it.

  ‘Pull me up!’ she laughed.

  He listened, wrenching her back toward him. Kait turned slightly as the momentum propelled her forward, having the wherewithal to hold the hat away from her before it became wedged between their bodies.

  One second she’d been dangling over the box of musty memorabilia, the next Kait was staring into the deep-set eyes she knew so well, too well, having long ago memorized every fleck of color in them. Now, only inches away, the poor lighting robbed her of those details, but Kait imagined she could see them, and she focused on that. If she didn’t, she would be unable to stop herself from focusing on the ways those eyes were staring back at her, the way she could feel his chest moving under her hand and hear the soft inhale and exhale of his breath.

  Too close.

  ‘Try this on.’ Her voice betrayed her with every syllable, too high and too breathy, but she placed the hat on top of his disheveled hair, pulling the leather visor down into position over his eyes. The matching leather strap that adorned the front of the hat was worn, its stitching ripped in places, and the brass buttons that held it in place on both sides tarnished, but the indistinguishable greenish-brown color of it matched the jacket, and the large golden emblem attached to the front boasted the same eagle insignia as the buttons, now done up in the middle of Branch’s chest.

  ‘You look like this stuff belongs on you, somehow.’ Kait didn’t even realize the thought had escaped her lips until Branch’s eyebrows shot up, shadowed by the visor.

  ‘Maybe I should have enlisted in the military instead of heading up north to that job in Canada.’

  ‘No.’ The answer came out forceful, shocking herself as well as him. ‘No,’ she said again, this time less panicked. ‘I don’t know if I could have handled that.’

  Her confession floated on the air, churning in the space that separated them, a secret that wasn’t a secret at all, yet it carried the same surprising weight of something unknown, purely because it wasn’t just thought, but spoken aloud.

  And as surely as Kait knew she couldn’t have handled it, a part of her was just as certain she couldn’t handle this, either. Them, their closeness despite the distance. Or was it the distance despite their closeness? Everything about this, now, was contradictory in Kait’s mind. The strength she felt that gave way to weakness – or was it weakness transformed into strength? – in his presence was no exception.

  Yeah, she definitely couldn’t handle this, being here, with him, like this.

  The problem was, now that she had experienced it, she couldn’t handle not being here with him, either.

  Chapter 12

  Branch

  That was close. Too close.

  One minute things were playful, juvenile even, with Kait trying desperately to get her hands on the hat just barely out of her reach, laughing like they were still two kids with their entire lives ahead of them. The next thing he knew, his gesture to help had turned into Kait against his chest, her gaze locked with his, her lips so close to his he could feel her breath whispering with his own.

  Branch could have kissed her. And he would have if she had stood there one second longer, staring up at him with those hooded eyes that kept deviating down, as painfully aware of the mere inches between their mouths as he was. But he hesitated one beat too many, leaving Kait the chance to lean away and move the conversation back to less shaky ground.

  There was no mistaking what he had seen in her expression, brief but blatant. She had thought of it ten times over while they stood there, lost in each other. So, they were on the same page, then, when it came to the obvious unbroken connection that bound them. But the same page wasn’t enough. Branch needed to ascertain which paragraph she was on or else he risked the chance of making a grave mistake that could result in losing her for good.

  ‘Your turn.’

  Kait’s face announced she didn’t have a clue what he meant by that, but she let out a long breath the moment he stepped away to push around the contents of one of the boxes behind him.

  ‘Grandpa Duke’s uniform isn’t all I found up here.’ Branch stood up, holding a green and white checkered dress in his hands, wrinkled from years stowed away but in perfect condition.

  ‘Would you look at that,’ Kait chuckled, taking it in her hands when he passed it to her. ‘This is straight out of the 1940s. It’s got to be.’

  ‘Grandma Addie really did keep everything, I think.’ He motioned toward her. ‘Like I said, your turn. Looks like it would fit you.’ It didn’t go unnoticed that he was throwing her own words back at her. And he was doing it on purpose, accompanied by a cheeky grin.

  ‘You want me to put this on?’ Kait hadn’t expected him to turn the tables, but the more Branch watched her, the clearer he realized there was something else bothering her, too. Having just slipped into his grandfather’s military uniform, Branch had a pretty good idea what it was.

  The same hesitation plagued her that had plagued him. She was unnerved by the thought of donning Grandma Addie’s clothes.

  ‘Go on,’ he said again, hoping to ease her mind. ‘Try it on.’

  ‘Stop using my own words.’

  ‘Then stop wasting time.’ He bit his lip, suppressing his amusement. ‘Just pull it up over your jeans and T-shirt.’

  She looked ready to protest again, but a moment later she turned her back on him, just as h
e’d done to her, and unzipped the dress, stepping into it and shimmying it up her thighs. When she turned back around, it was pulled into place and she was tugging it tight at the waist.

  ‘I think it’ll do up,’ she said, stepping toward him and turning away. ‘Can you zip me up?’

  Branch thanked God for small miracles. If she had been facing him, she would have seen his mouth open and close without any sound coming out. There was nothing suggestive about her remark, yet doing up the zipper of a woman’s dress, albeit one worn over jeans and a T-shirt, was an overly familiar gesture. Intimate, in a way.

  Maybe he’d seen one too many movies on Netflix. Nah, this was Kait’s fault, all those cheesy chick flicks she subjected him to when they were teenagers had rotted his mind. Or maybe he was just too hopeful for a sign of intimacy between them and Branch was willing to see those signs anywhere, regardless of whether they were real or not.

  ‘Branch?’

  He was just standing there, like a fool. ‘Right, sorry.’ He pulled the dress together at the small of her back. It was a bit loose on her, even with her clothes underneath, and the zipper slid up easily. ‘All set, milady.’

  Kait whirled around, forcing the swaying skirt to take flight into a full-blown twirl. ‘It was the 1940s, Branch, not the 1700s.’ The laugh that followed was uninhibited, freeing him of the apprehension he had let himself succumb to only moments before.

  He shrugged. ‘Sounded polite, I thought.’ Awestruck, he watched as Kait swayed this way and that, mesmerized by the way the full skirt seemed to float around her as she moved, her wide smile and soft chuckling transforming her into the young Katharine Hepburn he’d seen in those old movies Grandma Addie used to love watching so much. ‘So, if not milady, then what does a well-meaning soldier say when he wants to ask a pretty lady to dance?’

  Kait could hear the music drifting up through the attic entrance from the Bluetooth speaker he had set up in the kitchen downstairs. He could tell by the way she spun around and swayed in time with the melody, not just moving to see the skirt flail out, but finding the rhythm and allowing it to guide her.

  She stopped, her hands still gripping the fabric as she stared at him. A second later, her mouth lifted at one corner. ‘He probably just asks her to dance. Why does everything have to be so complicated?’

  Why, indeed. Something about the way she asked the question told him it didn’t have a thing to do with soldiers or eras gone by. There were so many things in their lives that were complicated, but this wasn’t one of them. Branch held out a hand, letting the brass button near his wrist glint in the incandescent light that shone from the bulb above them. ‘Will you dance with me, milady?’ He was sticking to the joke, purely because it had made her smile the first time he said it.

  The second time earned him one that lit up the drab room around them.

  ‘How corny, good sir,’ she laughed, slipping her hand into his. ‘But, yes, I’d love to.’

  The music suddenly seemed louder, somehow, like the joining of their hands and the feel of Kait under his fingertips managed to heighten his senses. In an old-fashioned stance, he pressed his palm into her side with their joined hands held outward, a polite space between his body and hers. But as the song changed, the first chords of a classic love song beginning to float through the air, Branch felt it before he saw it, and suddenly Kait was closer, like the melody wasn’t the only thing drifting, like somehow they had been entranced by the lyrics of love and longing. Branch didn’t know who made the decision to step in closer, or if it was even a conscious decision at all. He didn’t care. All he did care about was the fact that halfway through the second verse, Kait’s head rested against his chest, and his hand that had been holding her gingerly by her side now enveloped her, holding her to him like a precious treasure he was petrified to part with. It was how close to the truth that was which petrified him most.

  He prayed the song would last forever, refusing to fade at the end and playing again on repeat. Branch didn’t know what the song was called, and he had never been one to pay much attention to musicians’ names from any genres other than rock and country, but whatever the song was, and whoever the singer was, they were his favorite. Purely because they, together, the singer and their song, had managed to do what he had only dreamed of for the past eleven years. Kait was in his arms, and there was nothing else in the world Branch Sterling had ever wanted more in his entire adult life.

  ‘Kaitie, where have you been for so long?’ He whispered the words without forethought, his mouth pressed against her hair, intoxicated by the berry and vanilla scent of her shampoo. The question wasn’t one that required an answer, just more of a desperate utterance, a fevered thought that had unconsciously boiled over and slipped from his tongue. Which only made Kait’s reply that much more surprising.

  ‘Right here.’ Her voice was barely audible, but he felt her jaw move against his chest as she spoke. ‘I’ve been right here.’

  ‘I think I have been, too,’ he replied, hugging her tighter. He could no longer hear the music over the pounding of his own heart, the blood rushing in his ears like a dam broke somewhere within him. Maybe it had. And maybe he was right. Maybe this was where he had been for the past decade, right here, holding Kait and inhaling the scent of her shampoo and basking in the warmth that emanated from her as they moved in perfect rhythm.

  He might have left Port Landon, but Branch’s heart had been here the entire time, with Kait.

  They never missed a beat, still dancing to the rhythm of each other instead of the melody, lost somewhere amidst their high emotions and loud heartbeats. And yet, the moment Kait raised her head to reveal her pretty gemstone eyes to him, Branch could see the truth – she’d been right here, with him, the entire time, too.

  Eyes locked on his, Kait’s gaze said more than her words ever could. Branch couldn’t tear himself away, couldn’t see anything beyond her natural beauty, couldn’t hear anything beyond her shaky breaths mixed with his heart as it attempted to beat out of his chest.

  He didn’t know when he decided to do it, or if there was ever a conscious thought about it at all. He had a feeling the action had nothing to do with his brain and was led entirely by his heart. Either way, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers, soft and tentative and perfect in every way.

  The house could have fallen down around them. The song could have changed, and the sun could have refused to shine. Branch wouldn’t have noticed any of it, because nothing but kissing Kait mattered, nothing but the fact that she didn’t recoil or pull away. They stood there, unmoving, lost in each other as though not a minute had passed since they had been eighteen and head over heels for each other.

  He opened his eyes. Everything came rushing back, his senses kicking back into high gear. The music floated into his ears, the dust and cobwebs stringing across his peripheral vision. But Kait was still standing before him, her eyes fixed on him, unblinking, and her arms somehow wrapped around his waist. Neither of them spoke or dared to move, rendered speechless and unable to command their limbs to do anything but hold on to one another for dear life.

  ‘What just happened?’ Kait sounded distant. Whether it was her own shell-shocked state that caused it or Branch’s inability to focus on anything but the ghostly caress of her lips still lingering on his, he wasn’t certain.

  ‘I think,’ he replied, his mouth curling upward, ‘you just forgave me.’

  ‘Branch, I did that a long time ago.’

  It felt good to hear it, but he wondered at what cost that forgiveness had come. ‘You’d be the only one, then,’ he told her, unable to find the strength to step away and put distance between them. If he was getting to live out the dream of having her in his arms once more, even for a fleeting instance, he wasn’t about to let go of that dream until absolutely necessary. ‘I don’t blame you. For anything that happened afterward. I just want you to know that. I don’t blame you for telling me to leave.’

  Pain marred Kait’s fea
tures at the mere mention of that night but he wasn’t going to let the subject drop easily. They had spent a few days together now, for countless hours at a time, and yet the subject had never been broached. She had never been one for confrontation or conflict, and Branch knew she would continue to let it be the elephant in the room as long as he allowed for it.

  Their kiss changed things. It changed Branch’s solemn outlook, and his plans. It was one kiss, but he felt it. The longing. The passion. Kait still loved him, just as he still loved her. And that changed everything.

  ‘I should’ve heard you out.’ Kait let her arms fall to her sides, taking a step back. She was quickly looking a whole lot less certain about this – their proximity and the topic of conversation – and Branch figured she was about two seconds away from wrapping her arms around herself and shutting down completely. ‘I should have talked to you,’ she continued. ‘And listened. I should’ve just listened.’

  ‘Kaitie, it’s in the past.’ Branch stepped forward slowly. Her skittish resemblance to a timid deer had him reluctant to move too quickly, fearing she might feel cornered and take off down the attic ladder, but he chanced reaching out for her arms, tortured by her obvious unease. ‘We can’t change it. Trust me, there are so many things I wish I could. I’d do things differently. Anything to save you from the hurt I put you through. You’ve got to believe that.’

  ‘I do,’ she croaked out, appearing stricken by the thought. ‘I believe you would change what happened if you could.’

  Her unspoken words were just as powerful as the ones that came out of her mouth. She believed he would do it all differently if he could, but Kait was acutely aware of what those kinds of regrets could do to a person given enough time. She had been living with similar regrets for more than ten years as well, and they had eaten away at her in the same unforgiving, gnawing manner his had.