“And for the record, this isn’t just me,” he was saying. “I vetted it past my inner circle at the company and everyone is really excited.”
He reached for her hand and held it in both of his. “It’s not a ball gown or those glass slippers I know you had your eye on. But it’s freedom, El. You can do whatever you want now. You can buy that bed-and-breakfast you were talking about or put it away for Maddie’s future medical bills or just chuck everything and move to Hawaii and surf for the rest of your life, if you want.”
Aidan looked drawn and exhausted but brimming with excitement at being able to give her the gift of choice. She was stunned. Completely overwhelmed. No one, in all her life, had ever done such a thing for her and the magnitude of it awed and humbled her.
It wasn’t the amount on the check that overwhelmed her—though that was certainly life-changing. No, she thought of standing outside his office in the night, watching his excitement and eagerness and energy. All of that had been for her, because he wanted her to feel like she had options. Possibilities. He had taken the bare bones of an idea and literally worked day and night on her behalf to turn it into a reality.
Oh, she loved this man.
He was brilliant and driven, yes, but also generous, kind, loving.
And he needed her, she suddenly realized. As much as he had craved having his family around him this Christmas after his brain tumor taught him what truly mattered, he needed her and Maddie to tug him away from the computer sometimes. To make him laugh, to watch sparkly boat parades, to help him live.
He needed her and he loved her, too.
She knew it with sharp, stunning clarity. She looked at the phone on her lap again. If he didn’t care about her, he never would have gone to so much effort for her.
She would likely have to deal with these bursts of wild creativity sometimes, where he worked night and day on something that filled him with passion. She could accept that, as long as he, in turn, took time to pause and breathe and embrace the world around him with her and Maddie.
He squeezed her fingers. “Say something,” he said, looking nervous all over again.
She couldn’t seem to get any words out so she did the only thing she could manage.
She burst into tears.
* * *
OKAY, HE HADN’T expected that. As Eliza started to sob, Aidan switched instantly from wired, edgy, caffeine-fueled energy straight into panic mode.
“It’s a good thing, El. I promise. A really good thing.”
Instead of calming her, that only made her sob louder and he sat there like an idiot, not knowing what to do. In desperation he finally pulled her onto his lap, just as he would Maddie. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”
Why wouldn’t she say anything? She only kept looking at the check and then at him and then sobbing all over again.
Maddie, drawn by the commotion, marched over with a frown. “Why is my mama crying?” she demanded. “It’s Christmas. You’re not supposed to cry at Christmas.”
Aidan swallowed. “I’m not quite sure, to tell you the truth. Why don’t you go get her a drink of water? That might help.”
Maddie looked at her mother uncertainly then hurried out of their rooms to the kitchen.
“What is it?” he asked Eliza, after her daughter disappeared. “Do you completely hate the idea? We haven’t gone forward with anything, as of now. It’s just a concept. I can stop the whole thing this minute.”
“No. No. I love it. It’s amazing. You’re amazing.”
Well, that was something. He tipped her chin up to search her gaze. “So why the tears?”
She looked at him out of green eyes that looked soft, dazed, overwhelmed. “You did this for me.”
He shrugged, uncomfortable. “I investigated it for you, initially. But I followed through because I could see the potential right away. It’s a good idea. It’s going to make me a lot of money, El.”
She gave a watery laugh. “Well, that’s something. It’s not the only reason, though, is it?”
The way she was looking at him made him feel as if he could race to the highest peak of the Redemption Mountains and back without breaking a sweat, even as tired as he was.
“Like I said, I wanted you to have options. I don’t want you to ever again feel like you have to go to work for the next idiot who runs you down in the street.”
“Oh, Aidan.” She gave a soft, sweet sigh. “Is it any wonder I love you so very much?”
He almost toppled her from his lap onto the floor as shock and joy burst through him like exploding Christmas tree bulbs. “What?”
She laughed. “I love you. But then you’re the genius. You must have already figured that out.”
Love. A short time ago, just the word might have sent him running. Now he wanted to hold her close and have her whisper it in his ear, over and over.
“I hoped. I didn’t know.”
“Now you do. I love you. I woke up this morning, hating that my time here was ending and I was going to have to leave Snow Angel Cove and you.”
A soft, seductive peace seemed to settle over him and he wanted to close his eyes and savor every moment of it. “You can’t leave. As your boss, I’m ordering you to stay.”
“Ha. Too bad. I quit. You’re not the boss of me anymore, to quote your sister.” She held up the check. “Rumor has it, I don’t have to work a day in my life, if I don’t want to.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
He hesitated as the other idea that had been running through his mind since the night of the Lights on the Lake Festival pushed its way to the fore. “I do have another job for you, though, if you’ll take it.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve done wonders at turning Snow Angel Cove into a warm, welcoming home. How would you feel about doing the same thing to a town?”
Her eyes widened. “Haven Point?”
He nodded. “This town needs help, someone to pour life and joy and hope back into it like you’ve done for this house and for me. I can’t imagine anyone better suited to the task. What do you think?”
“Oh. Yes! I would love that!” She gave a happy little laugh and he couldn’t help himself, he kissed her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him eagerly. It was Christmas morning, he remembered, and right now he felt like a kid who had awakened to find every single thing he had ever dreamed of asking for and a whole hell of a lot he never even knew he wanted.
“For the record, I love you,” he murmured. “And Maddie, too. You do know I’m never going to let you go now, right?”
Her smile was incandescent with joy. “I’m counting on it, Geek Boy.”
He laughed and kissed her again. He wasn’t sure how long they sat that way by the twinkly lights of her little Christmas tree, but sometime later, he heard a throat being cleared nearby.
He wrenched his mouth away and found Maddie in her little red nightgown standing in the doorway. She was holding a glass of water with one hand and his father’s fingers in the other. Dermot beamed at him, looking pleased as pie.
“Can I come in now?” Maddie demanded. “Grandpop said I have to make sure you’re done kissing.”
Aidan grinned. “Oh, we are not done kissing, kiddo. Not by a long shot. I suppose we can stop for now, though.”
Eliza hopped off his lap, fiery red, and accepted the water glass from her daughter and a hug from his father.
“Merry Christmas, my dear,” Dermot said with his Irish brogue more pronounced than usual.
“And to you,” she murmured.
As he watched them, Aidan thought of the gnarled, twisted journey he had traveled the past five months and how it had changed him. He hoped he never had to endure the uncertainty, the pain, the fear of
anything like that again.
He thought of what his father had said, that a person had to survive the dark in order to fully appreciate the light—the joy and love and miracle of life.
Eliza was his light, his miracle, his joy.
His love.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from WILD IRIS RIDGE by RaeAnne Thayne.
“Hope’s Crossing is a charming series that inspires hope and the belief miracles are possible.”
—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author
If you loved Snow Angel Cove, be sure to check out these other great titles in New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne’s charming Hope’s Crossing series:
Blackberry Summer
Woodrose Mountain
Sweet Laurel Falls
Currant Creek Valley
Willowleaf Lane
Christmas in Snowflake Canyon
Wild Iris Ridge
All available now wherever ebooks are sold!
Looking for more? Be sure to also catch RaeAnne’s The Cowboys of Cold Creek series, only from Harlequin Special Edition:
Light the Stars
Dalton’s Undoing
The Cowboy Christmas Miracle
A Cold Creek Homecoming
A Cold Creek Holiday
A Cold Creek Secret
A Cold Creek Baby
Christmas in Cold Creek
A Cold Creek Reunion
A Cold Creek Noel
A Cold Creek Christmas Surprise
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CHAPTER ONE
THIS WAS, WITHOUT QUESTION, the craziest thing she had ever done.
Lucy Drake stood on the front porch of her great-aunt’s house, shivering at the cold, damp breeze that slid under her jacket.
She ought to just find a hotel somewhere in Hope’s Crossing to spend the night, instead of standing here on the dark and rather creepy-under-the-circumstances doorstep of a massive Victorian mansion after midnight in the middle of an April rainstorm.
If she had an ounce of brains or sense, that is exactly what she would do—climb back into her BMW and head for the nearest hotel. Hope’s Crossing was overflowing with them, and on a shoulder-season April night when the ski tourists were gone, she could probably find hundreds of empty rooms.
Then again, if she had either of those things—brains or sense—she wouldn’t be in this situation. Right now, she would probably be at the end of an eighteen-hour workday, heading back to her quiet condo on Lake Washington with another few hours of work ahead of her before she finally crashed.
Another gust of freezing wind whined fitfully under the eaves and sent the branches of the red maple beside the porch clawing across the roof like skeletal fingers.
She zipped up her coat and reached for the doorknob of the house. Crazy, she might be, but she didn’t need to be cold and crazy, too.
The door was locked, of course. What else had she expected, when Iris House had been empty since December and Annabelle’s shocking death? Even though she had known it would be locked, she still felt a hard kernel of panic in her gut at one more obstacle.
What if she couldn’t get in tonight? What if she could never get in? Where would she go? She had come all this way, two days of driving from Seattle. She had subleased her condo, packed all her belongings, brought everything with her. She would be stranded without a home, without shelter, in a town where the two people she cared most about in the world were both gone.
The lateness of the hour and her own exhaustion from the stress of the past week pressed in on her, macerating her control. She felt it slipping through her fingers like fine-grained sand but she forced herself to take a deep breath.
Okay. Calm. She could handle this. She had fully expected the door to be locked. No one had lived here for months. If she had showed up on the doorstep of the old house and found it wasn’t secure, then she would have cause to worry.
This wasn’t a problem. She knew right where her great-aunt always hid the spare key—assuming no one had changed the locks, of course....
She wasn’t going to go there yet. Instead, she turned on the flashlight app of her phone and used the small glow it provided to guide her way around the corner of the wraparound porch.
The chains of the old wood porch swing clanked and rattled as she sat down, a familiar and oddly comforting sound. She reached for the armrest closest to the front door with one hand, aiming the light from her phone with the other.
After a little fumbling, her fingers found the catch and she opened the tiny, clever hidden compartment Annabelle had created herself inside the armrest.
Only someone who knew the magic secret of the porch swing could ever find the hollowed-out hiding place. She reached inside and felt around until her fingers encountered the ice-cold metal of the key to Iris House.
“Thank you, Annabelle,” she murmured.
She discovered that no one had changed the locks when she inserted the key and turned it. See, there was a bright spot. Next hurdle: What if the security code had been changed since her last visit?
Knowing she didn’t have a moment to spare, she didn’t take time to savor the scents of rosemary and lemon wood polish and home that greeted her inside.
Instead, she bolted to the keypad for the state-of-the-art security system Annabelle had installed several years ago. Her fingers fumbled on the keypad but she managed to type in the numbers that corresponded with the letters H-O-P-E.
The system announced it was now disarmed. Only then did she let herself sigh with relief, trying not to notice how the small sound echoed through the empty space.
She flipped the light switch in the entryway, with its parquet floor and the magnificent curving staircase made up of dozens of intricately turned balusters.
How many times had she rushed into this entryway during the two years she’d lived here during her teen years and called to Annabelle she was home before dropping her books on the bottom step to take up to her room later?
Suddenly she had an image of when she’d first arrived at fifteen, her heart angry and battered, showing up at a distant relative’s home with everything she owned in bags at her feet.
Apparently, things hadn’t changed that much in seventeen years—except this time her bags were still out in the car.
She turned around, half expecting Annabelle to come bustling through the doorway from the kitchen in one of those zip-up half aprons she always wore that had a hundred pockets, arms outstretched and ready to wrap her into a soft, sweet-smelling embrace.
That familiar sense of disorienting loss gnawed through her as she remembered Annabelle wouldn’t bustle through that door ever again.
She felt something dig into her palm and realized she was still clutching the key from the front porch. She slid it onto the table, making a mental note to return it to its hiding place later then took another of her cleansing breaths.
Right now she needed to focus. She desperately needed sleep and a chance to regroup and regain a little perspective.
The air inside Iris House was stale, cold. She walked through turning on lights as she headed for the thermostat outside the main-floor bedroom Annabelle had used the past few years when it became harder for her to reach the second or third floors.
The heating system thermostat was set for sixty-two degrees, probably to keep the pipes from freezing during the winter, but the actual temperature read in the mid-fifties.
She tried turning the heating system off and then on again—ab
out the sum total of her HVAC expertise. When no answering whoosh of warm air responded through the vents, she frowned. Annabelle used to complain the pilot light in the furnace could be tricky at times. Apparently this was one of those times.
Lucy was torn between laughter and tears. What did a girl have to do to catch a break around here? She had walked away from everything and packed up her life to come here, seeking the security and safety she had always found at Iris House.
With all the possible complications that could have ensnarled her journey here from Seattle, she had finally made it and now a stupid pilot light would be the one thing keeping her from reaching her goal of staying here.
It didn’t have to be a stumbling block. Last time she counted, the old house had nine fireplaces and she had seen a pile of seasoned firewood against the garage when she pulled up. She didn’t have to heat the whole house, just one room. She could pick one and spend a perfectly comfortable night in front of the fire then have a furnace technician come in the next day.
And wasn’t that some kind of metaphor for her life right now? Who ever said she had to fix every disaster she had created right this moment? She only had to focus on making it through tonight then she could sort the rest of it out later.
Considering none of the beds likely had linens at all—and certainly not fresh ones—for tonight she would bunk on the sofa in the room Annabelle had used as a TV room, she decided, and deal with the rest of the mess in the morning.
“You can do this,” she said aloud.
Hearing her own voice helped push away some of the ghosts that wandered through the house. Annabelle. Jess. Even her younger self, angry and wounded.
Energized by having a viable plan of action, she quickly headed out into the rain again and grabbed an armload of wood from the pile, enough to keep the cold at bay for several hours, at least. Trust Annabelle to keep her woodpile covered and protected so the wood was dry and ready to burn. Her great-aunt had probably cut it all herself.
Back inside, she dropped the pile of wood on the hearth in the cozy little den and found matches and kindling sticks in a canister on the mantel.
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