“I couldn’t stop him,” Eileen said, smiling. “I told him you were probably busy cleaning up.”
“Heck, after that meal,” Frank said, “I’m willing to help!”
Luke, who had followed shortly on the heels of the two couples, carrying a large tray of dirty glasses, deftly navigated around them and laid the glasses down on the counter with a slight clink.
“Be careful,” he said. “She might not put you to work, but I will.”
Frank grinned. “I don’t usually barge my way into the kitchens of fine restaurants,” he said, “but I had to see this one. Just to make sure you didn’t really have a magic table hidden back here.”
“That meal was fantastic,” he said. “Out of this world.”
Jeanne smiled at the praise, but some part of her still hummed with anxiety, making it hard for her to soak it up. She couldn’t believe they’d managed to get the food they needed last night. Or put it all together into a meal for so many guests, with the skeleton crew they’d had to operate with.
Eileen rubbed Frank’s back affectionately. “When we got here, we were just grateful to have a roof over our heads,” she said. “We had no idea this was going to be one of the best experiences we’ve ever had as travelers.”
“The best,” Frank said. “I’ll say it. I think it’s been the best.”
“And it’s not just that incredible meal,” Eileen said. “Everything about this place is so . . .” She paused a moment, searching for the word. “Thoughtful,” she finally finished.
“Oh, Jeanne doesn’t do anything around here without putting thought into it,” Tim said over his shoulder, but he was smiling as he said it, and when he winked at Jeanne, she smiled back.
“Look, I like a nice wallpaper as much as the next guy,” Frank said, “but what I really love about this place is the way you took us in and made us feel like we were part of something.”
“They’ve always done that,” Stacy said. She and Bob looked happy, but they were far less effusive than the newer guests, and Jeanne could guess why. “From the very beginning,” Stacy added.
“We weren’t sure how this Christmas was going to feel,” Eileen said. “We booked this trip because it was our first holiday in over twenty years without the kids.”
Stacy nodded sympathetically. “That’s a big change,” she said.
“Yep.” Eileen nodded. “But you welcomed us in as if we were family. Even though you’d never met us before.”
“That’s what we always hoped to do here,” Jeanne said. “Treat everyone so well they feel like family.”
“Well, mission accomplished,” Frank said. He slapped his hand on the counter and pointed at Jeanne. “And don’t think you’re rid of us after this time, either. Because we’re coming back!”
“I’ve already talked with Iris about booking sometime in June or July,” Eileen said. “I can’t wait to see what this place looks like in the summer, all in bloom.”
Tim came up behind Jeanne and gave her a squeeze, checking to make sure she was okay. But Jeanne managed to smile.
“We would love to see you here this summer,” she said, which was absolutely true.
“Okay, well,” Frank said. “We don’t want to get in the way.”
“Then pick up a towel and get to work!” Luke joked, heading out to the dining room to collect another tray of dishes.
“You want?” Frank said, picking up a stray towel from the counter.
Jeanne laughed and shook her head. “Maybe the next time you come,” she said.
“All right, then,” Frank said. “Thanks again.”
Eileen gave Jeanne a warm hug, and the two of them trailed out the door, while Stacy and Bob lingered.
When the door shut behind them, Stacy just looked into Jeanne’s eyes, trying to smile. But after a moment, her eyes filled with tears.
“Hey,” Jeanne said, gathering Stacy up in a hug as well.
Stacy hugged her back warmly, from the heart. Then she pulled away, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I know it’s Christmas Eve. I shouldn’t be crying.”
“It’s always okay to cry,” Jeanne said. “You’ve got good reason.”
“Ah,” Bob growled, realizing the subject of the conversation. “Good riddance.”
“I just wish—” Stacy said. “I wish—” Then she fell silent, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“I know,” Jeanne said. “It wasn’t what any of us expected.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Stacy agreed, leaning into Jeanne as Jeanne slid her arm around Stacy’s shoulder. Then she looked at Jeanne with a faint smile. “But if it had to happen,” she said, “I’m glad it happened here. This was the only place in the world where Christmas could still feel even a little bit like Christmas to us under the circumstances. Thanks for that.”
“Of course,” Jeanne said, squeezing her arm. “To tell the truth, Christmas wouldn’t feel like Christmas to us without you.”
“Well,” Stacy said. “Hopefully this won’t be our last one. We’ll have to see what the new year brings.”
“That’s right,” Jeanne said.
As Stacy and Bob turned to go, Luke came through the swinging kitchen door again. Bob caught it and held it for him, and then Bob gave Jeanne a little salute as the two of them filed out.
“Okay,” Luke said. “I think that’s it from the dining room.” He clapped his hands. “What do you need in here? Put me to work.”
Jeanne shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “You’re done for the night.”
Luke looked around at the kitchen, still half-full of platters of food and dirty dishes.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Jeanne said. “You get out there and have some fun.”
Luke glanced at the kitchen door. “Fun, huh?” he said.
“See what Hannah’s up to,” Jeanne said, trying her best to sound nonchalant.
But Luke stared at her until she couldn’t help but grin.
“I smell what you’re cooking,” Luke said. “And I’m not saying I object. But . . .”
“But what?” Jeanne said.
“Doesn’t it feel like a little soon?” Luke asked. “I mean, she was supposed to be getting married this weekend.”
“If you ask me,” Jeanne said, tossing a spoonful of stuffing into an aluminum storage tray with unusual vigor, “we didn’t get rid of Trevor soon enough. And as far as anything else goes?”
When she looked up, Luke was hanging on her every word. He was more interested in Hannah, Jeanne realized, than she had even guessed.
“Yeah?” Luke prompted.
“I don’t think it’s too soon to spend some time with her,” Jeanne said. “Especially not tonight.”
Luke took a deep breath, then let it out. “Okay,” he said. “Wish me luck.”
Instead, Jeanne gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for everything,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Luke said and walked out, the door thunking behind him.
“Okay,” Jeanne said, almost to herself. She surveyed the kitchen and all the work that still remained, then picked up the nearest storage container and started filling it with leftovers.
But as she did, her eyes filled with tears. She tried to press on, hoping that they’d pass if she kept on working. But her crying only got worse.
Just as she finally reached a hand up to wipe her tears away, she felt Tim’s arms circle her waist.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
Jeanne nodded.
“Really?” Tim said, gently joking. “Because I don’t usually cry when I’m okay.”
“Did you hear them?” Jeanne said. “Making reservations to come back next year?”
“I heard,” Tim said quietly, and gave her another squeeze.
“It’s not just them,” she said. “I just realized . . . I’m going to have to cancel all our reservations. Everything that’s on the bo
oks now.”
“We’ll split it up,” Tim said. “I’ll help.”
Jeanne leaned back against him, letting herself rest for perhaps the first time since the storm began. “Thank you,” she said.
For a moment she just enjoyed the feel of his arms around her. But then she asked the question that had been echoing in her own mind. “What are we going to do?” she asked.
“I think now might be a good time to thank God,” Tim said. “For everything we still have.”
At another time, a stubborn resistance might have built up in Jeanne, wondering what they had to be thankful for, when everything they’d built seemed to be falling apart. But tonight, somehow, she knew what he meant.
“All the years we got to be here,” she said.
“That’s right,” Tim agreed. “And that we still have each other.”
Jeanne squeezed his hands, linked together over her belly. “That’s right,” she echoed quietly.
“And then,” Tim said, giving her one last embrace, and stepping back, “we finish these dishes.”
But before he went back to the wash sink, he stopped to give her a lingering kiss.
“I just wish I knew what was going to happen next,” Jeanne said.
“Me too,” he answered.
NO MATTER HOW MOLLY tossed and turned, she couldn’t seem to find a place where the starlight streaming in through the windows didn’t keep her awake.
Finally, she sat up in bed.
She’d covered the clock at some point earlier, because she couldn’t stand how fast it sometimes seemed to go, and also how slow, so she had no idea what time it actually was.
In the faint blue light reflected off the fields of white snow that glimmered beyond the antique glass in the windows, she surveyed the room.
Usually, when she couldn’t sleep, her policy was just to get up and do something quiet until she felt sleepy again. But beyond the door, the girls were sleeping just feet from her writing desk, which was where she’d naturally gravitate in a mood like this. And the attic, while beautiful and rustic, was hardly light- or soundproof. Anything Molly did in the main room was liable to be seen or heard in the office, slipping through the gaps around the door, which had warped so much in the years since it was first installed that it now had uneven, gaping spaces on all sides.
If she moved around too much, or even turned on a light that was too bright, she was worried about waking one or both of the girls.
Which was pretty much the last thing she needed right now.
It was thoughts of the girls, in fact, that had been keeping her up. She’d spent a lot of her life with kids, and she loved them. Some part of her, in fact, was probably still a kid—at least that was one of the things she always liked to say at readings, when people asked how she’d decided to write books for children, instead of doing something else.
She’d met lots of great kids before, and she was close to the children of some of her friends and family as well. She relished the role of buddy and aunt, getting to be the silly grown-up who didn’t have to enforce the rules.
But something was different about these girls. Or maybe, Molly thought, something was different about the family.
It wasn’t just that she had a crush on Marcus. “Crush,” she realized when she finally let the word surface in her mind, wasn’t really even the word for it. It wasn’t butterflies and blushing, although she couldn’t deny that his strong frame and blue eyes did something to her knees when she looked at him for too long. Even deeper than that, though, was a strong connection, a meeting of the minds. It felt like it had been there since before they met, a way of seeing the world, and talking about it, that they shared in common, and that was far harder to find than butterflies in your stomach.
She had thought that Marcus must feel it, too—not necessarily a romantic interest, but at least that sense of connection. And it had certainly felt like the girls were attached to her, even if it had only been a short while.
So she had been surprised by how much it had stung to hear Marcus so quickly, and so sternly, dismiss Bailey’s wish that they might be a family.
Of course, once Marcus hurried out of the room, leaving Molly alone with her thoughts, she realized how crazy it had been to think that he could have done anything else. They had only known each other for a few days. A person would have to be crazy to be thinking about sharing their whole lives in such a short time. And the hopes and hearts of little girls like Bailey and Addison were not to be played with, especially after they’d already gone through so much in losing their mom. If they were entertaining hopes that were never going to come true, the right thing to do was to let them know as quickly and gently as possible.
Which was exactly what Marcus had done.
But although Molly could organize her thoughts along these lines, she couldn’t seem to make her heart stop ringing as if it were a big bell that had just been struck a heavy blow.
Because the fact was that the time with Marcus and Bailey and Addison had made her think about her whole life.
For who knows how long, she had been lying in bed, tossing and turning, trying to tell herself that she was just crazy to be dreaming about joining her life with these three strangers who she barely knew, that she needed to get over it, and soon. Or preferably, now.
But as soon as she gave up on the attempt to fall asleep and sat up in the dark, she realized something.
It wasn’t just that she had fallen madly in love with Marcus, or was certain that she wanted to be part of his little family.
Instead, she realized, the time with them had woken her heart up to what it could be like to be part of a family. When she spent time with other kids, it was always in a classroom, or with their mom nearby, ready to jump in. And when she dated, it was always just her and whoever she was dating.
But this weekend had given her a taste of something she’d never experienced before: what it was like to take the place of a mother and wife in a sweet young family.
She’d been able to tell herself that might not be for her, and to believe that was the case. And for a long time she’d also felt like there wasn’t much she could do about it either way: for whatever reason, the world hadn’t presented her with the right man, or the right chance to have children.
But now that she’d had a taste of it, with Marcus and the girls, she suddenly knew that was something she wanted, and wanted deeply.
And as she’d tried to erase these thoughts with sleep, Marcus’s words had echoed again and again in her head: That’s not going to happen.
It hadn’t just felt like a way to calm down the girls’ inflated expectations, Molly realized. It bounced around her thoughts, a rejection of the possibility that she could ever have anything like this for herself. For reasons she could never really understand, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Molly took a deep breath and shook her head.
Now she knew more than ever that she needed to get out of bed, to break the hold of these thoughts and calm her mind so she could get at least a few hours of rest before Christmas morning.
But the last thing she wanted was to wake the girls so that they lost sleep the night before the big day or, God forbid, decided that they wanted Marcus to come back upstairs to help put them back to bed again.
She pulled the scarf she’d thrown over the clock away from the glowing digital face so that she could check the time.
Two o’clock.
Had she really been caught in these thoughts for so many hours?
In any case, she thought, everyone in the house would be asleep. Since a change of scene always helped clear her head, at least now she could creep downstairs and grab an evening snack from the kitchen without running into Marcus, or anyone else.
A moment later, she had thrown on her favorite baby-blue satin robe over her white cotton nightgown and padded out the door, so silently that she would have been surprised if the girls could hear even a single footstep.
The old stairs, to her rel
ief, proved to be incredibly quiet—probably due to more precise and thoughtful renovations by Jeanne and Tim, who must have realized that the normal creaks of an old house would keep all the guests awake, carrying sound to all the floors along the wide stairwell.
In what seemed like no time at all, without meeting another soul, she stepped gratefully into the kitchen, where she caught the swinging door before it could even begin to make any noise whispering back and forth before it came to a stop.
Then she turned around and saw Marcus sitting at the kitchen island, caught midgesture, a forkful of apple pie frozen halfway to his mouth.
For a brief moment, Molly calculated wildly, trying to believe there was even the smallest chance that he hadn’t seen her yet, and she could just slip right back through the door and flee to the safety of her room upstairs without having to say anything.
“Molly,” he said, not quite as if he was greeting her, but with a bit more wonder in his tone, as if some strange creature had just materialized in front of him and he was naming it as a way to get his bearings.
Then he let his fork drop to the plate and stood up.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just getting a midnight snack. You want something?”
“Um,” Molly said, drawing her robe around her. Somehow, even in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Marcus looked fresh and put-together enough to run a business meeting.
She lifted her hand to her hair in a nervous gesture, and realized that she hadn’t even looked in a mirror before she’d come downstairs. God only knew what she looked like.
“Here,” Marcus said, cutting a piece from the pie pan in front of him, then grabbing a small plate from a clean stack nearby.
He set the plate down next to him and pulled back the counter stool beside him.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t let me midnight snack alone.”
Molly managed a smile, and took the seat next to him, but huddled down as if she might possibly be able to make herself small enough that he would forget she was there.
The first bite of the pie, however, did act like a tonic on her, sending a surge of irresistible joy through her as she tasted the tart apples and the buttery crust and the hints of vanilla and cinnamon.
The White Christmas Inn Page 19
