by Cara Colter
“I thought we were your little work party,” Casey said, trying not to panic. “Emily and me.”
“Well, you were, but Cole pointed out to me he doesn’t want Emily to do any heavy lifting, and he didn’t really think you would want to be up on the roof replacing strings of Christmas lights. He wanted another guy, even though I asked Martin to help with the electrical. He said he’d be happy to do it for nothing. Isn’t that nice?”
Casey was having trouble focusing on Martin’s niceness.
“Who is it?” Emily asked. “He wouldn’t tell me who he invited. He just said it would be a surprise. I’m guessing Joe.”
“I’m not sure who it is,” Casey said, though she was guessing it was not Joe! She was amazed at how normal her voice sounded, considering she was forcing words out past constricted vocal chords. Because if it was who she suspected, it was a surprise, all right. Of the worst possible sort!
And why wouldn’t Turner Kennedy be just the surprise Cole would bring to the inn? the scientist in Casey insisted on asking. It was certainly one of the available options!
Turner had been the best man at Emily and Cole’s wedding. Why wouldn’t he be here as they assembled as much of the original wedding party as was possible for their renewal of vows? Why wouldn’t he jump at the chance to help get the old inn ready for their magical day, just as she had?
Because he disappeared, Casey wailed to herself.
Still, at one time, he and Cole had been best friends. Casey had assumed the friendship had been left behind, because when she had asked—not nearly as frequently as she wanted to, and with only the most casual interest—Emily had been vague.
“Oh. I’ll have to ask Cole. I think he said Turner is overseas. He’s some kind of government contractor.”
She’d thought, in those three magical days they had spent together following the wedding, that they had known everything about each other. Government contractor? Casey had felt the first shiver of betrayal at that. He hadn’t mentioned anything about being a government contractor. But in retrospect, he had headed her off every single time she had tried to delve into his life.
Just pretend I’m a prince who found a glass slipper. And that it fits you.
“If Turner is somewhere amazing, like France or Italy,” Emily had said, thankfully not reading her friend’s distress, “Cole and I should go visit!”
And when, after waiting an appropriate amount of time, Casey had screwed up the nerve to ask if Emily had asked Cole about Turner, her friend had replied, “Cole said he’s lost touch. Men! Relationships are a low priority.”
That was actually the first time Casey had heard bitterness in Emily’s voice in reference to her busy husband. But not the last.
Why would Turner be here now? Well, why not?
Why wouldn’t he come and help celebrate Christmas with his best friend’s newly reunited and rejoicing family? It went with everything Emily had been saying about the changes Cole was making. Her husband was giving a new priority to building and keeping relationships.
That’s what Casey was doing, too, wasn’t it? Making a vow to realize the importance of friendships before it was too late? Celebrating Christmas and the spirit of love with her best friends instead of that crazy, unpredictable, painful conglomeration of people sometimes known as a family?
Even her decision to create the kind of family she had always wanted for herself seemed to be wavering, perhaps due to some combination of her friends’ lack of enthusiasm and his arrival.
Stop it, Casey ordered herself. She didn’t even know if it was Turner. But all the ordering in the world would not slow her heart as the cab pulled away, and the man bent, effortlessly picked up a duffel bag and looped the strap over his shoulder, before turning to the steps that led to the front porch.
Casey was aware she was holding her breath as he stepped toward the faint light being thrown by a string of Christmas lights with too many burned out bulbs.
The light may have been weak, but it washed the familiar contours of his face, and turned the snowflakes caught in the glossy darkness of his hair to gold.
Her gasp was audible, and she covered it with quick desperation by clearing her throat. Casey’s wineglass trembled in her hand. She set it down. She told herself to move, to get out of here fast.
Instead, she was glued to the spot, her feet frozen, her eyes locked on his face.
It was him.
It was Turner. It was Turner Kennedy in the flesh.
Not unchanged, though the changes were subtle. Something in the way he held himself made a shiver go up and down her spine. As he arrived at the bottom of the step, he paused.
He had broadened in the years since she had last seen him, youthful litheness giving way to the pure power of a man completely in his prime. What hadn’t changed was that he was exuding an almost sizzling sense of himself, who he was in the world, and what he could take on.
Anything.
If the door of the inn had suddenly crashed open and a horde of bandits had fallen upon him, she had the sense he would be ready for it. He might even enjoy it!
Casey shook the picture off, annoyed that she could be so susceptible to the whisper of imagination. She knew nothing about him. She had once convinced herself otherwise, and she had been wrong.
The faint light illuminated his face, and she shivered again, despite herself. There seemed to be a certain remoteness in his expression that was different, but what did she know? She’d been a naive young bridesmaid when Turner Kennedy had been Cole Watson’s best man.
She had been the geeky girl, the science nerd, the brain, who had been noticed by the most popular boy in the school, the captain of the football team, the boy whose picture in every girl’s yearbook was marked with inked hearts.
Despite his closed expression, Turner was still the most astonishingly handsome man she had ever seen, so good-looking that a girl could fall for him.
At first sight.
So much so that when he had taken her chin in his hands as dawn broke, the morning after Cole and Emily’s wedding, and said, “Run away with me,” she hadn’t even hesitated.
Casey had tossed years and years of absolute control right out the window.
“Three days,” he’d said. “Spend the next three days with me.”
She should have known better than to share her new resolve about love with her girlfriends. It seemed she had thrown a gauntlet before the gods and they had responded with terrifying swiftness.
“Casey?”
She turned to her friends and saw the instant concern register on both their faces.
“What’s wrong?” they asked together.
What’s wrong? She was a scientist. Andrea had been right; she spent too much time in the lab. And nothing in that carefully controlled environment had prepared her for this encounter.
She was amazed when her voice didn’t shake when she said, “It looks like Turner Kennedy is here.”
“Turner?” Emily said. “I can’t believe it! We haven’t seen him since our wedding. I thought Cole had lost touch completely.”
Emily got up, raced to the front door and flung it open. “Turner Kennedy! What a wonderful surprise!”
Casey was experiencing that trapped feeling, a sensation of fight or flight. When Andrea went into the front hallway to greet the newcomer, too, Casey quietly set down her unfinished wineglass, left the parlor by the back door and slipped up the rear staircase to her room.
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She went in and softly closed the door, leaning against it as if she had escaped a twisting, foggy London street with the Ripper on her heels.
Her heart was beating hard and unreasonably fast, not entirely the result of her mad dash up the stairs.
She turned and looked at her suitcase.
Good. Not completely unpacked yet. She could throw the few things she had unpacked back in it. She could wait in here, quiet as a mouse, until the old inn grew silent, and then slink out that door and never come back.
She could spend a quiet Christmas in her apartment. Never mind that she had yearned for the company of loving friends. Never mind that she had longed for holiday traditions, for bonfires and impromptu snowball fights, hanging stockings on the hearth and making gingerbread cookies with the Gingerbread Girls. Never mind that she had longed for a little taste of the kind of Christmas she would create for her own child someday soon!
Never mind all that. She would go to her little apartment, where it was safe and everything was in her control. She could look up everything she needed to know about third-party reproductive procedures.
Maybe she’d even go to the lab for part of Christmas Day. Why not?
Her research there could be her greatest gift to the world. Ask any parent whose child had been diagnosed with cancer!
Another option would be to accept her mother’s invitation.
To join her at the Sacred Heart Mission House, where the Sisters of Mercy would be serving Christmas dinner to the poor. Where her mother, glowing with a soft joy she had never had while Casey was growing up, would remind her, ever so gently, not to call her Mom.
It’s Sister Maria Celeste.
There. Both the Caravettas—except her mother did not consider herself a Caravetta any longer—selflessly saving the world at Christmas.
Her crazy family, the reason Casey had sought refuge with her friends at the inn.
But she couldn’t stay here now.
It was one thing to say you were sworn off romantic love. It was another to be tested.
And Turner Kennedy had that indefinable something that would test any woman’s resolve, never mind one who had been locked away in a lab nursing a broken heart for nearly a year.
Or had it been longer? Had it really been ever since that three days together in a fairy-tale kingdom he had created? Just for her. A Cinderella experience. The little scrub-a-muffin noticed by the prince. The prince enchanted with her.
Only in the end, the fairy tale had been reversed. He had been the one with secrets. The one who had resisted her every effort to find out why only three days, where he was going, what he would be doing next. He had been the one who had disappeared into the night, only unlike the fairy tale, Turner had not left a single clue.
She had been left holding a memory as fragile as a glass slipper, only she had never again found the person who fit it.
But now he was here. Yes, Turner had a raw masculine potency combined with a roguish, boyish charm that had completely bowled her over on their first encounter.
Casey turned off the lights in her room and lay on her bed, staring at the glow of the mostly burned out string of Christmas lights outside her window. They were making a really ugly pattern on her waterstained ceiling. She contemplated how the hurt Turner had caused her felt recent, more recent than the hurt of her broken engagement!
In a different part of the house, she could hear everyone’s voices, Cole’s and Turner’s, raised in greeting, followed by laughter and conversation. She could, after all these years, pick out the tone of Turner’s voice. It was deep, a masculine melody touching the harp her spine had become.
It was obvious the men were now in the front room where the Gingerbread Girls had been earlier.
No chance of sneaking down the staircase without being seen. Casey fervently wished they would shut up and go to bed, so she could get out of here.
Instead, Turner’s voice triggered powerful memories of a presidential suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Jumping on the beds. Sitting in front of the fireplace wrapped in a luxurious, pure white robe, while he painted her toenails red. Walking to the theater. Taking a carriage ride through Central Park.
Three days of barely sleeping, of living with an intensity that was exhilarating and exhausting, of being on fire with life and love... Strip away all the luxury, and it was his hand in hers that had caused her to feel so exquisitely alive, his eyes on her face that made her feel as if she had never felt before.
Enough! Casey shook her head clear of the memories. Finally, after experiencing what she had once seen described in a poem as the “interminable night,” she felt it was safe to creep out of her room, jacket on against the cold, suitcase in hand.
She checked the hallway. Nothing. Not a sound beyond the wheezing of an exceptionally cranky old furnace. She was pretty sure Harper slept with her owner, the innkeeper, Carol.
Casey tiptoed through the house and out the front, where the screen door shrieked like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.
She froze, listened, waited for lights to come on. It was really dark out here. Even the Christmas lights had been turned off, no doubt part of the Gingerbread Inn’s austerity program.
Stumbling through the inky darkness found only in the country, Casey finally made it to her car, where she opted to use the key so there would be no blink of headlights or short blast of the horn when she unlocked it. She actually had her key in the door when it hit her.
She could not let Emily and Andrea down like this. It wasn’t about her. It was about making Emily’s day the most incredible experience of her life.
Besides, what explanation could she offer to her friends for her sudden defection? As close as she was to them, she had never let on about those three days she and Turner had spent together. Had never breathed out loud that she harbored a crush on the man, that she had waited and hoped and prayed that he would contact her again.
The memory of that—of waiting—made her cheeks turn crimson with anger.
She was acting like a thief! Acting as if she had done something wrong.
It was Turner who had breathed fire into her soul in those three days that had followed Cole and Emily’s wedding. And then he had walked away, and never, ever called. Or written. Had disappeared as if they had not shared the most intense of all experiences.
As if they had not fallen in love at first sight.
Slowly, she pulled her key out of the car door.
Casey was a scientist. She didn’t believe in the phenomena of coincidence, certainly did not believe in the universe conspiring to help people out. But really, in terms of her vow never to love again, could there be a more perfect test than this?
Could there be a better conclusion than coming face-to-face with the man who had made her aware of her fatal flaw?
It was perfect, really.
The perfect ending.
Not the one Andrea and Emily wanted her to believe in. No, in this story, the princess was not kissed awake by a prince. In this ending, the princess came awake all by herself. In her new happily-ever-after, Casey would walk away, sure of herself, entirely certain of her ability to be completely independent, to live with purpose and joy without being encumbered by a belief in the fairy-tale ending of love.
Love, even love that worked, was an uphill battle with heartache. Look at Em. Look at Andrea, having to bury her husband before her honeymoon had even ended!
Casey decided—right then and t
here, in the parking lot of the Gingerbread Inn, with fresh snow drifting down around her—to be on a quest, not for love, but for emotional freedom. She would rid herself once and for all of the lifelong myths and fantasies and hopes and dreams that had bound and imprisoned her.
Her life would be about her baby. Who better than a scientist to conduct the search for a donor with the perfect qualities to give her child?
She could make that decision about creating her own family in the way all the best choices were made. She would be measured and rational. She hadn’t got far in her research about how to choose a donor, but she hoped she would get to review photos. She would make sure the father of her child was nothing like her own devastatingly handsome father had been, or her immensely charming, but ultimately fickle fiancé.
The man would, especially, be nothing like Turner.
Who could turn those silvery eyes on a woman and enchant her entirely.
No, better to look for brilliance and gentleness, physical health and even features.
Really, she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it sooner—that science could provide her with a perfect father for her children!
When she thought back on it, she was a totally different woman than she had been in those few long-ago days with Turner.
She’d experienced nothing but heartache at the caprice of love. She’d buried her father, lost her fiancé to another woman and her mother to the church, attended the heartbreaking funeral of one of her best friends. She’d seen Andrea devastated by the death of her husband, and Emily by a struggling marriage. It was enough! Casey’s heart was in armor.
She was glad that Emily and Andrea had found love. She really was. But she was concluding her mission. The rejection of romantic love would make her a better mother to her future child, devoted and not distracted. Their lives wouldn’t be in a constant jumble of men moving in and out.
If the gods were throwing down a gauntlet in the face of her decision, she was accepting the challenge!
