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If she hoped her aloof graciousness would give her the upper hand, she was mistaken. Scent swept in the door with him, the deeply masculine smells of soap and aftershave, the baby scents of powder and purity, quickly overpowering all the warm cookie and Christmas smells.
When she firmly closed the door against the weather, the ancient knob came off in her hand, making her feel not professional, and not gracious, either.
Not now, she warned the old house, stuffing the knob back in the hole, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
But when she turned back to him, she could see he was a man who noticed everything. He would have noticed even if the knob had not popped back out of the door and landed with a clatter on the floor.
She bent and picked it up, thoroughly flustered. “I don’t charge extra for the rustic charm,” she said breezily, trying to ignore the cold air whooshing through the round hole in the door where the knob should have been.
No smile.
“Ah.” He glanced around her front foyer, took in the small welcoming hallway tree, decorated entirely in tiny white angels, the garlands of white-bowed boughs that wove their way up the staircase and had, until seconds ago, filled her house with the sharp, fresh scents of pine and Christmas.
He stood directly under the sprig of mistletoe she had suspended from the ceiling, and that made her look at his lips.
And think a distressing thought, entirely inappropriate for an independent professional such as herself, about what they would taste like, and what price a woman would be willing to pay to know that.
Too much. The price would be too much. She was still reeling from her mistake in judgment about Peter. Guessing what a complete stranger’s lips might taste like was just proof, as if she needed more, that she was still capable of grave errors.
He frowned. “If you don’t operate as an inn at this time of year, do you do all of this decorating for your personal enjoyment?”
“I was expecting guests for the evening.” She fought further evidence of her poor judgment—a ridiculous temptation to drop the professional facade and to unburden herself about the disastrous inaugural evening of Holiday Happenings. Though his shoulders looked broad enough to cry on, his eyes did not look capable of sympathy.
His next words made her glad she had kept her confidences. “Do you have any rooms without the, er, Christmas theme?”
“You don’t like Christmas.” She said it flatly, a statement rather than a question. Given his expression, it was already more than obvious to her he did not like Christmas. And probably not puppies, love songs or tender movies, either.
Which was good. Very good. So much easier to get through a few hours of temptation—of her own bad decision-making abilities—if the effect of those intoxicating good looks were offset by a vile nature.
What kind of person doesn’t like Christmas? Especially with a baby! He practically has an obligation to like Christmas!
The baby gurgled, reached up from under the blanket and inserted a pudgy finger in her mouth.
Nothing in the man’s expression softened, but the baby didn’t seem to notice.
“Mama,” the baby whispered, and laid her head on his shoulder in a way that confirmed what Emma already knew. Her guest might be cynical and Christmas-hating, but she could trust him with her life, just as that baby, now slurping contentedly on her thumb, did.
“Is she wanting her mama?” Emma asked, struck by the backward bonnet again, by the incongruity of this man, seemingly without any kind of softness, being with this baby. Of course. A mother. That made her safe from this feeling, hot and liquid, unfurling like a sail catching a wind. He was taken. Her relief, her profound sense of escape was short-lived.
“No,” he said, and then astonishingly, a flush of red moved up his neck, and Emma saw the tiniest hint of vulnerability in those closed features.
He hesitated, “Unfortunately, that’s what she calls me.”
Again, Emma felt a tickle of laughter. And again it was cut off before it materialized, because of the unwanted softness for him when she thought of him being called Mama. It was a startling contradiction to the forbidding presence of him, ridiculously sweet.
Even though she knew it was none of her business, she had to know.
“Where is her mother?”
Something shot through his eyes with such intensity it sucked all the warmth from the room. It was more than sadness, for a moment she glimpsed a soul stripped of joy, of hope. She glimpsed a man lost in a storm far worse than the one that howled outside her door.
“She’s dead,” he said quietly, and the window that had opened briefly to a tormented soul slammed shut. His voice was flat and calm, his eyes warned her against probing his soul any deeper.
“I’m so sorry,” Emma said. “Here, let me take her while you get your coat off.”
But when she held out her arms, she realized she was still holding the broken door knob.
He juggled the baby, and took the doorknob with his free hand, his gloved fingers brushing hers just long enough for her to feel the heat beneath those gloves.
Effortlessly, he turned and inserted the knob in the door, jiggled it into place and then turned back to her.
His easy competence made Emma feel more off center, incompetent, as if her stupid doorknob was sending out messages about her every failing as an innkeeper.
“The coat rack is behind you,” she said, and then added formally, as if she was the doorman. “Is there luggage?”
“I hope we won’t be staying long enough to need it.” He handed the baby to her.
Me, too, Emma thought. The baby was surprisingly heavy, her weight sweet and pliable as if she was made of warm pudding, boneless.
The wind picked that moment to howl and rattle the windows, and it occurred to Emma she might be fighting temptation for more than a few hours. It was quite possible her visitors would be here at least the night. Thankfully she thought of the crib she had found so that the babies who came Christmas Day would have a place to nap.
The baby regarded her warily, scrunching up her face in case terror won out over curiosity.
“How old is she?”
“Fourteen months.”
“What’s her name?” Emma asked softly, grateful for the baby’s distraction against the man removing his jacket to reveal a dark, expensive shirt perfectly tailored to fit over those impossibly broad shoulders, dark trousers that accentuated legs that were long, hard-muscled beneath the fine fabric.
“Tess,” he provided.
“Hello, Tess,” she crooned. “Welcome to the White Christmas Inn. I’m Emma.”
“The White Christmas Inn?” the man said, “you aren’t serious, are you?”
“Didn’t you see the sign on the driveway?” Just this morning, she had placed the word Christmas over the word Pond, the letters of Christmas just the teensiest bit squished to make them fit.
“I saw a sign, I assumed it was for the inn, but most of it is covered in snow and ice.”
“The White Christmas Inn. Seriously.”
He groaned, softly.
“Is there a problem?”
His answer was rhetorical. “Do you ever feel the gods like to have a laugh at the plans of human beings?”
Even though he obviously expected no answer, Emma responded sadly, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
The White Christmas Inn.
Ryder Richardson had no doubt the gods were enjoying a robust laugh at his expense right now. When he had headed out on the road tonight, he’d had one goal: to escape Christmas entirely. He had packed up his niece, Tess, and that amazing mountain of things that accompanied a traveling baby, with every intention of making it to his lakeside cottage by dark.
The cottage where there would be absolutely no ho-ho-ho, no colorful lights, no carols, no tree, no people and especially no phone. He had deliberately left his cell phone at home. Ryder Richardson could make Scrooge look like a bit player in the bah-humbug department.
He was not ashamed to admit to himself he just wanted to hide out until it was all over. Until the trees were shredded into landscape pulp, the lights were down, there was not a carol to be heard, and he could walk along a sidewalk without hearing bells or having complete strangers smile at him and wish him a Merry Christmas.
Ryder looked forward to the dreary days of January like a man on a ship watching for a beacon to keep him from the rocks on the darkest night.
In January there would be fewer reminders and fewer calls offering sympathy. The invitations to holiday parties and dinners and events designed to lure him out of his memories and his misery would die down.
In his luggage, he had made a small concession to Christmas. Ryder had a few simple gifts to give Tess. He had a soft stuffed pony in an implausible shade of lavender, new pink suede shoes, for she already shared a woman’s absolute delight in footwear, and a small, hardy pianolike toy that he was probably going to regret obtaining within hours of having given it to her.
He had not brought wrapping paper, and probably would not give Tess the gifts on December twenty-fifth, taking advantage of the fact that at fourteen months of age his niece was not aware enough of the concept of Christmas to know the difference.
This would be his year of reprieve. Next year, Tess would be two at Christmas. It wouldn’t be so easy to pretend the season didn’t exist. Next year, she would probably have grasped the whole concept of Santa, would want things from Ryder. Would he be able to give them to her?
As he turned back from the coat rack, through the open archway from the foyer into the living room, he caught sight of the fire burning brightly in the hearth at the White Christmas Inn, the huge tree glowing, top to bottom, an ethereal shade of white.
Despite steeling himself against all things Christmas, the scene called to him, like the lights of home calling a warrior back to his own land. For a disturbing moment he felt almost pulled toward that room, the tree, the promise it held. Hope.
CHAPTER TWO
HOPE. The word burned in Ryder’s heart for a second or two, not bright and warm, but painful. Because that was what he was intent on quashing in himself. He was a warrior who had glimpsed the lights of a home he could never go back to.
The socks that hung from the mantel, cheerful, were what triggered the memory.
Without warning—for the memories always came without warning, riding in on a visual clue or a scent or a sound he could not control—a picture flashed in his mind of different socks on a different mantel nearly a year ago. Those socks, bright red, with white fur cuffs, had names on them.
Drew. Tracy. Tess.
Ryder could see his brother, standing in front of those socks, holding the tiny baby way above his head, bringing her down, her round belly to his lips, blowing, the baby gurgling, and Drew looking as happy as Ryder had ever seen his brother look.
A shudder rippled through Ryder, and he looked deliberately away from the socks that hung on the mantel of the White Christmas Inn, picked up the baby bag that he had dropped on the floor, shrugged it over his shoulder.
In a few days, a year would have passed, and Ryder’s pain had not been reduced. A reminder about the danger of hope. There was no sense hoping next year would be better. There was no sense hoping life could ever be what it had been before the fire that had swept through his brother’s house early Christmas morning.
“Get the baby,” Drew had cried to him, as he’d stumbled out of the guest room, “I’ll get Tracy.”
Anyone who had not been in a fire could not understand the absolute and disorienting darkness, the heat, the smoke, the chaos intensified by the roar and shriek of it, as if the fire was a living thing, a monster, a crazed animal.
Somehow, Ryder had found the baby, and gotten her outside. Tracy had already been out there, in bad shape, burned, dazed, barely coherent. At first Ryder thought that meant his brother was safe. But then he’d realized Drew was still in there, looking for his wife, not knowing she was out here.
He’d raced back for the door, uncaring that flames roared out of it like it was the mouth of hell. He’d almost made it, too, back in there to find his brother.
But neighbors had pulled him back, four men, and then six, holding him, dodging his fists, absorbing his punches, their urgency to keep him out of there as great as his to go back in. He still woke in the night sometimes, coated in sweat, his heart beating hard, screaming his fury.
Let me go. You don’t understand. Let…me…go.
When Ryder thought of that the fury was fresh. If anything, he added to it as time went on. How could he have failed so terribly? How could his strength have failed him when he needed it most? If he could have shaken off those men, made them understand…
Then, just three months ago, more heartbreak, an intensified sense of failure, as Tracy, all out of bravery, had quit fighting her horrible injuries.
If there was a feeling Ryder hated more than any other it was that one: powerlessness. He’d been as powerless to save Tracy as he had been to break free of the men who had kept him from his brother.
Ryder shuddered again. He had put a wall around himself, and instead of letting it come down as time passed, brick by brick he made it stronger. He was ravaged by what had happened, destroyed by it. He could function, but not feel.
He hated it that his armor felt threatened by the fact that, ever so briefly, he had felt what the room had to offer. Heard the word. Hope. And seen that other word on her front door.
Believe.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice deliberately cold, protecting the coating of ice that shielded what was left of his heart.
No, he wasn’t. He had tried to keep Christmas, its association with his greatest failure, at bay. Instead, at the caprice of fate, here he was at a place that appeared to have more Christmas than the North Pole. If there were no baby to think of, he would put his coat back on and take his chances with the storm.
But then, if there were no baby to think of, he was pretty sure he would have self-destructed already.
“You looked like you saw a ghost,” Emma said. “Apparently we have them here, but I haven’t seen one yet.”
She actually sounded envious that he might have spotted one.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said curtly. Did she notice the emphasis on believe? Because that was the first in a long list of things he did not believe in. He hoped he would not be here long enough to share the full extent of his disillusionment with her.
“Well, I do,” she said, a hint of something stubborn in her voice. “I think there are spirits around this old house that protect it and the people in it. And I think there is a spirit of Christmas, too.”
And then, having made her stand, she blushed.
He looked at her carefully. Now that she had taken the hat off, he felt much less inclined to ask to speak to her mother. How old would she be? Early twenties, probably. Too young to be running this place, and too old to be believing nonsense.
He replayed her words of earlier. I usually don’t operate as an inn in the winter. I don’t charge extra for the rustic charm.
I not we.
She ran a hand through the dark, wild hair revealed by the removal of the awful Santa hat, a gesture that was self-conscious. Her blush was deepening.
Despite the shard of the memory stuck in his heart like broken glass, her hair tried, for the second time, to take down a brick, to tease something out of him. A smile? Only Tess made him smile. Though her hair was worse than Tess’s, which was saying something. His hostess’s hair, dark and shiny, was a tangle of dark coils, flattened by the hat, but looking as if they intended to spring back up at any moment.
He was shocked by the slipping of another brick—an impulse to touch her hair, to coax the curls up with his fingertips. He killed the impulse before it even fully formed, but not before he pictured how encouraging the wild disarray of her hair would make her sexy, rather than the adorable image the red socks and red sweater projected.
She was looking at him like a kitten ready to show claws if he chose to argue the spirit of Christmas with her, which he didn’t.
If the way she held Tess and crooned to her was any indication, she was exactly as she appeared; soft, wholesome, slightly eccentric, a believer in goodness and light and spirits protecting her house and Christmas. Not his type at all.
Even back in the day, before it had happened, when he cared about such things, he’d gone for flashier women, whitened teeth, diamond rings, designer clothes. Women who would have scorned this place as hokey, and his hostess for being so naive.
Except, last year, a spectator to the domestic bliss his brother had found, Ryder had thought, briefly, maybe I want this, too.
But now he knew he didn’t want anything that intensified that feeling of being powerless, and in his mind that’s what being open to another person would do, make him weak instead of strong, slowly but surely erode the bricks of his defenses. What was behind that wall was grief and fury so strong he had no doubt it would destroy him and whoever was close to him, if and when it ever came out.
For Tess’s sake, as well as his own, he kept a lid on feelings. He knew he had nothing to give anyone; somehow he was hoping his niece would be the exception, though he had no idea how she would be.
“You don’t run this place by yourself, do you?” he asked, suddenly needing to know, not liking the idea of being alone with all this sweetness, not trusting himself with it, especially after that renegade impulse to tease something sexy out of her hair.
He hoped, suddenly, for a family-run operation, for parents in the wings, or better yet, a husband. Someone to kill dead this enemy within him, the unexpected sizzle of attraction he felt. Someone he could talk hockey with as the night dragged on, to keep his mind off how little he wanted to be here, and how little fate cared about what he wanted.
Ryder’s eyes drifted to her ring finger. Red nail polish, a bit of a surprise, but probably chosen in the spirit of the season, to match the socks. How could he possibly be finding this woman, who stood for everything he was trying to run away from, attractive?
There was no ring on her finger, so he knew the answer to his question even before she answered.
“It’s all mine,” she said, and her chin lifted proudly. “I inherited the house from my grandmother, restored it, named it the White Pond Inn, and have been operating it on my own ever since.”
“I thought it was the White Christmas Inn,” he reminded her dryly.
“Christmas transforms everything,” she said with grave dignity, “it makes all things magic, even my humble inn.”
Well, she obviously believed.
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t want to get into it. He truly didn’t want to know a single thing more about her. He didn’t want to like the fact that despite her corkscrew hair waiting to pop into action, and despite her falling-off doorknob, she was trying so hard to keep her dignity.
Show me to my room. Please. But somehow, instead, Ryder found himself asking, “What makes a young woman tackle a project like this?” He didn’t add, on her own, though that was really his question.
Ryder was an architect. He and Drew had drawn up plenty of plans to restore places like this one. Underneath all the cosmetic loveliness, he was willing to bet the abundance of decorations hid what the falling-off door handle had hinted at. Problems. Large and small. Way more than a little scrap of a woman on her own would be up to.
“I’m a dreamer,” she said, fiercely unapologetic, and again, in the way she said that, he caught sight of her pride and stubbornness. And her hurt. As if someone—probably a hard-hearted jerk like him—had mocked her for being a dreamer.
Whoo boy. He bit his tongue, because it was obvious to him this house did not need a dreamer. A carpenter, certainly. Likely an electrician. Probably a plumber.
Despite biting his tongue nearly clear through, his skepticism must have clearly shown on his face because she felt driven to convince him—or maybe herself—that the house needed a dreamer.
“I actually saw it for the first time when my grandmother got sick. My mother and she had been, um, estranged, but one of the neighbors called and asked me to come home to help care for her. This house was love at first sight for me. Plus, it had been in our family for generations. When Granny died, I inherited, and I had to figure out a way I could afford to keep it.”
That was a warning, if he’d ever heard one. He did not like women who believed in love at first sight. As a man who lived in the wreckage of dreams, he did not like dreamers nor all their infuriating optimism.
Aside from that, the words told him an even more complete truth, whether he wanted to know it or not, and he didn’t. He saw the glitter of some defense in her eyes that told him things he would have been just as happy not knowing.
Hurt. Clues in what she was telling him. Something missing in her family, that had filled her with longing? Despite the happy Christmas costume, there was a reason a woman like that took on a place like this. And he was willing to bet it had little to do with family heritage, and a whole lot to do with a broken heart. She had decided loving a house was easier than loving a person.
He heartily approved, though he wondered if a dreamer could be pragmatic enough to pull that off.
This ability to see people more clearly than they wanted to be seen, and certainly more clearly than he wanted to see them, was one of the things Ryder hated since the fire. He sensed things, often seeing past what people said, to some truth about them. It was a cruel irony, since he was desperately trying not to care about anything, that he could see things he had never seen before, things that threatened the walls and armor of the defenses that kept some things in him, and some things out.
Pre-fire, Ryder had been a typical man, happily superficial, involved totally in himself. Building a business with his brother, hanging out with his buddies, playing in a semi-serious hockey league, and never getting even semi-serious with any one woman. That had been his life: a happy, carefree place. A guy zone of self-centered hedonism.
He had never been deep. Insensitive probably would have described him nicely, blissfully unaware there was any other way to be.
Now, he could walk by a complete stranger, and see their tragedies in the lines around their mouths and the shadows in their eyes. It was as if he had become a member of a secret club of sadness. Not seeing had been a blessing he had not appreciated at the time.
A little more than a year ago, Ryder certainly wouldn’t have ever been able to spot the hurt hiding in the shadows of Emma’s eyes. He realized, uncomfortably, that even with those shadows, her eyes were amazing.
A part of him, purely masculine, acknowledged that physically Emma was exquisite. Her features were small and perfect, her nose snubbed up a touch at the end, her lips formed plump bows of sensuality. And he was not sure he had ever quite seen that shade of eye color before, soft gray-green, moss and mist.
Despite the outfit—was it deliberately chosen to hide her assets? Another thing he probably would not have guessed pre-fire—he could see she was delicately curved, unconsciously sensuous.
Annoyed with himself, he realized it was the first time since the fire he had allowed the faint stir of attraction toward a member of the opposite sex to penetrate his barriers.