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She pulled one out and read the message out loud. “The weather outside is frightful.” She frowned, and pulled out another. “If you’ve no place to go.” Now she smiled as she looked at the rest. He had carefully penned, then pinned, all the words to the familiar Christmas song, “Let It Snow.” Even out of order, she recognized them.
“All the night long we’ll be warm.”
Oh, it was going to be a good night, she was sure of it.
Let it snow and snow some more!
By the time Brody answered the door, she was almost dancing with delight.
“It’s so Christmassy!” she said, throwing her arms around him. “I love the wreath.”
He kissed her soundly, until she was breathless. Then he stepped back. “I would have bought one and put it up weeks ago if I’d known the results.”
“I have lots to bring in. Want to help?”
They finally got all the food into the house, despite pelting each other with snowballs.
She set the last of the bags on the counter and took a deep breath of cinnamon-scented air. “Something smells fabulous.”
“I’m heating cider. I knew you’d be ready for a mug when you got here.”
She threw her arms around his neck again and kissed him. “You’re so thoughtful.”
Brody slipped his arms around her waist and held her there. “Seems to me you’re making me dinner. Little enough to do in return.”
“Cooking in this wonderful old kitchen is a treat. I love it. I can almost taste all the amazing meals that have been cooked here.”
“Doubtful. My mother loves her vegetable garden. Then she boils the heck out of every harvest. My father used to sneak behind her and turn off burners.”
“I know you miss him. I miss mine.”
He kissed the tip of her nose, then released her. “Having you here makes all the difference.”
“For the record, this is the best Christmas I remember in a long time.”
“Because?”
He was clearly fishing for a compliment. “I’m not working, of course. At least not very much.”
“And?”
“And I guess I love winter. The snow and the cold remind me of my childhood, before we pulled up stakes and headed for California.”
“And?”
She cocked her head. “Well, being with you is nice.”
“Nice?”
“Maybe that’s a bit of an understatement.”
“It had better be.” He pulled her close again, and this time the kiss went on and on—and the man did know how to kiss. When she finally stepped away, the room was cartwheeling around her.
She shook her head. “You expect me to cook after that?”
“You promised me dinner. And I just hauled in at least a ton of groceries.”
She sent him her most seductive smile, then she turned away before he could respond to the message in it. “No problem, I’ll just boil the heck out of everything in these bags and you’ll feel right at home.”
* * *
OF COURSE SHE didn’t. She had gone into debt for the rib roast, and she cooked it with potatoes, simmering them first so they would crisp up in the oven nestled against the roast. She served both with a spinach and artichoke casserole, fresh green beans, a cranberry, apple and walnut salad, and yeast rolls she had baked at Hollymeade that morning. For his part Brody opened a bottle of Merlot from a friend’s vineyard on Long Island.
When she set everything on the table, decorated with a red tablecloth from Hollymeade, evergreen boughs and white candles, Brody looked like a man who had died and reawakened to his first heavenly banquet.
“I’m going to be rude and ask if there’s dessert,” he said.
“Doesn’t this look like enough?”
“I have to know how much I can eat. If there’s dessert, too, I might be able to rein myself in, just a bit, in preparation.”
“Homemade gingerbread, and there’s maple whipped cream to go with it.”
He looked up from his plate. “Thank you. More than I can say.”
She heard so much in his voice. Thanks for the food. Thanks for cooking for me. Thanks for making a holiday special that would have been lonely and desolate.
If there was more, she didn’t want to think about it.
The food was as good as she had hoped. Clearly Brody thought so, too.
“You ought to be a pro, a chef,” he said, as he reached for another helping of potatoes. “This is better than any restaurant meal I’ve ever had.”
She was flattered. “Cooking’s my only real hobby. I would hate to ruin it.”
“You haven’t talked much about your job.”
She found herself telling him more about the man she worked for. “I know it’s not just my fault when things go wrong,” she said, “but it’s hard to remember that when Frank crowns me scapegoat of the year.”
“Do you have to stay there?”
She didn’t know. She did know she would be in demand if she ever looked for another job. She had a large network of leads and a standing offer or two. That sounded like bragging, though, so she just shrugged. “I’ve invested a lot in this job. I would hate to walk away.”
“You like what you do?”
“I love helping companies become more efficient. That’s my main function. If we can get just the right system in place, their productivity soars and everybody’s happy. It’s a great feeling.”
“You work with the big guys, I guess.”
“Usually, but the right system, computers, software, et cetera, customized for small businesses, can make all the difference, too. And sometimes it’s the difference between closing up shop or opening up markets.” She pushed back from the table a little, because she couldn’t eat another bite. “I’m sure you have a good system here, tailored to your needs, right?”
“I don’t have the time to fool with anything new.”
Or the money, she thought. The more time she spent with Brody, the more she suspected Ryan Vineyards was, at best, holding its own. Most of the land was planted with Concord grapes for juice, and Brody’s passion for making wine was on a back burner. She had seen his equipment, and California girl that she was, she knew what he had wasn’t state-of-the-art, as it should be to compete. The house needed attention inside and out, and one day, when she had dropped by unannounced, the temperature inside hadn’t been much different from the one outside.
“I could fix you up.” She said this as casually as she could, as if having a highly paid consultant revamp his entire business strategy wasn’t any big deal. “Get the right technology in place without a lot of fuss and bother. And with my contacts, I could do it in a way that wouldn’t break the bank. I could set up everything you need. Invoices, purchasing orders, follow-ups with potential clients, analysis of marketing campaigns. How’s your website?”
She had asked the last question in her most innocent tone, but she already knew the answer. The Ryan Vineyards website, if it could be called that, was pathetic, one page that looked as if it had been constructed by a middle school student for his first computer class.
“I can tell you’ve seen it already,” Brody said.
She nodded sheepishly. “I think I could do a thousand percent better with a minimum of work.”
He didn’t answer directly. “It’s a lot to think about tonight, and we ought to be celebrating. Would you like to try some of Ryan Vineyards’ own ice wine with dessert?”
Last week she’d had a glass of Ryan’s best Reisling, and it had compared favorably with German Reislings she’d been served on business trips. She said an enthusiastic yes.
They cleared off the table together and stacked the dishes in the ancient dishwasher. Then, while she dished up the gingerbread with generous dollops of whipped cream, Brody opened the wine.
They took both to the small table near the fireplace and sat together on soft cushions, watching the flames and working on the gingerbread.
The wine was wonderful, with notes of peaches and honey, a wine to be proud of, and she told him so.
He looked pleased. “The grapes have to freeze before we pick them, which means we have to leave them on the vine and hope a freeze is on the way before they rot. Then, of course, there’s not as much liquid after they freeze, so we make less wine. It’s a risky business, but good ice wine can sell for five times what a bottle of the Reisling brings.”
“That would make a great blog, updating people day by day on the state of the weather, the grapes, the work involved. Wine fanatics would hang on every word. They’d be standing in line for your wine when it was ready.”
“If I could just be two or three people at once, I could manage something like that.”
“I bet you like all the challenges.”
“It’s the darnedest thing. I do like challenges, always have. Take finding Eric’s baby quilts, for instance.”
Surprised at the nimble change of subject, she took another sip of her wine and waited.
“It’s the strangest thing, Jo, but I think I may have found them.”
“Really? You were in the Grants’ attic without me?”
“I’m still monitoring their roof for a possible leak.”
That surprised her, but she didn’t let on.
“Anyway, I went upstairs, and you won’t believe what I found.”
She raised a brow. “Won’t I?”
“The right box was there in front. Exactly where we looked that first day. Are you surprised?”
She set her plate on the table. “Not so much.”
“Well, I was. Really, really surprised. Stunned, in fact. Because...” He paused dramatically. “I had moved that box to the back row before you ever went up there in the first place.”
“Brody!”
He set his glass on the table. “Here’s the thing. I needed an excuse to be with you, or at least I thought I did. But a miracle happened. After we went through that first stack of boxes together, somebody moved that box right back to the front where we’d already looked.”
He had confessed. Now she had to, although he obviously knew the truth. “All right, after our first trip to the attic, Mrs. Grant told me where to find a house key and gave me a description of the box I was looking for. So I took out a couple of quilts and moved the box back to the front, so we wouldn’t find it when we were together. Of course I didn’t know that you—”
He put his arm around her and pulled her close. “Jo, do we still need excuses to be together? Do we need more time talking about our views on art or literature, about your job or mine, more snowballs and ice skating? Because it’s all been great. We could be best friends, I guess, if we really worked at it.”
She went into his arms without hesitation, shifting so her face was close to his. “But we were never destined just to be friends, were we?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Brody, just tell me this isn’t about the season....” Her voice caught. “And it’s not just nostalgia for lost youth.”
“It’s about never being able to forget you,” he said, just before he kissed her.
He was right, there really was no more need for conversation. And there was certainly no need to invent ways to entertain each other. There was no need to move into the bedroom, either. The fire was warm, the pillows were soft, and their clothes slipped away as easily as their painful past.
Later, lying against him, skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart, Jo stirred a little. “If Santa Claus comes down this chimney tonight, he’s going to get a big surprise.”
Brody pulled her close again. “Not to worry. Santa knows he doesn’t have to come. I already have my Christmas present.”
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