LITMIR.BIZ

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the ten-foot ceiling. Emma let her eyes rest on that angel for a moment.

      “One miracle,” Emma said quietly. “I wanted a perfect Christmas. I wanted to give the best gift of all, hope.”

      The angel gazed back at her with absolute serenity.

      “Oh,” Emma said, annoyed, “you aren’t even a real angel. If I had glass eyes, and paper wings I could look serene, too!”

      But then she cast her gaze around the room and her heart softened. The great room of the White Pond Inn had been turned into a picture out of a Christmas fairy tale. This scene was the payoff for all her hard work, and worth the crush of bills, the exhaustion that had become her constant companion.

      A fire roared and crackled in the river-rock hearth, colorful woolen socks hung at the solid-slab oak mantle. Garlands of real holly were tacked to crown molding. White poinsettias shone like lights in the dark corners of the room.

      Parcels wrapped in shades of white and festooned with homemade bows, containing brand-new dolls and fire trucks were already piled high under that tree, though she had to admit they didn’t look quite as pretty when she wasn’t sure how she was going to pay for them!

      She forced her mind away from that, and finished her inventory of the room. Red-and-white cushions had replaced the ordinary ones on the sofas and chairs, vases held candy canes, the glowing dark planks of the hardwood floors were covered with white area rugs.

      The room held a delicious aroma because of the continuous baking that had been happening in the house. The sweet comforting scents of cinnamon and nutmeg and pumpkin and apples had mixed with the smell of the occasional back puff of wood smoke to create a scent that could have been labeled and sold, Christmas.

      Another great money-making idea from Emma White, she told herself sarcastically, but then she sighed, unable not to enjoy the pleasure of what she had done.

      The inn was a vision of Christmas. It was going to bring great joy to many people. When her mother saw it, it would erase every bad Christmas they had ever spent together.

      “Holiday Happenings and the Christmas Day Dream will still happen,” Emma told herself stubbornly, but details from the ice storm of 1998 insisted on crowding into her head.

      The six-day storm had caused billions of dollars in damage, left millions of people without power for periods that had varied from days to weeks. Roads had been closed, trees destroyed, power lines had snapped under the weight of rain turning to ice.

      “I could not be so unlucky to have a six-day storm shut down Holiday Happenings completely,” she muttered, but then she whispered, “Could I?”

      The storm threw shards of ice up against her window and howled under her eaves in answer.

      And then, above the howl of the wind, her doorbell chimed its one clanging, broken note, but still an answer to her question about her luck!

      Emma’s eyes flew to her grandfather clock. Eight o’clock! Just when people were supposed to arrive. They had come anyway! The miracle had happened! How was it she had not heard cars, slamming doors, voices?

      She tried to rein in her happiness. Of course, it could just be Tim, checking to make sure she was all right in the storm.

      The Fenshaws had invited her into the fold of this lovely small community as if she belonged here, as if she was one of them. Tim had been interested in the White Pond property for his son when he returned from overseas, but when Emma had told him she had decided to keep it, he and his daughter-in-law Mona had seemed genuinely pleased, as if they had waited all their lives for her to come home to them.

      Now, what if she couldn’t pay them after the hours and hours they had devoted to making her dreams become a reality? She couldn’t have operated the inn for one day without their constant help and support.

      A shiver went down her spine. Worse, what if all these dreams, her foolishness as Peter had called it, cost her the inn?

      She went and opened the door, and despite the rush of ice-cold air, her heart beat hopefully in anticipation of guests, maybe locals from Willowbrook who had braved the weather.

      Only it wasn’t locals.

      And it wasn’t Tim.

      A stranger stood there, the glow from the string of white Christmas lights that illuminated the porch nearly totally blocked by his size. He was tall and impossibly broad across the shoulders. The sense of darkness was intensified by the absolute black of a knee-length wool coat, black gloves, dark, glossy hair, shot through with snowflakes.

      His features were shadowed, but even so, Emma could see the perfect cast of his nose, the thrust of high cheekbones, the strength in the jut of his chin.

      The stranger was astonishingly, heart-stoppingly handsome, even though the set of his firm mouth was grim, and his eyes were dark, intense and totally forbidding.

      Emma shivered under his scrutiny, felt the sweep of his cool gaze take her in from red socks to ridiculous hat, and saw his mouth tighten into an even grimmer line.

      It felt to Emma as if the devil himself had decided to pay her an early Christmas visit. In an instant she went from being an independent woman, operating her own business, to one who wished she could strip off her shapeless sweater and the added bulk of the long johns she had put on earlier in preparation for skating and sleigh-riding.

      She became a woman who would have given up just about anything to take back the recent disastrous haircut. In an effort to make her life simpler—or maybe to assert it was her life—she had cut her long glossy black hair, one of the few things about her that Peter had approved of. In rebellion, set free, heavy waves had turned to impossible, crazy curls. At least the Santa hat would be hiding the worst of it, though Emma wished she wasn’t wearing that, too.

      There was something alarmingly intriguing in the to-die-for features of the stranger who blocked the light from her front door. As her eyes adjusted to the deep shadow around him, she drank in his features and the expression on his face.

      The man looked as if he might have laughed once, but did no more. He was one of those men who was a puzzle that begged to be solved. Despite the remoteness in him—or maybe deepened because of it—he was temptation personified.

      But not to her, a woman sworn to put all her passion into her business and the coming Christmas. A woman who had sworn that the White Pond Inn was going to be enough for her, who could not trust herself to make a good decision about men if her life depended on it. No one, after all, had looked like a better bet than Peter.

      Her intriguing visitor’s eyes moved from her to the wreath on her door, taking in the sprigs of white pine interlaced with balsam and grand fir, taking in the gypsophila and tiny white bells, the glory of the homemade white satin bow. Finally, his gaze paused on the little wooden letters, red, inserted in the wreath, peeking out from under a sprig of feathery cedar.

      Believe.

      His expression hardened and his gaze strayed to the rest of her porch, glancing off the holly wound through the spindles, the red rag rugs, the planters filled with spruce boughs and red berries.

      If she was not mistaken, it was contempt that darkened his eyes to pitch before they returned to her face.

      Slam the door, she instructed herself. Whatever he has come here for, you don’t have it. And he doesn’t have one thing you need, either.

      She reminded herself, sternly, of rule one: independence! Emma already knew, many thanks to her mother—a lesson reinforced by the good doctor—that a man was the easiest way to lose that sense of independence, that sense of owning your own life.

      But the weather was providing a cruel reminder that she did not always make the rules for her life. Now she was given another such reminder.

      Because, in a breath, closing the door on him was no longer an option. A tiny whimper drew her attention, finally, from the mesmerizing black ice of his eyes.

      She was astonished

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