LITMIR.BIZ

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One channel showed a clip of a road outside Fredericton. The scene showed devastation, the road completely blocked by sagging power lines, by trees broken and splintered by the weight of the ice on them.

      Ryder snapped off the television. It looked to Emma as though he wanted to hurl her channel changer through the screen.

      “Where were you going?” she asked wondering at his desperation to be out of here. “Is someone waiting for you tonight?”

      “No,” he said. “No one’s waiting.” It said something about his life—starkly lonely, not that anything about him invited sympathy. Except the baby sprawling along the muscled length of his upper thigh.

      “Where were you going?” she asked again. Nothing about him invited her questions, either, and yet something made her ask them anyway. The truth was she wasn’t going to be invisible ever again. Not even if that was safe.

      “We were going to my cottage on Lake Kackaticka.”

      Emma frowned. She was familiar with the lake and the community of upscale cottages that surrounded it. At this time of year it was pretty much abandoned. A few year-round residents looked after the cottages, but the summer people stayed away. It was cold and dreary around the lake in the winter.

      “Who goes there in the winter?”

      “No one,” he said, making no attempt to disguise his satisfaction.

      “How long were you going for?”

      He shrugged.

      “The weekend?”

      He shrugged again, and she suspected the truth.

      “You weren’t going to spend Christmas there, were you?”

      “Yes, I was, not past tense, either. Yes, I am.”

      “Alone?”

      “Not alone. Me and Tess.”

      “But what kind of Christmas would that be for her?”

      He looked at the sleeping baby, doubt crossing those supremely confident features, but only for a moment.

      “She has no idea that it is Christmas.”

      It was his right to parent that baby however he wanted, Emma told herself sternly. He was her guest. It really wasn’t her place to argue with him. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she’d invited him here, or called down the weather personally to inconvenience him.

      She didn’t think pandering to his bad temper was a good idea, and besides she was committed to expressing her opinion after a year and a half of biting her tongue for Peter’s convenience! And look where that had gotten her!

      She’d already voiced her thoughts several times tonight, and apparently there was no stopping her now. In fact, she felt an obligation to render her opinion for the sake of Tess!

      “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him.

      He glared at the empty screen of the TV, then picked up the channel changer and turned the television back on, deciding it was interesting after all. “That just shows you’ve been sheltered up here in your fairy-tale world. You don’t know the first thing about sad.”

      There was no point saying anything more. She could tell in the set of his jaw that he was the stubborn type who never would admit he was wrong or change his mind.

      And yet there was that little ghost girl again, the one who’d been disappointed by every single Christmas, who insisted she knew everything there was to know about sad and how dare he insinuate otherwise?

      It must have been the ghost girl who couldn’t let it go.

      Emma said, sharply, “You’re depriving Tess of Christmas, that’s not just selfish. It’s mean.”

      The announcer on TV picked that moment to say, voice over a map covered with red lines of road closures that it would be three days before travel resumed on some of those roads.

      Ryder Richardson swore under his breath.

      “I suppose the baby doesn’t know any better than that, either,” Emma said.

      “You know what? I need you to show me to my room.” He stood up, not bothering to shut off the television, lifting the baby with graceful unconsciousness as he stood, tucking her sleeping head into his shoulder. To himself he said, almost musing. “It couldn’t get much worse than this, could it?”

      But Emma, dedicated to airing her views, wasn’t letting it pass. Just this afternoon she had been a woman totally content with herself and her circumstances. Totally. And now wild-child and woman-scorned, and wholesome-experienced-innkeeper were all wrestling around inside her in a turmoil because of him, and she found she resented this intrusion on her life.

      “No,” she agreed coldly, “it couldn’t.”

      But it did.

      The lights flickered, dimmed, flickered again, and then the room was plunged into darkness. The television went out with a sputter, the embers from a dying fire threw weak golden light across them.

      “It just got worse, didn’t it?”

      His voice in the darkness was a sensuous rasp that wild-child loved.

      “Yes, it did,” she said coolly.

      “Do you ever get the feeling the gods are laughing at you?” he asked, not for the first time that night.

      “Yes,” she said sadly, “I do.” Was now a good time to break the bad news to him? “The furnace is electric.”

      Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. The firelight flashed gold, on the perfect planes of his face. Wild-child sighed.

      It took him a moment to get what she meant.

      “Are you saying the only source of heat in this falling-down old wreck is that fireplace?”

      “Falling-down old wreck?” she breathed, incensed, pleased that woman-scorned was taking charge, getting the upper hand. “How dare you?”

      It felt so good to say that! To stand up for herself! She wished she would have said that to Peter, at least once.

      But no, not even when he’d told her, so sheepishly, while still making it her fault he and Monique had been seeing each other, what had she said?

      I understand.

      “Your front bell sounds broken, the door handle did come off in your hand, there’s frost on the inside of the windows, and when I dropped the baby’s bottle it rolled down the floor.”

      “Which means?” she asked haughtily.

      “Probably your foundation is moving. The floor isn’t level.”

      All her work on creating pure Christmas charm, and he was seeing that?

      “Do you always focus on the negative?” she snapped. How much did it cost to fix a moving foundation, anyway?

      “I do,” he said without an ounce of apology, even though he followed up with, “Sorry.”

      “You aren’t sorry,” Emma breathed. “You’re a miserable selfish man who is intent on spoiling Christmas not just for yourself, but for your niece and anyone else who has the misfortune to cross paths with you.”

      “Well, aren’t you glad I won’t be around to spoil it for you?” he said smoothly, completely unabashed by his behavior.

      “Huh. With my record, you probably will still be around Christmas Day. Spoiling things.”

      Silence, the light softening something in his features, an illusion, nothing more. But when he spoke, there was something softer in his voice.

      “What does that mean, with your record?”

      Don’t tell him, she ordered herself. Don’t. But another

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