LITMIR.BIZ

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to spending last Christmas Eve with Drew and Tracy, opening his gift from them. A gag gift, as always, a huge stuffed marlin, possibly the ugliest thing Ryder had ever seen, mocking the deep-sea fishing trip he and Drew had taken off the coast of Mexico earlier in the year. Was that the last time he had laughed, really laughed, until tonight?

      Come on, stay, his brother had said, at the door, “Silent Night” playing on the stereo inside the house. We’ll put you in the guest room. You can watch Tess open her presents tomorrow.

      Since Tess had been a cute and occasionally smelly little lump of a person at the time, incapable of opening her own presents, and probably oblivious to what they contained, Ryder had failed to see the attraction of that. He could clearly see the baby was going to have no appreciation whatsoever for the signed football he had gotten for her.

      But he had stayed, something about the magic of family being stronger than any other kind of magic.

      It was the last night he had ever experienced joy. It was the last time he had laughed. Until tonight.

      And he did not feel ready to invite those kinds of experiences into his life again. He had built his barricades for a reason—he was not nearly done beating himself up for his failure to save them all. But also to keep this out: longing for what could not be, ever again.

      A man had to be whole, unencumbered, to welcome experiences like those into his life. He was not that man. The easygoing young man he had been only a year ago was scarred beyond recognition.

      And knew he would not be that man again.

      Emma seemed to sense his mood shifting, changing, even though she could barely see him. He let go of her hand abruptly. She felt the faint tensing, his energy drawing away from her. She tried to draw him back.

      “Would you like to hear about Christmas at the inn?”

      He wanted to tell her no, to grab back the things he had just told her, but that seemed too sour, even for him, and it seemed to be going against the new spirit of cooperation he had promised, so he grunted instead.

      She took the grunt as interest, and she told him about Holiday Happenings and her neighbors helping her get ready, about the skating and the sleigh-riding, the craft sales, the wreaths, the amount of food they hoped to sell.

      “I hope it’s as wonderful as the night you just described to me,” she said, “if it happens. What am I going to do with four thousand hot dogs if it doesn’t?”

      “Four thousand?”

      “I always think big,” she said ruefully. “I was thinking if a hundred people showed up every night for ten days and each ate two hot dogs, I would need two thousand. And then I started thinking, what if two hundred people showed up every night? Or what if a hundred and fifty showed up, but a few of them were teenage boys?”

      Her math and her hopeless optimism were giving him a headache. Or maybe that was the thinly disguised worry in her voice.

      “You already bought everything?” he asked. Despite the fact he’d commanded himself not to encourage her with interest, to stop this, he hated that she’d apparently invested more than she could afford to lose in singlehandedly bringing the Christmas spirit to Willowbrook.

      Now, no one was coming.

      At least not tonight. “You still have nine days to recoup your losses,” he said. But he wasn’t sure if he believed it. What if the storm lasted longer, or if it was like 1998 and the Atlantic seaboard was shut down for days? What if the power didn’t come back on for weeks?

      Just because he was stranded here with her, lying on a mattress with her, that didn’t make it his problem.

      He didn’t care. No, that wasn’t the whole truth. He didn’t want to care.

      “Where are the hot dogs now?” he asked reluctantly.

      “Freezer.”

      “If the power doesn’t come on by tomorrow, you could put them in a snowbank.”

      She said nothing.

      “It’ll be okay,” he said. Hey, he’d get home and send her a check to cover her hot dogs.

      “It has to be,” she said, and he didn’t like what he heard in her voice one little bit. As if her whole life depended on Holiday Happenings working out.

      “What do you mean it has to be?” Ryder knew from experience you had to be careful about throwing challenges like that at fate. It had a way of never giving people what they thought they wanted.

      She told him about inviting the needy families, the gifts under the tree, the perfect Christmas Day she had planned for them.

      He could feel himself closing his eyes, trying to steel himself against her goodness.

      Suddenly she went silent. “Look at me chattering on and on,” she said, embarrassed, probably figuring out that being stranded gave the illusion of camaraderie, but it didn’t really make him worthy of hearing her dreams, sharing her confidences.

      Why had he allowed himself to be sucked into this?

      Not just alone, a voice answered him, lonely.

      He hated that admission, the weakness of it. He had failed his brother and his sister-in-law. He deserved to feel the way he felt.

      Still, something in him that was still human said to her, and meant it, “It’s good that you believe.”

      There was that word again, creeping around the edges of his life, looking for a way to sneak past his guard and into his heart.

      So it would be ready to break again.

      I don’t think so, he said to himself.

      “Oh,” she said, and laughed self-consciously. “I didn’t mean to sound like that. Saint Emma.”

      “Don’t forget—of the meek and submissive school of saints.” Giving in, just a little bit, to that temptation to play with her.

      But giving in a little bit was probably just a forerunner to giving in a lot. And in the end she was going to get hurt. He needed to pull back from this now, not just to protect himself. To protect her.

      He got to his feet, hesitated, and then reached back a hand for her when the mattress was thwarting her efforts to get up. The momentum of that tug pulled her into the length of him. He could feel her slightness, her softness, the delicious hint of curves. The enveloping lavender scent of her that would make it so easy to lose his head.

      The devil told him not to bother being a better man, not to bother protecting her. It told him to outrun the terrible loneliness reliving his memories had stirred up inside him.

      She was an adult. Kiss her. See what happened.

      He could almost taste her lips when he thought of that. A wanting, compelling, tempting, tantalizing, swept through him.

      More than a year since he had connected with another human being.

      But not her, he told himself sternly. You could not kiss a girl like Emma White without thinking it all the way through. Following an impulse could have far-reaching ramifications.

      Emma wanted to be fiercely independent, knocking down walls and climbing all over the roof by herself. She wanted to send the message, I don’t need a man.

      But she struck him, with her Christmas fantasies, with her wistfulness, with her desire to bring something to others, as not just old-fashioned and decent, but romantic. Emma was the type of woman who might think a casual kiss meant things it did not mean. She might think that he wanted to get to know her better or was looking for a mommy for little Tess, a future that involved her.

      The truth was Ryder Richardson did not look to the future at all.

      Ryder just got through every day to the best of his ability. And that, he told himself sternly, did not involve doing damage to others. And how could he not damage someone like her? Vinegar

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