Snowbound Bride-to-Be

The stranger was astonishingly, heart-stop-pingly 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 to see that nestled into the huge expanse of his shoulder, made almost invisible by utter stillness and a black blanket that matched his coat, was a baby.

It turned its face from his shoulder, and gazed at Emma with huge blue eyes, a living version of a doll she had wrapped earlier. The eyes that gazed at her with such solemn curiosity were as innocent as his were world-weary.

A girl, if the bonnet, a strangely lopsided concoction of dark wool, was any indication. Emma realized the hat was on the wrong way.

Despite the fact the visitor who had emerged from the storm looked so formidable, and so without humor, she almost smiled at the backwards hat.

But his words stole the smile and her breath.

“We need a place to stay.”

Her mouth moved in protest but not a single, solitary sound emerged from it. Him? Stay here? With all his attractions and mysteries being doubled by his protective stance with the beautiful baby?

“The highway patrol just told me to get off the road. It was going to close behind me.”

Say something, she ordered herself, but no sound came out of her mouth.

“Hopefully,” he said, “it will just be for a few hours. Until the roads reopen.”

Impossible to say yes to him. Even his voice was dangerous—as unconsciously sensuous as melted chocolate clinging to a fresh strawberry. He was dangerous to a woman like her who had made vows about the course her life was now going to take. No more begging for approval, married to the inn. And yet here she was, wanting to snatch the Santa hat off her head for him.

So, impossible to say yes. And even more impossible to say no.

He had a baby with him.

And isn’t this where the age-old story began? With no room at the inn?

She, who so desperately wanted to give everyone the perfect Christmas, turning away a stranger on the flimsy excuse that her need for predictability felt threatened by his cynical look and the dark mystery that clung to him like fog clinging to a dark forest?

By the treacherous little niggling of her own attraction? The part of her she would have sworn, even seconds ago, that she had completely tamed?

A primitive longing that if she indulged it, could turn her into her mother in a horrifying blink? Prepared to throw away everything—everything—for whatever it was that hard mouth promised.

She tried to reason with herself. He needed a place to stay. A few hours. That was hardly going to rock her world, mature business woman that she was now.

She pulled off the Santa hat.

His eyes went to her hair, something twitched along the firm line of his mouth, but then was gone.

“The highway patrol said you have the only accommodations in the entire Willowbrook area.” The way he said it made her feel as if he would have stayed elsewhere if he’d had a choice.

A modern hotel, stylish and without character. In his eyes, she saw all her hard work judged harshly, dismissed as corny, not charming. She did not like it one bit that the judgments of a complete stranger could hurt so badly. For a moment she wanted desperately to tell him she did not let rooms in the winter, which she didn’t.

But he had no choice. And neither did she. She was not sending that baby back out into the storm.

Despite the fact that none of the normal precautions were in place that protected her as a single woman running a business—the pre-visit information sheet, the credit card verification of ID—Emma felt only the danger of her attraction.

Something about the way he held the baby, protective, fierce, made her understand the only dangers he posed to her were emotional ones. But even if she were foolish enough to let forced proximity threaten her vows of independence, one look at his shuttered face assured her he would never be foolish.

She stepped back from the door, coolly professional. “I usually don’t operate as an inn in the winter, but I can clearly see that this is an emergency.”

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.