Snowbound Bride-to-Be

As he turned back from the coat rack, through the open archway from the foyer into the living room, he caught sight of the fire burning brightly in the hearth at the White Christmas Inn, the huge tree glowing, top to bottom, an ethereal shade of white.

Despite steeling himself against all things Christmas, the scene called to him, like the lights of home calling a warrior back to his own land. For a disturbing moment he felt almost pulled toward that room, the tree, the promise it held. Hope.

CHAPTER TWO

HOPE. The word burned in Ryder’s heart for a second or two, not bright and warm, but painful. Because that was what he was intent on quashing in himself. He was a warrior who had glimpsed the lights of a home he could never go back to.

The socks that hung from the mantel, cheerful, were what triggered the memory.

Without warning—for the memories always came without warning, riding in on a visual clue or a scent or a sound he could not control—a picture flashed in his mind of different socks on a different mantel nearly a year ago. Those socks, bright red, with white fur cuffs, had names on them.

Drew. Tracy. Tess.

Ryder could see his brother, standing in front of those socks, holding the tiny baby way above his head, bringing her down, her round belly to his lips, blowing, the baby gurgling, and Drew looking as happy as Ryder had ever seen his brother look.

A shudder rippled through Ryder, and he looked deliberately away from the socks that hung on the mantel of the White Christmas Inn, picked up the baby bag that he had dropped on the floor, shrugged it over his shoulder.

In a few days, a year would have passed, and Ryder’s pain had not been reduced. A reminder about the danger of hope. There was no sense hoping next year would be better. There was no sense hoping life could ever be what it had been before the fire that had swept through his brother’s house early Christmas morning.

“Get the baby,” Drew had cried to him, as he’d stumbled out of the guest room, “I’ll get Tracy.”

Anyone who had not been in a fire could not understand the absolute and disorienting darkness, the heat, the smoke, the chaos intensified by the roar and shriek of it, as if the fire was a living thing, a monster, a crazed animal.

Somehow, Ryder had found the baby, and gotten her outside. Tracy had already been out there, in bad shape, burned, dazed, barely coherent. At first Ryder thought that meant his brother was safe. But then he’d realized Drew was still in there, looking for his wife, not knowing she was out here.

He’d raced back for the door, uncaring that flames roared out of it like it was the mouth of hell. He’d almost made it, too, back in there to find his brother.

But neighbors had pulled him back, four men, and then six, holding him, dodging his fists, absorbing his punches, their urgency to keep him out of there as great as his to go back in. He still woke in the night sometimes, coated in sweat, his heart beating hard, screaming his fury.

Let me go. You don’t understand. Let…me…go.

When Ryder thought of that the fury was fresh. If anything, he added to it as time went on. How could he have failed so terribly? How could his strength have failed him when he needed it most? If he could have shaken off those men, made them understand…

Then, just three months ago, more heartbreak, an intensified sense of failure, as Tracy, all out of bravery, had quit fighting her horrible injuries.

If there was a feeling Ryder hated more than any other it was that one: powerlessness. He’d been as powerless to save Tracy as he had been to break free of the men who had kept him from his brother.

Ryder shuddered again. He had put a wall around himself, and instead of letting it come down as time passed, brick by brick he made it stronger. He was ravaged by what had happened, destroyed by it. He could function, but not feel.

He hated it that his armor felt threatened by the fact that, ever so briefly, he had felt what the room had to offer. Heard the word. Hope. And seen that other word on her front door.

Believe.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice deliberately cold, protecting the coating of ice that shielded what was left of his heart.

No, he wasn’t. He had tried to keep Christmas, its association with his greatest failure, at bay. Instead, at the caprice of fate, here he was at a place that appeared to have more Christmas than the North Pole. If there were no baby to think of, he would put his coat back on and take his chances with the storm.

But then, if there were no baby to think of, he was pretty sure he would have self-destructed already.

“You looked like you saw a ghost,” Emma said. “Apparently we have them here, but I haven’t seen one yet.”

She actually sounded envious that he might have spotted one.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said curtly. Did she notice the emphasis on believe? Because that was the first in a long list of things he did not believe in. He hoped he would not be here long enough to share the full extent of his disillusionment with her.

“Well, I do,” she said, a hint of something stubborn in her voice. “I think there are spirits around this old house that protect it and the people in it. And I think there is a spirit of Christmas, too.”

And then, having made her stand, she blushed.

He looked at her carefully. Now that she had taken the hat off, he felt much less inclined to ask to speak to her mother. How old would she be? Early twenties, probably. Too young to be running this place, and too old to be believing nonsense.

He replayed her words of earlier. I usually don’t operate as an inn in the winter. I don’t charge extra for the rustic charm.

I not we.

She ran a hand through the dark, wild hair revealed by the removal of the awful Santa hat, a gesture that was self-conscious. Her blush was deepening.

Despite the shard of the memory stuck in his heart like broken glass, her hair tried, for the second time, to take down a brick, to tease something out of him. A smile? Only Tess made him smile. Though her hair was worse than Tess’s, which was saying something. His hostess’s hair, dark and shiny, was a tangle of dark coils, flattened by the hat, but looking as if they intended to spring back up at any moment.

He was shocked by the slipping of another brick—an impulse to touch her hair, to coax the curls up with his fingertips. He killed the impulse before it even fully formed, but not before he pictured how encouraging the wild disarray of her hair would make her sexy, rather than the adorable image the red socks and red sweater projected.

She was looking at him like a kitten ready to show claws if he chose to argue the spirit of Christmas with her, which he didn’t.

If the way she held Tess and crooned to her was any indication, she was exactly as she appeared; soft, wholesome, slightly eccentric, a believer in goodness and light and spirits protecting her house and Christmas. Not his type at all.

Even back in the day, before it had happened, when he cared about such things, he’d gone for flashier women, whitened teeth, diamond rings, designer clothes. Women who would have scorned this place as hokey, and his hostess for being so naive.

Except, last year, a spectator to the domestic bliss his brother had found, Ryder had thought, briefly, maybe I want this, too.

But now he knew he didn’t want anything that intensified that feeling of being powerless, and in his mind that’s what being open to another person would do, make him weak instead of strong, slowly but surely erode the bricks of his defenses. What was behind that wall was grief and fury so strong he had no doubt it would destroy him and whoever was close to him, if and when it ever came out.

For Tess’s sake, as well as his own, he kept a lid on feelings. He knew he had nothing to give anyone; somehow he was hoping his niece would be the exception, though he had no idea how she would be.

“You don’t run this place by yourself, do you?” he asked, suddenly needing to know, not liking the idea of being alone with all this sweetness, not trusting himself with it, especially after that renegade impulse to tease something sexy out of her hair.

He hoped, suddenly, for a family-run operation, for parents in the wings, or better yet, a husband. Someone to kill dead this enemy within him, the unexpected sizzle of attraction he felt. Someone he could talk hockey with as the night dragged on, to keep his mind off how little he wanted to be here, and how little fate cared about what he wanted.

Ryder’s eyes drifted to her ring finger. Red nail polish, a bit of a surprise, but probably chosen in the spirit of the season, to match the socks. How could he possibly be finding this woman, who stood for everything he was trying to run away from, attractive?

There was no ring on her finger, so he knew the answer to his question even before she answered.

“It’s all mine,” she said, and her chin lifted proudly. “I inherited the house from my grandmother, restored it, named it the White Pond Inn, and have been operating it on my own ever since.”

“I thought it was the White Christmas Inn,” he reminded her dryly.

“Christmas transforms everything,” she said with grave dignity, “it makes all things magic, even my humble inn.”