A Love Inspired Christmas Bundle: In the Spirit of...Christmas / The Christmas Groom / One Golden Christmas

“The present she’d gone after was mine.” He’d wanted the fancy Western belt with his named engraved on the back, had hoped she’d order it for him. Now the belt remained in its original box, unused, a reminder that Erin had died because of him.

“Now you know why I feel the way I do about Christmas.” He spoke to the rows and rows of evergreens, though he knew Lindsey listened. He could feel her behind him, full of compassion and care. When she laid a consoling hand on his back, he was glad. He needed her touch. “Jade and I both have too many bad memories of Christmas to celebrate anything.”

Jesse looked toward the wagon which had already been outfitted for hauling visitors through the grove. Jade had crawled beneath the down quilt and lay softly singing along with the music, waving her hands in the air like a conductor. He’d somehow tuned out the carols until then.

Lindsey’s hand soothed him, making small circles on his back. “Don’t you want Jade to remember her mother?”

“Of course I do. How could you ask me that?”

“You said Erin loved Christmas and wanted the holiday to be special for you and Jade. Those times with her mother are important to Jade, and Christmas is one of the best memories of all.”

Not for him. And not for Jade either.

“I’d never take away her memories of Erin,” he said gruffly.

“When you refuse to let her have a Christmas tree, you’re telling her child’s mind to forget her mother and to forget all those wonderful times with her.”

“That’s not true,” he denied vehemently. “I’m protecting her. I don’t want her to relive that terrible night every Christmas.”

“Are you talking about Jade? Or yourself?”

He opened his mouth to refute the very idea that he was protecting himself instead of Jade. But words wouldn’t come.

“You can’t allow your own pain to keep Jade from having a normal childhood.” Her warm, throaty voice implored him.

“I’d never do that,” he said, but the denial sounded weak. With growing angst, he realized Lindsey could be right. In his self-focused pain, he’d hurt his little girl, denying her the right to remember her mother laughing beneath the tree on Christmas morning, the three of them dancing to “Jingle Bell Rock.”

He squeezed his eyes closed as memories washed over him.

“Not intentionally, but don’t you realize that she reads everything you do or don’t do, interpreting your actions in her childish understanding? She wants to have Christmas, but she worries about you.”

A great blue heron winged past, headed to the pond. Out in the pasture, the black horse grazed on an enormous round bale of hay, summer’s green grass a memory.

“I don’t want her worrying about me.”

“You can’t stop her. She wants you to be happy. She loves you. God loves you, too, Jesse, and He wants to help you get past this.”

“I don’t know how.” And even if he did, he wondered if “getting past” Erin’s death wouldn’t somehow be disloyal.

“Erin’s death wasn’t your fault. Start there.”

“I can’t help thinking she would be alive if she hadn’t gone shopping.”

“Those are futile thoughts, Jesse. You would be better served to wonder how you can honor her life.”

He turned toward her then. She’d hit upon the very thing he longed for. “I don’t know how to do that either.”

“You already are in one way. You’re raising Jade to be a lovely child. But God has more for you. He wants you to have a life free of guilt and anger. Full of peace.”

Jesse felt the tug of that peace emanating from his boss lady. A fierce longing to pray, something he hadn’t done in two years, gnawed at him.

“Let’s go choose a tree,” Lindsey urged, holding out a hand. “For Jade.”

He took a breath of clean mountain air and blew it out, his chest heavy and aching. He could do this for his baby. A Christmas tree wasn’t that big a deal, was it? He’d worked in the things for a couple of months now without dying.

His eyes drifted over the acres of pines, noting one major difference. These were bare. If he took a Christmas tree back to the trailer, Jade would want to decorate it.

He turned his attention to the wagon where his brave little trooper no longer sang and conducted. Huddled down into the quilt, her black hair tousled, she lay sleeping.

Last Christmas, the first anniversary of Erin’s death, he’d done his best to ignore the holiday altogether. Erin’s family, far away in Kentucky had sent gifts, but he’d tossed them in the garbage before Jade had seen them. The few times she’d mentioned presents, he’d reacted so harshly she’d quickly gotten the message that the subject of Christmas was off limits.

But she’d cried, too. And that forgotten memory of her tears tormented him.

Fighting down a rising sense of dread, Jesse took Lindsey’s hand. “Let’s go wake her.”

Lindsey’s quiet eyes studied him. “Are you okay with this?”

Though uncertain, he nodded.

They went to the wagon where Jade lay sleeping like an angel, her black hair a dark halo around her face. Sooty lashes curved upon her weather-rosy cheeks. One arm hugged the covers, rising and falling with the rhythm of her silent breath.

“Look at her, Jesse. You have so much to be thankful for. I know people who’d give anything to have a child like Jade.” Her voice grew wistful. “Including me.”

Her soft-looking lips turned down, one of the rare times he’d seen her unhappy. He didn’t like seeing her sad.

“I thought you were perfectly content up here alone.” They spoke in hushed tones so as not to startle the sleeping child. But the quiet created an intimacy that made him feel closer to Lindsey than he had to anyone in a long time.

“I’m learning to be content in the Lord, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about having a family someday.”

Something stirred inside Jesse. Lindsey would make a great mother—and a good wife to the right man. Someday one of those holy churchgoers who’d never committed a sin in his life would marry her.

Already miserable with the forthcoming Christmas tree, he didn’t want to think about Lindsey with some other man.

Fighting off the uncomfortable thoughts, he stroked a knuckle down Jade’s cheek. “Hey, Butterbean. Wake up. Ready to get that Christmas tree?”

His little girl blinked, her green eyes sleepy and confused, but filled with a hope that seared him. “Really?”

With a nod, he swallowed hard and helped her down from the wagon. As if she expected the offer to be rescinded at any moment, Jade wasted no time. She grabbed each adult by the hand and pulled them toward the grove.

An hour later, laden with lights and tinsel and lacy white angel ornaments Lindsey had given Jade from a box in her Christmas building, they’d headed back to the trailer. Jade had been ecstatic over the three-foot tree, raising the level of Jesse’s guilt as well as his anxiety. All the way into town he’d wondered if he could actually go through with it, if he could spend a month staring at a reminder of all he’d lost.

In the end he’d been a coward, placing the small, shining tree in Jade’s bedroom where he wouldn’t have to see it. His child had been so thrilled with the thing, she hadn’t questioned the reason. He’d nearly broken, though, when she’d crawled exhausted beneath her covers, the sweetest smile on earth lifting her bow mouth. “Is it okay if I say a prayer and thank Jesus for my tree and all my guarding angels?”

“Sure, baby, sure.”

Long after she’d fallen asleep, he’d sat in the trailer’s tiny living room, staring blindly at the paneled wall.

What had he gotten himself into? Lindsey Mitchell with her sweetness and overwhelming decency was tearing him apart. His frozen heart had begun to thaw. And like blood-flow returning to frost-bitten fingers, the sensation was pure torture.