One Winter's Sunset: The Christmas Baby Surprise / Marry Me under the Mistletoe / Snowflakes and Silver Linings

He brushed the hair off her forehead and let his touch linger there a moment. “Don’t worry. I’ll be there to catch you.” His hand drifted down, along her jaw. “I always will be.”

She shook her head, and tears glimmered in her eyes. “Cole—”

“Trust me, Em. Just tonight.”

She bit her lip and watched him for a moment, wary, hesitant.

“It’ll be fun. Unscripted, spontaneous, fun. I promise.”

Then the hesitation disappeared and she smiled. “Okay. As long as you don’t rock the boat.”

He took her hand and led her down the hill. Her hand felt good in his, right. Long ago, they had stopped holding hands. Why, he couldn’t remember. If they ever got back together, he vowed that if Emily was nearby, he would always hold her hand. “Of course. Not rocking the boat is my specialty.”

“You’re wrong about that, Cole. I’m the one who never likes to rock the boat,” she said, bending to help him right the boat and slide it into the water. “You’re the one who takes chances.”

“In business, yes. In my personal life—” he took an oar, then waited while she climbed into the rowboat before handing her the second oar “—not so much.”

Cole gave the boat a push, and it slid into the water with a gentle ripple. He took both of the oars, positioned himself on the bench, then began rowing away from the shore. The oars made a satisfying whoosh sound with each stroke, while his back and shoulder muscles jerked to attention. A fish jumped out of the water behind them, then flopped back in, spattering them. Emily watched him row, a smile playing on her lips. “What?” he asked.

“You look...well, you look sexy and strong doing that.”

“Then maybe I should do this more often.”

She didn’t respond to that, just smiled again and leaned back on the bench. “All the times I’ve been to the Gingerbread Inn, I’ve never been out on the lake after dark. It’s so peaceful out here.”

A perfect setting for a man to propose, Cole thought. When he’d proposed to Emily all those years ago, he’d done what he always did—he’d created a plan for the evening and stuck to his timetable, almost to the minute. Dinner in the city, followed by the ubiquitous and clichéd carriage ride along New York’s streets, then pausing by Central Park to slip onto the carriage’s carpeted floor and pop the question. He’d known Em was going to say yes before he even asked, because they’d talked about getting married a half dozen times before.

Out here, alone in the dark while fish bobbed in the water around them and geese swam silently along the banks, he had the perfect setting for something unexpected. Something that would show Emily he wasn’t here to fix the porch or chop firewood. He was here for them. For a second chance. He gave the oars a final tug, then set them across the center of the boat. Then he leaned forward, dropping to one knee, and reached for his wife’s hands.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Living on the edge,” he said. “Emily, I don’t want a divorce. I don’t want us to live apart anymore. I want to try again, to give our marriage the chance it needs. Will you try again?”

Her eyes widened, and she backed up a bit. Damn. This was why he planned these things out. So he could have time to write a good proposal, to plan out what he was going to say. That had to rank up there with the top ten least romantic proposals in the history of time. “Cole, there’s a lot we need to discuss. Things we haven’t settled yet.”

“What’s to settle? I love you.” He held her hands, but noticed she didn’t hold his back. Nor did she tell him she loved him. Had her feelings for him changed? Was he reading her all wrong?

“It’s about more than love, Cole. It always was. We’re...not on the same path anymore.”

He grinned. Okay, so she hadn’t said she didn’t love him, either. He’d take that as a good sign. “We are now. A path that’s kind of going in circles in the middle of the lake.”

She pulled her hands back and tucked them inside her coat. The air between them dropped a few degrees, and the grin faded from Cole’s face.

“I want a family, Cole. I always have. We’ve put it off forever, and honestly, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t understand why. You’ve achieved what you want with the company, I’m writing my book...what more is there to do or get before we have kids?”

Just the word kids made him freeze. When he’d first married Em, he’d told her he wanted children, and maybe for a time, he had. But as the years had worn on and he watched his friends have kids and have trouble and turmoil in their families, trouble and turmoil that affected the kids and ruined their childhoods, the more Cole didn’t want to change the status quo. But he knew that telling Em would drive her away for good. She had always been set on having children, the one risk Cole didn’t want to take. “We always wanted to travel, Em. Have fun, live our lives, before we added kids into the mix.”

She let out a gust. “Let’s go back to shore. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Let me ask you this.” He leaned toward her, causing the boat to make a gentle rocking motion. “Why do you think having kids will improve our lives?”

“How can you say they won’t?” She shook her head. “I don’t get you, Cole, I really don’t.”

“I’m just trying to make sure we have everything in order first.” He didn’t want to tell her that the thought of being a father was the only thing that truly scared Cole. He knew what he was good at and what he wasn’t—and parenting didn’t make the list of talents.

“You and your lists and timetables.” She let out a gust. “For once, I wish you would just let all that go.”

He was losing her. He could hear it in her voice, see it in her face. They had reached a moment of no return, a time when he had to act, instead of just talk. Their relationship stood on a fault line, and only a dramatic shift would keep it from falling apart.

“I can, if you want me to, Em.” He tugged his cell out of his pocket and held it over the water. “I can drop this in the water, and not think twice about it. Devote myself entirely to us for the next week or month or year or however long it takes.”

“You’d do that? Walk away from the company?”

“If it brings us back together, yes.” Then, as if God was testing his resolve, Cole’s phone began to ring. Doug, again. The little notification bar under the caller ID showed Doug had called four times with no answer. Definitely an emergency, if he was trying that hard to get hold of Cole.

He glanced at the screen, his stomach churning. The urge to answer the call, to solve the problem, burned inside him. The company had taken so much of his life in the past ten years and even now, even when it mattered, he couldn’t let it go. He could feel the need calling to him, like the business held an invisible string to his gut. He wasn’t sure which direction the need went—whether it was the company that needed him or him who needed the company. The phone dangled from his fingers, inches from the water. Then his fingers tightened their grip and the decision was made. He realized that at the same time Em did.

Emily gave him a sad little smile. “You might as well answer it.”

“What about us?”

“Us?” She took the oars and put them in the water, then began rowing back toward shore. “The only thing I know for sure is that I’m done going in circles.”

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_944bf083-4084-54f6-b082-9c0ebe2c8236)

COLE CAUGHT UP to her after the boat was back on shore and Emily was already striding up the hill. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Back inside.” Where she belonged. Where she wouldn’t have to think about that little rise of hope she’d had a few minutes ago when Cole had offered to throw his phone away—and answered it instead. She should have known better. He was doing what he’d always done—making promises that would dissolve as soon as they got back to real life.

“I thought we were talking.”

She spun around. “I am tired of talking, Cole. We’ve done nothing but that for years. And where did it get us? Nowhere but divorced.”

“We’re not divorced yet, Emily. There’s still—”

“I don’t want to hear one more second about how there’s still a chance. How many times did I say that to you? How many times did I try to make this work? Try to change our lives? And what did you do?” She cursed under her breath and shook her head, hating the pain in her chest, the tears burning the back of her eyes. God, why did this hurt so much? When would Cole stop having a hold on her heart? She wanted to scream at him, to tell him to stop putting her through this emotional roller coaster. The same one she’d ridden so many times in the past ten years, she could predict the next loop. There’d be a high, a wonderful honeymoon period of flowers and dinners out, followed on its heels by the plummeting lows of Cole’s absence, an empty house and an empty bed. “You made a bunch of promises and then went to work. Which is what you’re going to do this time, too, Cole. I know you. That is the curse of being married to you for so long. I know what you’re going to do, and I keep coming back even though I know it’s going to hurt.”

“The company—”

“Was always number one. And I was somewhere in distant second place.” She refused to cry. To let that hurt any more than it already had. But it did, oh, how it seared against her heart, the truth a branding iron that left a jagged scar.

Silence stretched between them for a long moment. “I never meant for that to happen.”

“Yet it did, Cole. Do you know how many times I hoped and prayed and believed, and then you’d break my heart again?” She pressed a hand to her chest and forced herself to take a breath, to be strong, to sever this connection once and for all. “I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me to go through that pain one more time. Not one more time.”

Emily had finally reached her breaking point. Maybe it was the baby, maybe it was being here at the inn, where she had first learned to believe in happy endings. Maybe it was that damned hope that had sprung up inside her when Cole arrived here, and when he stayed, and when he held his phone over the lake.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “I’m done with this insanity, Cole.”