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

FOR ONE LONG sweet moment, Cole’s life was perfect. Then Emily broke away from him, and stumbled back a step. “We...we can’t do that. We’re getting divorced, Cole.”

He scowled. “I know what’s going on between us.”

“Then let’s stop getting wrapped up in something that’s never going to work. We made that mistake a few months ago, and—”

“And what?”

She shook her head and backed up another step. “And it was a mistake.”

“So you’re giving up, just like that?”

Her gaze softened, and though Cole wished he read love in that look, what he really saw was sympathy. “No, Cole, I never gave up. You did that for both of us a long time ago. And now you’re doing what you always do. Fighting to win, because Cole Watson never loses at anything. Too bad you never realized that you lost me a long, long time ago.”

He stood on the dock for a long time, listening to the soft patter of her feet as she headed up the dock and toward the inn. The water winked back in the sunlight, bright and cheery. For the hundredth time, Cole wondered what the hell he was doing here and why he was trying so hard to save his marriage when his wife didn’t want him to.

The lake blurred in front of him, and his mind drifted back over a decade into the past. To a beach in Florida, a run-down motel and the happiest five days of his life. Things had been simpler then, he realized, before the company and the money and the big house, and all the things he thought would improve their life. Instead, it had cost him all he held dear.

Somehow, he needed to get back to that simple life, to the world that had once seemed to consist of just him and Emily. Then his phone started buzzing against his hip, and he knew doing that was going to be harder than he’d thought.

* * *

Emily buried herself in words for two hours that afternoon. She cracked the window, letting some of the crisp, fresh air filter past the lacy curtains and into the room. The sounds of chirping birds and the occasional whine of the table saw broke the quiet of the day. The pages flew by, as she took her characters and had them battle past the challenges in their lives, striving for success, even against impossible odds. The book was going very, very well and each new chapter she started gave Emily a little burst of energy and satisfaction. She was doing it. Finally.

She sat back in the chair and stretched. If only solving her own life problems was as easy as solving those of her fictional characters.

It didn’t help that she had complicated things herself by kissing Cole. It was as if there were two parts to her heart—the part that remembered the distance, the fights, the cold war of the past few years, and the part that remembered only the heady beginning of their relationship. The laughter, the happiness and the sex.

Okay, yes, being touched by Cole was the one part of their marriage that had never suffered. Their sex life, when they’d had one, had been phenomenal. He knew her body, knew it well, and had been a wonderful lover.

When he had been there to love her at all.

That was the real problem in their marriage. Cole’s absences, fueled by his dogged dedication to the business, meant he was never home. In the early years, she’d supported him, encouraged him to work as much as he needed, but as success began to mount and Emily thought he would finally cut back on his hours, Cole instead worked more, dedicating weekends and vacations to this new project or that customer problem. He’d poured his heart and soul into the company, leaving almost nothing of either one for their marriage.

She got to her feet, gathering her dishes from her afternoon snack and headed down to the kitchen. Carol was peeling potatoes at the table, and had a basket of fresh green beans waiting to be cleaned beside her. Emily put her dishes in the sink, then sat in the opposite chair and started twisting off the stringy ends and breaking the green beans in half, then adding them to a waiting colander. “I remember doing this when I was a little girl,” Emily said.

Carol smiled. “You always did like helping me in the kitchen. Half the time I’d have to kick you out and remind you that you were on vacation, not part of the KP crew.”

Emily shrugged. “I liked being here.”

“Instead of with your own family.”

“We weren’t much of a family to begin with,” Emily said. “My mother was always off doing her thing, my father was always working. And when they were together, they fought like cats and dogs.”

An understatement. Emily’s parents’ marriage had been mostly a marriage of convenience, two high school friends who’d married at the end of senior year, then had a child in quick succession, before realizing they were better friends than lovers. They had lived separate lives and only came together for birthdays and major holidays. The annual “family” summer vacation to the Gingerbread Inn was more of an opportunity to spend time with their friends and play shuffleboard than to bond as a family. The only time all three of them were together was Friday nights, when they all went into town for dinner at their favorite diner.

Carol picked up a fork and pricked holes in the scrubbed potatoes. “So when you grew up you did the opposite, right?”

Emily let out a little laugh and thought about how she had described her parents. She’d done the same thing, though not on purpose. For years, Emily had done her own thing and Cole had worked. The only saving grace—they hadn’t caught a child in the middle of that mess. Not until now. Emily covered her belly with her palm. When Sweet Pea arrived, she vowed to give her baby the childhood Emily had never had. “I pretty much carbon copied their life. At least I’m smart enough to get out before bringing kids into that...mess.”

“Oh, I don’t know if it’s the same thing. I saw your parents together. If they were ever in love, it wasn’t there by the time they started coming up here in the summers. You and Cole on the other hand...” Carol shrugged.

“Me and Cole what?”

“There’s still feelings there. Whether you believe it or not.” Carol put the potatoes in the oven beside a chicken roasting on the middle rack.

“That’s just because he doesn’t want to accept that it’s over.” Emily took the colander to the sink and ran cool water over the green beans.

“If you ask me, he’s not the only one who still cares.” Carol put her back to the counter and faced Emily. “I’ve seen the way you look at him.”

Heat rushed to Emily’s face. “That’s just the hormones.” Even as she said the words, though, she knew there was more involved than a rush of hormonal input. She’d kissed him back, with as much desire and depth as he had kissed her. The familiar rush of heat had risen in her, and still simmered in her gut, even now.

She still cared about him, and always would. Love...

She’d avoid that word and combining it with the name Cole. Smarter to do that than to get wrapped up in a fantasy, instead of reality.

Carol just hmmed at that and started the dishes. Emily picked up a dish towel to help dry, but Carol shooed her away. “You’re still a guest here, missy. So go do what guests do and relax.”

Emily headed outside, forgetting until she heard the tapping of a hammer on nails that Cole was out here, working. Still. She started to turn around and head back into the inn when Cole called out to her.

“Hey, do you mind helping me for a second?” he said. “I could really use a second pair of hands.”

He was holding a long board in one hand, a hammer in the other. With the tool belt slung across his hips and sawdust peppering his jeans and work boots, he looked relaxed. Sexy.

A few minutes of helping Cole would be about being nice, not about getting close to him and admiring his body. Or the heat that still rushed through her veins whenever he was near.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“Just hold one end in place. I’m trying to get the rest of the siding repaired on this side of the building, but first I have to fit this fascia board in place.”

She stared at him. They’d built the New York house from the ground up, and though Emily had been in charge of the decisions about faucets and paint colors, Cole had handled all the construction details, because he had spent so many years working on houses and knew the lingo. “Fascia board?”

“It goes up there.” Cole pointed to the roofline ten feet above them.

She couldn’t see any way that Cole could do this job alone, not without risking a broken neck. “Okay. Just don’t ask me to hammer. You know how I am with tools.”

“Oh, I remember, Emily.” He winked at her. “My thumb remembers, too.”

“Sorry.” She grinned. “Again.”

Cole got on one of the ladders and waited for Emily to get on the other one. They stepped up in tandem, until he had the board in place under the gutter and she had aligned her edge with the roofline.

“I’m just teasing you about my thumb,” he said with a smile. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“That’s not what you said that day. All we were doing was hanging some pictures, and you made it into a major project. Tape measure, level, laying out the frame placement with masking tape. Our house wasn’t the Louvre, you know.” She grinned.

“So I’m a little anal about those kinds of things.”

“A little?” She arched a brow.