“Tess,” he provided.
“Hello, Tess,” she crooned. “Welcome to the White Christmas Inn. I’m Emma.”
“The White Christmas Inn?” the man said, “you aren’t serious, are you?”
“Didn’t you see the sign on the driveway?” Just this morning, she had placed the word Christmas over the word Pond, the letters of Christmas just the teensiest bit squished to make them fit.
“I saw a sign, I assumed it was for the inn, but most of it is covered in snow and ice.”
“The White Christmas Inn. Seriously.”
He groaned, softly.
“Is there a problem?”
His answer was rhetorical. “Do you ever feel the gods like to have a laugh at the plans of human beings?”
Even though he obviously expected no answer, Emma responded sadly, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
The White Christmas Inn.
Ryder Richardson had no doubt the gods were enjoying a robust laugh at his expense right now. When he had headed out on the road tonight, he’d had one goal: to escape Christmas entirely. He had packed up his niece, Tess, and that amazing mountain of things that accompanied a traveling baby, with every intention of making it to his lakeside cottage by dark.
The cottage where there would be absolutely no ho-ho-ho, no colorful lights, no carols, no tree, no people and especially no phone. He had deliberately left his cell phone at home. Ryder Richardson could make Scrooge look like a bit player in the bah-humbug department.
He was not ashamed to admit to himself he just wanted to hide out until it was all over. Until the trees were shredded into landscape pulp, the lights were down, there was not a carol to be heard, and he could walk along a sidewalk without hearing bells or having complete strangers smile at him and wish him a Merry Christmas.
Ryder looked forward to the dreary days of January like a man on a ship watching for a beacon to keep him from the rocks on the darkest night.
In January there would be fewer reminders and fewer calls offering sympathy. The invitations to holiday parties and dinners and events designed to lure him out of his memories and his misery would die down.
In his luggage, he had made a small concession to Christmas. Ryder had a few simple gifts to give Tess. He had a soft stuffed pony in an implausible shade of lavender, new pink suede shoes, for she already shared a woman’s absolute delight in footwear, and a small, hardy pianolike toy that he was probably going to regret obtaining within hours of having given it to her.
He had not brought wrapping paper, and probably would not give Tess the gifts on December twenty-fifth, taking advantage of the fact that at fourteen months of age his niece was not aware enough of the concept of Christmas to know the difference.
This would be his year of reprieve. Next year, Tess would be two at Christmas. It wouldn’t be so easy to pretend the season didn’t exist. Next year, she would probably have grasped the whole concept of Santa, would want things from Ryder. Would he be able to give them to her?
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