Silence. She’d left herself wide open to his sarcasm, so thank God he was saying nothing.
Only when he did speak, she wished he’d chosen sarcasm.
“You’ve never had a good Christmas?” He seemed legitimately astounded. And legitimately sorry, for the first time. But then his customary skepticism won out. “Come on.”
She remembered last year, excited as a small child, arriving at Peter’s parents’ home. No, not a home. A mansion. A picture out of a splendid movie. The trees on the long drive lit with white lights, every window of the house lit, she could see the enormous tree sparkling through the window.
And that had been the beginning of a Christmas that looked exactly like the Christmases she had dreamed as a little girl, but that felt like an excursion into hell.
“Have you?” she asked Ryder, tilting her chin proudly, knowing his answer. There was only one reason people hated Christmas, wasn’t there? They’d given up trying to make it something it could never be.
Maybe it was time for her to surrender, too, to forget trying to change her fortunes, to abandon that little girl who wanted something so badly. Maybe it all was just an illusion. Christmas had become a corny, commercial package, a dream that no one could ever make a reality.
Maybe the truth was that it was a terrible time of year, laden with too much stress and far too many expectations. Maybe it would be a good time to plan a vacation to Hawaii. It probably would have been a whole lot easier to talk her mother into celebrating Christmas in Hawaii than it had been to convince her to come here.
A trip to Hawaii would be possible after a successful year of business. Maybe I’ll give in and add televisions, after all. If the foundation doesn’t collapse.
After a long time, he surprised her by saying, quietly and with obvious reluctance. “Yes, I have. Had good Christmases.”
She could feel him shifting in the dancing light of the fireplace flames. He came way too close, and peered down at her.
He shifted the baby into the crook of his elbow, and with his free hand he did the oddest thing.
He touched her hair.
“We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” he said solemnly, as if he had touched it only to make that point. “I won’t wreck your Christmas, Emma.”
She saw something desolate in his eyes, and was taken aback by the realization that he was trying to protect her from that.
“If you’ve had good Christmases, don’t you want that for Tess?” she asked, quietly. “I had a mother who thought Christmas was a nuisance. It was awful.”
And maybe it wasn’t just Christmas, but parenthood in general, that her mother had found bothersome.
That’s what had made Emma so eager to please, to prove somehow she was a good person. Worthy. Was she still trying to prove that? Was that what Holiday Happenings and Christmas Day Dream were really about?
She hated that she was questioning the purity of her motivations.
“Emma, I’m doing my best,” he said quietly. “Just leave it.”
But she couldn’t. “And what if your best just isn’t good enough?”
“Don’t you think I ask myself that every day?”
She studied him, saw the torment in his face, went from being angry with him and with herself and with Peter and her mother and the world, to feeling something far more dangerous. Empathy.
“If you’ve had good Christmases, why do you hate it so much now?” she asked him.
The pause was very long, as if he considered telling her something, fought with it, won.
“Emma, I’m just passing through. I’m not leaving my burdens here when I go.”
He said it almost protectively, as if they would be too heavy for her to handle. He was right. They were strangers.
That was not changed by the fact he had touched her hair.
Or by the fact that he had an adorable baby.
It was not changed by the fact that they were marooned here by the storm, like shipwreck survivors on a desert island.
He had his baggage and she had hers, and he was right not to share it, to keep his boundaries high. It was a reminder of what she needed to do, as well.
“I’ll find a flashlight,” she said, moving away from the emotional minefield they were treading so lightly, realizing the only thing they had to share was how to get through a night without electricity.
She sighed. “If the power stays out, in very short order this room will be the only truly warm one in the house. I have a crib upstairs, and we can haul a mattress down here for you. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“I hope the power is going to come back on,” he said.
So do I, but the way my luck is running, I doubt it. “I’ll show you where the crib is.”
Moments later, Emma, holding the sleeping baby, was watching him take the crib apart. Despite her resolve that they be nothing more than strangers, she couldn’t help but admire how comfortable he was with tools, the man-thing.
It had taken her the better part of an afternoon to put that crib together, studying instructions, putting A into B. He had the whole thing dismantled and downstairs in a matter of minutes.
While he was reassembling the crib, Emma went back upstairs to get a mattress off the bed in the room closest to the staircase.
“Tess didn’t even know I’d moved her,” he commented, coming up behind her.
“She sleeps like a log.”
“I’m envious,” he said. A man who carried burdens so heavy they affected his sleep?
Don’t pursue it, she told herself.
“It’s already chilly up here,” he said.
“Well, you know these old wrecks. The insulation is in about the same shape as the foundation.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I have a tendency to be way too sensitive. I know there’s lots wrong with the old place. It’s foolish to love her anyway.”
“What do you have for insulation?”
A pragmatic question. He didn’t want to know anything about what she loved. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t want to know what he loved, either.
A lie. She did. Despite all her resolve, both wild-child and woman-scorned were supremely interested in what a man like him loved.
The baby was obvious, of course.
She stuck to her resolve and the relatively safe topic of her old house. “ I found old newspapers in the walls when I redid the bathroom.” She didn’t mention how the tub falling through the floor had necessitated the renovation before she really had the funds to do it. “New insulation is on my to-do list.”
“Big list?” he asked, conversationally.
But Emma already felt foolish enough for blurting out about her Christmases. She was saying nothing else to him that could be interpreted as self-pitying.
The insulation fell into that category. If she was going to borrow money, wouldn’t that have been the sensible choice? New insulation? A new roof?
Oh, no, dreamer that she was she had been spending money on gifts for needy families, and redoing this bedroom in preparation for her mother’s visit.
Was she still trying to prove herself worthy? Emma shut the thought off fast and focused on problems she could solve.
If she didn’t become