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 greatest failure, at bay. Instead, at the caprice of fate, here he was at a place that appeared to have more Christmas than the North Pole. If there were no baby to think of, he would put his coat back on and take his chances with the storm.
But then, if there were no baby to think of, he was pretty sure he would have self-destructed already.
“You looked like you saw a ghost,” Emma said. “Apparently we have them here, but I haven’t seen one yet.”
She actually sounded envious that he might have spotted one.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said curtly. Did she notice the emphasis on believe? Because that was the first in a long list of things he did not believe in. He hoped he would not be here long enough to share the full extent of his disillusionment with her.
“Well, I do,” she said, a hint of something stubborn in her voice. “I think there are spirits around this old house that protect it and the people in it. And I think there is a spirit of Christmas, too.”
And then, having made her stand, she blushed.
He looked at her carefully. Now that she had taken the hat off, he felt much less inclined to ask to speak to her mother. How old would she be? Early twenties, probably. Too young to be running this place, and too old to be believing nonsense.
He replayed her words of earlier. I usually don’t operate as an inn in the winter. I don’t charge extra for the rustic charm.
I not we.
She ran a hand through the dark, wild hair revealed by the removal of the awful Santa hat, a gesture that was self-conscious. Her blush was deepening.
Despite the shard of the memory stuck in his heart like broken glass, her hair tried, for the second time, to take down a brick, to tease something out of him. A smile? Only Tess made him smile. Though her hair was worse than Tess’s, which was saying something. His hostess’s hair, dark and shiny, was a tangle of dark coils, flattened by the hat, but looking as if they intended to spring back up at any moment.
He was shocked by the slipping of another brick—an impulse to touch her hair, to coax the curls up with his fingertips. He killed the impulse before it even fully formed, but not before he pictured how encouraging the wild disarray of her hair would make her sexy, rather than the adorable image the red socks and red sweater projected.
She was looking at him like a kitten ready to show claws if he chose to argue the spirit of Christmas with her, which he didn’t.
If the way she held Tess and crooned to her was any indication, she was exactly as she appeared; soft, wholesome, slightly eccentric, a believer in goodness and light and spirits protecting her house and Christmas. Not his type at all.
Even back in the day, before it had happened, when he cared about such things, he’d gone for flashier women, whitened teeth, diamond rings, designer clothes. Women who would have scorned this place as hokey, and his hostess for being so naive.
Except, last year, a spectator to the domestic bliss his brother had found, Ryder had thought, briefly, maybe I want this, too.
But now he knew he didn’t want anything that intensified that feeling of being powerless, and in his mind that’s what being open to another person would do, make him weak instead of strong, slowly but surely erode the bricks of his defenses. What was behind that wall was grief and fury so strong he had no doubt it would destroy him and whoever was close to him, if and when it ever came out.
For Tess’s sake, as well as his own, he kept a lid on feelings. He knew he had nothing to give anyone; somehow he was hoping his niece would be the exception, though he had no idea how she would be.
“You don’t run this place by yourself, do you?” he asked, suddenly needing to know, not liking the idea of being alone with all this sweetness, not trusting himself with it, especially after that renegade impulse to tease something sexy out of her hair.
He hoped, suddenly, for a family-run operation, for parents in the wings, or better yet, a husband. Someone to kill dead this enemy within him, the unexpected sizzle of attraction he felt. Someone he could talk hockey with as the night dragged on, to keep his mind off how little he wanted to be here, and how little fate cared about what he wanted.
Ryder’s eyes drifted to her ring finger. Red nail polish, a bit of a surprise, but probably chosen in the spirit of the season, to match the socks. How could he possibly be finding this woman, who stood for everything he was trying to run away from, attractive?
There was no ring on her finger, so he knew the answer to his question even before she answered.
“It’s all mine,” she said, and her chin lifted proudly. “I inherited the house from my grandmother, restored it, named it the White Pond Inn, and have been operating it on my own ever since.”
“I thought it was the White Christmas Inn,” he reminded her dryly.
“Christmas transforms everything,” she said with grave dignity, “it makes all things magic, even my humble inn.”
Well, she obviously believed.
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t want to get into it. He truly didn’t want to know a single thing more about her. He didn’t want to like the fact that despite her corkscrew hair waiting to pop into action, and despite her falling-off doorknob, she was trying so hard to keep her dignity.
Show me to my room. Please. But somehow, instead, Ryder found himself asking, “What makes a young woman tackle a project like this?” He didn’t add, on her own, though that was really his question.
Ryder was an architect. He and Drew had drawn up plenty of plans to restore places like this one. Underneath all the cosmetic loveliness, he was willing to bet the abundance of decorations hid what the falling-off door handle had hinted at. Problems. Large and small. Way more than a little scrap of a woman on her own would be up to.
“I’m a dreamer,” she said, fiercely unapologetic, and again, in the way she said that, he caught sight of her pride and stubbornness. And her hurt. As if someone—probably a hard-hearted jerk like him—had mocked her for being a dreamer.
Whoo boy. He bit his tongue, because it was obvious to him this house did not need a dreamer. A carpenter, certainly. Likely an electrician. Probably a plumber.
Despite biting his tongue nearly clear through, his skepticism must have clearly shown on his face because she felt driven to convince him—or maybe herself—that the house needed a dreamer.
“I actually saw it for the first time when my grandmother got sick. My mother and she had been, um, estranged, but one of the neighbors called and asked me to come home to help care for her. This house was love at first sight for me. Plus, it had been in our family for generations. When Granny died, I inherited, and I had to figure out a way I could afford to keep it.”
That was a warning, if he’d ever heard one. He did not like women who believed in love at first sight. As a man who lived in the wreckage of dreams, he did not like dreamers nor all their infuriating optimism.
Aside from that, the words told him an even more