Snowbound Bride-to-Be. Cara Colter

trying to pull that hat back off.

      “It doesn’t look like she likes hats, anyway,” Emma said.

      “Until she lets me comb her hair, she wears hats.” He took the hat back off and stepped aside, letting Emma see for the first time what was underneath.

      If she started laughing at him again, he was going to pick up the baby and head back into the storm, knock on the door of the first house in Willowbrook that had no Christmas decorations and beg for sanctuary from the storm.

      But Emma didn’t laugh. Her gasp of dismay was almost worse.

       Hey, it’s not as if your hair is all that different.

      But Emma’s hair was different from Tess’s. Emma’s curls looked as if she had tried, maybe too vigorously, to tame them. He felt that inexplicable urge to touch again, focused on his niece’s hair instead.

      Tess’s white blonde hair did not look as if it had been combed since the day she was born, even though it had only been two days. Her hair looked like it belonged to a monster baby.

      It formed fuzzy dreadlocks and tortured corkscrews. There was a clump at the back that looked like it might house mice, and two distinct hair horns stood up on either side of her head.

      “No nanny for the last two days,” he explained, feeling the deep sting of his own ineptitude. “And in Tess’s world, Uncle is not allowed to touch the goldilocks.”

      Emma looked skeptical, as if he might be making up a story to explain away his own negligence.

      “I know,” he said dryly. “It’s shameful. A twenty pound scrap of baby controlling a full grown man, but there you have it.”

      Emma still looked skeptical, so he demonstrated. He reached out with one finger. He touched Tess’s hair, feather-light, barely a touch at all.

      The baby inhaled a deep breath, and exhaled a blood-curdling shriek, as if he dropped a red-hot coal down her diaper. He removed his finger, the shriek stopped abruptly, like a sentence stopped in the middle. Tess regarded him with her most innocent look.

      “Ha,” he said, moved his finger toward her, and away, shriek, stop, shriek, stop. Soon, he stopped as soon as her mouth opened wide, so she was making O’s and closing them, like a fish.

      Emma snorted with laughter. Not that he wanted to get her laughing again or explore the intrigue of shadows that danced away when she laughed, and flitted back when she didn’t.

      Again, he wondered what he was doing. He had not wanted Emma to cry. He wanted this even less. Firsts.

      There was something tempting about being with someone who did not know his history, as if he could pretend to be a brand-new man. He contemplated that, being free, even for a moment a man unburdened, a man with no history.

      But he wasn’t those things and Ryder hated himself for thinking he should be free of the mantle he carried. His brother had died because he was, quite simply, not enough.

      The fact that Emma could tempt him to feel otherwise made him angry at her as well as at himself, as irrational as that might have been.