White Pond, the neglected house and overgrown eighteen acres from her grandmother last spring. It had quickly become apparent to her she couldn’t afford to keep it.
By then Emma was committed to keeping it. There was something here of her family and her history that Lynelle had scorned, but that Emma needed. So, she’d used her life savings, not huge on her wage as a medical receptionist, given permanent notice to the job she had taken temporary leave from, and risked her engagement, which had already been on the rocks since last Christmas, and which had well and truly washed up on shore when she’d made the decision to come home and care for the grandmother who had been a virtual stranger to her.
And then on a shoe-string budget, with endless determination and elbow grease, Emma had done her best to refurbish the house. She had opened as a bed and breakfast last summer.
It had soon been woefully obvious to her that the B and B business was as tricky and as full of pitfalls as her old house. Still, she had hoped to repair all the foibles of her first summer season with Holiday Happenings.
Again, Emma could sense her former fiancé and boss, Dr. Peter Henderson, his thin face puckered with disapproval, his arms folded over the narrowness of his chest. “Emma,” he was saying, “you don’t have any idea what you are getting into.”
She hated it that with each passing day, his predictions of doom and gloom seemed to be just a little closer to coming true.
And if I had known the full extent of what I was getting into, would I have—She wasn’t allowing herself to think like that.
Emma turned an eye to the inn’s tree, a Fraser fir, magnificent in completely white ribbons and ornaments and lights, the angel’s wings brushing the ten-foot ceiling. Emma let her eyes rest on that angel for a moment.
“One miracle,” Emma said quietly. “I wanted a perfect Christmas. I wanted to give the best gift of all, hope.”
The angel gazed back at her with absolute serenity.
“Oh,” Emma said, annoyed, “you aren’t even a real angel. If I had glass eyes, and paper wings I could look serene, too!”
But then she cast her gaze around the room and her heart softened. The great room of the White Pond Inn had been turned into a picture out of a Christmas fairy tale. This scene was the payoff for all her hard work, and worth the crush of bills, the exhaustion that had become her constant companion.
A fire roared and crackled in the river-rock hearth, colorful woolen socks hung at the solid-slab oak mantle. Garlands of real holly were tacked to crown molding. White poinsettias shone like lights in the dark corners of the room.
Parcels wrapped in shades of white and festooned with homemade bows, containing brand-new dolls and fire trucks were already piled high under that tree, though she had to admit they didn’t look quite as pretty when she wasn’t sure how she was going to pay for them!
She forced her mind away from that, and finished her inventory of the room. Red-and-white cushions had replaced the ordinary ones on the sofas and chairs, vases held candy canes, the glowing dark planks of the hardwood floors were covered with white area rugs.
The room held a delicious aroma because of the continuous baking that had been happening in the house. The sweet comforting scents of cinnamon and nutmeg and pumpkin and apples had mixed with the smell of the occasional back puff of wood smoke to create a scent that could have been labeled and sold, Christmas.
Another great money-making idea from Emma White, she told herself sarcastically, but then she sighed, unable not to enjoy the pleasure of what she had done.
The inn was a vision of Christmas. It was going to bring great joy to many people. When her mother saw it, it would erase every bad Christmas they had ever spent together.
“Holiday Happenings and the Christmas Day Dream will still happen,” Emma told herself stubbornly, but details from the ice storm of 1998 insisted on crowding into her head.
The six-day storm had caused billions of dollars in damage, left millions of people without power for periods that had varied from days to weeks. Roads had been closed, trees destroyed, power lines had snapped under the weight of rain turning to ice.
“I could not be so unlucky to have a six-day storm shut down Holiday Happenings completely,” she muttered, but then she whispered, “Could I?”
The storm threw shards of ice up against her window and howled under her eaves in answer.
And then, above the howl of the wind, her doorbell chimed its one clanging, broken note, but still an answer to her question about her luck!
Emma’s eyes flew to her grandfather clock. Eight o’clock! Just when people were supposed to arrive. They had come anyway! The miracle had happened! How was it she had not heard cars, slamming doors, voices?
She tried to rein in her happiness. Of course, it could just be Tim, checking to make sure she was all right in the storm.
The Fenshaws had invited her into the fold of this lovely small community as if she belonged here, as if she was one of them. Tim had been interested in the White Pond property for his son when he returned from overseas, but when Emma had told him she had decided to keep it, he and his daughter-in-law Mona had seemed genuinely pleased, as if they had waited all their lives for her to come home to them.
Now, what if she couldn’t pay them after the hours and hours they had devoted to making her dreams become a reality? She couldn’t have operated the inn for one day without their constant help and support.
A shiver went down her spine. Worse, what if all these dreams, her foolishness as Peter had called it, cost her the inn?
She went and opened the door, and despite the rush of ice-cold air, her heart beat hopefully in anticipation of guests, maybe locals from Willowbrook who had braved the weather.
Only it wasn’t locals.
And it wasn’t Tim.
A stranger stood there, the glow from the string of white Christmas lights that illuminated the porch nearly totally blocked by his size. He was tall and impossibly broad across the shoulders. The sense of darkness was intensified by the absolute black of a knee-length wool coat, black gloves, dark, glossy hair, shot through with snowflakes.
His features were shadowed, but even so, Emma could see the perfect cast of his nose, the thrust of high cheekbones, the strength in the jut of his chin.
The stranger was astonishingly, heart-stoppingly handsome, even though the set of his firm mouth was grim, and his eyes were dark, intense and totally forbidding.
Emma shivered under his scrutiny, felt the sweep of his cool gaze take her in from red socks to ridiculous hat, and saw his mouth tighten into an even grimmer line.
It felt to Emma as if the devil himself had decided to pay her an early Christmas visit. In an instant she went from being an independent woman, operating her own business, to one who wished she could strip off her shapeless sweater and the added bulk of the long johns she had put on earlier in preparation for skating and sleigh-riding.
She became a woman who would have given up just about anything to take back the recent disastrous haircut. In an effort to make her life simpler—or maybe to assert it was her life—she had cut her long glossy black hair, one of the few things about her
