People had the audacity to hint he needed a partner, a wife, a feminine influence for Tess, but to him the fact they suggested it only meant he had become successful at hiding how broken he was inside. What little he had left to give he was saving for Tess, and he hoped it would be enough.
Suddenly he felt too tired and too hungry even to think.
Or to defend himself against the thought that came.
That he was alone in the world. That all the burdens of the past and all the decisions about the future were his alone to carry and to make.
The warmth of the White Christmas Inn was creeping inside him, despite his efforts to keep it at bay, making him feel more alone.
Emma had said Christmas transformed everything and made it magic, and she had said there were spirits here who protected all who entered. But the last thing he needed was to be so tired and hungry that her whimsy could seep past the formidable wall of his defenses.
So what if he didn’t have what most people were able to take for granted? So what if life was unfair? He already knew that better than most. So, he didn’t have someone to ask about the baby spitting out a cookie, he didn’t have a holiday season to look forward to instead of dread, he didn’t have a place to belong that was somehow more than walls and furniture. He had made his choice. Not to rely on anyone or anything, because he of all people knew that those things could be taken in an instant.
Loss had left him weakened, more loss would finish him. He had a responsibility. He was all Tess had left in the world. He wasn’t leaving himself open to the very forces that had nearly destroyed him already.
Ryder Richardson needed desperately to be strong for the little girl who had fallen asleep in Emma’s arms, one mashed half-eaten cookie still clutched in a grubby fist.
He felt his strength returning after he ate the hot dogs and about two dozen of the cookies. But inside he felt crabby about this situation he found himself in. He had made himself a world without tests, and he felt as if he was being tested.
Make that crabbier.
“Thanks for the meal,” he said, formally. “If you could show me our room, Tess needs to be put in a bed, and I need to check the weather.”
“I don’t quite know how to break this to you,” whatever she was about to break to him delighted her, he noticed with annoyance, “but the only way you’ll be checking the weather from your room is by sticking your head out the window.”
For a moment he didn’t quite grasp what she was saying. And when he did, the sensation of crabbiness, of his life being wrested out of his control, intensified.
No television in the room. No escape, no way of turning off everything going on inside him. He considered the television the greatest tool ever invented for numbing wayward feelings, for acting as anesthetic for a doubting mind.
“People come here to get away from it all,” she said cheerfully.
“To feel the magic,” he said, faintly sarcastic.
“Precisely,” she said happily, he suspected missing his sarcasm deliberately.
“You have a television somewhere, right?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“No buts. Lead me to it. Or face the wrath of man.”
She didn’t seem to find his pun funny at all. And he was glad. He really didn’t need to experience Emma’s laughter again. Especially if he was going to stay strong.
The wrath of man. Funny. Except he meant it. And there was something in him, something fierce and closed, that reminded Emma of a warrior. There was no doubt in her mind he would lay down his life for the baby that so obviously held his hardened heart in the pudgy pink palm of her hand.
The baby had clearly—and gleefully—demonstrated her power with the hilarious hair show.
But whatever moment of lightness he had allowed himself then was gone from Ryder’s face now. He was practically bristling with bad temper.
It would be a foolish time to let him know that television was not part of Emma’s vision for the White Pond Inn, and it certainly didn’t fit in with its incarnation as the White Christmas Inn.
But she had already told him she believed in spirits and magic, risking Ryder’s scorn because she had vowed, after Peter, there would be no more trying to hide who she really was from other people, no more giving opinions that they wanted to hear.
What an expert she had become at reading what Peter wanted from the faintest purse of lips, giving that to him, making him happy at her own expense. How many times had she swallowed back what she really wanted to say so as not to risk his disapproval, his patronizing suggestions for her “improvement”?
“I consider the inn a techno-electro-free zone,” she said, and could hear a certain fierceness in her own voice, as if somehow it was this man’s fault that even after she had nearly turned herself inside-out trying to please Peter, he had still searched for someone more suitable. And found her.
“Techno-electro,” he said, mulling over the word, which she was pretty sure she had just invented.
“Television is not on the activities agenda, not even on the bad-weather days.”
“I’m dying to know what you do on the bad-weather days.”
Even though he clearly wasn’t, she forged on, determined to be herself. “I bring out board games, and a selection of jigsaw puzzles. I always have tons of books around. I encourage guests to shut off their cell phones and leave the laptops at home.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, daring him to find her corny while almost hoping he would. Because if he judged her the way Peter had judged her she could dismiss the somewhat debilitating attraction she felt for him.
She realized she was a little disappointed when he didn’t even address her philosophy.
“Since I’m here by the force of fate, instead of by choice, you’re going to make an exception for me.”
It wasn’t a question, and he was absolutely right. He had not come here looking for what her other guests came here looking for. He was not enchanted, and he had no intention of being brought under the spell of the White Christmas Inn.
Which was good. What would she do with a man like that under her spell?
“I do have a television in my room,” she admitted reluctantly.
What she didn’t admit to was the DVD player. They were guilty pleasures she indulged in when she was just too exhausted to do even one more thing. There was always something to be done when you ran an establishment like this: windows to be cleaned, bedding to be laundered, floors to be polished, flower beds, lawns, paint-touchups. And that was just the day-to-day chores and didn’t include the catastrophes, like the time the upstairs bathtub had fallen through the floor.
Sometimes, it was true, on those bad-weather days while her guests
