you didn’t put those Christmas lights on the peak of the roof yourself.”
Tim had already given her a very thorough lecture about that. She wasn’t listening to another one.
“I’m just making the point—I can handle my end of the mattress.” She turned the flashlight beam on the floor so he couldn’t see her face, which was blushing as if she had said something about sex. Couldn’t I have worded that differently?
“Why do I have a feeling that what you think you can handle and what you really can handle are two entirely different things?”
“Because you’re a chauvinist pig?” she asked, keeping her voice deliberately sweet, glad he couldn’t see her face because his statement could sum up her knowledge of sex, too.
“Gee, and a minute ago I was worried you were going to fall down the steps and have the mattress and me land on top of you. Now I’m thinking if you fell, could you at least bite your tongue? Preferably off.”
“You charmer, you.”
Was a desert-island camaraderie developing between them? Wild-child was jumping up and down at the desert-island possibilities.
“At least let me take the end that’s going down the stairs first.”
“No,” she said stubbornly. Woman-scorned, who didn’t need a man taking charge of anything, took over. She picked up the foot of the mattress and began dragging it along the floor, leaving him with no choice but to pick up the other end. She was trying not to grunt as they headed for the stairs, but the mattress was an awkward bundle, hard to get a grip on, heavier than she had thought it would be.
As it turned out, he’d been right about the bedding, too. They should have made two separate trips. Because as they neared the middle of the stairway, the silk caught in the holly on the railing.
She paused to untangle it before it pulled the whole garland down or tore the silk. She dropped the flashlight, and they were in darkness.
It happened fast after that.
“Wait a sec—” she cried as she felt the mattress pressing against her. But it was too late. The mattress squeezed by her, sweeping her along with it. Emma grabbed a fistful of something before being plunged downward into complete darkness.
“ARE you okay?” Ryder called.
Emma couldn’t answer at first, the wind knocked temporarily out of her.
“Are you hurt?” he asked again. She could hear him trying to get past the mattress that blocked the stairs.
“Fine,” she managed to get out before he made a hole in the wall, bumping against it like that. The walls were admittedly flimsy in an “old wreck” of a house like this.
She couldn’t help it. Emma began to giggle and then to laugh. But he mistook the muffled howls of her laughter for cries of pain and came hurtling down to her. Predictably, he got caught up where the mattress blocked the step, and he crashed down on it beside her.
They lay there, side by side, on the mattress that blocked the staircase. Their legs and feet were up the stairs, their heads and backs on the floor of the foyer. They were only faintly illuminated by the shadows the firelight in the next room was throwing against the wall.
The laughter died in her throat as Emma became aware of how solid he felt beside her, how his presence here in the house during the storm was somehow reassuring.
Even if he was an ass who thought her house was a wreck and who was going to deprive Tess of Christmas.
“Emma, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she assured him again, though as she drank in the scent of him she wondered how true that was. “Are you?”
She felt him get up on his elbow, stare through darkness made only a little less black by the slight light leaching in from the other room.
He lay back down, sighed. “I guess I’m okay. Providing jest for the gods tonight. So, did one of your spirits push you down the stairs?”
“Oh, no, just made sure the mattress was there when I hit the floor.”
“Ah.”
Was his cynicism slightly tempered? Ryder had altered his position slightly, and Emma could feel the solidness of his shoulder touching hers, make out the strong line of his nose, the sensuous curve of his mouth.
“I want you to know I’m not the kind of girl who ends up on a mattress with a guy on such a short acquaintance,” she teased, trying to reduce with humor the tension she felt in her belly.
“I already guessed,” he said softly.
And her humor left her. What did that mean?
“Remember when I said I didn’t think things could get any worse?” Ryder asked softly.
“Yes?”
“Around you they can. And they do.”
“I know,” she agreed, “The White Christmas curse.”
“Maybe it’s not a curse,” he said softly. “Maybe it’s magic, just like you said. And I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of.”
And then he was laughing. It was a rusty sound, self-deprecating and reluctant, as if he had not laughed for a long, long time and did not particularly want to laugh now.
For all that, it was a sound so lovely, so richly masculine and so genuine, that it made her want to stay in this place, on a mattress jammed half on the stairs and half off, with this man beside her for as long as she could, to rest a moment in this place that was as real as any place she had ever been before.
Woman-scorned tsked disapprovingly.
Well, why not laugh, Ryder thought? His situation was absurd. He was trapped at a place dedicated to Christmas corniness, the power was out, the storm raged on. He could hear it rattling the windows and hounding the eaves. He was lying in the pitch darkness on a crashed mattress, with Emma so close to him he could smell the scent of lavender on her skin.
Life was playing a cosmic joke on him, why not laugh?
Why keep fighting this? He was stuck, she was stuck, they were in this together, whether he liked it or not. The powerful surge of intensity he was feeling toward her was only because of the crisis nature of the situation. People in situations like this tended to bond to each other in way too short a time.
He could not act on that. Maturity was being required of him. A certain amount of cooperation was going to be needed to get them through this, but nothing more.
There was no sense railing against the unfairness of life. He’d already done that, and it made no difference.
