The Complete Christmas Collection. Rebecca Winters

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end.

      Instead of the kiss saying a chaste good-bye, her answering fire consumed him and filled him. His hands tangled in her short hair—he knew a startled ah of satisfaction that it felt exactly as he had known it would—and his lips claimed her and branded her, even as hers claimed him and branded him. He found his hand at the back of her neck, pulling her closer, wanting to go deeper, wanting more.

      Her tongue danced with his lips, the edges of his teeth, tangled with his tongue, and he thought he would melt from the inferno she was creating. It felt as if the ice could be banished, as if he could be alone no more—

      He pulled away from her, but it took every ounce of power he had left. His armor, made of steel, had melted like butter before her.

      And he didn’t want her ever to know that.

      “We should go back to the house. I’m going to go start packing my stuff—” His voice was rough with determination that hid his weakness from her. “—tonight, so that Tess and I will be ready to go as soon as the road opens tomorrow.” He hoped to slip out quietly, no long-drawn-out good-byes.

      “Stay,” she said quietly. “Ryder, stay for Christmas.”

      “Your neediest family?” he said sourly, trying to be what he had been before, a man who could chase others away with his bitterness, trying not to let her see what had just happened to him.

      She said nothing.

      “I don’t need your pity,” he said sharply, trying again.

      “In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I don’t pity you,” she said just as sharply. “If you can’t do this for yourself, do it for Tess.”

      “No.” He kept it short. If he engaged her in discussion she might think she could convince him to stay. “I have to go.”

      Even without the heat of kisses, the ice was melting from around his heart. Deciding to give into her had been his undoing. How could you not care about her?

      Despite his every attempt not to, he was falling as in love with Emma White as she was with him.

      Ryder Richardson knew that was impossible. He knew that you could not fall in love with someone in such a short period of time.

      But he also knew that love was not logical, and that it defied the rules people tried to make around it.

      How could this be happening to him? He who knew the exact price of love, he who knew he would be destroyed if he rolled those dice again and lost?

      Better not to take a chance at all than to risk so much.

      There was Tess to think of, too. How could he ever be what Tess needed if he left himself open to being destroyed by the fires of love again?

      He had to go now. While he still had the strength. Before the magic took him completely and did the worst thing of all.

      Made him believe.

      Just as the letters buried in her wreath had promised that first day.

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      The next day, the road opened before it was light out.

      Emma listened to the snowplow down on the main road. Ryder had packed up the night before, just as he had said he would.

      Now, as Ryder tried to get her ready to go, Tess was having a full-blown melt-down, struggling against the implacable strength of her uncle’s arms.

      It would serve him right, Emma thought, if she just stepped back and let him deal with it. But she couldn’t. She had to try and ease Tess’s distress, and that of Sue and Peggy. The Fenshaws had arrived with Tess and their baskets of food and their hearts full of good cheer, just as Ryder was packing the car to leave.

      Now they were all in the front doorway of her house, except Tim, who had taken one look at Ryder’s packed bags, sent him a look of disgust and stomped off.

      “Shh, sweetie,” Emma said, trying to get the hat on Tess’s head, “please don’t. It’s going to be all right. Everything will be fine.”

      In her heart she felt this was patently untrue.

      Sue and Peggy were both sobbing quietly, clutching their mother.

      “I don’t want Tess to go,” Peggy cried, a little girl who had already said good-bye to her father this year, and was having trouble with one more good-bye. But it was obvious Ryder and Tess were going. Ryder’s face remained impassive and determined.

      He took the hat from Emma’s hand, stuffed it into his own jacket pocket.

      “Let’s not drag this out,” he suggested, cool and remote, once again the man who had arrived on her doorstep with his devil-dark eyes and wearing his cynicism like a cloak.

      He turned and walked out the door and down to his car, the engine already running, the ice and snow scraped off it.

      The sad little entourage followed him outside. Tim, who had been standing on the porch, his hands thrust into his pockets, rejoined them, held out his hand.

      “Good luck, son,” he said quietly, his eyes searching Ryder’s face. He seemed to find something there that gave him something to believe in, because he nodded. But he was the only one who found it, because as Ryder and the baby reached the car, Peggy broke away from her mother and thrust Bebo into Tess’s hands.

      Emma, hanging on by a thread, bit her lip at the act of selfless generosity from one so young.

      The screaming stopped for a blessed second, and then started more intensely than before. Tess threw Bebo, previously beloved to her, on the ground, and arched herself over her uncle’s arm with such fury that anyone less strong might have been taken off guard and dropped her.

      Emma found something to believe, too.

      That another Christmas would be ruined. No matter what happened now—if Holiday Happenings had a thousand people a night show up, if the Christmas Day Dream was a complete success, if her mother showed up beaming more love than the Madonna, it felt as if it didn’t matter, it couldn’t erase this horrible scene and it couldn’t even touch the place going cold inside her.

      Because he was leaving. And if he was leaving—his heart hard to Tess’s shrieks of protest and the heart-wrenching tears of Peggy and Sue—he was not looking back once he left here.

      It would be so much easier to accept that if she had not laughed on that mattress with him, held his broken heart under her fingertips on that moonlit night, if she had not given so much of herself into his keeping, if she had not seen his soul last night when they had skated, danced across that golden ice connected to one another, free, joyous.

      All that was gone from his face now, as if he regretted what he had allowed himself to feel as much as she had rejoiced in it.

      “Good-bye, Emma.” With finality.

      She wasn’t giving him the satisfaction of saying goodbye.

      “Thank you for teaching

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