to choke out the words without crying.
And, for a moment, some regret did touch his eyes, but then he turned from her and put the baby in her car seat, ignoring her flailing fists and feet and her cries.
“Tess NOT go.”
Sue picked up Bebo off the ground, wiped a smudge of snow tenderly from the triangle nose and then reached in the open door and shoved the doll back into Tess’s arms. She stepped back from the car and wailed.
Emma watched in a daze as Ryder shut the door, glanced at Tim, accepted Mona’s quick hard hug, and then turned and looked at her.
What did she expect?
Nothing.
Expectations were clearly her problem, the reason she always ended up disappointed by Christmas. And by life. And by men.
He did not even hug her. He had said his good-bye to her last night on that skating rink.
He lifted a finger to his brow, a faint salute, his eyes met hers and he looked quickly away.
No sense thinking she had seen anguish there. No sense at all.
“I hope your mother comes for Christmas,” he said, and then his eyes went to Tim, who had taken a sudden interest in scraping the snow away from his feet with the toe of his boot. He frowned.
As if her mother coming for Christmas would absolve Ryder of something.
“She’ll be here Christmas Eve. Now that the roads are open, I can send her the bus ticket this afternoon.”
He nodded, relieved. She glanced at Tim who was now looking into the far distance, hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels.
Right until the moment his car turned at the bottom of the driveway that he had helped to clear, and then slipped from view, Emma could feel herself holding her breath, hoping and praying he would change his mind.
“Emma,” Tim said uncertainly, “I don’t think you should get your hopes up about—”
She held up a hand. She didn’t want to hear it. Don’t get your hopes up. About Holiday Happenings. About your mother. About him.
That was her curse.
Not Christmas.
Those damn hopes, always picking themselves up for one last hurrah, even after they’d been dragged through the mud and knocked down and shredded and stomped upon.
Emma turned and walked away from the Fenshaws, her shoulders stiff with pride. It wasn’t until she saw the damned Believe letters in the wreath that she closed the door, sagged against it and cried like a child.
“SNOWMAN?” Ryder asked Tess.
She did not look up from Bebo, her new best friend. Ryder had given her the much newer lavender soft-stuffed pony the day they arrived here at the cottage. Why wait for Christmas? He had needed the distraction then.
He now saw it had been a ridiculous effort to win back her affection. The pony lay abandoned under the couch with the pink suede shoes.
He’d given the shoes to her five minutes after the pony hadn’t worked, a desperate man. She had kicked them off in a fit of anger and had not looked at them since.
He sighed, watching her. Tess was sitting on the floor, talking soft gibberish to Bebo, sporting monster hair again, refusing to allow him to touch it.
Anyone who thought a baby was willing to forgive and forget didn’t know Tess.
They had been at his lakeside cottage long enough that the accusing look should have left her face by now. He had lost track of days, and counted them now on his fingers.
Tomorrow was going to be Christmas Eve.
“Let’s go outside and build a snowman,” he said again, thinking she might not have heard him the first time. Building snowmen had been her favorite thing at home, before the White Christmas Inn had become part of her reality.
“Tess NOT go.” She slammed on the toy piano to make her point. He had also given her the piano in an effort to distract her from her fury with him. It hadn’t worked any better than the pony or the shoes. She didn’t play with it, but used it as emphatic punctuation to her anger with him. The tone of the piano was awful and reminded him of Emma’s doorbell.
He should have fixed that before he left.
Ryder told himself to stop pleading with the child and take charge.
He could bundle her up into her snowsuit, wrestle her boots onto her feet, put her hat on the right way and take her outside, build the snowman, hope to distract her from his treasonous act of removing her from the Fenshaws, from “Eggie and Boo,” from Emma and from the White Christmas Inn.
It would take an hour or so out of a day that seemed to be stretching out endlessly, despite the fact the cottage had a forty-two-inch plasma television set and a satellite that got four hundred channels. He had not found one single thing to watch that could hold his attention, and Tess was suddenly not interested in her old favorite cartoons.
What had he ever been thinking when he had thought coming to the cottage would be a refuge?
Over the last few days, Ryder was discovering he hated it here. He had bought the cottage last summer, a place his brother had never been, no memories. A pleasant place in the heat of the summer, with water sports, along with the satellite dish, to add to the distraction quotient.
But there seemed to be no escaping the dreariness in the winter.
The decor and furnishings, which had come with the cottage, were modern and masculine. The paint was a neutral frosty white, the furniture ran to sleek black leather, the finishes were stainless steel. The art was large abstract canvases, meaningless brush strokes of red. At the time of purchase, it had all looked sophisticated to him, clean and uncluttered.
Not cold and impersonal, a showroom not actually intended for people to live in. Of course, the cold could be because of the endless damp billowing off that lake.
Or from the way he felt inside.
Like a cold-hearted bastard. Not just selfish, but mean. Ask Tess. Ask those little girls who had sobbed as he was leaving. He couldn’t even look at that rag doll without being filled with self-loathing.
Little Peggy had been able to overcome her own distress enough to think of someone else first, to try and bring comfort.
That final scene filled him with shame.
Looking around the ultra-modern bareness of the cottage, Ryder missed the inn. He missed doorknobs coming off in his hands, and the imperfection of the sloping kitchen floor. He missed the fact that everywhere you looked inside or outside that inn, there was something that needed doing.
Not like here.
Unbelievably,
