teenagers and young moms and dads. Mona had more games, and it was nearly midnight as they all began to reboard the bus, the children clutching their favorite toys, packages being loaded into the cargo hold under the bus. There were hugs and expressions of gratitude and tears.
Mona and Tim packed up the girls, and Tess was put to bed in a crib in the green room.
Emma and Ryder were alone in front of the fire.
“I’m exhausted,” she told him, stretching out her legs. “And exhilarated. It was better than anything I planned.”
He touched her hair, ran his fingers through it.
“You know the weird part?” she said, quietly, “it wasn’t really Holiday Happenings. And not even today, as beautiful as it was.”
He nodded. “I know, Emma.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s this, what we’re feeling right here, right now, isn’t it?”
“That’s it exactly,” she said. “Exactly. When I stopped expecting the world, overlaying reality with my dreams, it was as if I could enjoy it for the very first time.”
And that feeling didn’t go away because Christmas had, and neither did Ryder. He stayed.
She woke up most mornings with a kink in her neck from falling asleep on him.
And she woke up eager for the next day, to see what love brought.
A touch of hands, a moment stolen to share a hot dog, an afternoon while the Fenshaws kept Tess.
Ryder and Tess left on New Year’s Day.
And that was when the romance began in earnest. He sent flowers. He e-mailed. They talked on the phone as late into the night as they had every day since Christmas.
He came for the weekends, but more and more Emma went to the city, aware that she had missed the city and loved it. Sometimes they would take Tess with them as they explored little coffee shops and antique markets, other times they left her with Miss Markle while they went to the theatre, or out for a quiet grown-up dinner.
The passion between them grew until it flared, white-hot. Every touch, every look, a promise.
But it was Ryder who would never let the passion culminate.
“Hey, I have to be an example for Tess. I don’t want her to think it’s okay to give in without committing.”
For Emma’s birthday, in the spring, Ryder gave her an engagement ring, and asked her to marry him.
In the summer, at White Pond Inn, they married, a quiet, small outdoor ceremony with the people they cared about most in the world. Tim, Sr., was there, and so was Tim, Jr., in his uniform. Mona and Sue and Peggy had on matching burgundy dresses.
Tess, in a snow-white dress that somehow had a big smudge down the front of it, was supposed to be the flower girl, but she sat down on her way up the grassy aisle beside the pond, and started picking dandelions and couldn’t be persuaded there was something more interesting than those little yellow flowers.
And to Emma it didn’t matter. She had given up expectations. And perfection.
And yet, when she saw Ryder waiting for her at the end of that aisle, she stepped around Tess and kept going. She didn’t once look to see if Lynelle had made it after all.
They were writing their own history now. Beginning today.
And Emma could clearly see that it was not Christmas that transformed everything; it was love. And it was love that made all things magic.
And that the man waiting for her, with such a tender light in his dark eyes, was all the perfection she ever needed.
TWENTY-TWO gallons of hot chocolate.
Ten of mulled wine.
Four hundred and sixty-two painstakingly decorated Christmas cookies.
And it was not going to be nearly enough.
“If you lift that kettle of hot chocolate, I’m throwing you over my shoulder and taking you home,” Ryder told Emma, irritated.
“I love it when you’re masterful,” she said, clearly not seeing how serious the situation was.
“I’m not joking, Emma.”
“Ha. As if you could pick me up right now.”
“I could,” he said threateningly. He still felt this thrill when he looked at her and used the word wife. This woman had come into herself so completely it nearly made him dizzy that she had chosen to love him. Emma was sassy, confident, radiant, strong, on fire with her love of life. And of him.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Tim, could you get this hot chocolate for me? Ryder has decided I’m delicate.”
Tim, Jr., came over and lifted the pot of warm liquid easily. “You are delicate,” he told her sternly. “Keep an eye on her, Ryder. I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”
“And that would not be very far,” Emma said giving her huge belly a satisfied pat.
The truth was Ryder had tried to talk her out of White Christmas at the inn this year.
The doctor had told them to expect a New Year’s baby. What if they got snowed in, like the year they met?
But Emma had gotten that mulish look on her face and he’d known there was no sense arguing with her. He’d call a helicopter if they got snowed in. He had his cell phone with him, just in case.
Besides, there would have been no living with Tess if he had cancelled their yearly Christmas trip to White Pond Inn.
She was four now, a young lady who knew her own mind. He looked for her—Emma had dressed her in neon pink so they could spot her in the crowds. She was down on the pond, in her new skates, shuffling along between Sue and Peggy. This year, their little sister, born about nine months after Tim had returned home from his tour of duty—was in the sled being pulled behind the girls.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Tim said, following Ryder’s gaze to the four little girls on the pond, “but I hope that’s a boy in there.”
“Chauvinist,” Emma accused him, but her eyes twinkled with the shine of a woman well-loved.
“Healthy is good enough for me,” Ryder said.
He decided, as long as he could keep an eye on Emma and keep her from lifting anything too heavy, it was good to have come to White Pond this year after all.
She had sold the White Pond Inn to Mona and Tim shortly after she’d agreed to marry Ryder. The younger Fenshaws didn’t run it as a bed-and-breakfast, the inn was now their
