had a real tree since...”
“Since?” She’d hesitated, leaving the sentence incomplete. Good memories or bad ones? he wondered.
“Since our family Christmases with my grandmother.”
He looked over at her and caught her smiling wistfully.
“We always had a real tree, too. And Gram did her holiday baking and the kitchen always smelled good.”
“You don’t have a real tree now?”
She shook her head. “I live in an apartment and I travel a lot. A small artificial one is enough.”
“Not this year, eh?” he asked, thinking that the idea of spending the holidays alone in an apartment with a plastic tree sounded very lonely indeed. “I’ll go bring up the boxes of decorations.” He nodded at the television. “There’s a Christmas Classics channel in the music section. Why don’t you turn it on?”
“Really?”
She sounded skeptical, and that just wouldn’t do.
“You can’t decorate without Christmas carols,” he decreed.
By the time he found the boxes and got them upstairs Christmas songs were playing and Hope had disappeared.
“Hope?”
“In the kitchen.”
Her voice came from around the corner, and he put the first box in the living room before going to find her.
She was standing in front of the stove, stirring something in a pot that smelled fantastically spicy.
“Mulled cider,” she announced. “I found the seasonings when I was looking in the cupboard the other day. This is as good a time as any, right?”
“It’s perfect. I’ll start on the lights while you finish up. The lights take the longest.”
He was halfway through putting multi-colored twinkle lights on the tree when she came into the room carrying two mugs, steam curling off the top. He took a break and stood up, stretching out his back as she held out the mug.
“It looks good,” she offered.
“I like lots of lights,” he replied, thinking back to when he and Brad had been boys and their job had been to stand back and squint. The lights had all blurred together, and any blank spots in their vision had meant there were holes that needed to be filled. One year the tree had been so big that their dad had used over fifteen hundred lights on it. “It’s kind of a family tradition.”
He took a sip of his cider and raised his eyebrows. “Mmmm,” he remarked, angling a sideways glance at Hope.
Her lips were twitching just a little.
“I found some spiced rum in the cupboard, too. Thought it might warm you up after your cold hike.”
He swallowed the warm cider, felt the kick of the rum in his belly. It wasn’t just the rum. It was her, wasn’t it? She could have a fun side if she let it out to play more. She put a wall around herself most of the time, but behind that wall he had a suspicion there was hidden a warm, giving woman. A woman he could like. A lot.
Right now she looked barely past twenty, with her straight hair in a perky ponytail and hardly any makeup. He could think of more pleasant ways than mulled cider to warm up, and all of them included her, in his arms.
Which would be a very, very bad idea. They were hardly even friends. It was a big leap from their newfound civility to being lovers. And there was no point in starting something he didn’t intend to finish.
“It’s good,” was all he said, and he took another drink for fortification. It didn’t help that she looked so cute in her snug jeans, when her long fingers curled around the mug as she blew on the hot surface of the cider with full pink lips.
He got to work putting on the rest of the lights while she dug through the boxes for ornaments and the tacky red and green tinsel garland he put on the tree each year. By the time he’d finished she’d pulled out a box and was sitting on the sofa, surrounded by nearly a dozen porcelain shops and buildings—his mother’s Christmas village.
“This is adorable,” she said, lifting up an ornament that depicted a red square building with a steeply pitched roof and the word Schoolhouse on a sign above the door.
“My mom’s. Every year we got her a different building until she could build a whole town. Look.” He reached inside a large plastic ice cream container and took out a tiny LED light. “Put this inside and it lights up.”
“Pretty. Where do you normally put it?”
“On the long table in the hall.”
Hope held the porcelain carefully in her hands and looked up at him, dismay turning her lips downward. “But you can’t enjoy it there. You only see it as you pass through.” She looked around and then her eyes lit up. “Look. What about the two tables we pushed together?”
“It’s big enough.”
“We need a white cloth. Just a minute.”
She disappeared upstairs and returned with a snowy white towel. He watched as she draped it over the tables and put the schoolhouse down. She stood back and put a finger to her lips, then went back to the box again and again. She went into the kitchen and came back with something in her hand he couldn’t discern, but she tucked it under the towel and before his eyes a hill of snow seemed to appear. Tiny figurines of children followed, punctuated by green bottlebrush-like trees and a snowman in a black top hat. Before he knew it she’d arranged the whole village—church, school, bookshop, houses—along the table, with snowy white hills forming a backdrop.
“How did you do that?”
She beamed. “Do you like it?”
“I do. What’s more, I think my mom will, too. It’s a shame you’re not going to meet her.”
Not meet her...not be here for Christmas Eve and then Christmas morning...it surprised him to realize he wanted her there. He liked having Anna around, but there was something right about Hope being in the house, wandering through the barns. She added something to the place—a sense of sophistication and class that he found he appreciated. And ever since that first day with Cate he’d been able to tell that even when she held back, there was something about the children that she responded to. She was fitting in rather well, considering the hoity-toity photographer who’d arrived only days ago.
Perhaps fitting in too well. Considering lately he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
* * *
Hope saw the look in Blake’s eyes and nerves bubbled in her tummy. She’d seen that look before: a softening of the features, a warming of the eyes, the slight parting of lips. There were times she tried to elicit this precise expression for the camera. Other times she’d seen it in the moments before she’d been kissed.
And Blake was looking at her that way, making her knees turn to jelly and her pulse pound.
Kissing
