all pretended to be excited and believe he was the Santa.
Cain hadn’t bothered with the make-believe. He’d taken what he could, then gone back to the orphanage, to wake up on Christmas morning to a neatly wrapped present that had always held clothes some well-meaning town person had donated to the orphanage. He hadn’t expected much else. It had simply been his life. Just as his life now was his life. But now it was all up to him to get what he wanted, instead of waiting for some Good Samaritan to give the “poor orphan” something he needed.
He hadn’t had the desire to go into the clinic moments earlier, but now he found himself getting out of his car to go into the school. Snow was starting to fall softly from the gray heavens, and it brushed his face. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket as he went toward the entry and took the steps in a single stride.
He pushed against the heavy wood-and-glass doors, but the door was locked tight. He cupped his hands on the cold glass and leaned to peer inside. Security lights showed the expansive center hallway. Lockers lined both sides of the walls, and the same highly polished tiles were still on the floor. Christmas was everywhere, from the paper garlands looping high on the walls to the Christmas tree, done in red, green, silver and gold, just inside the door.
He could almost see the kids in the hallway, the bustle of life, back then. He could remember the smell of new books and new pencils, the shouts of friends heard above the daily announcements blaring over the loudspeakers. Then that was gone, and all he felt was an emptiness that was almost tangible to him. He pulled back from the door, ready to leave. But as he turned to go, he saw a small blue car turn into the parking area, disappear behind the large plow for a moment, then come back into view as it pulled into the slot he’d forgone, the one for the librarian.
The windows in the car were partially fogged up, but he could make out a single occupant. The motor stopped, the door opened and he found himself looking at the woman from the elevator. She stepped out into the cold, and glanced up at him, her forehead tugged into a frown under her bright yellow knit cap.
“You,” she said, her breath curling into the cold air, the single word sounding like an accusation.
He wasn’t an egotist, but most women didn’t study him as if he were an insect. At that moment, this woman was regarding him with the same contempt she’d shown earlier. At least, he thought that was the expression on her face as she hurried over to the stairs and came up quickly to stand one step below him. She was just as tiny as he remembered. Now, standing on the step above her as he was, he towered over her by at least a foot.
She tilted her face up, and he saw tendrils of her brilliant hair that had escaped her yellow knit cap clinging to her temple and her cheek. Her amber eyes were narrowed on him as if she didn’t like what she saw, and her voice was brusque when she asked, “What are you doing here?”
He found himself forcing a smile, but there was no humor in him at all. “I’m going to blow the place up,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “How about you?”
Red suddenly dotted her cheeks and her expression tightened even more. She exhaled in a rush. “You don’t belong here.”
He wouldn’t argue with that. He never had belonged here. Not here, not anywhere. “I went to this school back in the Stone Age, and I was just looking around.”
“For old times’ sake?” she muttered.
He shrugged. That was as good an explanation as any he could come up with at the moment. “Sure, old times’ sake.” He hadn’t meant to be sarcastic then, but he was. He glanced down, and saw a ring of keys in her gloved hand. “What are you doing here with keys?”
“I work here. I teach second grade, or I will be teaching second grade when school’s back in session after the holidays.”
A teacher? He never had a teacher like her when he was here. “Well, I won’t keep you,” he murmured, and went down the stairs.
He couldn’t tell if he heard her say “Goodbye” as he walked away, but he heard the door open, then close, followed by the sound of a lock being set. As he got in his car and settled behind the wheel, he realized he didn’t even know her name. He’d never asked. He glanced back at the school and was taken aback to see the woman with no name looking out the glass top of the door at him. And the woman with no name wasn’t smiling.
Cain read people well. He could size up someone at ten feet and be pretty close to being right about the person. Maybe owning a casino had something to do with having that particular skill, or maybe it was a skill he’d honed throughout his life. Strangers had come and strangers had gone, and it had always been up to him to figure out why anyone was near him, and what they wanted from him.
But this woman baffled him, this woman didn’t fit into any of the categories he used when he labeled people. She was pretty enough, in a small, delicate way. A teacher. And she hated him.
He drove out of the parking lot, even though he had the most overwhelming need to go back and confront her. He just wanted to understand. But he didn’t turn back. He drove north, and by the time he got to the Inn and his cabin, he realized he’d never confront her. He’d never see her again. He’d leave, and she’d be teaching her hellions at the start of the new year. He shrugged as he went in a side door to his cabin, into comfortable heat. What she thought of him just didn’t matter.
AS HOLLY SAT BACK in her chair behind her desk, which was heavy with paperwork, the silence of the empty classroom weighed heavily on her. She wasn’t able to concentrate, not with her thoughts on the one person she didn’t even want to think about—Cain Stone. First the shock of seeing the man in person, then Annie’s reaction to her reaction to Cain Stone.
“That’s just plain irrational,” Annie had said while Sierra destroyed more gingerbread men. “You’ve never even talked to him.”
She had talked to him. Once. When she was seven or maybe eight. He’d been up on the mountain, ready to ski the hard run without permission. It was their land, not some teenagers’, who had seemed to her to take great delight in taunting her father. Her father had yelled at them, and she could remember she’d yelled, too.
The boys, four of them altogether, had waited until she and her father had gotten close; then, one by one, they had taken off down the run. They’d skied out of sight and never looked back. She still remembered their laughter echoing in the cold air. Then one year they didn’t come to ski. She didn’t think they ever were there again.
“He ran away,” Annie had said to her. “He took off when he was sixteen and no one knew for years where he went. Then he showed up in Las Vegas, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Her history, she thought bitterly. She’d heard the name Cain Stone a year ago, and it had changed her whole life. She gave up working at her desk, got up, gathered her things and left the school. She didn’t have far to drive to get to the house she’d rented for herself and Sierra. But by the time she was inside, she was freezing.
Quickly, she lit the fire she’d laid in the fireplace of the old bungalow, then went into her room. The place had been rented furnished, with nondescript pieces. A brown couch, two matching chairs, knotty pine end tables and a braided rug in the living room. Her bedroom had a double-sized, metal bedstead, with a single dresser and another braided rug. Sierra’s room had a single bed, a chest of drawers and about the only thing, besides their clothes, she’d brought with them from Las Vegas—her crib.
Without looking around, Holly stripped, stepped into a hot shower and stood there
