seemed she had thrown a gauntlet before the gods and they had responded with terrifying swiftness.
“Casey?”
She turned to her friends and saw the instant concern register on both their faces.
“What’s wrong?” they asked together.
What’s wrong? She was a scientist. Andrea had been right; she spent too much time in the lab. And nothing in that carefully controlled environment had prepared her for this encounter.
She was amazed when her voice didn’t shake when she said, “It looks like Turner Kennedy is here.”
“Turner?” Emily said. “I can’t believe it! We haven’t seen him since our wedding. I thought Cole had lost touch completely.”
Emily got up, raced to the front door and flung it open. “Turner Kennedy! What a wonderful surprise!”
Casey was experiencing that trapped feeling, a sensation of fight or flight. When Andrea went into the front hallway to greet the newcomer, too, Casey quietly set down her unfinished wineglass, left the parlor by the back door and slipped up the rear staircase to her room.
She went in and softly closed the door, leaning against it as if she had escaped a twisting, foggy London street with the Ripper on her heels.
Her heart was beating hard and unreasonably fast, not entirely the result of her mad dash up the stairs.
She turned and looked at her suitcase.
Good. Not completely unpacked yet. She could throw the few things she had unpacked back in it. She could wait in here, quiet as a mouse, until the old inn grew silent, and then slink out that door and never come back.
She could spend a quiet Christmas in her apartment. Never mind that she had yearned for the company of loving friends. Never mind that she had longed for holiday traditions, for bonfires and impromptu snowball fights, hanging stockings on the hearth and making gingerbread cookies with the Gingerbread Girls. Never mind that she had longed for a little taste of the kind of Christmas she would create for her own child someday soon!
Never mind all that. She would go to her little apartment, where it was safe and everything was in her control. She could look up everything she needed to know about third-party reproductive procedures.
Maybe she’d even go to the lab for part of Christmas Day. Why not?
Her research there could be her greatest gift to the world. Ask any parent whose child had been diagnosed with cancer!
Another option would be to accept her mother’s invitation.
To join her at the Sacred Heart Mission House, where the Sisters of Mercy would be serving Christmas dinner to the poor. Where her mother, glowing with a soft joy she had never had while Casey was growing up, would remind her, ever so gently, not to call her Mom.
It’s Sister Maria Celeste.
There. Both the Caravettas—except her mother did not consider herself a Caravetta any longer—selflessly saving the world at Christmas.
Her crazy family, the reason Casey had sought refuge with her friends at the inn.
But she couldn’t stay here now.
It was one thing to say you were sworn off romantic love. It was another to be tested.
And Turner Kennedy had that indefinable something that would test any woman’s resolve, never mind one who had been locked away in a lab nursing a broken heart for nearly a year.
Or had it been longer? Had it really been ever since that three days together in a fairy-tale kingdom he had created? Just for her. A Cinderella experience. The little scrub-a-muffin noticed by the prince. The prince enchanted with her.
Only in the end, the fairy tale had been reversed. He had been the one with secrets. The one who had resisted her every effort to find out why only three days, where he was going, what he would be doing next. He had been the one who had disappeared into the night, only unlike the fairy tale, Turner had not left a single clue.
She had been left holding a memory as fragile as a glass slipper, only she had never again found the person who fit it.
But now he was here. Yes, Turner had a raw masculine potency combined with a roguish, boyish charm that had completely bowled her over on their first encounter.
Casey turned off the lights in her room and lay on her bed, staring at the glow of the mostly burned out string of Christmas lights outside her window. They were making a really ugly pattern on her waterstained ceiling. She contemplated how the hurt Turner had caused her felt recent, more recent than the hurt of her broken engagement!
In a different part of the house, she could hear everyone’s voices, Cole’s and Turner’s, raised in greeting, followed by laughter and conversation. She could, after all these years, pick out the tone of Turner’s voice. It was deep, a masculine melody touching the harp her spine had become.
It was obvious the men were now in the front room where the Gingerbread Girls had been earlier.
No chance of sneaking down the staircase without being seen. Casey fervently wished they would shut up and go to bed, so she could get out of here.
Instead, Turner’s voice triggered powerful memories of a presidential suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Jumping on the beds. Sitting in front of the fireplace wrapped in a luxurious, pure white robe, while he painted her toenails red. Walking to the theater. Taking a carriage ride through Central Park.
Three days of barely sleeping, of living with an intensity that was exhilarating and exhausting, of being on fire with life and love... Strip away all the luxury, and it was his hand in hers that had caused her to feel so exquisitely alive, his eyes on her face that made her feel as if she had never felt before.
Enough! Casey shook her head clear of the memories. Finally, after experiencing what she had once seen described in a poem as the “interminable night,” she felt it was safe to creep out of her room, jacket on against the cold, suitcase in hand.
She checked the hallway. Nothing. Not a sound beyond the wheezing of an exceptionally cranky old furnace. She was pretty sure Harper slept with her owner, the innkeeper, Carol.
Casey tiptoed through the house and out the front, where the screen door shrieked like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.
She froze, listened, waited for lights to come on. It was really dark out here. Even the Christmas lights had been turned off, no doubt part of the Gingerbread Inn’s austerity program.
Stumbling through the inky darkness found only in the country, Casey finally made it to her car, where she opted to use the key so there would be no blink of headlights or short blast of the horn when she unlocked it. She actually had her key in the door when it hit her.
She could not let Emily and Andrea down like this. It wasn’t about her. It was about making Emily’s day the most incredible experience of her life.
Besides, what explanation could she offer to her friends for her sudden defection? As close as she was to them, she had never let on about those three days she and Turner had spent together. Had never breathed out loud that she harbored a crush on the man, that she
