confided in her, she knew instinctively it would change something irrevocably and forever.
Like her plan for a new life.
Still, looking into his closed face, she knew she was in no danger from his confidences.
He kept things to himself.
He did not lean.
He did not rely.
He was the last of a dying breed, a ruggedly independent man who was entirely self-sufficient, confident in his own strength to be enough to get him by in an unforgiving environment.
He was totally alone in the world, and he liked it that way.
She was leaving. She did not need to know one more single thing about him.
He moved to the window, away from Jamey’s relentless pursuit. He looked out and sighed.
“I don’t think life is quite done being unfair to either one of us,” he said, his voice deep, edged with gravel and gruffness.
“What do you mean?”
“Come and see for yourself.”
Amy moved beside him and was stunned to see that while she had been decorating the tree, oblivious, a storm had deepened outside the window. The snow was mounding on his driveway, like heaps of fresh whipped cream. Already the gravel road that twisted up to the house was barely discernible from the land around it.
His eyes still on the window, not looking at her, he said, “Mrs. Mitchell?”
“Amy.”
“Whatever. You won’t be going anywhere tonight.”
“Not going anywhere tonight?” Amy echoed. But she had to. She had to correct her mistake, hopefully before anyone else found out.
The urgency to do so felt as if it intensified the moment he said she wasn’t going anywhere.
If there was one thing Amy Mitchell was through with, it was being controlled. It was somebody telling her what to do. It was being treated as an inferior rather than an equal.
And she fully intended to make that clear to Mr. Ty Halliday. He wasn’t going to tell her what to do.
“I have to go,” she said.
“This isn’t the city. Going out in that isn’t quite the same as going to the corner store for a jug of milk. If you get in trouble—”
“And you think I will.”
“—and I think there’s a chance you might, it can turn deadly.”
She shivered at that.
“There’s not a lot of people out here waiting to rescue you if you go in the ditch or off the road, or get lost some more or run out of gas.”
“I’m a very good driver,” she said. “I’ve been driving in winter conditions my whole life.”
“Urban winter conditions,” he guessed, and made no effort to hide his scorn. “I don’t think that’s a chance you want to take with your baby.”
“You’re probably overstating it.”
“Why would I do that?” he asked, and his eyebrows shot up in genuine bewilderment.
Yes, why would he? He had made it plain her and Jamey’s being here was an imposition on him. The possibility startled her that he wasn’t trying to control her, that he was only being practical.
“The native people have lived in this country longer than both of us,” he continued quietly. “When they see this kind of weather, they just stop wherever they are and make the best of it. They don’t think about where they want to be or what time they should be there and who might be waiting for them. They stay in the moment and its reality and that’s why they don’t end up dead the way somebody who is married to their agenda might.”
Amy saw, reluctantly, how right he was. This was the kind of situation that had made her husband, Edwin, mental. And her in-laws. Delayed flights. Dinner late. Any wrench in their carefully laid plans sent them off the deep end.
This was her new life. If she just applied the same old rules—if she rigidly adhered to her plan—wasn’t she going to get the same old thing? Feeling uptight and harried and like she had somehow failed to be perfect?
What if instead she saw this as an opportunity to try something new, a different approach to life? What if she relaxed into what life had given her rather than trying to force it to meet her vision and expectation?
What if she acted as if she was free? What if she just made the best of whatever came?
Her desire to protest, to have her own way, suddenly seemed silly and maybe even dangerous, so she let it dissipate.
And when it was gone, she looked at Ty Halliday, standing in the window, his coat drawn around him, his handsome face remote, and she was not sure she had ever seen anyone so alone.
At any time of year, that probably would have struck her as poignant.
But at Christmas?
What did it mean that he had never put up a Christmas tree, not even when he was a child? That seemed unbearably sad to her, and intensified that sense she had of him being terribly and absolutely alone in the world.
What if she used these altered circumstances to make the best of it? What if she made the best of it by giving him an unexpected gift? What if she overcame her own hurt, the unfairness of her own life, and gave this stranger a gift?
A humble gift. A decorated tree.
Wasn’t that really what Christmas was all about? When she had left the safety of her old world behind her this morning, she hadn’t been running away from something, as he had guessed.
No, she hoped she was running toward something. Hadn’t she hoped she was moving toward something she had lost? Some truth about who she really was? Or maybe about who she wanted to be? About the kind of life she wanted to give her baby?
She did not want to be so wrapped up in her own grievances she could not be moved by the absolute aloneness of another human being.
She took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said, “I guess I could stay. Just for the night.”
He turned and looked at her, one eyebrow lifted, as if amused she thought she had a choice.
“In the morning,” he said with the annoying and quiet confidence of a man who was accustomed to being deferred to, “I’ll see that you get where you’re going.”
I’ll look after you.
Maybe it was the fury of the storm that made that seem attractive. Or maybe, Amy thought, she had an inherent weakness in her character that made her want to be looked after!
“I
