been in love for a long time now.
That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry to do this. You’ll take it as a failure, but you shouldn’t. It’s more my fault than yours. I just didn’t know how lonely it would be, waiting for you to come back. Although, to be brutally honest, there were times you seemed a thousand miles away even when you were here.
What I see now is that my feelings for you aren’t strong enough to take the frequent separations of military life. I doubt yours are, either.
So I can’t marry you. I’m sorry.
I’ll always remember you and the good times we had, but I know that this is the right thing to do. And you believe in doing the right thing, don’t you? That’s practically your mantra.
Maybe one day we’ll meet again, in happier circumstances.
Yours truly,
Denise
CHAPTER ONE
“ARE YOU CERTAIN we’re not at the North Pole?” Michael surveyed the frigid landscape beyond the ice-encrusted windows of the rental car. After his deployment to the Persian Gulf earlier that year, he was familiar with loneliness and deprivation, but he’d never been to a place as cold and isolated as this before.
The strange new world was nearly colorless. Out of the flannel sky, fat, lazy snowflakes spiraled toward the windshield in random loops and whirls. A frosty two-lane highway stretched away into a frigid forest of bare branches and ragged pines, which were burdened by mantles of heavy snow. Even the sun seemed leached of warmth and color, a tissue-paper disk hidden behind layers of clouds.
Michael shivered inside his Navy-issued topcoat. His bleak mood offered no more warmth than the rental car’s faulty heater.
Christmas in a town called Christmas. The stuff of sugar plum dreams, except he wasn’t buying it. There was no magic remaining in Mike’s world.
“Gotta be the North Pole,” he grumbled.
“Nah.” Nicholas York shoved the heating lever up to full blast, hoping to eke out another degree of warmth. The hearty Yooper—a common slang term for a denizen of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—had been Mike’s closest friend since flight school in Corpus Christi, right on through to their present assignment in the Blue Knight strike fighter squadron. “Not unless our pilot took a wrong turn.”
Michael grunted. “I didn’t like the look of the man.” They’d connected in Detroit, flown north in a rinky-dink prop plane, then disembarked at an airport in the middle of nowhere. From there they’d driven over a hundred miles deeper into nowhere. Maybe they had traveled beyond the North Pole.
“Only because you hate giving up control,” Nicky said cheerfully.
He had good reason to be cheerful. Nicky was going home for the holidays, to his wife and children. While Mike was glad their leave had come through at the last minute, for the Yorks’s sake, he sure wished he had a better plan than extra-wheeling it with someone else’s family for the holidays. If Nicky hadn’t insisted, Mike might have spent the time off hunkered down with a case of Michelob and a sixty-four-inch football telecast, in an effort to forget that he had no homecoming reunion of his own. Not even one that took place in a frozen wasteland.
Mike burrowed deeper into the coat’s raised collar. “I’m here, aren’t I? Seven days of Christmas in a town called Christmas. Seven days of out-of-control holiday celebration.”
Nicky gave him a look. An I-know-what’s-frosting-your-butt look. “Buck up. There are no Scrooges in a Christmas Christmas.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ordinarily, Mike was a doer, not a brooder, but he’d had a lousy year. First he’d been Dear Johned, then stranded for the holidays by a mother and stepfather who’d rather cruise Belize than gather around a faux fireplace in their Florida condo. Adding the recent news that his squadron would soon be sent on another tour of the Gulf had put him in an unusually morose mood.
He looked out at the barren landscape and said, with heavy sarcasm, “Another fine Navy Day.”
“Hey, now.” Nicky peered eagerly through the windshield, as if there was anything out there except more of the same. “Wait’ll you see Shannon and the kids. They’ll get you into the Christmas spirit.”
“Don’t worry,” Mike said. One good, swift kick in the keister would jar him out of his malaise. “I’ll be jolly for them. Ho, ho, ho.”
While more than a year had passed since Mike had seen Nicky’s family, they’d always be tight. There had been many good times, especially during the first years of duty after the men had earned their wings. Mike was the godfather to the Yorks’ first son, Charles, known as Skip. And Shannon had fixed Mike up with Denise, so they’d frequently double-dated with the Yorks.
At that thought, the fond memories might have turned sour, but Mike wouldn’t let them. He focused on Nicky’s kids instead. He was looking forward to being Uncle Mike again. Presents were wrapped and ready in his luggage.
There were also other family members to meet on this visit—parents, two sisters, assorted aunts and uncles. All of them ready to welcome Mike with open arms. Given his less-than-festive mood, the prospect was not entirely heartening.
Mike straightened. “What’s that? That big, white thing?”
“What?” Nicky followed Mike’s nod. “You mean the snowman?” He leaned over the steering wheel. “We’re home.”
The plywood snowman was fifteen feet tall, erected on the side of the road beside a placard that read Welcome to Christmas, Michigan. Mike stared as they drove by. The snowman’s painted details were faded by time and a dusting of snow, but the message was clear. He was in for it.
“There’s a Santa sign on the western end of town,” Nicky said, almost apologetically.
Celebrate or bust. Mike geared himself up as they drove toward a cluster of buildings that signified the outskirts of the town. Here was color at last. Every structure was strung with lights and decorated to the max. Bulbous, blow-up cartoon figures perched atop piles of snow. Plastic reindeer ran a roof line. Metallic man-made trees sat side by side with the real thing, all of them circled with blinking lights. The holiday banners that had been strung from the electric poles flapped in the wind.
“I ought to bring something,” he said suddenly. “Like a…what do you call it—a hostess gift?”
“Don’t bother. We Yorks are an informal bunch.”
“No.” Mike seized on a plan that would give Nicky and his family some private time. And himself, too. “When we reach the downtown area, drop me off. I’ll nip into a gift store, then get a taxi—” He stopped abruptly, supposing that there were no taxis. “I’ll hitch a ride, or whatever. If your family’s place is close enough, I can walk.”
“In this storm?” Nicky shook his head. The snowfall had thickened. Clumps of the white stuff had accumulated at the edges of the windshield wipers that swept the glass. “Mom would never forgive me. She’s expecting you.”
“Right—for
