Mills & Boon Christmas Set

She had known him. She had known he woke up at precisely seven-ten every morning. She had known he would always order grilled cheese at the university cafeteria. She had known he preferred the news over The Big Bang Theory. Angie had thought that what she had shared with Harry was intimacy and that it would lead her directly to the safety she craved. She had thought their entire lives were predictable enough to make her comfortable.

But in that boat, sharing a spoonful of ice cream with a near stranger, she had felt as if she was digging into the tip of the iceberg that was intimacy. She had felt exhilarated by the potential for danger, not afraid of it. In fact, the exhilaration was in part because, for the first time in far too long, she had not been afraid. She had been the opposite of afraid.

She had been fearless.

And she knew that feeling of being fearless was not going to go willingly back into its box.

She glanced at a clock. It was really too late to do anything and yet she felt too energized by her encounter with Jefferson to go to sleep. She unpacked the groceries and put them away, smiled at the video of Wreck and Me. If she left it out for him to find, would he watch it?

Still filled with a restless kind of energy once the groceries were stowed, Angie decided to make some blueberry muffins.

“If he gets nothing else from my stay here, he will be able to see there is life beyond bean burritos,” she muttered to herself.

* * *

Three days later, Jefferson felt like a prisoner in his own house, marking x’s on his wall. He was well aware that in the course of human history, three days was a very short time.

But in the context of having Angie aka Brook Nelson under the same roof as him, it was a torturous eternity. In his efforts to avoid her, she had driven him underground. He’d always enjoyed working at night; now it felt compulsory.

But despite seeing her only occasionally—her crazy hair hidden under a babushka obviously of her own invention, her legs looking long and coltish in shorts and skirts, T-shirts clinging to her, the sweat beading on her neck, the cobwebs sticking to the rubber gloves she always wore—there was no pretending she was not here. Even though she seemed to be avoiding him just as scrupulously as he was avoiding her, the house smelled different since she had arrived.

If it was just the smell of cleaning supplies and fresh air, it would not have been so disturbing. But no... Her scent—faintly spicy, clean, feminine—clung like a faint vapor in every room she had been in. Which, as far as he could tell, was all of them, except this room and his bedroom.

Also disturbing was the noise. If it was just the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and the washing machine and dryer, it probably would not have been so disturbing. But, though she was probably not aware of it, the more involved she got in some task, the louder she hummed.

Christmas tunes, of all things. “Jingle Bells” and “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Silent Night.” On more than one occasion she had burst into bloody song and it had stuck in his head—Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus lane—long after she had moved out of hearing.

The problem was she sounded so happy that he could not bring himself to tell her to stop. Even though he was avoiding her with all his might, on those occasions when he could not avoid bumping into her, Jefferson could see the tension she had arrived with had eased from her.

She was still easily startled—he’d come up behind her one day while she was vacuuming, and his eardrums were still ringing from the scream—but was losing that terrified, hunted look he’d first glimpsed on her first day when the pinecone had dropped on her car.

It was not just that the house was undergoing a transformation, which it surely was. Dust was disappearing. Cobwebs were being banished. Floors were emerging from under a layer of grime. Windows were, one by one, beginning to shine.

The biggest transformation was in his kitchen. The day’s mail was neatly sorted. Every surface was gleaming. Every dish he left there in the dark of night was swept away. The fridge had real cream in it for his coffee, and milk for the selection of cereals that had appeared. There were single-serving containers of yogurt, and lettuce and tomatoes. There was a selection of drinks. There was fresh fruit in a bowl on the counter.

Best of all—or perhaps worst of all, depending how you looked at it—were the meals that she left for him. Though the heat was climbing into the nineties and was over one hundred again, once, every day she had the oven on for something.

The rich smells tantalized him even before he took his nocturnal journey down to the kitchen to see what she had done. Muffins. Fresh bread. Cookies. Last night, she had left him a roast chicken dinner.

Tonight she had left a steak, and a tinfoil-wrapped potato with careful instructions how to grill it.

He set down her note, aware he felt like a wild animal being lured in by the promise of food. His anticipation for what she would make for him grew every day.

If she wanted to discuss things with him she left him a note. He was uncomfortably aware that he was looking forward to the notes as much as the food. He looked around for today’s and found it next to the stack of other ones.

He went through the old ones, aware he was smiling. Hers...

Have you got a ladder I could use outside?

His...

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES GET ON A LADDER.

Would tomorrow be a good day to put the furniture out on the deck for an airing?

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TRY TO MOVE THAT FURNITURE BY YOURSELF.

I have a system figured out.

NO.

Tonight, he read her response to that, aware he was looking forward to it.

I’m going to put the couches on dishcloths, like coasters, and slide them across the floor. Must you write in all caps like that? It’s disconcerting.

NO, YOU AREN’T, he scrawled with great enjoyment. AND YES, I MUST WRITE IN ALL CAPS. I FAILED PENMANSHIP IN SCHOOL.

He hesitated. Too much information? Stop analyzing everything. Admitting he’d failed penmanship in school was not the same as admitting he’d had a terrible row with his wife, and she had gone out into a storm...

He shook that thought off. A gentleman would offer to help Angie move the furniture.

But no, the two weeks minus the time elapsed would be so much easier to get through if he stayed on his path of avoidance. It was good, anyway. He was way ahead of schedule on the Portland project.

He went out to the deck and lit the barbecue as per her instructions. He stood there for a moment, taking in the dark surface of the lake, the lights across the way, the night sounds. It occurred to him it had been a long time since he had felt something like this: just simple enjoyment.

It occurred to him, even though she wasn’t beside him, that she was here. In his house. And somehow, it was changing everything. He wished she was down here with him.

He forced himself to suck it up. To repeat his mantra. Two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks.

* * *

Angelica surveyed the kitchen with satisfaction. The early-morning light poured through the windows. Jefferson had eaten his steak dinner and gobbled up the cookies she had made yesterday.

She looked for his note, read it and smiled. He’d failed penmanship? Really, it was hard to imagine him failing anything. She put that note with the others, aware she was collecting them.

She went over to the grinder, and put in coffee beans. In a few minutes fresh coffee was dripping into the pot. She savored the smell of it and the light and the birdsong—and Jefferson’s note. She felt so supremely rested. She felt alive and happy.

The phone rang, as she poured herself that first cup of coffee, and she felt herself tensing. Jefferson’s house phone rarely rang. For too long, the phone ringing in her life had meant the sound of breathing on the other end. Or a hang-up. Or a sobbing explanation. Or a begging plea.

She reminded herself she was fearless now and, coffee in one hand, she picked up the phone without checking the call display.

“Stone House,” she said cheerfully.

A moment later the cup, filled with coffee fell from her hand and shattered on the floor. She stared at the mess, put the phone receiver back in its cradle. She wondered, dazedly, if proclaiming herself fearless had been like a challenge to the gods.

Jefferson appeared at the kitchen door. “I heard a crash.” He took in the smashed coffee cup. “Thank God,” he said. “I thought you’d finally managed to fall off a ladder.”

She shook her head mutely.

He crossed the room in a single stride and gazed down at her.

“What is it?”

“The police just called,” she managed to croak. “The Calgary police. I took your advice and called them after...”

That magical night shimmered, momentarily, between them, like a mirage.

And that’s what it was, she told herself. A mirage. Real life was different. “Angie?” He took her shoulders and gave her a gentle shake. She looked up into his eyes, and tried to feel the sense of safety she had felt that night, and really ever since. But maybe that had been part of the mirage, feeling safe in an unsafe world.

“Tell me what’s happened,” he ordered her.

“You know that girl Winston told me he had been dating? The one who supposedly dumped him at the same time Harry dumped me?”

He cocked his head at her, frowning, still holding her shoulders, thank God, anchoring her to his kitchen and him and not allowing her to fly toward her fear.

“She’s missing. The police suspect foul play. And they suspect Winston is connected to it, and no, they have not located him yet.”

He said a word under his breath that should have appalled her. Instead, for a reason she couldn’t decipher immediately, it made her feel reassured, but still she trembled. She could feel panic quaking within her, just below the surface.

“I feel I need to do something,” she said. “But I don’t know what it is. Scream? Cry? Lock myself in the bathroom? Run away?”

“You aren’t doing any of that.” He pulled her in close to him and held her tight.

In the circle of Jefferson’s arms, she could feel the trembling begin to subside. “I’m not?” she whispered.

“You aren’t going to scream, or cry. You aren’t going to lock yourself in the bathroom, and you most certainly are not going to run away.”

She sighed against him. She wasn’t so sure she wasn’t going to cry. “I—I—I guess you’re stuck with me for a little while longer, then.”

He put her away from him, at arm’s length.

“Well,” he said, all business, “let’s make the most of it, shall we? Did you want to move furniture today?”

She stared at him, stunned by his sudden change in demeanor. “What?”

“Look, I’m not letting you move it by yourself. The last thing I need is a Workers’ Compensation claim. And I happen to have a clear day as far as my schedule goes.”

Her mouth worked soundlessly. Suddenly, she knew exactly what he was doing. Somehow he knew if he left her alone or even let her make her own decisions, they would all be bad ones. He could probably tell she was a hair away from dissolving into hysterics. Somehow he knew he had to get her focused on something else.

“You should have something to eat. I can recommend the chocolate chip cookies,” he said it as if it was an ordinary day.

“Chocolate chip cookies are not breakfast!”

A tiny smile played along his lips, satisfied. He had managed to distract her, and he was pleased about it.

“I had them. I seem to be okay,” he said. He held one out to her, wafted it underneath her nose.

She grabbed it from him and took a bite. Surprisingly, it felt as if it might not be such a bad breakfast, after all. She gobbled down three of them. Surprisingly, it felt as if the knots of anxiety in her stomach were eased. By the cookies, or by him, she couldn’t quite be certain.

While she ate cookies, he went and surveyed the living room.

“I have a plan,” Jefferson announced. “I have a furniture dolly out in the shed. I think it might work better than the dishrag system you outlined.”

She was ashamed of it, but she could not even let him out of her sight when he went to get the dolly.

“You might as well come with me,” he said, as if it was his idea, as if she was not already stuck to his heels like glue. “There are other things we might need from the shed.”

She followed him outside into the morning. She stopped for a minute, gulping in the freshness, the call of the birds, the chatter of an indignant chipmunk.

At the shed door, he stopped and looked back at her.

“Something else?” he said quietly. “He’s not coming for you here. And if he did, he’d have to get past me. And you know what?”

She shook her head.

“He’s no match for me.”

And she knew, looking up at him, that that was absolutely true. She knew why she had been reassured instead of appalled by that dreadful word he had said.

Because in that single syllable had been this message.

Jefferson Stone would lay down his life for her. And though Angie had lost the lovely sensation of fearless that she had felt over the past few days, something in her relaxed as she watched him fling open the shed door.

“There it is.”

She saw the red handles of a dolly poking out from behind a weed whacker, a sack of lawn seed and several boxes. It seemed to her that her idea of sliding the furniture out of the living room was better than his, but she said nothing.

She reached to take the first dusty box from him. Their hands touched. His closed around hers and squeezed. She realized Jefferson was offering her his strength until her own returned.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ANGIE WAS FEELING STRONGER, already, as she set down the first box, and Jefferson passed her another. Finally, he unearthed the dolly and managed to wrestle it out of the shed.

He brushed himself off while she looked at the dolly. “It’s covered in spiderwebs. We just need to—”

She caught Jefferson taking a giant step back out of the corner of her eye.

“What?”

“I don’t like spiders,” he said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

He made a face. She was aware he was not kidding, not entirely.

“For someone who does not want to be mistaken as a knight in shining armor, it was a very brave thing to go inside that shed if you’re afraid of spiders.”

“I don’t recall using the word afraid.”

“Maybe we’re all afraid of something,” she said gently.

He rejected her gentleness. “I’m not afraid of them. I just don’t like them.”

“Look! There’s one crawling up the handle. It’s huge.”

“Don’t touch that!”

She ignored him and let the spider crawl onto her hand.

“Put that down.”

“He’s cute. Look.” She held out her hand.

Jefferson stepped back. She stepped forward. He scowled. She giggled. She took another step forward. He retreated, then turned on his heel and darted through the trees.

She shrieked with laughter and went in hot pursuit of him. He plunged through the trees and leaped over fallen logs, shouting his protests.

She followed on his heels, shouting with laughter.

Finally, when they were both gasping for breath from running and laughing and leaping logs and dodging trees, Jefferson put the huge trunk of a live tree between them. He looked out from behind it. She lunged one way. He went the other.

Then his hand snaked out from behind the tree and grabbed her wrist.

“You made me drop him,” she protested. In actual fact, she was pretty sure she had dropped the spider a long time ago.

“Thank God,” he said. He threw himself down on the forest floor and lay on his back, his hands folded over his chest as if he was monitoring the hard beating of his heart. “It’s already hot,” he said.

It felt like the most natural thing in the world to lie down on the forest floor beside him. It smelled of new things and ancient things, blended together perfectly. She looked up through the tangle of branches at a bright blue sky. And then she turned her head to look at him, drinking in his strong and now so familiar profile.

New things. The way she felt about him.

Ancient things. The way men and women had come together for all time and against all odds.

“Are you really afraid of spiders?” She suspected he wasn’t. He wouldn’t be lying here in all this forest duff if he was afraid of creepy-crawly things, would he? “Or were you just distracting me from my own fear?”

“Maybe you were right. Everybody’s afraid of something.”

“What are you afraid of? Really?”

He was silent for a long time. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked quietly.

She thought of that. She thought of him being an orphan and first losing his grandparents and then his wife. She thought of his extreme isolation. Of the fact that he didn’t even want a housekeeper who was chatty.

He was afraid to let anyone in. He was afraid to lose anything else.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s obvious.”

“It’s too hot to move furniture today,” Jefferson announced, obviously not prepared to probe his fears any further, obviously fearing he had already said way too much. And so there it was. Full retreat.

Except it wasn’t. She recognized a miracle when it was presented.

“You want to go out on the boat?” he asked softly.

Angie thought of the boat and how safe she had felt there through the storm, and how much it must have taken for him to offer her this. She thought of the boat as the place where pure magic had unfolded between them.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to go out on the boat. And suddenly, I’m starving. I knew cookies were not a good breakfast! Should I pack a lunch?”

“Sure. And don’t forget your bathing suit.”

“How do you know I have one?”

“It was on the bill.”

She thought of that bathing suit. She was pretty sure she did not have the guts to wear it in front of him. On the other hand, he was testing his courage. Maybe all of it, all of life, was a call to courage.

He got up and held out his hand to her. She took it and he never let it go as they walked to the house together.

* * *

“What is that?” Jefferson asked, when Angie met him at the boat a half hour later.

“What?”

“What you are wearing.”

“It’s a bathing suit cover.”

“It looks like a cross between a monk’s frock and Mexican serape. Where did you unearth it?”

“I made it,” she said, as if she was quite pleased with herself. “I mean I didn’t sew it. I didn’t have time. I just found some fabric and cut it. I’ve always been good at making things.”

“Hmm, good might be a bit of a stretch,” he said, and realized he felt comfortable teasing her. It was a terrible thing, but he felt glad about that phone call this morning. It had broken the impasse he had created between them.

He wanted to give her—a woman who had suffered just a little too much—carefree days of summer. He wanted to do that, even if it cost him.

He took the boat out onto the lake, and they did a tour of some of its hundreds of miles of coves and inlets and arms. And then he brought them back to a place that was not that far—and yet a world away—from where his house was located.

“Let’s go ashore here for lunch,” Jefferson suggested.

“What is this place?” Angie asked, handing him the picnic basket and then taking his hand and letting him help her out of the boat.

“Watch the pier. It’s a bit rotten. This is where my grandparents’ house used to be. You can still see the foundation.”

She wandered over and looked at the crumbling stone foundation. “What happened to the house?”

He went and stood beside her, nudged a stone with his foot. “It burned down a few years ago. It had been abandoned for some time.”

“What a beautiful spot.” She reached for the basket and pulled a blanket from it. She set it out and they both settled on it. “I’m surprised you didn’t build your new house here.”

“It wasn’t practical. This spot is nearly inaccessible by land. My great-grandfather ran a trading post here for lake traffic. When I came here, my grandparents were still almost exclusively using a boat for transport.”

“How did you go to school?”

“Until high school, by correspondence. Then, my grandparents bought a place for us in Anslow. They said it was because they were getting older, but I know it was so I could have a normal high school experience, make some friends.” He grinned at the memory. “Meet a girl. My grandfather was always concerned about me meeting a girl.”

It occurred to him his grandfather would be very pleased, indeed, to see this girl eating a picnic lunch by the old homestead.

“What kind of normal did you have here?” she asked.

He thought he should probably stop talking, but on the other hand, it was good to distract her and to see her growing more relaxed by the minute.

“The best kind,” he said. “I grew up using a boat, and chopping wood and hunting and fishing. I knew every inch of these woods. It helped me. It healed me.”

He was shocked to hear himself say that. He was not sure he had ever said it before. If he had been able to say it to Hailey, would she have understood?

“I could never sell it,” Jefferson heard himself say.

“Sell it?” Angie looked at him, astonished. “I think it would be criminal to sell it.”

As they ate lunch, she seemed to know all the right questions. And so he found himself talking of things he had not spoken of for years. He told her of the basset hound named Sam who had followed him through the days of his boyhood, and of a baby squirrel he had bottle-fed. He told her of the winter the snow had piled up past the roof, and of being on the lake in twenty-foot swells. He told her of bear encounters and afternoons in the hills picking gallons of huckleberries that his grandmother turned into pies and preserves.

“People see this place as magical in the summer, but my favorite time of year here was Christmas,” Jefferson said.

“Really? Why?”

“My grandmother used to have a Christmas gathering every year, right on Christmas Day. She sent out a blanket invitation. Everyone was invited, and everyone came. My grandfather and I were put to work a month in advance. We had to find the perfect Christmas tree, and make sure there was enough wood to have a bonfire down by the lake. The main body of this lake never freezes, but sometimes the arms do, and I can remember my grandfather going out there with a saw, every day in December, to check the depth of the ice. We were allowed to skate if the ice was over four inches thick. The day he pronounced it safe was better than Christmas for me. I can remember skating on it when the ice was so clear it was like skating on a sheet of glass over the water.

“It could be hard to get here in the winter, but they came for the Stone Christmas, anyway. There were no gifts allowed at her gathering—my grandmother said the gift was each other. And so people came from miles around, and the women got around her gift rule by bringing pies and homemade bread and buns and jars of preserves.

“Families prepared skits, and we sang songs, and we ate food until we could barely move. We kept a bonfire going, and there was sledding and snow fights and snowman building competitions. Lots of times people came prepared to stay, and there were sleeping bags on the floors, and the gathering lasted for days.”

It seemed, as he spoke, he was being restored to some part of himself that he had forgotten.

“It sounds wonderful,” she said wistfully. “What happened to it?”