Mills & Boon Christmas Set

There were two guest suites off the entertainment room with fold-back doors out onto private decks that overlooked the lake.

She could choose one to stay in. Both would probably provide ample separation from the master of the house.

But it looked, she thought with a bit of trepidation, as if it would be very easy to break into this lower level. Besides, maybe the photo shoot crew would need a place to stay.

After making a thorough list of what needed to be done downstairs to make it habitable for the photo crew, should they decide to stay there, she scooped up the dirty dishes and went back upstairs. There was no room in the dishwasher for the dishes, and so she started it, stacking a second load above it. It felt beautifully satisfying to be doing these normal things.

Then, she crept down the hall the way Jefferson had gone. The first door was firmly closed, and she went on extra silent feet past it. She could hear him talking, and since he did not seem like the type who would talk to himself, she presumed this was the phone call he had scheduled.

And then she went past his office, farther down the hallway. The next door was open a crack to reveal the master bedroom.

She peeked in. There was a huge window that capitalized on the view. Like all the other windows in the house, it needed a thorough cleaning.

A door led to a private deck, where there was a covered hot tub. Another door, closed, must have led to the master bath.

The bed was king size, with a gorgeous solid headboard of gray weathered wood that looked as if it might have been retrieved from an old barn. Still, the room lost any semblance to boutique hotel chic because the beautiful linens on the unmade bed were rumpled. There were clothes on the floor and overflowing the dresser drawers. There was a heap of magazines sliding off the nightstand, and several empty glasses and plates were scattered about available surfaces.

She moved away from Jefferson’s open bedroom door, contemplating how relieved she was he had specifically told her to stay out of his room. She bit back a nervous giggle at the thought of what might be in there. Good grief, she’d been saved from picking up his underwear off the floor.

“My heart is overflowing with gratitude,” she said softly, out loud, and realized it was completely true. She felt as if she had been plucked from a terrible predicament, but more, she had been given a task to do, and she had a sense of being needed, of having a contribution to make.

She kept going.

There were two more guest bedrooms, and a guest bath. The opulence of these rooms was undisturbed. Except for dusting and freshening—and maybe a vase of flowers—they already looked ready for the cover of a magazine.

At the far end of the hall was a narrow doorway. She thought it was a closet, and opened it to see if this was where extra linens were kept.

Instead she found a narrow staircase, and, intrigued, she followed it.

As soon as she saw what was at the top of that narrow staircase, Angie knew this was where she would stay. Her sense of gratitude deepened. The room was a secret sanctuary, octagon shaped, encased in windows. There was even a tiny bathroom through one door. She peeked in at the claw-foot tub, and at yet more windows overlooking the lake. Then she turned back to the room.

It was a delight in whites: white bed, white linens, white walls. The white draperies, on closer inspection, were silk. She was delighted to see the room also had a small craft alcove with a sewing machine and neat cubicles full of fabrics and craft items.

Angie could not help herself. She went over and inspected the sewing machine. It was a very good model. Growing up as she had, in a single-parent household, there hadn’t always been money for the fashionable clothes she wanted. But a sewing lesson in a home economics class had changed all that. By the time she was in high school, she could copy any design she saw and was creating her own designs, too. She had made extra money sewing for her mother’s friends and for her own classmates.

At home, tucked away safely in a drawer was a sketch for the wedding dress she had designed herself and hoped to wear down the aisle.

That memory brought her back to reality with an unpleasant snap. She became aware it was also unbelievably hot and stuffy in this room, and she went across the bleached hardwood floor and threw open the windows. Within seconds a gorgeous, cool cross breeze was coming off the lake, fluttering in the curtains and cooling and freshening the room.

Though it was not 100 percent in keeping with her mission of making mental lists of what needed to be done in each room, Angie gave in to the temptation to flounce down on the bed. Her flounce created a cloud of dust, but she lay there, anyway, letting the fresh breeze from the windows carry the dust away. She allowed herself to contemplate the delicious sense of being 100 percent safe.

The windows were low, and even lying down she could see the lake. The view from this room was spectacular. She was looking down at the decks below, the one with the hammock on it, and the other with the hot tub.

She blushed at the thought she could spy on her boss while he sat in that tub. He did not seem like the kind who would wear a bathing suit!

“That’s exactly the kind of nosey parker he does not want around,” she told herself.

She looked away from the hot tub and could see that, beyond the decks, there were rough stairs carved out of the face of the huge stone the whole house sat upon. The steps led to a crescent moon of a beach and a dock with a sleek motorboat bobbing at its mooring. An afternoon wind was kicking up, and there was a chop on the water, the waves white capped.

She knew she could not go to sleep. She could not. But to find safety after experiencing so much tension? To have a sweet sense of mission after floundering in her own distress for so long?

Her eyelids felt as if they were weighted down by stones. She sighed, snuggled into the somewhat dust scented white of the duvet on the bed, and fell fast asleep.

* * *

Darkness fell, and Jefferson was edgily aware as he set down the phone after a long afternoon of conferences that he was not alone in his house.

The envelope she had passed him earlier, marked Urgent, caught his attention and he opened it.

Dear Jefferson,

As I mentioned to you in our recent phone conversation, the town of Anslow hopes to provide a picnic area where the Department of Highways widened the road after your wife’s accident. Our intention is to name the area the Hailey Stone Lookout.

Hailey had not been part of our community for very long, but we so want to honor her in this way. Would you please consider attending the fund-raiser as our guest? It would mean a great deal to all of us.

The theme is Black Tie Affair and dress is formal. Dinner with dancing to follow.

Will you let me know?

The letter was signed by Maggie, who as well as running the Emporium, was second in command to the mayor, and the town’s most goodhearted busybody.

She, like, Clementine, had been a friend of his grandmother’s. She had been one of the ones who circled around him after the death of his parents, clucking over him and loving him through all that pain, sewing him seamlessly into life of a small town. She had cheered at his hockey games and been part of the standing ovation for Grease. She had been in the front row, beaming at his graduation. She had held his grandmother’s hand when they had buried his grandfather, and again when he had gone away to university. It was Maggie who had held his own hand when he came back for his grandmother’s funeral.

When he and Hailey had decided to build on this land that had been his grandparents’ it had been Maggie who had welcomed them home as if they belonged here.

Had he already known, even at those initial stages, that Hailey would never belong here?

Jefferson glanced at the date. The fund-raiser was two weeks away, the day before the magazine crew was showing up. He cursed under his breath. It was the second time in one day that honoring Hailey had come up. Just like with the photo shoot, how could he refuse? Plus, he didn’t want to let Maggie down. But he had a horrible feeling the whole thing was just a ruse—not to honor Hailey but to parade the whole town’s eligible women before him.

The people of Anslow meant so well, but none of them could believe a life worth living could be had without family. They thought it was “time” for him to get over it and get on with it, as if these things could be done on a schedule. But couldn’t they see? For him family was forever connected to loss. And it was loss he could not bear any more of.

“I’ll think of a way,” he decided. He wished his new housekeeper had never handed him the envelope.

His new housekeeper. He listened. He thought he would hear sounds of her rummaging around, but there was nothing. In fact, he was pretty sure, now that he thought about it, that he had not heard a sound for hours.

He slipped out of his office and into the hallway. Night was falling and his house was in deep shadow. He sniffed the air. He knew there was hardly anything to cook with, so why was he disappointed that she had not made him dinner, and then sharply annoyed at his disappointment.

He had done fine without her for all these years.

He noticed the doorway at the end of the hall was open, and he went toward it, and then quietly up the dark staircase.

He paused as he came into the room. There was very little light left in it. It had been Hailey’s favorite room in the whole house design.

“Like a secret room,” she had said.

It had seemed to him it was the kind of room their kids might have adored, back then, when he had still held the hope he would one day create a family of his own.

But Hailey had designed the room not for kids but for crafts.

Crafts? He remembered the astonishment in his voice. Because his wife, the consummate professional, did not do crafts any more than she did double ovens.

The knife ache of pain throbbed along his temples. Because he had had a dream of settling here, and having kids here, and the night that Hailey had run off into the storm, it had been apparent their dreams were entirely different.

He had failed her so colossally.

Then, as his eyes adjusted to the dimness in the room, Jefferson saw Brook on the bed. She was curled up on her side, facing him, and she was fast asleep, her golden sand curls scattered over the white pillow cases.

It occurred to him he should feel annoyed. This was hardly the way for her to make the stellar impression she had promised. And yet seeing her sleeping, the anxiety completely relaxed from her face, Jefferson did not feel annoyed.

He felt as if he had done the right thing, and maybe the only thing. A thing that would have made his grandparents proud of him. This was his grandparents’ land. They would have never turned away someone in need. That was the unspoken creed they had lived their lives by, and no one had benefited more than he from their strict adherence to the golden rule.

He stood there for a moment too long, because Brook’s eyes opened, sleepy and disoriented at first, and then they widened.

She sat up on the bed. A scream of pure terror erupted from her. She scrambled backward, knees to her chin, pulling the covers along with her and putting her back into the corner.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, Brook, it’s okay. It’s me.”

That apparently was not reassuring, as she screamed again, a scream of fear so primal it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“Jefferson Stone,” he said, but then it occurred to him he had not volunteered his name as of yet, so it might not reassure her at all. It also occurred to him, the light in the room was very dim. All she could see was a hulk standing in her doorway.

He stood there for a moment trying to get his eyes to adjust more fully. She scooted out of the corner bed, and he lost sight of her in the darkness. And then something crashed down on his head. By instinct, he reached out, connected with the arm of his attacker and pulled her in close to him.

“Let me go,” she screamed, fighting like a wildcat.

Instead of letting her go, Jefferson pulled the panicky woman into his chest and held her hard and tight. She pummeled him with her fists. She reared back and hit his chest with her head. He was afraid she might bite him. But he would not let go.

“Brook, stop it,” he said quietly. “Stop it. It’s just me. Jefferson.”

Finally, his voice seemed to penetrate all that panic. The wriggling strength of her went suddenly still, though he could feel the rabbit-fast beat of her heart against his chest.

“Jefferson?” She tilted her face up at him, and he could see the glitter of gold in her eyes as she stared up at him, frightened and baffled.

“Jefferson Stone, your new boss?”

Silence. And then, recognition pierced the glaze in her eyes, and for the first time he thought she might actually be wide-awake.

“Oh, my God! My new boss. I just hit my new boss with a lamp.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I’m so sorry. No. I’m beyond sorry. I’m mortified. Devastated. Appall—”

“I get it,” he said drily.

She seemed to realize she had made no effort to pull away from him. He realized how delicate she felt pressed into the length of him. He realized what he wanted to realize the least: that his life had become too vacant, lacking almost completely in this most basic of human needs. To be touched.

Jefferson Stone was far too aware that Brook felt good. And smelled good, and that a man could live to see eyes like that searching his face for goodness.

And finding it.

She seemed to realize now that rather than fighting to get out of his arms, she was clinging to him. Embarrassment painted her cheeks a delicate shade of pink. She dropped her arms to her sides and took a wobbly step back from him. After a moment, she lifted her arm and pushed her hand through her rumpled curls.

“I think you should sit down,” he said.

No argument. She retreated to the bed. She sat on the edge of it, peering through the darkness.

He reached over and flicked on the overhead light.

Jefferson had never seen terror as naked as what remained in her freshly illuminated face. He held up his hands, like a cowboy who had dropped his weapon, and he backed toward the door. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

But now comprehension was dawning in her own features.

“Of course, you’re not,” she said. “I know who you are now. I thought you were...” She dropped her head into her hands. Her whole body shuddered.

“Are you crying?” he asked. It was the first time since this whole thing had started that he felt panic.

“N-n-no.”

Clearly she was lying. Sheesh. She was the world’s worst liar.

Jefferson hesitated in the doorway. What he wanted to do was run from the sheer need in her. She was about to hit emotional meltdown.

“I’m practically a hermit,” he told her. “I don’t know how to help you.”

“I—I—I don’t need any h-h-help from you.”

But she did. She needed, obviously, to be comforted.

He was in no way qualified to do that. His every inclination was to keep backing up until he was all the way down the stairs.

But what he wanted to do, and what he did, were two separate things.

“Has anyone ever told you that you are the world’s worst liar?” he asked.

CHAPTER SIX

“THAT WOULD BE a good thing, wouldn’t it?” Brook sniveled. “Being a bad liar?”

In any other circumstances, Jefferson would have agreed with her. But at the moment? He would have liked to believe her. That she did not need any help from him.

Jefferson told himself that rap on the head with her bedside lamp was preventing him from thinking rationally. He was shocked at himself when he did not retreat from Brook’s naked need but, instead, dropped his arms to his sides and moved with measured steps into the room, around the shattered lamp and across to the bed.

She looked very vulnerable, still in the blouse and shorts she had arrived in, though now her outfit was quite crumpled. He was ready to stop the second she indicated he should, but she never did. He arrived at the bed, and felt large and oafish, towering over her. She peeked through the fingers that covered her face. She drew in a long, shuddering breath.

She was trembling. It reminded him of aspen leaves in a breeze. Given how frightened she had been, he was sure his very size intimidated.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I feel like an ogre in a fairy tale.”

She hiccuped, glanced at him through her fingers again and tried for a wobbly smile. “Then I hope it’s Wreck.”

“I don’t have a clue who that is,” he admitted.

“Wreck and Me? It’s a kid’s movie about an ogre.”

“I’m not up on my kids’ movies.”

“Wreck turns out to be the good guy, despite appearances.” She wasn’t sobbing uncontrollably anymore, so he was making progress. Maybe. Did he want her to think he was a good guy? Not really.

Women like her pinned their hopes and dreams on men they perceived to be good guys. Like most, he would eventually let her down.

But not tonight. Tonight he could be a good guy. He hesitated, looking for a way to not be quite so big against her tininess. And then, seeing nothing else to do, so he was not hovering over her from a great height, he sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under his weight, and she slid toward him. Their thighs touched. Hers were bare.

A truly good guy would not be so suddenly and painfully aware of her.

She did not try to scoot right through the wall, but regarded him with wide eyes studded with tears.

“So, Brook, who did you think I was?” he asked.

For a moment, she didn’t comprehend the name, confirming that she was just about the world’s worst liar and that she had lied about who she was. But that lie was somehow connected to this terror and to the tears trickling down her cheeks. Now was not the time to press her for the truth.

“I—I—I thought you were someone else,” she managed to stammer.

“That’s reassuring.” He deliberately kept his voice flat and calm. “I can be grumpy, yes. But I don’t think terrifying enough to deserve a lamp over the head.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve certainly never had a woman react to me like that before.”

He saw the faintest glimmer of a smile and was encouraged by it. It was like trying to win the trust of a wary deer in a meadow.

“No, I don’t suppose you have,” she said.

This was going from bad to worse. She was blushing delicately. She probably would have liked to lie about the fact she thought he was attractive. There was no need for him to preen. He needed to recognize the danger. His housekeeper thought he was attractive. And a good guy.

She was obviously going to survive. He ordered himself to get up and leave.

The stupid good guy vetoed him.

“Who?” he asked. “Who the hell is scaring you like this?”

His tone was all wrong, he realized, the fury at whoever it was having crept, entirely unbidden, into his voice. She seemed to shrink in on herself, as if being terrified was an indictment of her, as if somehow her being terrified was her own fault, an unforgivable weakness.

“It was just a bad dream,” she said, her voice muffled.

She was lying again. It had not been just a bad dream. But he let it go. He shouldn’t have pursued it in the first place. It fell strongly into the none of his business category. It was time to extricate himself from this situation.

The good guy was not ready to go. The good guy was struggling to find words to bring her comfort. Of course the colossally self-centered guy had been in charge so long, he could find none. The analyst had long ago banished sensitivity as a weakness that could not be tolerated.

The good guy could not fail to notice she was still trembling, that tears were still slithering out between the fingers that covered her face.

The bad guy in him sighed with resignation and went, somewhat unwillingly, where the good guy told him to go. It was not a place of numbers. Or words. Or equations. Or analysis.

The good guy in Jefferson Stone went to the place where his grandmother had gone when a frightened and heartbroken waif had been delivered to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

But she wasn’t. Her voice was wobbling as if she was running a jackhammer. She scrubbed furiously at her tears with the palm of one hand.

Some instinct or memory of the little boy he had once been, some primal recognition of what goodness was and what was required of him made Jefferson slide his arms under her and tug her over onto his lap. Her hesitation—a sudden stiffening, a small resistance—did not even last a breath. And then she was snuggled into his chest, her curls tickling his chin, her tears washing through his shirt, her warm weight a puddle against him.

“It’s okay,” he said. His voice was rusty, unaccustomed to reaching for that gentle note. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re safe.”

Sweetheart? Desperation to make her feel better was obviously making him crazy. What was he doing calling her sweetheart? But somehow he didn’t want to call her Brook, to invest in the obvious lie she had told him about her name.

It added to his sense of craziness that making physical contact with his new housekeeper seemed to be becoming a regular event!

But, at that moment, the good did shine through. Because despite the sweetness of her curves, despite her warmth pooling against him, despite her designated role in his life, despite the lie of her name between them, she felt not like the beautiful woman that she was. She felt only like a frightened child, as he had once been. And he felt only like a person reaching deeply and desperately within himself for the decency to comfort her, as his grandmother had once done.

And so he stroked her hair and told her over and over again, in a crooning voice that he did not recognize as his own, that she was safe. He could feel the tension draining out of her, her muscles relaxing, her breathing becoming more regular, the hard pulsing of her heart slowing.

And she must have felt safe, because she finally said, her voice low and tentative, “You know how you said I’m not a very good liar?”

“Hmm?”

“My name isn’t Brook.”

He waited.

She sighed as if she were weighing the wisdom of what she was about to do. “It’s Angelica. Angie.”

He waited, again, to see if she would go on, if she would explain the necessity of the subterfuge to him, but she didn’t. In fact, he felt her relax totally, and then her breath came in even little puffs against his chest. Her hair had fallen forward, shielding her face, and when he tucked it back, he saw she was asleep.

He sat there for a long time, afraid to waken her. Finally his arm felt as if it was going numb. He wondered, as he worked his way out from under the slight weight of her, if she had ever truly been awake.

He settled her back in the bed, drew the covers over her and gazed down at her for a moment.

Her face looked relaxed, angelic even, the perfect face for someone named Angelica. He bent and kissed her cheek, as if she was a child he had tucked in.

And then he turned swiftly from her, embarrassed by his tenderness. “I hope,” he muttered, “neither of us remembers a thing about this by morning.”

She had a chance of that. He did not.

He glanced once more at the sleeping woman, then went quietly down the steps and closed the door to the turret room behind him.

Jefferson was aware of steeling himself against whatever he had felt in that room. It was one thing to be a good man. But it was another to care about others. To care about others was to invite unspeakable pain into your life. He would use this incident to shore up rather than lessen his resolve for their relationship to be professional only. He would withdraw himself, as completely as it was possible to do while they were under one roof. Withdrawing was something he was an absolute expert at. After the blow of Hailey’s death, he’d withdrawn quite successfully from the world for the past three years.