The Winter Berry House

What was he going to do with this place? A thick coating of dust covered everything and there were spiderwebs strung about the corners of each room. Even the spiderwebs had dust on them. Grandma Addie would have had a conniption fit.

Thinking of her, with her easy manner and constant puttering around this big old place, caused a violent clenching in Branch’s chest. It was impossible to be here and not think of her. He had made sure to call her and check on her regularly, but Branch knew his absence had been hard on his grandmother. It had been his choice, and she never once reprimanded him for it, but he knew that Grandma Addie would have done anything to have him home more permanently. He visited as much as his work schedule allowed, sporadic visits that mostly consisted of late-night arrivals, remaining hidden inside the sanctuary of 14 Crescent Street, and disappearing again like a thief in the night the day before he was due back at work. Usually, his visits were unplanned and spontaneous; anytime he thought he heard even a hint of longing in Grandma Addie’s voice – a hint of longing that matched his own. But there was one visit a year that was always guaranteed.

Christmas.

This house had held so many massive holiday dinners that Branch had lost count. His grandparents went all-out, with Grandma Addie spearheading the huge orchestrated event. It was never simply a meal around the dining room table for a few friends and family members. Oh no, that wasn’t enough for his grandmother. Instead, there had always been an open invitation on Christmas Eve, and anyone who was around, available, with their own families or without, were welcomed to fill up the home and enjoy more homemade food, fun, and togetherness than they’d witnessed in the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year combined. As an adult, he had missed the Christmas Eve extravaganza every year, using work as an excuse for his late arrival long after the guests had retreated home. But as a child, he had helped his grandparents with the decorating. It took weeks to transform every room into a festive backdrop, but they’d done it. Every year, without fail.

Until last year, when his grandmother was stricken with chest pain. She’d called her next-door neighbor, who then called the ambulance once he arrived and called Branch from the hospital. Eighteen hours later, Grandma Addie passed away in her hospital room, with that neighbor by her bedside.

Four hours after that, Branch made it to the hospital, but he was too late to say goodbye. He wasn’t sure he would ever forgive himself for that.

Standing here now, knowing she was gone and she wasn’t coming back, Branch didn’t know how he was going to stand being in this house, in this town, without her. Losing Grandpa Duke had been hard enough three years ago, but at least Branch and his grandmother had each other to help themselves through it. In theory, anyway. Branch had stayed as long as he could then, as well, ultimately hightailing it back to the airport in Detroit to escape his grief and occupy himself with his career. Branch realized now that he’d left Grandma Addie to pick up the pieces of her heartbreak then just as she was leaving him to do now.

It was merely another item to add to the list of reasons he felt so guilty.

He could have stayed in Port Landon, helped both of his grandparents more as they aged, been there for them as they’d been there for him for so many years. Instead, he’d thrown himself into a job that couldn’t have been further away from home. It was the easy way out, the coward’s way out. Purely because the town that had welcomed him with open arms in the wake of his parents’ tragedy had chosen to turn its back on him. Because he’d made mistakes he would never be forgiven for.

Even as Branch thought it, he knew it wasn’t the entire truth. At eighteen, he hadn’t cared at all what everyone in Port Landon thought of him. He didn’t much care now, either, honestly. Sure, his grandparents’ opinion mattered, and he strived to make them proud – God, he hoped he had – but there was only one other person in this town whose opinion of him had mattered back then.

And she had given him no room to misread what that opinion was when she told him she hated him and didn’t ever want to see him again.

Kait.

It had been more than ten years. They had just been kids back then. But they had known love. Known it, felt it, become fevered by the all-consuming nature of it. And they had lost it amongst the destruction of his mistakes and the rumors his actions had flooded the town with.

Shaking his head, Branch moved back out to the front door where he had entered. He couldn’t think about that catastrophe, especially not on the heels of the guilt he carried about his grandmother. His failure to be the man that Kait Davenport deserved on top of the disappointment he undoubtedly caused his grandparents was too much to bear separately. Rehashing both of those shortcomings together … the weight of his guilt would drown him, for sure.

He shoved his work boots back on and headed back out to the driveway to collect his luggage from the Escape. Branch just needed to make it through December. By then, he would have his grandparents’ house sorted and cleaned, and he would have made a decision as to what to do with it before he left Port Landon. For good. He would have no reason to ever set foot in the small town again after that.

Thirty-one days. Surely he could manage to get through one month without causing anyone here any more trouble.

As quickly as the thought entered his mind, it was thwarted by a simple reality. He was pretty sure his presence alone would be enough to cause a boatload of trouble in this neighborhood. Not even a decade could change that.

Chapter 3

Kait

Kait was exhausted, and it wasn’t just from the six shifts she had worked in a row – which were definitely contributing to her burning eyes that yearned to close for a solid ten hours or so and the sluggish heaviness of her limbs that she figured had to be obvious in the way she dragged herself along from table to table instead of effortlessly bouncing from one to the next the way she normally did. No, it was also because she’d had to defend herself from the constant mention of Branch’s name since yesterday. Arnold’s faux pas had only been the beginning.

To Port Landon’s credit, no one was cruel enough to talk about her ex-boyfriend’s arrival to her face. On second thoughts, maybe it had nothing to do with social graces and everything to do with the whole lot of them being plain and simple cowards.

Because everyone was talking about Branch Sterling. At least, they were until Kait showed up. Every patron of the diner seemed to get suspiciously quiet each time she approached their table or booth, staring up into her pale jade eyes with a wide, you-caught-me expression.

She heard the whispers, the incessant buzz of gossip and chatter. It was like she had screamed at Branch only yesterday while standing in that hospital hallway, the way folks were chattering on about it. You would have thought the eleven years that had passed since were a figment of her imagination, or that their small town had come to a group decision that Kait couldn’t handle what had happened all those years ago.

Well, maybe no one else had got over their scandalous breakup, but she sure had. More than a decade had passed, and it’d passed by without the likes of Branch Sterling in it. He might have shattered her heart into a million pieces, and a friend might have been badly injured in the process, but Kait wasn’t the same woman she was at eighteen. Her eyes were wide open now, and she didn’t need Branch to be happy. She didn’t need him then, despite what she’d naively thought, and she sure didn’t need him now.

Branch Sterling was her past. Just because the folks around here didn’t want to focus on the future didn’t mean she had to follow suit.

Kait was thankful Janna wasn’t working alongside her today. They rarely worked together, as their boss was good about scheduling them on opposite shifts as much as possible in order to keep childcare costs down, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible to avoid an overlap in their work schedules. Yesterday had been the first time in months she and her sister had been paired up to take on the lunch rush. After eight constant hours of Janna’s perfectionism and overbearing demeanor, Kait felt a little guilty at how relieved she was to know it would undoubtedly be a while before the schedule called for them to work together again. Lunchtime hadn’t been as busy as expected, though, and the two women had managed to get the Christmas tree and two big boxes of decorations out of the storage room. Janna, always the one to plan and organize everything to death, had sorted the decorations into countless piles, deciding in a meticulous fashion which decorations would go where. Kait knew better than to question her reasoning. That’s why she focused on getting the ratty-looking artificial pine tree up, sticking its bent wire branches into the rickety wooden base. She half expected the poor thing to collapse the moment she started stringing garland and lights on it.

It didn’t, however, and the vintage tree was still standing tall today while she carefully hung a mismatched collection of ornaments on the branches. With only a few tables to serve and the lunch crowd now come and gone, Kait welcomed the change of pace. Janna would have had a fit if she’d seen her choosing ornaments and hanging them without a concrete color scheme or well-thought-out plan, but Kait didn’t operate like her sister did. Okay, so she would have chosen a color scheme and planned her ornamental execution a little more thoroughly if there had been a choice of ornaments that allowed for such luxuries, and if she didn’t have to stop what she was doing each time the bell above the door rang out. Besides, it was Christmas decorating, not choosing a seven-course meal for the Queen.

Kait had always been the more impractical of the two. Always the one to use her heart more than her head. As she plucked a faded plastic nutcracker from the cardboard box and looped it onto one of the branches, she could barely contain an indignant snort.

Follow your heart, they said. She’d had that phrase engrained in her by every adult she knew since she was a little girl. And look where that had got her. Still working in the same diner she’d managed to get a part-time job at back in high school, still joined at the hip with her older sister, still fending off the same unwanted affections from a friend she’d never deserved, and still wishing things had been different. She liked her job, and loved her sister and Port Landon more than words could say; she would never contest that. But Kait wished she had made different choices, with her head and not her heart. Wished that she was maybe just a bit more like Janna and that she had never met—

‘Branch.’

She had been scanning the room sporadically, making sure the two tables she was still serving – a booth near the front door and a table beside the window across the room – didn’t need her assistance. As she raised her gaze, the door swung open, the bell above it ringing sharply to announce the new patron’s arrival.

Kait was convinced she knew it was him before she consciously recognized him. Like something inside her felt his presence before her mind fully registered it. But if it wasn’t her mind that recognized him first, that only left …

Damn you, heart.

If Branch had expected to see her, he was a really good actor. Kait, however, knew him well enough to know he never could master the art of a poker face. He had never been a good liar. At least, she hadn’t thought so until she discovered the massive lies he’d managed to keep from her. She didn’t know what to think anymore.

Unfortunately, the only thing she could think about clearly at the moment was that Branch Sterling looked even more handsome than she remembered. He seemed taller, somehow, although it could have just been the way the sun’s rays were bursting through the windows, highlighting his lanky outline and making the contours of his jaw more pronounced. His jacket was thick to block out the frigid winter cold, his boots bulky and tucked under a pair of faded Levi’s. Dark curls of unruly hair peeked out from under a Lakers cap, and the beak of it cast a shadow across his dark eyes, deepening the hue from a chestnut brown to an undeniable espresso.

And those eyes were trained on her, unblinking. Round and haunted, as though he was seeing a ghost.

Kait didn’t think she looked anything like her teenage self, but she also didn’t doubt it would be a shock to see her, here, in the same uniform that hadn’t changed since the beginning of time. Her straw-colored hair was longer than she had worn it back then, but not much else had changed. She still pulled it back into a tight ponytail while at work, still refrained from wearing much in the way of makeup, and still knew the value of sturdy, although bland, footwear. She might be older, but there was enough resemblance remaining that she didn’t blame Branch for staring the way he was.

She suddenly realized she was standing there, hand suspended in mid-air, about to place an ornament on a Christmas tree she had forgotten existed. It was about the same time she noticed that a few people in the diner were staring, too.

‘You going to close that door sometime soon? You’re letting the cold in.’

Branch turned at the sound of the question, from the older man seated at the booth closest to the entrance. He let the heavy door swing shut behind him. ‘Sorry about that,’ he muttered with a curt nod. It was the only moment of reprieve Kait got from the intensity of his gaze.

‘I … didn’t know you worked here still.’ There was an apology in his tone she hadn’t asked for. Approaching her slowly, as though fearful he might spook her, Branch pulled his hat from his head, letting his wild waves spring free as he raked a hand through his hair. Yeah, he was definitely wearing it longer these days. ‘If I had known …’

He wouldn’t have come there at all? He would have shown up before now, hoping to catch even a quick glimpse of her? Kait wasn’t sure she wanted him to finish that sentence.

‘I heard you were in town.’ She was proud of herself for the lack of emotion her voice conveyed. It wasn’t a greeting, but it wasn’t a blatant dismissal, either. Just a neutral comment. Which was the complete opposite of the battle going on inside her. Kait wanted to step away from him but was also yearning to throw her arms around him and hug him tight. She wanted to scream at him and call him every name she could think of, while longing to whisper her gratitude for coming back to her after all this time. For being there, in front of her, allowing her to drink him in and remember all the promises and dreams that had once been the foundation of who they were.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. ‘Want coffee?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer, suddenly desperate to do something, anything that didn’t include standing there staring at the man who, in her eyes, was the definition of conflict and heartbreak.

‘We will,’ the man sitting closest to the front door hollered, confirming what she already expected – people were hanging on every word between her and Branch, eavesdropping, and they weren’t afraid to admit it. Kait offered him a polite smile from across the room, then left Branch standing by the front counter to refill their coffee mugs and check if they needed anything more.

Branch was perched on one of the stools when she returned to her station behind it, leaning on his elbows, jacket unzipped. His hat sat on the counter beside him. ‘Coffee sounds good.’

Pouring him one, she slid it toward him, along with a sugar dispenser.

‘Milk instead of cream, right?’ The second the words left her lips, she regretted them, hating their familiarity. They had thought they were so cool back then, drinking copious amounts of coffee, pretending to be adults. Kait had loved knowing the way her boyfriend preferred his coffee, like it was one of the little things that proved how close they were, how much she adored him.

Now, the knowledge was etched into her mind. She wished she could forget his coffee preference. Wished she could forget a lot of things.

‘Right,’ Branch confirmed, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. ‘How’ve you been, Kaitie?’

It was on the tip of her tongue to lash out at him. No one’s called me Kaitie in a long time, Branch. I’m Kait now, all grown up and not nearly as naive as you remember. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, too caught up in how the sound of that nickname made her heart beat faster. All she wanted to do was forget the way he made her feel and everything that went along with those feelings. It was really hard to do when he was her past personified, traipsing into the present and carrying with him the same soft eyes and alluring manner she had fallen for so long ago.

‘I’ve been good.’ It was the most she could commit to. The full truth would open a wound she wasn’t prepared to contend with. ‘You?’ Civility. She could give him that much without breaking the pact she’d made with her teenage self to never forgive him for what he did.

Staring down at the cup in his hands, Branch shrugged. ‘I’m all right,’ he replied. ‘Sorting through Grandma Addie’s place. Or pretending to, so far.’

He might have meant it as an attempted joke, but there was no mistaking the deep grief in his eyes at the mention of his beloved grandmother. Kait’s resolve to be merely civil went out the window.

‘I’m sorry about your grandma.’ She meant it, knowing full well how much the woman had meant to him. Grandma Addie had been just as much his mother as his grandmother, and she had never shied away from loving him like her own. ‘Must be almost a year now since she passed.’

‘A year tomorrow,’ Branch corrected, raising his gaze to meet hers. ‘And more than ten years since I’ve laid eyes on you. You look good.’

There it was. The fact that a decade spanned between them had been pushed out into the open, no longer the elephant in the room. Kait’s cheeks flamed crimson, knowing she would never have mentioned it on her own. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered, her throat suddenly thick.

He held her stare, a battle of wills. ‘Don’t what?’ He lowered his voice to match hers. No one else in the diner seemed to be paying them any mind, but the question was meant for her ears only.

‘Don’t come in here and make me want to forgive you.’

‘Kaitie, if you haven’t by now, nothing I can say is going to change that.’ His jaw clenched slightly. ‘Doesn’t make it any less good to see you, though.’

Damn you, she screamed silently. For still being you. Something was breaking inside her again, caused by the same man who had broken her once before. She could feel it. The difference this time was that Kait was pretty sure it was the armor she’d constructed around herself that was being fractured by him this time, not her heart. It was such a contradiction, the way he was able to calm her down and ease her mind with his simple kindness and affection, yet be capable of shattering her heart so irrevocably.

Well, that was just fine. Let Branch Sterling walk in here and throw his polite words and kind mannerisms around. Being civil to each other might put cracks in her defensive armor, but Kait was sure he could never do more damage than that. Not now. It had been more than ten years, and there was no reason they couldn’t handle this like adults. He might still be easy on the eyes and hold the same allure, but that was just pure and simple physical attraction combined with a healthy dose of nostalgia.

He was a man, and only a man. Not the love of her life, not the man who’d broken her heart, and not the man she had truly thought she would never see again. Just Branch, nothing more.

She would believe it if she repeated it enough times.

‘It’s good to see you, too.’ See, that was a very acceptable grown-up retort.

In the midst of taking a drink from his mug, Branch’s eyes seemed to change as he stared at her over the rim of it. When he set it down, an unmistakable grin played on his lips and he let out a soft chuckle, fidgeting with the handle of the mug.

‘Something funny?’ The sight of his genuine smile was causing her stomach to flutter.

‘It pained you to admit that.’ Branch’s smile stayed put, but he downed the last mouthful of coffee and tossed a five-dollar bill on the counter.

Okay, she obviously didn’t have much of a poker face, either. ‘Maybe I didn’t actually mean it,’ Kait replied defiantly, her chin jutting out in hopes of keeping up the pretense.

Leaning in, Branch’s dark eyes were alight with amusement. ‘You did, and so did I.’

Why couldn’t she pull her gaze away from him? Why did she feel like she had just been caught red-handed stealing from the proverbial cookie jar? And why in the world were the corners of her mouth tugging upward to match his?

Because he knew her, inside and out. She knew he knew her. She could pretend all she wanted if it made her feel better, but facts were facts. Branch knew her better than anyone else.

‘Is it okay if I come here and see you again?’ Another whisper from his lips, another question meant only for her.

Transfixed, Kait couldn’t help herself. She nodded. ‘How long are you here in town, Branch?’

‘Till the end of the month,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

She watched him reach for his hat and walk out of the diner, zipping his jacket up as he went. The bell above the door rang loud and shrill as he disappeared out into the snowy streets, but Kait didn’t feel the icy chill that wafted into the room from the opened door.

Branch was back, for the entire month of December. All she had to do was survive it. Two days down, twenty-nine to go.

Chapter 4

Branch

Branch didn’t believe in fate. How could he? He was a man who lost his parents as a kid, lost the woman he loved as a teenager, and lost the grandparents who had been his only remaining family in his late twenties.

If fate was real, it was cruel. For him, it was easier to disbelieve.

But when he strolled into that diner to get a cup of coffee to go, hat pulled down low and jacket collar tugged up to conceal his identity as much as he could, he would have believed in leprechauns that rode unicorns, or that pirates buried treasure in the harbor that ran parallel to Port Landon’s downtown. He would have believed in anything, because there was no way he could come face to face with those pretty emerald eyes and not believe in something bigger than himself.

Kait Davenport was even more breathtaking than he remembered, something he didn’t think was possible. Seeing her standing there in that pale purple uniform, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail with flyaway strands at her temples, it was like he had taken a step back in time. She could have easily passed for her eighteen-year-old self, he was sure of it. The only thing different was what he saw in her eyes. A hardness mixed with weary resignation. Like she couldn’t trust anyone around her, and she was tired of having to keep her guard up. Or tired of people proving her distrust right all the time.

He had been the first one to cause that haunted expression. Now, unexpectedly, Branch felt something he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Desire. Not just in the seductive sense, though there was a need pulsing inside him to be closer to Kait, as close as he could be. One glimpse was enough to make him want her in every way imaginable, to make him remind her of what they once had. Who they’d once been.

But the desire that overwhelmed him most was the need to soften that hardness in her eyes. He might have been the cause of it once, but Branch wanted to be the one to melt it away.

When he left Port Landon more than ten years ago, there had been no chance of that happening. Kait hated him, right along with a large percentage of the rest of the town. But as surprised as he was to lay eyes on her in that diner, nothing could have prepared him for what flashed in her gaze when he asked if he could see her again.