A Blazing Little Christmas(85)

The streets were decorated with lights that glimmered in the darkness, and he found the Neumann house easily—it was the one with thirty-seven cars lined down the block. In the window, the Christmas tree shined and beckoned. Just like her.

Inside the security of his truck, his palms were sweating, and he rubbed them on his jeans. For a long time he stared at the house, waiting for the familiar need to run. The clock on the dashboard said it was seven o’clock, five hours to midnight, and Christmas Day.

Ten minutes later, then twenty minutes. Two hours later, with the moon high in the sky, he realized the panic inside him was gone. He had other needs now. Rebecca. He walked up the snow-covered sidewalk and rang the bell.

An older woman answered, a light-up reindeer pin clipped to her sweater. “Mrs. Neumann?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m here to see Rebecca.”

“Certainly. Come in.”

“I’ll wait outside, thanks,” he told her.

She frowned, but nodded and went to find her daughter.

The noises coming from inside the house were loud. Laughing, singing, a million voices were talking at once. Those sounds alone terrified him. This was new and strange. But he would do this. He could do this.

Rebecca came to the door, and when she saw him she smiled at him, her eyes full of excitement and hope. He looked at her, looked at the sprig of mistletoe hanging over the door, and smiled back.

Then he kissed her. Full on the lips.

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered against his mouth.

“I’m late. I had to go to Canada, but I’m back. For good.”

“I told you the French language was overrated.”

“Yeah,” was about all that he could say, because he had to kiss her again.

Dear Santa,

I just want you to know up-front that Rebecca is making me write this letter to thank you. She’s convinced you’re real. Me? It’ll take a while to convince. I’m not so big on the whole Christmas experience, and Santa, and “peace, love and joy,” but I’m starting to understand, especially the love part. That I’m getting down. So, thank you.

Sincerely,

Cory Bell





Epilogue


“What is it about the snow that makes people fall in love?”

Roland heard his wife’s question as he burrowed in the refrigerator looking for the ingredients for his wife’s favorite cocktail. He knew some of the younger guys tried to sway their dates with expensive champagne, but Roland had learned long ago that hot chocolate was his wife’s aphrodisiac of choice.

And Roland had learned never to argue with anything that made his wife sigh with happiness.

“Well, it’s pretty.” He poured milk in a pan and turned it on just high enough that he wouldn’t scorch it while Helen kept her eyes trained on a spot out on the lake.

Their home was a stone’s throw away from the inn. Close enough for them to run over in an emergency, but far enough away to let them feel as though they could get away from it all on the hard days.

“Roland Krause.” She turned from the window to frown at him, clearly displeased. “Is that the best you can do? Your wife asks you a thoughtful question about the nature of love and what inspires something so profound and you suggest that snow is pretty?”

He hid a grin as he stirred the cocoa into the pan, and attempted to give her question more serious thought. Because no matter how effective chocolate had been at lighting his wife’s fire in the past, he knew from long experience that the best aphrodisiac for a woman—for his woman—was a sense of mental connection.

It had taken him ten years of marriage to come up with that, but it was a notion he’d put to good use since then. Who said you couldn’t teach an old guy new tricks?

“You’re right.” He took his time thinking, waiting for his wife’s good humor to come around, the drink to warm and inspiration to strike. “I think it’s the freshness of the snow that does it.”

He poured some cocoa for him and poured hers into her favorite pewter mug, the one they’d bought on a honeymoon trip up to Montreal. He still smiled to remember that.

“What do you mean?” Helen drew closer, her eyes all for him now.

He handed her the drink and kissed her on the forehead.

“I think snow brings to mind fresh starts and new beginnings. It’s clean and it’s pretty, it makes the world around us quiet, and it forces us to stay home and look inward instead of racing around the countryside looking for happiness under any old rock.”

He settled across the kitchen table from his wife in her blue bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, her hair pinned high on her head after her nightly bath. She smelled good. Looked better.