You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(108)

After which, what was a man supposed to do? He’d had to get her. And it had been so much fun. He had felt like a kid again, until he caught her at last and rolled her under him in the snow, when he’d realized—no, it wasn’t childish. No, he was an adult, his body at that moment felt very, very adult, and this was how his adult life could be, with her. Happy. Thrilled. Aroused. Zinging with energy and fun. Forever.

He’d proposed to her that night. She’d been so happy, too. As if, in offering himself to her, he had offered her the whole world.

And the forever of fun had lasted a few years. It turned out she had wanted more in her world than him, but that hadn’t really been a surprise when he understood how important that was to her, or even a disappointment, just, eventually, a—regret. Because he himself was all he could actually offer her. The rest of what she wanted was even more beyond his control than hers. It wasn’t even happening in his body; it was all in hers. And he knew that his physical distance from it was something for which she had a very hard time forgiving him.

Although he had tried to control what happened, God. He had tried everything: talking to her the first time—We can try again, honey—oh, shit, had that been a bad idea. And the second time: Don’t think about it, honey, please don’t get your hopes up. In a way, that technique had worked well for him, the second time—to just turn his brain off, not believe in it at all. Except that she had hated him so much for his ability to do that and for his attempts to get her to do it, too. And the third time—he had just lived in pure, knotted dread, so worried about her that he couldn’t even stand to think about the baby at all, except as what the little fetus might do to her if it didn’t, if it didn’t—

And then it hadn’t.

And none of his attempts to solve things, to make her better—Maybe we should adopt, or Honey, we’ve got us at least, or Honey, what do you think about a little trip to the Bahamas? India? Mount Everest?—had worked at all.

He looked down at her now, not really hoping for a spark of that old laughter and not finding it, either. But she settled into the walk, the kitten finally figuring out that the snow wouldn’t hurt her or at least that it was a hurt she could bear, her shoulders relaxing and a little sigh running through her, her face growing thoughtful and quiet, sadness in there, yes, but a sadness with which she had made some kind of peace.

He took his glove off—stupid armor—and caught a snowflake off her lashes, then rubbed it against her cold-flushed cheek. Her face brightened, like a surprise to her, and she looked up at him. He smiled down at her. “If I drop snow down your neck, will you chase me and kiss me?”

Her lips curled cautiously up at the corners, her eyes crinkling with a hint of her old humor. That humor was so wary now, and he wanted to coax it out of hiding. It’s all right. I know your laughter got brutalized, but we’re in a safe space now. Aren’t we? “You might be banned from waffles for the rest of your life,” she threatened him, and then her eyes flickered.

Oh, did you realize that to ban me from waffles, you’d have to actually let me back in for the rest of my life?

“I guess I won’t risk it,” he said. And then he tripped her and took her down in the snow, just like that, his pulse leaping in a giddy, testosterone-laced surge to be doing something so outrageous in their current circumstances. He cushioned her fall with his arms, bracing himself over her with a grin. “Let’s make a snow angel instead.”

But her hint of laughter faded away, and he could see her swallow. “I can’t yet,” she whispered. “She would have been four.”

Their first attempt at a child. Their second attempt would have been a boy of almost three, and their last attempt would have been just turning one. For a moment, visions flashed through his mind—a little blonde girl making snow angels, and a brown-haired boy throwing snowballs at her, and maybe him holding a tiny one-year-old by the hand to help her walk—and his own throat closed. He bent and kissed Kai, slow and firm, and pulled them back to their feet. “All right,” he said quietly and put his arm around her shoulders as they kept walking.

They hiked a long time, up through the woods. The snow was fresh and quiet under the trees, winds in the upper branches stirring flakes down on them gently, as if they were walking under Kai’s sieve of powdered sugar. He smiled at the thought of comparing the taste of sugar on her skin to that of real snow, and then his smile faded slowly as the idea grew in him, replacing pleasure in the fancy with arousal and a sense of its danger. Yes, kissing her was incredibly dangerous, more dangerous than any risk he had ever taken. He just never knew, now, how Kai might react to anything he did. That certainty of her happiness in him, once so precious, had been entirely destroyed.

Arousal and its danger laced together, strengthening each other like rival armies inciting each other to battle. The white-and-shadow quiet under the trees contrasted with the thump of his blood through his veins. A bright red cardinal flashed by like a glimpse of a broken heart, and he turned her against a pine tree and sipped a snowflake right off her cheek.

Ah—cold and fragile, yielding instantly to the warmth of his mouth and her skin. Not sweet, like her sugar, but purified of flavor.

He caught snow off the nearest branch and rubbed a pinch of it over her cheekbone, making her gasp and shiver. He breathed an apology over that snow, melting it, and kissed the cold spot, warming her up again.