Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance)(68)

She gives me an odd look. "No, silly. Presents are for the children, on Christmas Eve. Christmas is for food and revelry."

"Revelry?"

"I had my first glass of wine at Christmas. Real wine. My brother is younger, but he was allowed to drink before I was. Uncut wine, I mean. At table we always drank wine with water."

"You got drunk? On one glass?"

"I was fourteen," she sighs. "One glass, yes. My head felt like it was bursting the next day. I wish you'd been there to give me cranberry juice."

"Cranberry… oh, yeah. You remember that?"

She nods.

I go quiet, just watching her. She stops to fiddle with the ornaments and toys, watches a model train go around and around the trunk of a fake tree, smiling.

"What are your Christmases like?" she asks.

I stand next to her, watching the train go in circles.

"When I was little, Mom and Dad would buy me a mountain of presents. So much that they filled up the whole couch in the living room. They didn't have much and they couldn't really afford it, even buying used toys and stuff, but I never knew. They never let me know they were poor when I was a kid."

"Poor?"

I sigh. "They sat me down when my sister was three and I was thirteen, and told me my Christmas would be a little leaner so my sister could have presents. I was angry at first, but watching her rip open the packages made me change my mind, and I told them not to get me anything the next year. I mean when she was two, she couldn't open anything herself, you know?"

"Do you feast?"

"We did, yeah," I sigh. "Mom would glaze a canned ham, and Dad would let me have half a beer. I guess it's like you and the wine. We'd eat at noon, then go to my grandmother's house for the rest of the day. Then usually the weekend after we'd go up to my other grandmother's house, up in Pennsylvania."

"Canned ham?" Ana says.

"Ham that comes in a can."

"Like the Spam?"

"Like the Spam. Just a lot bigger. And less Spammy. The only thing they really have in common is a can and they came from a pig."

"Oh."

We head out of the Christmas store and back into the sunlight. Ana holds my hand as we walk and almost pulls me along as we get closer to the sea. She must not have seen it in a long time. She almost runs to the boardwalk and then across it to lean on the fence and look out.

It's a bright day but windy, and the waves are rolling in hard, rising and crashing. Ana grins and stares out as the wind picks up and stretches her hair out behind her, whipping it so hard I wish I'd brought a heavier jacket.

Without a word she runs down the stairs and darts across the sand. I catch up to her just where the waves rise farthest and roll back, the foam licking the toes of her sneakers. She leans into the wind and lets the sea spray coat her face, pressing her eyes tightly shut even as she grins wildly.

I hook my arms around her just to keep her from toppling forward into the water. I'm freezing, but she looks like she's ready to go for a dip. I rest my chin on her head and breathe against her. Ana puts her hands on my arms and rocks in my embrace, smiling.

"It's beautiful here."

"Yeah. It is. Come on."

It pains me to take her away from the water. She's enraptured with it, enamored by it. She stares at it the whole time we walk down the boardwalk.

Until she hears the distant, tinkling music and looks around. She stops in her tracks with a little scuff of her feet on the boards and her mouth falls open. She's seen Funland.

For anyone who's been to a real amusement park, Funland isn't going to be all that impressive. It occupies half a city block, fronting on the boardwalk. The biggest rides are the haunted house and the Viking ship, though a couple are taller, rising high above the building's open roof. Ana starts toward it like she's being pulled by some invisible rope, almost stumbling.

"Can we?" she pleads, turning to me. "Can we go inside?"

"Why do you think we're here?"

She grins wildly and breaks into a run, her hair whipping behind her. I sprint to catch up, then grab her around the waist before she can rush inside.

"Easy, easy," I tell her. "Rides first, then we'll play some games, huh?"

"What sort of games?" she says, smirking.

"Frog Pond."

She blinks. "Is that a euphemism?"

"No. Those kinds of games are for later. Right now we have fun. Come on, we're riding the Mad Mountaineer first."

After I buy a sheaf of ride tickets, I wedge Ana into one of the miniature roller-coaster cars that make up the Mad Mountaineer. It's not a real roller coaster. Maybe twenty feet wide, it just spins wildly in circles, the cars riding up and down on a track, no more than a foot of difference.

Ana screams wildly anyway, once it starts moving. She holds on to me for dear life, alternating between yelping and laughing. She laughs so hard she's out of breath when it slows.

She fidgets in her seat. This is the best part. I will never forget the look on her face, I swear it. The Mountaineer goes full speed backward, and Ana cries out and hugs on to me harder until she realizes what happened. Then she laughing starts again.

She's still giggling when I offer her a hand out of the car.

We ride the Paratrooper next. I can see her fidgeting nervously next to me in line. There's not much of a wait, and we take one of the cars together. The Paratrooper lifts the cars with their parachute-shaped roofs in a tilted circle, rising high over the rest of the rides before swinging down again.