wouldn’t he come and help celebrate Christmas with his best friend’s newly reunited and rejoicing family? It went with everything Emily had been saying about the changes Cole was making. Her husband was giving a new priority to building and keeping relationships.
That’s what Casey was doing, too, wasn’t it? Making a vow to realize the importance of friendships before it was too late? Celebrating Christmas and the spirit of love with her best friends instead of that crazy, unpredictable, painful conglomeration of people sometimes known as a family?
Even her decision to create the kind of family she had always wanted for herself seemed to be wavering, perhaps due to some combination of her friends’ lack of enthusiasm and his arrival.
Stop it, Casey ordered herself. She didn’t even know if it was Turner. But all the ordering in the world would not slow her heart as the cab pulled away, and the man bent, effortlessly picked up a duffel bag and looped the strap over his shoulder, before turning to the steps that led to the front porch.
Casey was aware she was holding her breath as he stepped toward the faint light being thrown by a string of Christmas lights with too many burned out bulbs.
The light may have been weak, but it washed the familiar contours of his face, and turned the snowflakes caught in the glossy darkness of his hair to gold.
Her gasp was audible, and she covered it with quick desperation by clearing her throat. Casey’s wineglass trembled in her hand. She set it down. She told herself to move, to get out of here fast.
Instead, she was glued to the spot, her feet frozen, her eyes locked on his face.
It was him.
It was Turner. It was Turner Kennedy in the flesh.
Not unchanged, though the changes were subtle. Something in the way he held himself made a shiver go up and down her spine. As he arrived at the bottom of the step, he paused.
He had broadened in the years since she had last seen him, youthful litheness giving way to the pure power of a man completely in his prime. What hadn’t changed was that he was exuding an almost sizzling sense of himself, who he was in the world, and what he could take on.
Anything.
If the door of the inn had suddenly crashed open and a horde of bandits had fallen upon him, she had the sense he would be ready for it. He might even enjoy it!
Casey shook the picture off, annoyed that she could be so susceptible to the whisper of imagination. She knew nothing about him. She had once convinced herself otherwise, and she had been wrong.
The faint light illuminated his face, and she shivered again, despite herself. There seemed to be a certain remoteness in his expression that was different, but what did she know? She’d been a naive young bridesmaid when Turner Kennedy had been Cole Watson’s best man.
She had been the geeky girl, the science nerd, the brain, who had been noticed by the most popular boy in the school, the captain of the football team, the boy whose picture in every girl’s yearbook was marked with inked hearts.
Despite his closed expression, Turner was still the most astonishingly handsome man she had ever seen, so good-looking that a girl could fall for him.
At first sight.
So much so that when he had taken her chin in his hands as dawn broke, the morning after Cole and Emily’s wedding, and said, “Run away with me,” she hadn’t even hesitated.
Casey had tossed years and years of absolute control right out the window.
“Three days,” he’d said. “Spend the next three days with me.”
She should have known better than to share her new resolve about love with her girlfriends. It seemed she had thrown a gauntlet before the gods and they had responded with terrifying swiftness.
“Casey?”
She turned to her friends and saw the instant concern register on both their faces.
“What’s wrong?” they asked together.
What’s wrong? She was a scientist. Andrea had been right; she spent too much time in the lab. And nothing in that carefully controlled environment had prepared her for this encounter.
She was amazed when her voice didn’t shake when she said, “It looks like Turner Kennedy is here.”
“Turner?” Emily said. “I can’t believe it! We haven’t seen him since our wedding. I thought Cole had lost touch completely.”
Emily got up, raced to the front door and flung it open. “Turner Kennedy! What a wonderful surprise!”
Casey was experiencing that trapped feeling, a sensation of fight or flight. When Andrea went into the front hallway to greet the newcomer, too, Casey quietly set down her unfinished wineglass, left the parlor by the back door and slipped up the rear staircase to her room.
She went in and softly closed the door, leaning against it as if she had escaped a twisting, foggy London street with the Ripper on her heels.
Her heart was beating hard and unreasonably fast, not entirely the result of her mad dash up the stairs.
She turned and looked at her suitcase.
Good. Not completely unpacked yet. She could throw the few things she had unpacked back in it. She could wait in here, quiet as a mouse, until the old inn grew silent, and then slink out that door and never come back.
She could spend a quiet Christmas in her apartment. Never mind that she had yearned for the company of loving friends. Never mind that she had longed for holiday traditions, for bonfires and impromptu snowball fights, hanging stockings on the hearth and making gingerbread cookies with the Gingerbread Girls. Never mind that she had longed for a little taste of the kind of Christmas she would create for her own child someday soon!
Never mind all that. She would go to her little apartment, where it was safe and everything was in her control. She could look up everything she needed to know about third-party reproductive procedures.
Maybe she’d even go to the lab for part of Christmas Day. Why not?
Her research there could be her greatest gift to the world. Ask any parent whose child had been diagnosed with cancer!
Another option would be to accept her mother’s invitation.
To join her at the Sacred Heart Mission House, where the Sisters of Mercy would be serving Christmas dinner to the poor. Where her mother, glowing with a soft joy she had never had while Casey was growing up, would remind her, ever so gently, not to call her Mom.
It’s Sister Maria Celeste.
There. Both the Caravettas—except her mother did not consider herself a Caravetta any longer—selflessly saving the world at Christmas.
Her crazy family, the reason Casey had sought refuge with her friends at the inn.
But she couldn’t stay here now.
It was one thing to say you were sworn off romantic love. It was another to be tested.
And Turner Kennedy had that indefinable something that would test any woman’s resolve, never mind one who had been locked away in a lab nursing a broken heart for nearly a year.
Or had it been longer? Had it really been ever since that three days together in a fairy-tale kingdom he had created? Just for her. A Cinderella experience. The little scrub-a-muffin noticed by the prince. The prince enchanted with her.
Only in the end, the fairy tale had been reversed. He had been the one with secrets. The one who had resisted her every effort to find out why only three days, where he was going, what he would be doing next. He had been the one who had disappeared into the night, only unlike the fairy tale, Turner had not left a single clue.
She had been left holding a memory as fragile as a glass slipper, only she had never again found the person who fit it.
But