Maureen Child - A Cinderella Story - Maid Under the Mistletoe / My Fair Billionaire / Second Chance with the CEO

Of course, he’d gotten here. To this mountain with the beautiful home he shared with a housekeeper he paid to be there. To solitude that sometimes felt like a noose around his neck. To cutting ties to his family because he couldn’t bear their grief as well as his own.

He gulped down a swallow of hot coffee and relished the burn. He stared out the shop window at the relentless snow and listened to the otherworldly quiet that those millions of falling flakes brought. In the quiet, his mind turned to the last few days. To Joy. The tension between them was strung as tight as barbed wire and felt just as lethal. Every night at dinner, he sat at the table with her and her daughter and pretended his insides weren’t churning. Every night, he avoided meeting up with Joy in the great room by locking himself in the shop to work on what was under that tarp. And finally, he lay awake in his bed wishing to hell she was lying next to him.

He was a man torn by too many things. Too twisted around on the road he’d been walking for so long to know which way to head next. So he stayed put. In the shop. Alone.

Across the yard the kitchen light sliced into the dimness of the gray morning when Holly jerked the door open and stepped outside. He watched her and wasn’t disappointed by her shriek of excitement. The little girl turned back to the house, shouted something to her mother and waited, bouncing on her toes until Joy joined her at the door. Holly pointed across the yard toward the trees and, with a wide grin on her face, raced down the steps and across the snow-covered ground.

Her pink jacket and pink boots were like hope in the gray, and Sam smiled to himself, wondering when he’d fallen for the kid. When putting up with her had become caring for her. When he’d loosened up enough to make a tiny dream come true.

Sam was already outside when Holly raced toward him in a wild flurry of exhilaration. He smiled at the shine in her eyes, at the grin that lit up her little face like a sunbeam. Then she threw herself at him, hugging his legs, throwing her head back to look up at him.

“Sam! Sam! Did you see?” Her words tumbled over each other in the rush to share her news. She grabbed his hand and tugged, her pink gloves warm against his fingers. “Come on! Come on! You have to see! They came! They came! I knew they would. I knew it and now they’re here!”

Snow fell all around them, dusting Holly’s jacket hood and swirling around Joy as she waited, her gaze fixed on his. And suddenly, all he could see were those blue eyes of hers, filled with emotion. A long, fraught moment passed between them before Holly’s insistence shattered it. “Look, Sam. Look!”

She tugged him down on the ground beside her, then threw her arms around his neck and held on tight. Practically vibrating with excitement, Holly gave him a loud, smacking kiss on the cheek, then pulled back and looked at him with wonder in her eyes. “They came, Sam. They’re living in our houses!”

Still reeling from that freely given hug and burst of affection, Sam stood up on unsteady legs. Smiling down at the little girl as she crawled around the front of the houses, peering into windows that shone with tiny Christmas lights, he felt another chunk of ice drop away from his heart. In the gray of the day, those bright specks of blue, green, red and yellow glittered like magic. Which was, he told himself, what Holly saw as she searched in vain to catch a glimpse of the fairies themselves.

He glanced at Joy again and she was smiling, a soft, knowing curve of her mouth that gleamed in her eyes, as well. There was something else in her gaze, too—beyond warmth, even beyond heat, and he wondered about it while Holly spun long, intricate stories about the fairies who lived in the tiny houses in the woods.

* * *

“You didn’t have to do this,” Joy said for the tenth time in a half hour.

“I’m gonna have popcorn with Lizzie and watch the princess movie,” Holly called out from the backseat.

“Good for you,” Sam said with a quick glance into the rearview mirror. Holly was looking out the side window, watching the snow and making her plans. He looked briefly to Joy. “How else were you going to get into town?”

“I could have called Deb, asked her or Sean to come and pick up Holly.”

“Right, or we could do it the easy way and have me drive you both in.” Sam kept his gaze on the road. The snow was falling, not really heavy yet, but determined. It was already piling up on the side of the road, and he didn’t even want to think about Joy and Holly, alone in a car, maneuvering through the storm that would probably get worse. A few minutes later, he pulled up outside the Casey house and was completely stunned when, sprung from her car seat, Holly leaned over and kissed his cheek. “’Bye, Sam!”

It was the second time he’d been on the receiving end of a simple, cheerfully given slice of affection that day, and again, Sam was touched more deeply than he wanted to admit. Shaken, he watched Joy walk Holly to her friend’s house and waited until she came back, alone, and slid into the car beside him.

“She hardly paused long enough to say goodbye to me.” Joy laughed a little. “She’s been excited by the sleepover for days, but now the fairy houses are the big story.” She clicked her seat belt into place, then turned to face him. “She was telling Lizzie all about the lights in the woods and promising that you and she will make Lizzie a fairy house, too.”

“Great,” he said, shaking his head as he backed out of the driveway. He wasn’t sure how he’d been sucked into the middle of Joy’s and Holly’s lives, but here he was, and he had to admit—though he didn’t like to—that he was enjoying it. Honestly, it worried him a little just how much he enjoyed it.

He liked hearing them in his house. Liked Holly popping in and out of the workshop, sharing dinner with them at the big dining room table. He even actually liked building magical houses for invisible beings. “More fairies.”

“It’s your own fault,” she said, reaching out to lay one hand on his arm. “What you did was—it meant a lot. To Holly. To me.”

The warmth of her touch seeped down into his bones and quickly spread throughout his body. Something else he liked. That jolt of heat when Joy was near. The constant ache of need that seemed to always be with him these days. He hadn’t wanted a woman like this in years. He swallowed hard against the demand clawing at him and turned for the center of town and the road back to the house.

“We’re not in a hurry, are we?” she asked.

Sam stopped at a red light and looked at her warily. “Why?”

“Because, it’s early, but we could stay in town for a while. Have dinner at the steak house...”

She gave him a smile designed to bring a man to his knees. And it was working.

“You want to go out to dinner?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, shrugging. “It’s early, but that won’t kill us.”

He frowned and threw a glance out the windshield at the swirls of white drifting down from a leaden sky. “Still snowing. We should get up the mountain while we still can.”

She laughed and God, he loved the sound of it—even if it was directed at him and his lame attempt to get out of town.

“It’s not a blizzard, Sam. An hour won’t hurt either of us.”

“Easy for you to say,” Sam muttered darkly. “You like talking to people.” The sound of her laughter filled the truck and eased his irritation as he headed toward the restaurant.

* * *

Everybody in town had to be in the steak house, and Joy thought it was a good thing. She knew a lot of people in Franklin and she made sure to introduce Sam to most of them. Sure, it didn’t make for a relaxing dinner—she could actually see him tightening up—but it felt good to watch people greet him. To tell him how much they loved the woodworking he did. And the more uncomfortable he got with the praise, the more Joy relished it.