Snowbound Bride-to-Be by Cara Colter Page A

unlovely scowl that deepened on his face as each channel reported the same ominous weather.
    The storm was not projected to end until the early hours of morning.
    Even then, roads reopening were going to depend on highway clean-up. One channel showed a clip of a road outside Fredericton. The scene showed devastation, the road completely blocked by sagging power lines, by trees broken and splintered by the weight of the ice on them.
    Ryder snapped off the television. It looked to Emma as though he wanted to hurl her channel changer through the screen.
    “Where were you going?” she asked wondering at his desperation to be out of here. “Is someone waiting for you tonight?”
    “No,” he said. “No one’s waiting.” It said something about his life—starkly lonely, not that anything about him invited sympathy. Except the baby sprawling along the muscled length of his upper thigh.
    “Where were you going?” she asked again. Nothing about him invited her questions, either, and yet something made her ask them anyway. The truth was she wasn’t going to be invisible ever again. Not even if that was safe.
    “We were going to my cottage on Lake Kackaticka.”
    Emma frowned. She was familiar with the lake and the community of upscale cottages that surrounded it. At this time of year it was pretty much abandoned. A few year-round residents looked after the cottages, but the summer people stayed away. It was cold and dreary around the lake in the winter.
    “Who goes there in the winter?”
    “No one,” he said, making no attempt to disguise his satisfaction.
    “How long were you going for?”
    He shrugged.
    “The weekend?”
    He shrugged again, and she suspected the truth.
    “You weren’t going to spend Christmas there, were you?”
    “Yes, I was, not past tense, either. Yes, I am.”
    “Alone?”
    “Not alone. Me and Tess.”
    “But what kind of Christmas would that be for her?”
    He looked at the sleeping baby, doubt crossing those supremely confident features, but only for a moment.
    “She has no idea that it is Christmas.”
    It was his right to parent that baby however he wanted, Emma told herself sternly. He was her guest. It really wasn’t her place to argue with him. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she’d invited him here, or called down the weather personally to inconvenience him.
    She didn’t think pandering to his bad temper was a good idea, and besides she was committed to expressing her opinion after a year and a half of biting her tongue for Peter’s convenience! And look where that had gotten her!
    She’d already voiced her thoughts several times tonight, and apparently there was no stopping her now. In fact, she felt an obligation to render her opinion for the sake of Tess!
    “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him.
    He glared at the empty screen of the TV, then picked up the channel changer and turned the television back on, deciding it was interesting after all. “That just shows you’ve been sheltered up here in your fairy-tale world. You don’t know the first thing about sad.”
    There was no point saying anything more. She could tell in the set of his jaw that he was the stubborn type who never would admit he was wrong or change his mind.
    And yet there was that little ghost girl again, the one who’dbeen disappointed by every single Christmas, who insisted she knew everything there was to know about sad and how dare he insinuate otherwise?
    It must have been the ghost girl who couldn’t let it go.
    Emma said, sharply, “You’re depriving Tess of Christmas, that’s not just selfish. It’s mean.”
    The announcer on TV picked that moment to say, voice over a map covered with red lines of road closures that it would be three days before travel resumed on some of those roads.
    Ryder Richardson swore under his breath.
    “I suppose the baby doesn’t know any better than that, either,” Emma said.
    “You know what? I need you to show me to my room.”