Page 48 of Summer Weddings

M itch woke early Christmas morning.

Not wanting to wake Chrissie, he moved silently into the living room, where the miniature lights on the tree glittered like frosted stars. He smiled at their decorations—paper chains, strung popcorn and handmade ornaments.

He rearranged the gifts under the tree. He’d placed them there the night before, after Chrissie had gone to bed. He knew she didn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore, but it was fun for both of them to keep up the pretense.

The largest present wasn’t from him but Bethany.

A Barbie thingamajig. Town house or some such nonsense.

Only it wasn’t nonsense to Chrissie; the kid took her Barbie seriously.

She’d be thrilled with this. He knew Chrissie would be happily absorbed with her gifts all morning, and then later, in the afternoon, they were going to Bethany’s place for a turkey dinner with all the fixings.

Bethany.

He needed these quiet early-morning moments to clear his thoughts and make sense of his feelings.

It had happened.

Despite his resistance, his best efforts to prevent it, despite his vows to the contrary, despite the full force of his determination, he’d gone and fallen in love with Bethany Ross.

He didn’t want to love Bethany, and in the same breath, he found himself humbled that this remarkable woman had entered his life. Especially after Lori. Especially now.

Mitch paced the living room, too restless to sit. Admitting that he cared deeply for Bethany required some sort of decision. A man didn’t come to this kind of realization without defining a course of action.

He knew he had nothing to offer her. While it was true that he made enough money to support a family, his financial status wasn’t impressive. Somehow he doubted this would matter to Bethany, but still…

He was dismally aware, too, that he came to her with deep emotional scars and a needy child in tow.

The mere thought of loving again, of trusting again, terrified him.

It made him break out in a cold sweat. On top of everything else was the paralyzing fear that he’d fail Bethany the way he had Lori.

Then again, he reminded himself, he had options. He could do what he’d done since September—deny his feelings. Ignore what his heart was telling him.

He might’ve continued that way for months, possibly years, if it wasn’t for one thing.

Chrissie.

From the moment his daughter had met Bethany, she’d set her sights on turning the teacher into her mother and his wife.

Watching the two of them together had touched him from the very first. In ways he’d never fully understand, Bethany ministered to his daughter’s need for a mother in the same way she satisfied his own long-repressed desire for a companion. A wife…

As the weeks progressed, Chrissie had started looking to Bethany for guidance more and more often. There wasn’t anything Chrissie wouldn’t do to be with her—including feign flu symptoms.

What confounded him was the fact that Bethany seemed to share his feelings. He felt her love as powerfully as those brief moments of sunlight every day, brightening the world in the darkness of an Arctic winter.

Admitting his love for Bethany—to her and to himself—wasn’t a simple thing. Love rarely was, he suspected. If he told her how he felt about her, he’d also have to tell her about his past.

Love implied trust. And he’d need to trust her with the painful details of his marriage. With that came the tremendous risk of her rejection. He wouldn’t blame her if she did turn away. If the situation were reversed, he didn’t know how he’d react. He was laying an enormous burden on her.

Telling her all this wasn’t something he could do on the spur of the moment. Timing was critical. He’d have to wait for the right day, the right mood.

Not this morning, he decided. Not on Christmas. He refused to spoil the day’s celebration with the ugliness of his past. No need to darken the holiday with a litany of his failures as a husband.

“Daddy?” Chrissie stood just inside the living room doorway yawning. She wore her pretty new flannel pajamas—the one gift he’d allowed her to open Christmas Eve.

“Merry Christmas, pumpkin,” he said, opening his arms to her. “It looks like Santa made it to Hard Luck, after all.”

Chrissie leapt into his embrace and he folded his arms around her, slowly closing his eyes. His daughter was the most precious gift he’d ever been given. And now, finding Bethany… His heart was full.

* * *

“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” Ben teased, placing his hands on the bulge of his stomach and sighing heavily. He eased his chair away from the kitchen table. “If anyone else finds out what a good cook you are, Bethany, I’ll be out of business before I know it.”

Bethany smiled, delighted with his praise. “I don’t think you need to worry. Those pies of yours were fabulous, especially the mincemeat. I’d like to get your recipe.”

Ben grinned. “Sure. No problem. It’s one I came up with myself—I like to try new things when I cook. How about you? Have you always been this good in the kitchen?”

It was another trait she shared with her birth father, but once again this wasn’t something she could mention.

She nodded. “While other little girls were playing with dolls and makeup, I was using my Betty Crocker Baking Center to concoct all kinds of cookies and cakes.”

“Well, all that practice sure paid off,” Mitch said.

Bethany blushed a little at the compliments.

She’d done her best to put on a spread worthy of their praise.

The meal had taken weeks of careful planning; she’d had to special-order some of the ingredients, and her mother had mailed her the spices.

A lot of the dishes she’d made were traditional family recipes.

Mashed sweet potatoes with dried apricots and lots of butter.

Sage dressing, of course, and another rice-and-raisin dressing that had been a favorite of hers, one her grandmother made every year.

“You miss your family, don’t you?” Mitch asked as he helped her clear the table.

“Everyone does at Christmas, don’t you think?

” This first year so far away from her parents and two younger brothers had been more difficult than she’d expected; this morning had been particularly wrenching.

She knew they missed her, too. Bethany had spoken to her family in California at least once a day for the past week.

She didn’t care how high her phone bill ran.

“I must’ve chatted to Mom three times this morning alone,” she told Mitch. “It’s funny. For years I’ve helped her with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, but when it came to doing it on my own, I had a dozen questions.”

“You need me to do anything?” Ben asked, getting up from the table. He carried his plate to the sink. “I’ve done plenty of dishes in my time. I wouldn’t mind lending a hand, especially after a meal like that. Seems to me that those who cook shouldn’t have to wash dishes.”

“Normally I’d agree with you, but not today. You’re my guest.”

“But…”

“I should think you’d know better than to argue with a woman,” Mitch chided.

Laughing, Bethany shooed Ben out of the kitchen.

“We were going to continue our game of Monopoly, remember?” Chrissie reminded him eagerly. “You said you wanted a chance to win some of your money back.”

“Go play,” Bethany said with a laugh. “I’ll rope Mitch here into helping.”

“You’re sure?” Ben asked.

“Very sure,” she told him, glancing over at Mitch with a smile.

Mitch mumbled something she couldn’t hear. She looked at him curiously as she reached for a bowl. “What did you say?”

His eyes held hers. “I said a man could get lost in one of your smiles and never find his way home.”

Bethany paused, the bowl of leftover mashed potatoes in her hands. “Why, Mitch, what a romantic thing to say.”

His face tightened, as though her comment had embarrassed him. “It must be the season,” he said gruffly. He turned away from her and started to fill the sink with hot, sudsy water.

Bethany smiled to herself. It was rare to see Mitch Harris flustered.

She fingered the polished five-dollar gold coin he’d had made into a pendant and placed on a fine gold chain.

The coin had been minted the year of her birth, and he’d had it mounted in a gold bezel.

The necklace was beautiful in its simplicity.

The minute she fastened it around her neck, Bethany knew this was a piece of jewelry she’d wear every day for the rest of her life.

She felt that her gift for Mitch paled in comparison. Mitch was an avid Tom Clancy fan, and through a friend who managed a bookstore in San Francisco, she’d been able to get him an autographed copy of Clancy’s latest hardcover.

When Mitch had opened the package and read the inscription, he’d looked up at her as though she’d handed him the stone tablets direct from Mount Sinai.

Chrissie had been excited about her Barbie town house, too.

The one who’d surprised her most, however, was Ben.

He’d arrived for dinner with not one pie but four—all of them baked fresh that morning.

In addition to the pies, he’d brusquely handed her an oblong box.

Bethany got a kick out of the way he’d wrapped it.

He’d used three times the amount of paper necessary and enough tape to supply the U.S. Army for a year.

Inside the box was a piece of scrimshaw made from a walrus tusk. The scene on the polished piece of ivory was of wild geese in flight over a marsh. Mountains rose in the distance against a sunlit sky.

Ben had dismissed his gift as nothing more than a trinket, but Bethany knew from her brief stay in Fairbanks how expensive such pieces of artwork had become. She tried to thank him, but it was clear her words only embarrassed him.

“I would’ve thought you’d want to fly home for Christmas,” Mitch said, rolling up his sleeves before dipping his hands in the dishwater.