Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. He left her with that declaration, and all she could think was: Well, at least I know you can feel something.
No. The thought put him in an unfair light. He’d shown tiny flashes of emotions over the course of their two conversations. Rage. Annoyance. Frustration. Fear.
But the deep, aching loneliness she saw in him when she suggested he didn’t have to spend Christmas alone resonated inside of her. Until now, this entire…spectacle was little more than a means to an end. She assumed he had to be, at least on some level, a lonely man. Does a content, happy, and fulfilled person hate Christmas? No. But she now realized her actions here could serve more than one purpose. She could help him and save the town. She could teach him the true meaning of Christmas while also restoring Christmas for the people she loved most in the entire world.
Despite what countless TV shows and movies had taught her, she really could have it all.
First, she needed to get him to come back into the living room with her. She knew that wouldn’t happen just on its own. Shouting at him from the living room to come back and hang out with her so she could show him the beauty of the season probably wasn’t her best bet.
“Think, Kate,” she muttered to herself, pacing the living room. “Think.”
Pacing the Persian rug, she surveyed the room. It was, in every sense of the word, rich. The house was built in a faux-Victorian style, an American collection of half-British angles and ornamentation, and the inside reflected Mr. Woodward’s inclination to show off his wealth. He presented himself as a gaudy man, to say the least, and he never shied away from spending money or talking about spending money—a trait he clearly didn’t share with his nephew. Kate’s pacing only halted when she heard the movement of a loose tile in the kitchen.
“He’s gone,” she called. “You can come out now.”
No sooner had she spoken than Michael burst from behind the swinging door, which smacked against the nearest wall. He huffed and puffed with the dramatics of an amateur opera singer, as if he’d been shoved into a tiny, airless closet instead of the well-stocked kitchen for the last ten minutes.
“What was that?” he spluttered, pointing at a random place in the room. Kate could only assume he meant to point at somewhere Clark stood, but she had no way of knowing for sure. It was obvious he’d been eavesdropping. She returned to her pacing, rolling over everything she’d learned about the man from their last encounter.
He was so cold. Not just in the way he spoke to her or saw the world, but in his eyes. He was frozen down to his heart. She just hoped a good Christmas fire could be lit and melt the ice and frost away, not just for their sake, but for his.
“That,” she answered, a bit too smug for her own good, “was the first stage of my plan.”
“And you just let him go?”
“Yeah.” She ran a hand through her hair and checked her wrist for a ponytail holder she already knew wasn’t there. Her dirty blonde hair was so long and thick it often broke the thin elastics, leaving her to fuss and fiddle with her locks whenever she got too nervous to think straight. Tugging on one strand of hair, as if to pull some wisdom from her own brain, she tried to lay down her plan. “He needs time to cool off. Nothing was going to get done by needling him.”
“What’s your genius plan now, huh?”
Genius. That was it. When she was seven years old, Miss Cartwright—owner of the music and dance studio near the center of town—told her she could be a genius piano player if she ever put her mind to it. When The Christmas Company said it would pay for her lessons if she used her skills for the festival every year, she’d readily accepted.
And as it happened, the Woodward House’s living room housed the town’s most beautiful and most expensive piano, which sat in the corner across from the Christmas tree, waiting to be played.
Kate wandered over to the ancient Steinway. Her fingers only just brushed the ebony cover. It shot a thrill through her, like touching a holy relic; she needed to approach with reverence.
“We’re going to smoke him out of his room.”
“How?” Michael asked, as she lifted the cover and took her place on the bench. Shaking his head, he immediately began a muttered stream of vain prayers. “Don’t say with song. Please don’t say with song.”
Her fingers touched the keys. Out of tune. She winced, but pressed forward.
“With song,” she confirmed.
It was perfect, really. So much had already been written and spoken about the power of music, Kate didn’t think twice about this stage of her plan. Music spoke to the soul in a language unwhispered by any other tongue. Her screaming after him about the magic of the season wouldn’t work, but her joyful voice raised in song might be enough to coax him out of his hiding place, wherever that might have been.
Michael didn’t share her optimism.
“We’re doomed. We’re totally doomed. This isn’t a song and dance kind of guy, Kate.”
“I know.” She cracked her knuckles. It was going to take a lot of singing to cover the flaws of this piano’s lack of tuning, but she never backed away from a challenge. Besides, she listed “singing Christmas Carols” as one of the Special Skills on her resumé. Without knowing it, she’d trained for this exact moment her entire life. “That’s why this is going to work.”
“And what’s your plan after this, hmm? Make him fall in love with you and the town like one of those movies you love so much?”
“I’m not going to fall in love with Clark.”
“Right. Because you’re going to be an old maid and Miller’s Point and the festival will be your family and your children. I’ve heard this speech before. Besides, I didn’t say anything about you falling in love with him. I said he would fall in love with you.”
“Love doesn’t factor into this plan at all,” she rushed out, eager to be done with this particular conversation. Whenever she and Michael broached the topic of her love life, they played out the same old song and dance. She reminded him that romantic, all-consuming, life-changing love never entered her mind as a possibility for herself. The pickings in town were slim and most of the people they went to high school with were paired off by the summer after senior year. And even if some handsome stranger did ride into town and she did want to fall in love with him, she wasn’t even sure she knew how to go about doing it.
And then, he’d remind her that anyone could fall in love—no one knew how to fall in love; it just happened—and they’d go around and around in circles. She didn’t have time for circles and talk of romance today, especially not in the context of Clark Woodward. “We’re going to do Christmas our way. And…” Her fingers ran along the keys, testing them out one by one in no particular order. She struggled to articulate what about Clark she struggled with or how she planned to get the best of him. “He’s got this thing about him. He’s lonely. I can tell.”
“He’s inherited a corporation worth millions of dollars, at least. I think he cuddles a body pillow stuffed with hundred-dollar bills every night.”
“The money doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, the money doesn’t matter?”
Before this morning, Kate never would have made such a bold claim. She lived in a two-and-a-half-room apartment above the town’s only bookshop. A broken lock barely kept her door closed and she existed on a steady diet of diner food and gas station salad bowls. If anyone knew the importance of money and the detriment of not having it, it was Kate. But when faced with Clark, she didn’t see a rich man or a happy one. He was someone desperate to hide his own crippling solitary confinement. He believed himself above Christmas because he believed himself above people in general, a fact Kate was out to prove completely false.
“It doesn’t. I mean, I thought it did, but there’s something there. Or, something isn’t there. And if we can give it to him…”
Michael nodded and helped himself to the opposite end of the piano bench as Kate continued to noodle some random melodies. She operated on muscle memory, barely pressing the keys for noise.
“He may just want to give us the festival.”
“And he’ll be a better man for it.”
Michael huffed a noise under his breath. Clearly, transforming Clark into a better man ranked low on his list of priorities. For a while, nothing passed between them but the music pouring from her fingers. Kate recalled Clark’s enraged voice when he heard the music upon first entering the house. Once he heard the live thing, it would only be a matter of time before he sprinted down here to stop her. Then, she’d have him right where she wanted him. Michael gave her an unreadable look, creeping into the corners of her vision like rolling fog.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you like him.”
Kate choked on her own laughter. Clark Woodward was arrogant. Prideful. A complete miser with no regard for the happiness or safety of others. He was a tyrannical boss and a rude host. And he’d never read Dickens. Who graduated with an MBA without reading Charles Dickens at least once? She couldn’t ever see herself liking someone who hadn’t read the greatest in the English canon, even if he did light a fire of excitement in her every time they began one of their verbal sparring matches.
“I don’t like him.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t dislike him either!” She covered for herself, resisting the urge to hold up her hands in a pose of joking surrender. “I feel—”
Michael cut her off.
“You feel for him.”
“I feel bad for him,” she corrected, even though it wasn’t remotely true. Or, rather, it was true, but it wasn’t the entire truth. She did feel bad for him. It just wasn’t the end of her feelings. Horror of horrors, she actually related to him. “Haven’t you ever felt lonely?”
“Well, besides sharing a house with two brothers, I’ve had to deal with you basically my entire life. You never stop talking. No, I’ve never felt lonely.”
“I have,” Kate said, her head dipping down towards the piano keys.
“I know.” Hard edges softened around Michael and he nodded in recognition. They would never speak of the thing that made her lonely, and he knew it. “I know. Just seems like a flimsy reason for you to want to help a guy.”
“I can help him and the town at the same time. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“I just want you to keep your eye on the ball,” Michael said.
Kate didn’t want to think about the sad things anymore. She wanted to sing. She wanted to play the piano until the lonely man upstairs was forced to confront them down here. She couldn’t save the person she was when she was at her loneliest, but she could at least save him.
And her entire town and way of life, while she was at it.
With a blistering, face-cutting smile, Kate effectively ended their conversation.
“What do you think? ‘Good King Wenceslas’ or ‘Here We Come A-Caroling?’”
After storming out of the room, Clark made a deal with himself: if he could survive the next two days without seeing Kate Buckner again, he would buy himself something nice. Something practical, of course. A watch, maybe. Or a new set of locks for his apartment in Dallas. A pair of shoes he didn’t have to repair every other week because they insisted on falling apart at the seams when he walked too long or the temperature rose over seventy degrees. He rarely promised himself these sorts of rewards. His idea of a reward was sleeping in an extra fifteen minutes past his 6 a.m. alarm on Saturdays. But between the difficulty—maybe the impossibility—of avoiding Kate in his own house and the post-Christmas deals soon to flood the malls and shops back home, he decided it was worth it.
Here we come a-caroling along the fields so green!
Here we come wandering so fair to be seen!
He was sure he could do it until she started singing. There was music in his house. Not just any kind of music. Christmas music. When choosing a place to work from today, he’d made sure to pick the farthest room in the house from the living room. The second office used to host his uncle’s secretary, if the discarded paperwork and bubble gum wrappers were any indication, and he assumed it would be a fine hideout for a few days. Its couch and proximity to a bathroom were convenient; he’d just have to make sure he snuck to the kitchen for snacks when he was sure Kate wasn’t anywhere along his route.
A flawless plan…until she decided to go and fill the house with music. At first, Clark did his best to ignore it. He shut the heavy office door carefully, trying not to disturb the cheesy toy basketball hoop hung over the top—apparently, his uncle had hired an eight-year-old boy as a secretary—and returned to the whirring laptop. Maybe no one in this town was working, but he had a work ethic, and it didn’t disappear because the weather got a little cold.
The closed door did basically nothing to prevent the music. If anything, it somehow managed to get louder. He shook his head and resolved to ignore it. He could manage distractions. He was disciplined enough to work over some annoying piano tunes.
Love and joy come to you! And to you glad Christmas too!
Clark tapped his foot. Maybe that sound would drown out their warbling.
And God bless you and se-end you a Happy New Year!
It didn’t. He just managed to tap in time with them, giving them a beat. He covered his ears. Maybe that would drown them out.
And God se-end you a Happy Ne-ew Year!
It didn’t. There was no drowning them out. Them, of course, because, as it turned out, he and Kate hadn’t been as alone in the house as he assumed they were. Michael’s slight drawl joined Kate’s…competent singing. In a more generous mood, Clark might have described her singing as beautiful. Stirring, even. Not because it was technically perfect—it wasn’t—but because there was a freedom to it. She didn’t care about sounding good; she sang because it brought her joy.
Or something. Clark didn’t want to read too deeply into it.
“That’s enough.”
Decorations and other passive, ignorable expressions of her Christmas obsession, he could handle. But indoor caroling? He couldn’t allow it.
Leaving his work behind, he stormed downstairs. He flew past the miniature Dickens village set up on a long end table in the hallway, the popcorn garlands strung between overhead light fixtures and down the garland-strewn grand staircase. Thank goodness his allergies didn’t include pine or he’d be a dead man walking.
By the time he arrived in the living room, embarrassingly out of breath, they’d moved onto the slower, more somber “Silent Night,” which Kate elected to sing in German.
Great. She knew German. The enemy living in his house was clever, talented, beautiful, and bilingual.
Not that Clark cared about any of that, of course. She was, above all, a nuisance. An obstacle to be conquered on his way to full control over his family’s affairs. He had to think of her that way. He never thought about anyone else he did business with in warm or familiar terms. Why should he start now?
“What is this?”
“We’re singing.”
Apparently, the concept of a rhetorical question was lost on Michael, who answered with a big grin as Kate’s song continued. Her head hung low over the keys and her golden-brown hair curtained her face, but the melody her lips offered wrapped around Clark with the insistence of prayer. He tried his best to ignore the clenching of his heart. The scene in the living room was something out of The Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell couldn’t have painted it better himself. A man and a woman sat, cozily enough, on a piano bench in the middle of a Christmas-covered living room. The fireplace crackled and the music hummed.
The picture-perfect image was enough to make Clark sick. It was enough to make Clark want to sing along. It was enough to make him wonder if Michael and Kate were together.
Again, not because he cared. Just because he needed more ammo against her. And he was curious.
“Singing’s not allowed,” he snapped, harsher than he intended.
Michael scoffed, undeterred.
“What is this, The Sound of Music?”
“I’m being pretty generous, letting you stay here. But this isn’t an open invitation. You can’t just have free rein in my house. And you know what?”
Clark’s admittedly self-righteous lecture ended with the abrupt ringing of the doorbell. Truth be told, he was so oblivious to the workings of the house, he hadn’t realized what their doorbell even sounded like, so the noise sent him jumping in shock.
“Oh, good!” Kate looked up from the piano keys for the first time since he arrived, her brown eyes alchemizing to a glistening gold. Michael popped up from the piano bench and ran towards the front door. For all of the excitement, a pit of understanding bottomed out in Clark’s stomach. If he wasn’t careful, his house would soon be overrun with townies. “Emily’s here!”
“Emily who?”
“Emily Richards.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
He didn’t need an introduction. Emily Richards tottered through the living room door, juggling storage containers of brightly wrapped presents in her cocktail-straw-thin arms. The introduction wasn’t necessary because Clark had actually met Emily the night before. She worked behind the check-in desk of the Miller’s Point Bed and Breakfast. She was the one who had suggested sleeping in his car because “no one in this town is going to have room for you after what you did.”
He hadn’t taken her advice, choosing instead to return home for the first time in a long time, but that didn’t stop her words and the hatred in her eyes from haunting him the entire way.
Emily Richards was a twig of a woman with high blonde hair. She couldn’t have been any more different from Kate if she tried. Where Kate was all curves and warmth, Emily was narrow and icy. Without knowing either of them particularly well, Clark could only assume their differences made their friendship work.
“Sorry I’m late. I walked all the way up the hill and it was murder on my calves. Where should I put these?”
“What are those?”
“Donation bins.” Kate’s deft hands continued their musical exploration of the keyboard, even as she afforded him the bare minimum of her attention in favor of Emily. “Go ahead and put them on the floor for now. We’ll take them out with us later.”
“Later? Where are you going?”
The suspense extended as Emily flounced into his kitchen without saying so much as a “hello” to him.
“Who wants eggnog?” She shouted.
“Three glasses in here please!”
Nope. Clark’s foot needed to come down. He couldn’t allow them to walk all over him and around him like this. He’d given her the run of the house, sure. But he did not agree to have his entire life overrun, not by Kate and certainly not by her friends. Every minute, she threw more and more illegal fireworks at him; soon, his annoyance would explode. His right hand twitched; he struggled to control his own breathing.
No one got under his skin like this. Not business partners, not rivals. And never a woman.
“No, no! No eggnog for me. Two glasses.”
“But—”
“I didn’t come down here for eggnog. I came down here to tell you to stop playing.”
“It’s not Christmas without music. C’mon,” she said, her voice lighter than a chorus of bells. “Sing a song with us. It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t sing,” he growled.
“Everyone sings at Christmas.” Emily returned with the eggnog and requisitioned the overstuffed couch, plopping down on it and burying herself in the cushions. “Even Frank Sinatra sang Christmas songs and he could hardly carry a tune.”
“Frank Sinatra was a great singer and this isn’t a party!”
“Why not?” Her golden eyes twinkled with the edges of a private joke. “You look like you could use a little party.” She’d wedged herself under his skin and she knew it.
You look like you could use a little party. The challenge repeated in his head, a maddening, singsong refrain he wished he could pluck out and erase from his memory. An unfamiliar feeling welled inside of him; every time he tried to place it, the name eluded him. It wasn’t rage or dignified coldness; he could easily identify those, as they were his most common emotional responses to nearly any annoyance, even if he didn’t let them register on his face. He felt altogether different than he could ever remember feeling before.
Fondness? Was it fondness?
Before he could answer, he turned tail. A hasty retreat would be best. Alone in his office, there was no way he could feel anything for Kate.
“I have to work. Keep the noise down and the disasters to a minimum, please,” he commanded.
But he’d only made it three steps towards the exit when Michael sidled up beside him and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. Clark didn’t often have occasion to feel like “one of the boys,” but when Michael elbow nudged him, he could almost imagine it.
“Hey, Clark.”
“Yes?”
“Can I give you some advice?”
Clark didn’t want his advice. He knew the other man’s advice would inevitably lead him to staying here, in this room, in close proximity to the undecorated Christmas tree and the beautiful, determined, open-hearted Kate Buckner.
“…Yes.”
“Just go along for the ride. Your life will be much, much easier. I promise.”
He huffed out a breath and scanned the room again. The living room of Woodward House always sunk under the weight of its own grandeur. Its stark beauty reflected its self-importance in its thick brocade furnishings and expensive finishes. The entire house suffered this design style; the office Clark holed himself up in, untouched by Kate’s magical Christmas hands, was a sea of dark shadows and leather chairs. He glanced around this room. The new décor was—dare he say it?—tasteful. Small touches of holiday décor accented the mantelpieces and end tables, while a simple wreath hung above the fireplace. Even the Christmas tree was mercifully undecorated, strung with only simple garlands of white fairy lights. On the one hand, he resented the intrusion of brightness and levity to his dark world. On the other, could he really go back to his small room and listen to their laughter and song, knowing all the while he could be a part of it if he only said yes? Was he really content to sit in the darkness when light was just a step away? He knew he couldn’t return to the shadows.
He just didn’t want anyone else to know that.
Besides, the threat of memories in this place was too strong. Every corner of this house reminded him of the time before, of when he had a family here, when this season actually meant something to him. If he stayed here with Kate and her friends, then at least he’d have a distraction.
Steady as a tree, he returned to the fold of the living room party. He never once let his expression slip, but Kate seemed to see straight through him, as she had from the moment they met. She didn’t look at him with judgment, though. There was something else in her soft tone. Understanding? Acceptance? Clark couldn’t tell and maybe he didn’t want to. All he wanted was one uncomplicated day in the sun.
“Any requests?” she asked.
“I’m not singing. But I will stay.” He tacked on another claim, just in case she thought she’d won something in this exchange. “Just to make sure you don’t burn the house down.”
A single nod and quiet smile were his only reward from Kate.
Emily picked up the slack. Popping up from the couch, she declared, “Great idea. I’ll get you some eggnog after all.”