NOELLE WAS BEING lifted up by what she saw in Aidan’s eyes, lifted up out of her body and delivered to a place where angels gathered.
That place was dangerous, she told herself.
And yet, still, even knowing the danger, it was hard to break the bond between them, between their hands, and their eyes, their bodies so close together, radiating warmth from all their exertions. Even their breath was frosty and tangled, as if they were breathing in the essence of each other.
Noelle yanked her snow-soaked mittens out of his, but somehow she didn’t move. Couldn’t. He was drinking in her face with a look she could not move away from.
As if he was thirsty and she was a long, cool drink of water. Or maybe she was the thirst and he was the drink of water.
“Not beautiful,” she stammered. “I’m not.”
“What would make you believe such a thing?”
Her mouth moved to begin reiterating a long list of proofs, but not a single sound came out.
“I knew it,” he growled with a fearsome anger. “Some dog in your past—possibly your recent past—has made you believe this thing.”
She could still say nothing, stunned by what she saw in his eyes.
He wasn’t saying this to make her feel good. It wasn’t some pat line. It came from the deepest part of him, a place where there were no lies or deceptions, only truth.
And if she doubted, Aidan took off his glove. He reached out with a gentleness that almost made her cry for the affirmation of his truth in it. His hand warm, his skin silk over iron, touched her cheek, scraped it, rested there. She could not move away from his touch, captive to his unexpected tenderness.
“You are so beautiful,” he said softly. “You may be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
Her mouth fell open. She could feel herself leaning toward whatever she saw in his eyes.
“Daddy, are you going to kiss Noelle?”
The little voice, inquisitive, delighted, yanked them apart.
His hand fell down. He shoved it in his pocket. “Of course not!” he said.
“No!” Noelle agreed.
He spun away from her. “I have no idea where that ax is.”
She scanned the churned-up snow. “When you find it, the saw should be nearby.”
And then some nervous tension broke between them, and the three of them were laughing all over again, kicking up snow until they found the ax and saw.
Back on their journey, after the detour, they entered another grove of trees.
“This is mostly balsam fir,” Noelle said. She took a deep breath. “Can you smell them? I think they’re the best Christmas trees. They’re native to my grandfather’s land.”
“I can smell them!” Tess said.
They wandered through them, judging this one and that, Tess leaning close to several to smell them and to see if they whispered.
“You might want to explain to her the whispering part is not exactly literal.”
“Ah, ye of little faith,” Noelle said. “When did you stop believing in magic?”
He didn’t answer that, just looked away quickly so that she knew it had been a long, long time ago.
Suddenly Tess, who had been flitting from tree to tree like a bumble bee pollinating flowers, stopped. She stood in front of a tree. She cocked her head. She was utterly still.
And then she turned and looked at them, her face incredulous.
“It whispered!” she said.
Aidan took a surprised step back and looked at Noelle. “Exactly what kind of enchantress are you?” he said.
“Apparently the beautiful kind,” she said, laughing.
“But that’s the most dangerous kind of all,” he said softly, and suddenly that near-miss, near-kiss moment was sizzling in the air between them.
Imagine a man like Aidan Phillips thinking she was dangerous.
Still, she could not linger in the power of that.
“You don’t know the meaning of the word dangerous,” she said. “But chopping down a tree could change that.”
“I think there are all kinds of danger, and sometimes the more subtle kinds are way more threatening than the sharp blade of a big ax.”
“Is it perfect?” Tess asked. “Is it?”
They all stood looking at the tree. It was about five feet tall, and mounded with snow. Aidan stepped forward and shook it. The snow slid off it and down his back.
“Just taking one for the team,” he said. “No need for concern.”
The tree, without snow, was nicely filled out on one side and not so much on the other. Though it looked big from Tess’s viewpoint, it was obviously very small, maybe a little taller than Noelle was. The branches were too far apart in places. There was another place where a large branch had been damaged and all the needles had turned brown. The top had taken off crazily in a different direction than the bottom, giving the tree quite a crooked lean.
It was, without a doubt, the most perfect Christmas tree any of them had ever seen.
“I’m going to try to break this to you gently,” Noelle told Aidan an hour later, “but you are no woodsman.”
He had, by now, stripped off his jacket. And his mittens. The sweat was beaded on his brow.
Really? She could have offered to go back to the barn and retrieve the chainsaw. But that would have taken all the fun out of it.
Fun and something else. There was something gloriously breathtaking about seeing the male animal pit his strength against the elements.
Plus, ever since the near kiss, Noelle’s senses felt heightened. The light, especially the way it threaded through his coal-dark hair, seemed exquisite. The sharp smell of the tree had intensified as his ax bit into bark and pulp and, finally, sap. Tess’s laughter, as she made angels and covered the dog with snow and wrote her name with footprints, filled the glade with fairy music.
Noelle’s you-are-no-woodsman taunt earned her a good-natured glare, and Aidan renewed his efforts to chop through the trunk of the tree. Finally, it was still upright, but only by the merest of threads of broken wood fiber.
“Move the women, children and dogs to safe ground,” he shouted. “Timber.”
The tree didn’t so much fall, as kind of gently slide down, with a whisper rather than a crash. Several of its branches cracked, making the tree even less perfect than it had been before.
“That was somewhat anticlimactic,” Aidan declared, breathing hard.
But Tess was beside herself with excitement. After resting briefly, all of them, ignoring the discomfort of prickly needles and sharp little branches, grabbed on to the tree and began to drag it through the snow.
Night came early at this time of year, and it was nearly dark by the time they got the tree almost back to the house. They were breathless and tired and utterly happy.
They paused for a rest as the house came into view. It was drenched in the dying light of the day, in soft pinks and muted golds and fiery oranges. As the darkness deepened around it, an owl hooted, and in the far distance, a pack of wolves began to sing a haunting and wild song.
“Wolves?” Aidan asked, surprised.
“Yes, relative newcomers to this area.”
“Are they on the other side of that field?” he asked.
Noelle smiled at the fierce, protective note in his voice. “The sound really carries on nights like this. I don’t think they’re close, at all. And that’s not a field, though I can see why you would think so when it’s covered with snow like that. It’s a pond. My grandfather always clears it Christmas Day for skating.”
“Oh, too bad, we didn’t bring skates. Tess doesn’t have any yet. I haven’t skated for years. And Nana? Can you imagine?”
They shared a laugh.
A light turned on in the house, throwing a golden glow out the window and lighting up a pathway through the snow. It beckoned them, calling them home, to the promise of warmth against the cooling of the day, a promise of safety against the mysteries of the woods in the night.
And then a door slapped open.
“Are you done yet?” Nana’s shrill voice carried across the snow as clearly as the wolf song had.
“Art takes time!” Rufus yelled back. “Where have you been? I needed you to hand me the string of lights marked number fourteen. I had to get down and get it myself. I’m old. I can’t be expected to go up and down a ladder a hundred times!”
It was possibly the first time Noelle had ever heard her grandfather refer to himself as old.
“Oh, be quiet, you ancient coot. Do you ever stop complaining? I was helping! I went in to find something for supper.”
“Do you think this has been going on since we left?” Aidan asked. He didn’t even try to hide his amusement.
“No doubt. I’m not sure what it is. My grandfather never acts the way he does with her.”
“You don’t know what it is?” Aidan said, looking at her with interest. A smile was tickling his lips.
“No. Do you?”
“It’s the age-old game.”
She felt shocked. “But my grandmother has only been gone a few months. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Maybe that’s what he thinks, too,” Aidan offered softly. “That it needs to be fought. That it isn’t right.”
“They don’t like each other,” she insisted, but for some reason she was thinking she had said nearly those same words to Aidan. I don’t like you.
And he had said them to her.
And then, despite that initial animosity, only hours later, they had come very close to kissing. A shiver went up and down her spine as she contemplated the fact that she might be playing the age-old game with Aidan.
It had to stop. It could only end in pain.
Her grandfather’s voice came with clarity through the cold air and across the snow again.
“I hope you didn’t meddle with supper.”
“It’s already in the oven.”
“I have a plan I’m following!”
“Oh, well,” Nana said, unrepentant. “I think I can figure out how to heat a frozen lasagna.”
“That’s not for tonight! Tonight was cabbage rolls. It was marked right on the containers. I had Mrs. Bentley mark them.”
Noelle smiled. Her grandfather was so organized he’d had one of the neighbors prepare frozen dinners for him and for the company he was expecting. It was just so endearing...and yet again, it nagged at her. Much preparation had gone into this. Why hadn’t he told her what he was up to?
Apparently Nana missed the endearing part of an old widower hosting guests for Christmas.
“Oh, don’t be so stuck in your ways. The label must have fallen off. Aidan and Tess and Noelle will be home soon, and they’ll be hungry. Shouldn’t they be home by now? What if Aidan’s bleeding to death out there?”
“Maybe all of them got attacked by that wolf pack. Being eaten as we speak.”
“What wolf pack?”
“You can’t hear them? If you’d stop talking for three seconds... Plug in the lights.”
“Wolves?” That shrill note again.
“Plug in the damned lights!”
And into the sudden silence and the gathering darkness, the lights of the house winked on. They were bright primary colors: red and yellow, blue and green. They ran around the roofline, making globes of reflected color in the snow. They marked the gables. They wrapped around the porch pillars and the railings, and they outlined the windows. Noelle could not be sure how two old people had gotten this much done.
Maybe, despite the bickering, there was a certain magic in the air.
Certainly, the house seemed to be saying that. It had transformed from an old ranch house to a gingerbread house, something worthy of a fairy tale, in just an afternoon.
There was something about standing here, with Aidan and Tess, listening to the quarreling of Rufus and Nana in the distance, that made Noelle’s heart stand still. And in the silence of her heart not beating, she was sure she heard a little voice.
There are other ways that game can end, it said: all good fairy tales end with and they lived happily-ever-after.
But Noelle reminded herself firmly of the red dress in her closet, her reminder of broken dreams. This was no fairy tale, she admonished herself sternly. There was no point casting Aidan in the role of a prince, despite his lapse in calling her beautiful and despite the near-miss kiss. He had made it abundantly clear he was not interested in a romance, and that she had better not be, either!
Grabbing the tree again, Noelle moved deliberately away from the lure of the magic in the air and toward the house. Aidan and Tess joined her and they dragged the tree up onto the porch. And then Noelle and Aidan stood, looking at it, while Tess danced around it.
Rufus and Nana admired their find and declared it perfect.
“Are we going to decorate it tonight?” Tess asked. “Please? Please? Please?”
There was something about the hopefulness of a child that made magic very hard to outrun.