He shrugged off her touch. “Maybe not, but I blame myself just the same. Look what I’ve cost you.”
Jessie wanted to explain that it wasn’t Erik she missed so much as the feeling of family that had surrounded them all that night as they sang carols. To say that aloud, though, would be a betrayal of her husband, an admission that their life together hadn’t been perfect. She owed Erik better than that. He had given her the one thing she’d never had—the feeling of belonging to a family with history and roots.
“Regrets are wasted, Lucas. We should be concentrating on the here and now. It’s almost Christmas, the season of hope and renewal,” she said.
She glanced around the living room, which looked as it would at any other time of the year—expensive and sterile. It desperately needed a woman’s touch. Even more desperately, it needed to be filled with love.
“You’d never even know it was the holidays in here,” she chided him. “There’s not so much as a single card on display. I’ll bet you haven’t even opened them.”
“Haven’t even been out to the mailbox in days,” he admitted.
She lifted her gaze to his. “How can you bear it?” Before he could answer, she shook her head. “Never mind. That was what the cabinet full of liquor was all about, wasn’t it?”
“Sure,” he said angrily. “It was about forgetting for a few blessed days, forgetting Christmas, forgetting Erik, forgetting the guilt that has eaten away at me every single day since my brother died right in front of my eyes.”
Jessie flinched under the barrage of heated words. “Sounds like you’ve been indulging in more than whiskey. You sound like a man who’s been wallowing in self-pity.”
“Self-loathing,” Luke said.
“Has it made you feel better?” she chided before she could stop herself. She’d been there, done that. It hadn’t helped. “Has anything been served by you sitting around here being miserable?”
He didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He just stared at her, his expression vaguely startled by her outburst.
“Don’t you think I feel guilty sometimes, too?” she demanded. “Don’t you think I want to curl up in a ball and bemoan the fact that I lost a husband after only two years of marriage? Well, I do.”
She was on a roll now, releasing months of pent-up anger and frustration. She scowled at him. “But I for one do not intend to ruin the rest of my life indulging in a lot of wasted emotions. I cried for Erik. I grieved for him. But a part of him lives on in Angela. I think that’s something worth celebrating. Maybe you’re content to spend the holidays all shut up in this bleak atmosphere, but I’m not.”
Oblivious to his startled expression, oblivious to everything except the sudden determination to take charge of her life again, starting here and now, she declared, “The minute I get up tomorrow morning, I am going to make this damned house festive, if I have to make decorations from popcorn and scraps of paper.”
She shot him a challenging look. She had had it with his veiled innuendoes and sour mood. “As for you, you can do what you damned well please.”
Chapter Six
Sitting right where he was, staring after Jessie long after she’d gone, Luke realized he hadn’t given a thought to Christmas beyond being grateful that he wouldn’t be spending it with his family, enduring their arguments and silences, their grief. Consuela had dutifully purchased his gifts to everyone, wrapped them and sent them over to White Pines. He’d merely paid the bills.
Now, though, he would have had to be denser than stone to miss Jessie’s declaration that the atmosphere around his house was awfully bleak for the season. That parting shot before she’d gone off to her room had been a challenge if ever he’d heard one. Just thinking about it was likely to keep him up half the night, wondering how he could give them both a holiday they would never forget. There was no question in his mind that with Jessie and Angela in the house, it would be wrong, if not impossible, to ignore the holiday—the baby’s first.
A week ago he hadn’t expected to feel much like celebrating, but for the past forty-eight hours his mood had been lighter than it had been in months. Part of that was due to Angela’s untimely, but triumphant, arrival. She was truly a Christmas blessing. A far greater measure of his happiness was due, though, to this stolen time with Jessie and his sense that she truly didn’t blame him for Erik’s accident.
He finally admitted at some point in the middle of the night that instead of getting her out of his system, he was allowing her to become more firmly entrenched in his heart. He could readily see now that his initial attraction to Jessie had been pure chemistry, tinged with the magical allure of the forbidden. In some ways, his conscience insisted, she was even more out of reach to him now.
But he knew in his gut that the attraction went beyond her being unavailable to him. Traits he’d only suspected before were clear to him now. He was coming to know her strengths and her weaknesses in a whole new way and nothing he’d discovered disappointed him.
In addition to being beautiful and warmhearted, she was also quick-tempered. In addition to being strong and brave, she was also willful and stubborn. She had a quick wit and a ready laugh, but she could also be a bit of a nag when she believed in her cause. In his view the positives outweighed the negatives. The contrariness only made her more interesting.
Those discoveries solidified his long-held belief that she and Erik had been
