Snowbound Bride-to-Be by Cara Colter Page B

isn’t as large as this one.”
    Again, there was the sense of needing to go, the momentary helpless frustration, and then surrender.
    He wasn’t going anywhere until they got the driveway cleared. He might as well enjoy the mouthwatering bread, the homemade jams, the hot coffee. He might as well enjoy the innocence of those children, the fact that they liked him without any evidence that they should.
    “Would you like to hold Bebo?” Peggy asked him.
    He heard Emma laugh again as he tried to think of a diplomatic response, and then she rescued him by saying, “I’d like to hold her, Peggy.”
    “Me,” Tess yelled, and Peggy surrendered her doll to the baby even though Tess was covered in jam.
    Of course, surrendering to enjoyment was like surrendering to the magic that was wrapping itself around him, trying to creep inside him. Somehow as he filled up on breakfast and giggles, he became aware something was changing. He felt not trapped , somehow. Not ecstatic, either, but not trapped.
    “Water’s fine so far. What do you think we start clearing first?” Tim asked Emma, coming back into the room. “Pond or driveway?”
    “Driveway,” Emma said.
    And Ryder might have appreciated how practical she was being—since no one could even get to the pond without the driveway, except that she looked right at him, and smiled sunnily. “Mr. Richardson is anxious to go.” She didn’t say it, but she might as well have, And we’re anxious to have him leave .
    He felt stung. Because for some reason he had thought she was anxious to have him stay. But she wouldn’t look at him, and he remembered he had seen heartbreak in her devotion to this house.
    His leaving was what was best for everyone, some sizzle in the air between him and Emma was not going to pass if it was tested by too much time together.
    “Let’s see what I remember about using a chain saw,” Ryder said, and got up when Tim moved to the door.
    At the door he saw the older man pause, smile at the commotion. “Look at them girls with that baby. It’s like Christmas came early for them.”
    Ryder looked back, and his heart felt as though a fist was squeezing it. Tess waddled back and forth between the two girls, Peggy’s doll in a grubby death grip. The girls clapped and encouraged her every step.
    The sense of his own inadequacy, from which he had taken a quick break, languishing in the warmth of Emma’s approval, came back with a vengeance.
    Ryder felt, acutely, the thing he could not give Tess.
    This.
    Family. She needed the thing he was most determined not to leave himself open to ever again.
    He wondered if Emma was right about there being only one right decision, or if only the most selfish of men would think he could possibly know what was best for that baby, think that he could give her everything she needed.
    Not because it was what was best for her. But because he loved her. Hopelessly and helplessly and she was all that was left of his world.
    Tess normally kept a sharp eye out for any indication of a good-bye. When he left for work in the mornings, she would arch herself over Mrs. Markle’s arms in a fit of fury. But this morning, covered in jam from her fingers to her ears, she did not seem to notice he was preparing to leave her in the care of strangers.
    He was relieved that she was not making a fuss about the fireplace, either, though every now and then she would cast it a wary look, then look to the girls to see if they noticed the fire-breathing monster in the room with them.
    It wasn’t really as if he was leaving her with strangers. Somehow in one night Emma was not a stranger, and he seriously doubted the Fenshaws remained strangers to anyone for more than a few seconds.
    He turned away from the play of the children and went out to his car to retrieve the boots and gloves he had packed for the cottage because Tess loved to play in the snow. He didn’t even go back in to put them on, refusing to subject himself to the warmth of that