Christmas In Snowflake Canyon (13 page)

He doubted Genevieve would appreciate knowing Dylan found the same peace with his dog that he did listening to her chatter.

“Does he need anything? Some water or, I don’t know, some peanut butter on a cracker or something?” He shook his head. “My nieces and nephews have been giving him treats under the table all evening, none of it good for him. He probably just needs a warm place to take a nap.”

As if on cue, the dog headed to a patch of carpet in the living room in front of a heater vent, circled a few times to claim it as his and then stretched out.

Once the dog was settled, Gen turned back to Dylan. “How much experience do you have with a wallpaper steamer?”

“About as much as you’ve had with black-and-tan coonhounds, I imagine.”

She smiled, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. He liked seeing her this way, with her hair a little tousled, her skin flushed, her face fresh and natural.

She would probably look just like this after making love.

Everything inside him seemed to shiver, and he had to take several sharp breaths to regain control.

“I’ve been thinking about the logistics here,” she went on, “and I think it would be best if you direct the steamer while I scrape off the wallpaper.”

He could handle that, as long as he could keep these inappropriate sexual thoughts at bay.

She frowned. “You’re not really dressed for this. It’s a messy job. I’m going to be sticky with wallpaper glue and little shreds of paper for weeks.”

Pop didn’t strictly have a dress code for his Sunday dinners, but he didn’t appreciate his family showing up in any old thing, either. Dylan had worn a blue long-sleeved oxford to dinner, with the sleeve pinned up over his stump.

He should have worn the prosthetic arm. As painful as it could be some days, it wasn’t quite as unsightly as that empty sleeve.

“It’s fine. It will wash.”

“Just take off your shirt. I can see you’re wearing a T-shirt underneath. You can just work in that and then change back into the other shirt when we’re done.”

He shifted, wondering what he had gotten himself into. He ought to tell her to forget this whole thing. He hated dressing and undressing with one hand. It was awkward and uncomfortable, especially trying to shrug out of a shirt. He also didn’t wear short sleeves much anymore, even in the summertime.

“Sure. Okay,” he finally muttered. Feeling stupid, he did his best to unbutton the shirt without looking like a three-year-old learning to undress himself and then pulled it off and hung it over the same chair with his coat.

She was watching him, her eyes wide and her color high. Morbid fascination, he might have thought, except she seemed to be looking more at his chest and his shoulders than the empty spot below his left elbow.

“Where do we start?” he asked.

She cleared her throat and tucked another strand of hair behind her ear. “Um. This is the steamer.” She turned it on. Tucker looked up through the doorway at the whining noise then dropped his head again, the lazy old thing.

A hose led from the main machine on the floor to a rectangle panel about the size of a notebook. Tendrils of steam curled out of it.

Gen handed that part to him. “Just hold the plate against the wall to moisten the paper and release the glue, section by section. I’ll come along behind you and try to find an edge to lift away with the scraper.”

After a few moments, they fell into a comfortable rhythm. Working vertically, he would steam a piece for a moment then she would scrape that while he moved to the next area. By necessity, they had to stay close together, the steam from the machine swirling around them in an oddly intimate way. He was hyperaware of his body—each pulse of blood through his veins, each inhale and exhale.

He was also aware of her, the flex and release of her biceps as she worked, the way she nibbled her lip as she scraped away at a particularly difficult spot, how her T-shirt molded to her chest…

“Oh. I almost forgot,” Gen said after a few moments. “I had music going while I worked. I turned it off to answer the door.”

She pulled a tiny silver remote out of the pocket of worn jeans and aimed it at a small speaker unit in the corner. Some kind of weird music eased out, lots of accordion and mournful French that sounded like something out of a smoky Paris jazz café.

He raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Her expression turned rueful. “What can I say? Sometimes I’m in a mood. What would you prefer?”

His music tastes were all over the place but lately he mostly enjoyed classic rock. It might help keep his mind off enjoying a little
ooh là là
with her.

“Got any CCR or Stones?”
“I can make a playlist.”
She fiddled with the MP3 player attached to the speakers, and a moment later, Mick and the gang started in on “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

Perfect.

The work was physically demanding but not disagreeable. He had already found at his house in the canyon that deconstruction—tearing down in order to rebuild—could be oddly satisfying. The experience was the same here.

Together, they made good progress. After maybe half an hour, they finished the second wall. She stopped and shook out her arms.

“Why don’t we trade places for a while?” he suggested. “Your arms are probably killing you.”

“But I can always switch if one gets tired,” she said, her expression solemn.

Something bleak and grim lodged in his chest. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Gen,” he said quietly. “I feel sorry enough for myself.”

He grabbed the scraper away from her and set to work on the section he had last steamed.

After a charged moment, she picked up the steamer. “So I’m thinking about ripping up the carpet next,” she said. “I pulled up the tacks in one corner and it looked as if it had hardwood underneath. I have no idea how to refinish floors but I read an article this afternoon online and it didn’t sound all that difficult. You have to start with tearing out the carpets, obviously, and then you remove all the tacking strips, which sounds like an awful job. I can’t imagine how gross it will be under the carpet. I might have to rent a floor sander but they have those at the home-improvement store.”

She started chattering about finishing wood floors, about buying new hardware for the kitchen cabinets, about all the other things she planned to do on the house—many of which she had already told him up at the cabins, but he didn’t care. The words surged over and through him, edged with an oddly poignant sweetness that left no room for the bitter.

She knew.

Somehow she knew how much he liked listening to her talk about anything and everything in that throaty, sexy voice.

She couldn’t possibly understand why. Even he wasn’t sure he comprehended why her conversation filled some gaping chasm inside him, how focusing on the mundane details helped keep all the ugliness at bay.

A fragile sort of tenderness seemed to twist and writhe around them like the steam, easing its way around all that ugliness, scraping him bare just like he peeled away her wall.

He faltered in his steady movements but quickly recovered. He couldn’t let himself have feelings for her. Now,
that
was a freaking disaster in the making. He pushed it away and focused instead on the story she was telling him about a trip she took to the wine country of the Loire Valley with some friends.

Before he knew it, she had jabbered her way around the entire room. His arm throbbed from the relentless scraping, but it was a good kind of sore, earned through hard work and effort.

“I guess that’s the last of it,” she wound down enough to say and turned off the steamer. The music on the media player had stopped, too, without either of them being aware of it.

The room suddenly seemed far too quiet.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all your help, Dylan. You’ve saved me so much time and energy. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said gruffly, wondering what the hell was wrong with him that he actually felt more centered and calm after an hour of scraping wallpaper layers off a wall with Genevieve Beaumont than he had from sharing dinner with the people he loved most in the world.

“I must have yakked your ears off.”

“You didn’t. See? Still here.” He tugged at an earlobe and she smiled a little.

She tucked that errant hair behind her ear again. Her fingers were long and slender—elegant, even with her battered manicure.

He should leave. Now. The warning bells sounded in his head but he ignored them. Instead, he crossed the small space between them, leaned down and took what he had been thinking about since the moment he walked into her grandmother’s ugly house.

O
n the crazy scale, kissing Genevieve Beaumont topped out at “Are-you-out-of-your-freaking-mind?”

He knew it intellectually in the tiny sliver of his brain that could still function at that level, but he ignored it. This just felt too right, too perfect. It had been so damn long since he had felt the wonder of a woman’s kiss— the soft sweetness of her breath mingling with his, the press of her curves against his chest through thin cotton, the urgent churn of his blood.

Other than a shocked inhale, she didn’t react for a few seconds, then he felt the slide of her arms around his neck and she returned his kiss with delicious intensity.

His mouth moved on hers, wondering how he could possibly have forgotten how delicious that surge of blood, that edgy hunger could feel.

She tasted sweet and minty, with just a hint of that vanilla scent that surrounded her. She made a soft, sexy sound in her throat and he deepened the kiss, unable to believe she was here next to him, her mouth warm and enthusiastic against his.

Their mouths fit together perfectly. In his experience, that wasn’t always the case. First kisses could be awkward affairs, trying to figure out what to move where, but this… This was better than any of the increasingly heated dreams he’d been having about her since that memorable night at The Speckled Lizard.

She made another sexy sound and drew her hands up around his neck. He had to be closer to her. Without thinking, he went to wrap his arms around her. Both arms.

She faltered a little, just a tiny stiffening, but he felt the sudden tension and ice crackled through him.

He had forgotten. For one brief, amazing moment, he had completely forgotten the vast gulf between them.

He jerked away, his breathing ragged and his heart pulsing in his chest like the first time he’d jumped from a plane in Airborne School.

“You…didn’t have to stop.”

She sounded breathless, and she looked absolutely delectable—her lips slightly swollen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes dazed. He was almost positive she had been just as into the kiss as he had been.

It was the
almost
there that slayed him.

What if she hadn’t been? What if she had only been playing along to protect his feelings, so he didn’t feel like an ass for kissing her? They were friends, of a sort. She knew more about him than his family by now.

He knew she had a much softer heart than she let on—maybe she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by showing her revulsion.

He grabbed his shirt off the chair in the entryway and shoved his stump through the sleeve, out of sight. He was aghast at his sudden urge to plow his fist through the walls they had just scraped.

He mustered as much calm as he could. “We both know that was a mistake.”

“Do we?”

She seemed genuinely confused. How could she act all innocent, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as if the world hadn’t suddenly shifted, as if she could see nothing wrong in the kiss?

“For the next few weeks, we’re obligated by the court system to work together. How will we do that when things are funky between us?”

“Why would things be funky over a simple kiss?”

It hadn’t been simple. To him, the kiss had been magical. Hearts and flowers and choirs of angels singing. Okay, they were naughty angels, yeah, singing about tangled bodies and slick skin and losing himself inside her, but singing nonetheless.

He wasn’t about to admit that to her, not when she was acting as if it meant nothing. A simple kiss. Huh. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. My stump and

I won’t disgust you anymore.”
“Who says you disgust me?”
“Your body language did. Come on, Gen. Don’t pretend. I felt how you flinched away when I accidentally touched you.”

Her color rose a little higher. “You’re imagining things.”

“Am I? Go ahead. Touch it.” He unpinned his sleeve and shoved the cuff up, extending his arm as far as it would go.

“This is stupid.”

She looked at him and at his arm, the puckered edge, the scars. He saw something in her eyes, something deep and troubled. Oddly, it didn’t look like disgust. After a pause when she made no move forward, he yanked the sleeve down again and shrugged into his coat.

“Yeah. It is stupid,” he said quietly. “So was kissing you. It won’t happen again.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but he cut her off. “Come on, Tucker.”

The dog rose, stretching his hind legs first and then his front before he padded sleepily over to Dylan.

“Wait. You don’t have to leave.”

He gave her a long, solemn look. “Your wallpaper is down. You should be all ready to paint now.”

She chewed her lip. “Dylan—”
“Good night, Gen. See you tomorrow.”
After a long pause she sighed, still looking troubled.

“Thank you for your help. You saved me a great deal of time and energy.”

He nodded, whistled to his dog and headed for the door.

That had to rank among the strangest hours of her life. Gen stood at the window watching Dylan’s battered old pickup drive away through the snow that had begun to flutter down, coating the roadway with a thin layer that reflected white in his headlights.
She thought of working beside him as they removed the wallpaper, of that strangely sweet mood, tenderness and affection and that sexual awareness that had swirled around them like the steam.

And then that kiss.

Everything inside her shivered at the memory of his mouth on hers, firm and demanding, of the scent of him, masculine and outdoorsy. In all her twenty-six years, no kiss had ever stirred her like that.

As usual, she had ruined everything, startled by the unexpected feel of his unnaturally smooth arm against her back where she had expected another hand.

He thought she had been repelled. She didn’t know how to tell him she hadn’t found anything disgusting, only different. If he had given her another minute or two, she would have touched him when he’d demanded it. She hadn’t been able to find the nerve, not with him watching her so intently. She had been too busy being overwhelmed with compassion and sorrow for all he had endured.

She closed her eyes, tasting him on her lips again, sweet and sexy. She wanted to savor the moment, especially given his determination that it had been a mistake that wouldn’t happen again.

Why would he want to kiss her again? What could she possibly have to interest a man like Dylan? He thought her some kind of empty-headed party girl who only cared about fashion and design.

She sighed and began cleaning up the mess left in the dining room. Shredded paper, sticky with wallpaper paste, covered the floor in piles.

Remodeling a house was sloppy and dirty and hard. Kind of like her life felt right now.

once agaIn, Grandma Pearl’s annoying Hallelujah doorbell rang just as she was giving her hair a final brush. Thus far, she hadn’t had a single visitor worthy of

such a gleeful announcement. She might have been happy to see Dylan the night before but by the time he left, she certainly wasn’t singing the man’s praises.

Luck still wasn’t with her. She opened the door with the security chain in place and saw only a faux-fur coat so authentic-looking she sometimes wondered if it was real.

She wanted to close the door again, lock it tight and sneak out the back. Too bad she instantly saw a few obvious problems with that. For one thing, she wouldn’t be able to back out her BMW without smashing her mother’s Mercedes SUV in the driveway. For another, eventually Laura would find her, and she was quite sure she wouldn’t like dealing with the consequences.

After fumbling with the chain with fingers that felt graceless and awkward, she pulled open the door. “Mother. Here you are again, bright and early.”

“I know. Crazy, isn’t it? I decided on a whim last night to drive into Denver to finish some last-minute Christmas shopping. When your father and I were in Switzerland in August, I bought a really lovely sweater for my friend Annamaria—you know, that nice tennis pro I’ve been working with lately. But she told me last month she’s expecting a baby. Can you believe that? I certainly can’t give her a size-four sweater now, when she won’t be able to wear it for a whole year.”

“That is a quandary.”

“I’ve shopped in every store in Hope’s Crossing without finding anything I think she would like, but I’m sure I’ll be able to pick something up in Denver.”

“Well, good luck.”

Her mother pushed her way into the house and pulled off her leather driving gloves. “I thought perhaps you could come with me, darling. We haven’t spent nearly enough time together since you’ve been home from Paris. Wouldn’t it be fun to have lunch at the Brown Palace and walk through our favorite shops?”

Laura gave her a strangely tentative smile. She seemed almost…desperate for Genevieve to go with her. “Oh, I can’t. I have to work at the center today. I wish you had called before driving over here,” she said, surprised that she meant the words and that she actually felt a little regret at having to refuse.

Her mother pursed her lips. “Again? Didn’t you work several days last week?”

Gen fought back a sigh. Despite having a workaholic husband, Laura seemed to think the rest of the world existed just to fill her own leisure hours. She couldn’t always have been this way. The Beaumonts were not wealthy when she was little, only for the past twenty years or so.

“I really am sorry, Mother, but I have to finish a hundred community-service hours by January. I’ve completed sixteen, which still leaves me eighty-four to go. I’m probably going to have to go every day until Christmas.”

“It’s ridiculous. That’s what it is! I don’t understand how your father could let this happen. He said he would fix it. He talked to the judge! I thought everything was settled. You did absolutely nothing wrong. I don’t understand how you can let yourself become a virtual slave to that…that wounded-soldier outfit.”

“I’m not a slave. And Father did talk to the judge. While he couldn’t reduce my time, I did have the option to go somewhere else for the rest of my hours. I chose not to because I have committed to A Warrior’s Hope and right now they need me.”

She doubted her mother would understand that particular concept.

“You could call in sick. Surely they won’t make you come in to work if you’re under the weather.”

“True, but I’m not under the weather,” she pointed out. “You could tell them you are,” her mother persisted.

“Everyone deserves a little holiday. I was so looking forward to having a day of shopping, just the two of us. Girls’ day in the city. It’s just what we both need.”

Even if she didn’t have to go to the recreation center that day, she couldn’t have spared the time to shop with money she didn’t have in Denver. Not when she had this horrible house hanging around her neck like a hideous scarf.

“I can’t, Mother. They’re expecting me today at A Warrior’s Hope. We have new guests arriving, which is apparently a stressful time, and I’m in charge of decorating for the welcome reception.”

Anticipating the task ahead of her after Charlotte asked her Saturday, Gen had even bought some supplies the day before around town and gathered more from nature. She couldn’t wait to see how they turned out. She didn’t mind the decorating part of things, but she was more than a little nervous about meeting a roomful of wounded veterans and their families. Would they all be bitter and angry like Dylan? Anxiety fluttered through her.

“Come on, darling. Someone else could do that for you,” Laura pressed. “We haven’t had a moment together since you arrived. I’m anxious to catch up and find out about all those French men you’ve been dating.”

She didn’t have much to tell in that direction. She had dated a few. While she had inevitably been entranced by their charm and wit, she hadn’t had a silly girlish crush on any of them. None had made her chest tingle or her stomach twirl with nerves like Dylan Caine did.

She swallowed. “I can’t.”

Laura heaved a sigh. “I suppose I’ll have to spend the day in Denver by myself.”

If she didn’t know better, Genevieve might think her mother sounded almost…lonely.

On impulse, she stepped forward and kissed her mother’s cheek. Laura smelled of Estée Lauder makeup and the Annick Goutal perfume she always wore. “I’ll have an afternoon off either Wednesday or Thursday. Perhaps we can go to lunch here in Hope’s Crossing. Several new restaurants have opened since I’ve been back. If that doesn’t work out, let’s definitely plan on brunch Sunday.”

“I have a hair appointment Wednesday and a luncheon party at the country club Thursday. I’ll make reservations for Le Passe Montagne for Sunday morning. Charlie is coming home this week after his finals so we can all go together.”

“Deal.”

Her mother hugged her and then stepped back. She looked around the house, her carefully constructed nose wrinkled with distaste.

“This house. It’s terrible. It looks like you’re living in a war zone! I don’t understand why you can’t just sell the place as is. Whoever buys this land will probably tear this horrible house down.”

Though she suspected her mother was right, she still felt a pang of regret she didn’t quite understand. She hated the house, too, though the funkiness was growing on her. She didn’t want to contemplate the idea of someone razing it.

If that was the eventual outcome, she still wanted to pour as much as she could afford, financially and physically, into making the house presentable. The better the house looked, the more she could make in profit from the sale.

Her mother probably couldn’t understand that, especially as
she
wasn’t the one fighting for a future. Laura had always hated this place, only in part because of the outdated decor that Grandma Pearl refused to change.

Laura and Grandma Pearl hadn’t really gotten along. Her grandmother had had little patience for her daughter-in-law’s social ambitions, and Laura had had even less for Grandma Pearl’s loud, gaudy, sometimes abrasive personality.

“Oh. Look at that,” Laura exclaimed. “You’ve taken down that atrocious wallpaper. That must have been a job by yourself.”