The Christmas Wedding Quilt: Let It Snow / You Better Watch Out / Nine Ladies Dancing

“I have the key. I look after the Grants’ house, too.”

Jo leaned back. “Well, you’re a busy boy, aren’t you? Nothing to do in the vineyard this time of year?”

“I have a bargain with the owners. For a nominal fee I watch their houses in winter, and in the fall they come to my place and pick grapes. We make quite a party out of it.”

“You don’t have machines for that?”

“We harvest the juice grapes by machine, but these are more fragile. Vignoles grapes for wine.”

“I always loved seeing all those acres of grapes.”

“And eating them. The summer we met.”

She had been smiling, but that died now. “You know, Pacific time or not, I really am wiped.”

He had been dismissed, so he stood. “The snow’s going to continue through the night. You have some staples in the pantry, a little flour, sugar, salt, that sort of thing, along with some canned soup. But not a lot else. It might be some time before you can shop. I’d ration.”

“Uncle Albert said somebody plows the driveway after it snows.”

“That would be me. But not until the snow stops long enough for it to make sense.”

She uncurled her legs and gracefully rose to follow him to the door. “Thank you for the fire and coffee.” She stuck out her hand.

Surprised, he took it, but the contact was brief. “What are old friends for?”

“I guess we were friends, weren’t we?”

“Maybe we can be again.”

When she didn’t respond he smiled, as if the lack didn’t matter, as if friendship went without saying when, of course, it was probably impossible.

More things left unsaid, their mutual talent.

“Be sure to close the doors on the fireplace before you go to bed,” he said. “The chimney’s just been cleaned, so it’s safe enough, but that’s a hot fire. You don’t want any sparks popping into the room.”

“Thanks, I have a fireplace in my condo.”

“Then you’re an expert.”

She tilted her head. “At lots of things. I’ve been taking care of myself for a very long time.” She paused. “But thank you for taking care of me tonight. I’m not sure where I would be right now if you hadn’t come along.”

He considered those parting words on his way home. She had been talking about tonight and where she would have been without his help. But Jo was a survivor. She would have found a way to keep from freezing even if she’d been forced to dig out the whole driveway to get back on the road.

Now he wondered where she would be if he had never come along at all, if he had never met her the summer she turned sixteen, if they hadn’t made a thousand plans together, all canceled summarily four years later. Had she stopped trusting men after that? Was that why she’d never married? Had she stopped coming to Hollymeade because she had been afraid of running into him? How many choices had she made that stemmed from their past?

How many had he made?

He found himself at the Grants’ house instead of his own. It was more than six miles from Ryan Vineyards, so he hadn’t simply made a wrong turn. No, the wrong turn had come a long time ago. Now there was no telling where this one might lead.

He jumped down and went through his ring of keys on the way to the front door. Inside he took the steps upstairs and then those to the attic two at a time. The Grant house wasn’t as large or lovely as Hollymeade, but it was a pretty Colonial with banks of windows looking over the water and decks all around, well cared for and loved.

Unlike Hollymeade this house wasn’t heated in the winter, and right now the inside temperature was as cold as the outside. He kept his gloves on until he had reached his destination, a pile of boxes in the front. He knew right where they were because he had helped Eric’s father move them to this spot. He’d been impressed at how carefully each one had been labeled, in case the contents were ever needed again.

He spotted the one he was looking for and began to stack the rest along the side until he could get to it.

“Eric’s baby things.” He grimaced at the label and shook his head, but not at the words, at himself for thinking this was a good idea.

He almost left it where it was, but in the end, he carried it across the attic to a pile of boxes that hadn’t yet been sorted, a pile Lydia Grant was probably making her way through each summer.

When he left the house, the box with Eric’s baby things was stored in the very back of the Grants’ attic, six down on an unmarked pile, the label turned toward the wall. It was the least likely place anyone would look for it.

It might buy him the time he needed to get to know Jo again.

CHAPTER THREE

HOLLYMEADE STILL LOOKED much the same. After a breakfast of cold cereal Jo wandered the rooms, a cup of tea from the only tea bag in the house warming her hands. Some things had changed, though. The walls in the living area were a different color now, a silvery sage, and the sofas were new. The armchairs, though? Those she remembered from afternoons curled up with Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, even if the chairs now wore slipcovers.

The kitchen had newer appliances, and someone must have decided that updated laminate countertops were a worthwhile investment. But the pot rack with its copper-bottomed saucepans still hung near the stove. And while the curtains had to be new, they mimicked the ones she remembered, gauzy white and tied back to let in the light.

She was home.

Outside the snow continued, and now it was nearly as high as the windows. Of course there must have been snow on the ground already. Western New York was famous for the stuff. Jo couldn’t believe she had gambled on reaching the grocery store today. But there would be no road trip, not until the skies cleared. While she was still in bed she’d heard a plow on the main road, but she doubted it was easy to travel.

Before breakfast she had inventoried the pantry shelves, hoping Brody had exaggerated, but embellishing wasn’t his style. She could heat a can of chicken noodle soup for lunch, snack on a candy bar midafternoon and eat the remaining hash from the can she had opened last night for dinner. If she followed that pattern, she would be okay for two more days, although she wasn’t looking forward to cream-of-broccoli Tuesday. She supposed if the snow continued longer, she might be able to make pancakes without oil or eggs and eat them with sugar sprinkled on top.

She wrinkled her nose. Of course she could always call Brody to rescue her again.

When hell froze over.

Since she prepared for everything, she’d made plans in advance if she happened to run into him. A chance encounter at the grocery maybe, a few sentences of greeting and catch-up, then both of them heading off to their separate lives. Their relationship had ended a decade ago. They were hardly the people they had been. Through the years she had erased memories of him the way she routinely wiped away outdated files on her computer.

But unless a hard drive was reformatted, old files still left traces. And how did a woman reformat her heart?

As she stared outside at the winter wonderland, snow clinging to evergreen branches and icicles dripping from the roof of the boat shed, she remembered.

After her father’s death, Jo’s mother had resettled herself and her preteen daughter in Hollywood, using a generous life insurance payment. Sophie, darling of their town’s little theater, had decided to bury her grief in an acting career. When that proved impossible, she devoted herself to making the unenthusiastic Jo into a star.

Jo, who preferred auditions to her mother’s handwringing, found work in a few commercials, but when it became clear her daughter didn’t have either drive or talent, Sophie sought work as a makeup artist. Unfortunately money dribbled through her fingers. The rental house gave way to a furnished room, and on the afternoon their landlord threatened to break down their door to collect three months of rent, Jo took over their finances.

As Sophie spiked between elation and despair, Jo covered all the other bases and kept her grades high, because by then she knew that an education and a good job would be her saving grace. Luckily her father had made sure to establish a college fund that Sophie couldn’t tap, and Jo vowed that when the time came, she would use every penny to pursue a degree that promised a job at the end.

Hollymeade and her father’s family faded into the background, because Sophie, fiercely possessive, refused to let her visit the lake house.

The year Jo turned sixteen, a miracle happened. As she powdered the leading man’s nose on the set of a low-budget film, Sophie caught an associate producer’s eye, and three weeks later they were married in Vegas. Since his next project was in Italy, Sophie and her new husband headed for Milan to spend the summer, and Jo was packed off to Hollymeade.

Jo had been thrilled to fly back to New York and settle into a room in the old house to reconnect with her father’s family and disconnect from her mother. Her grandmother had been thrilled, too, and their quilting lessons had resumed. Unfortunately her cousins, whom Jo hadn’t seen in years, couldn’t join them. Rachel was living in Australia, Ella in Seattle, and Olivia was enrolled in a special summer language program in Salzburg. Members of the larger Miller family came and went, some with children younger than she was, but after the thrill of reunion wore off, Jo began to feel lonely.

Until Brody Ryan showed up.