Christmas at Holiday House - RaeAnne Thayne Page 0,43
I have ankle problems, so that wasn’t in the cards for me.”
“A ballerina. Wow! Were you good?”
“To my preadolescent brain, I was brilliant. To everyone else, probably not.”
Her wry self-reflection made him smile. He was fiercely drawn to her, even though he knew it wasn’t smart.
“I was good at caring for sick people. Between my mother and my aunt, I had plenty of experience. Somewhere in there, I realized I found much more satisfaction in helping other people than anything else I had done. It made sense to pursue a career in it.”
He knew many people who would have whined and complained about the cards they had been dealt if they had been in Abby’s situation, orphaned, alone. Instead, she had turned her pain outward to help others.
He twisted the garland around a branch and fluffed it out a little.
“That’s perfect. You’re very good at this.”
He made a face. “Please don’t say that too loudly. I don’t want Winnie to commandeer me into helping her next year.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” she said with a smile.
He gazed down at her, feeling an odd tug in his chest he didn’t recognize.
She was the first to look away. “Okay. I can reach the garland from here and do the lower branches.”
He bent down to hand her the spool of ribbon. As she reached up to take it from him, the alluring scent of her swirled around him, mingling with the evergreen garlands in the room: vanilla, almond, cinnamon. Luscious.
He wanted to kiss her. Ethan closed his eyes and willed away the urge.
“What about you?” she asked as she moved away. “Why don’t you like the holidays?”
“Who says I don’t like the holidays? I’m here decorating for holiday-palooza, aren’t I?”
“Only because your grandmother conned you into it.”
He laughed. “You’ve been here for more than a week and probably know how good Winnie is at convincing people to do what she wants. I seem to be overly susceptible.”
Her smile lit up the room. “Only because you love her so much,” she said softly.
His hands were actually shaking from fighting the urge to pull her into his arms. That had never happened before. Ever.
He cleared his throat. “Okay. My part of the garland is done. What’s next?”
“Ornaments. Hundreds of them. Let’s start by putting the giant balls on, which take up a lot of real estate on the tree. We can fill in the holes with all the other ornaments after that.”
“Fine. Point me to the giant balls.”
He couldn’t say that without discovering a twelve-year-old boy still lived inside him who found that sentence hilarious.
She pointed him to several large boxes. “Take one box up and then I can hand you more as you need them. We need to space them out as much as possible so we have enough for the whole tree.”
Fortunately, the giant balls were light and he was able to carry two boxes in one hand as he ascended the ladder again. He set one on the top of the ladder and held the other box while he hung the huge glossy red and gold baubles on the tree.
There was an odd sense of satisfaction in the work, he thought after hanging the balls and then going down the ladder for more ornaments.
He would never have expected it. Maybe this was why people enjoyed decorating the house so much for the holidays, this sense of adding something new, something beautiful. The Christmas music and the flickering firelight contributed to his mood as did the lovely woman working below him.
“I am not disliking this is much as I expected I would,” he said.
Abby gave him a startled look.
“Don’t get me wrong. I would still probably rather be plucking out my eyebrows, but the result is nice.”
“It looks good, doesn’t it? I’m glad I didn’t have to pick the decorations out, I only had to put them up.”
He wanted to ask her a hundred questions. Why were she and Christopher starting over in a new town where they knew no one? How was she handling the death of her husband, two years after? How did she continue to be so cheerful after she had endured a string of terrible losses?
Ethan didn’t want to ruin the moment by bringing darkness into it. He was enjoying himself too much.
He even found himself humming along to some of the familiar songs.
He could only hope his grandmother didn’t wander out to find them or she would probably fall again, in shock this time to find him