Sleigh Ride with the Single Dad, page 15
It didn’t matter now that she had tears rolling down her cheeks. She wasn’t sad, exactly. Mary had believed that she was about to be reunited with her love and she had welcomed the release from any more suffering. She hadn’t died alone, either. She had been grateful for Grace’s company. For a hand to hold.
And she’d been lucky, hadn’t she?
She had known true love. Had loved and been loved in equal measure.
Or maybe she was sad.
Not for Mary, but for herself.
Grace had come so close to finding that sort of love for herself—or she’d thought she had. But now, it seemed as far away as ever. As if she was standing on the other side of a plate-glass window, looking in at a scene that she couldn’t be a part of.
A perfect scene.
A Christmas one, perhaps. With pretty lights on a tree and parcels tied up with bows underneath. A fire in a grate beneath a mantelpiece that had colourful stockings hanging from it. There were people in that scene, too. A tall man with dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Two little mop-topped, happy boys. And a big, curly, adorable dog.
It took a while to get those overwhelming emotions under control but the company of this brave old woman who had unexpectedly appeared in her life helped, so by the time Grace alerted others of Mary’s death, nobody would have guessed how much it had affected her. They probably just thought she looked very tired and who wouldn’t, after such a long day?
It took a while after that to do what was necessary after a death of a patient and it was past time for Grace’s shift to finish by the time she bundled herself up in her warm coat and scarf and gloves, ready for her walk home.
She walked out of the ER via the ambulance bay and found that it had been snowing far more than she’d been told about. A soft blanket of whiteness had cloaked everything and the world had that muted sound that came with snow when even the traffic was almost silent. And it was cold. Despite her gloves, Grace could feel her fingers tingling so she shoved her hands in her pockets and that was when she felt the crinkle of that envelope again.
Thanks to her time with Mary, she had completely forgotten to put it on Charles’s desk.
Perhaps that was a good thing?
Running away from something because it was difficult wasn’t the kind of person she was now.
Charles had told her how courageous she was. He had made her believe it and that belief had been enough to push her into risking her heart again.
And that had to be a good thing, too.
Even if it didn’t feel like it right now.
She had almost reached the street now where the lamps were casting a circle of light amidst a swirl of snowflakes but she turned back, hesitating.
She hadn’t even looked in the direction of Charles’s office when she’d left. Maybe he was still there?
Maybe the kind of person she was now would actually go back and talk about this. Take the risk of making herself even more vulnerable?
And that was when she heard it.
Someone calling her name.
No. It was a jingle of bells. She had just imagined hearing her name.
She turned back to the road and any need to make a decision on what direction she was about to take evaporated.
There was a sleigh just outside the ambulance entrance to Manhattan Mercy.
A bright red sleigh, with swirling gold patterns on its sides and a canopy that was rimmed with fairy lights. A single white horse was in front, its red harness covered with small bells and, on its head—instead of the usual feathery plume—it had a set of reindeer antlers.
A driver sat in the front, a dark shape in a heavy black coat and scarf and top hat. But, in the back, there was someone else.
Charles...
‘Grace...?’
Her legs were taking her forward without any instruction from her brain.
She was too stunned to be thinking of anything, in fact. Other than that Charles was here.
In a sleigh?
Maybe she’d got that image behind the plate-glass window a little wrong earlier.
Maybe this was the magic place she hadn’t been able to reach.
Just Charles. In a sleigh. In the snow.
And he was holding out his hand now, to invite her to join him under the canopy at the back. Waiting to help her reach that place.
Grace was still too stunned to be aware of any coherent thoughts but her body seemed to know what to do and she found herself reaching up to take that hand.
She had been on the point of summoning the courage to go and find Charles even if it meant stepping into the most vulnerable space she could imagine.
Here she was, literally stepping into that space.
And it hadn’t taken as much courage as she’d expected.
Because it felt...right...
Because it was Charles who was reaching out to her and there was no way on earth she could have turned away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HEART-WRENCHING...
That look on Grace’s face when she’d seen him waiting for her in the sleigh.
He’d expected her to be surprised, of course. The sleigh might not be genuine but the sides had been cleverly designed to cover most of the wheels so it not only looked the part but was a pretty unusual sight on a New York street. Along with the bells and fairy lights and the reindeer antlers on the horse, he had already been a target for every phone or camera that people had been able to produce.
For once, he didn’t mind the attention. Bundled up in his thick coat and scarf, with a hat pulled well down over his head, Charles Davenport was unrecognisable but the worry about publicity was a million miles from his mind, anyway. The sight of this spectacle—that had taken him most of the day to organise—didn’t just make people want to capture the image. It was delighting them, making them point and wave. To smile and laugh.
But Grace hadn’t smiled when she saw him.
She’d looked shocked.
Scared, almost?
So, so vulnerable that Charles knew in that instant just how much damage his silence had caused.
And how vital it was to fix it.
The sheer relief when Grace had accepted his hand to climb up into the carriage had been so overwhelming that perhaps he couldn’t blame the biting cold for making his eyes water. Or for making it too hard to say anything just yet. How much courage had it taken for her to accept his hand?
He loved her for that courage. And for everything else he knew to be true about her.
And nothing needed to be said just yet. For now, it was too important to make sure that Grace was going to be warm enough. To pull one faux fur blanket after another from the pile at his feet, to wrap them both in a soft cocoon. A single cocoon, so that as soon as he was satisfied there was no danger of hypothermia, he could wrap his arms around Grace beneath these blankets and simply hold her close.
Extra protection from the cold?
No. This was about protecting what he knew was the most important thing in his life at this moment. Grace. So important in his boys’ lives as well. The only thing he wasn’t sure of yet was how important it might be in her life.
The steady, rocking motion of the carriage was like a slow heartbeat that made him acutely aware of every curve in the body of the woman he was holding and, as the driver finished negotiating traffic and turned into the lamplit, almost deserted paths of Central Park, he could feel the tension in Grace’s body begin to lessen. It was under the halo of one of those antique streetlamps that Grace finally raised her head to meet his gaze and he could see that the shock had worn off.
There was something else in her gaze now.
Hope?
That wouldn’t be there, would it? Unless this was just as important to her as it was to him?
Again, the rush of emotion made it impossible to find any words.
Instead, Charles bent his head and touched Grace’s lips gently with his own. Her lips parted beneath his and he felt the astonishing warmth of her mouth. Of her breath.
A breath of life...
Maybe he still didn’t need to say anything yet. Or maybe he could say it another way...
* * *
For the longest time, Grace’s brain had been stunned into immobility. She was aware of what was around her but couldn’t begin to understand what any of it meant.
Her senses were oddly heightened. The softness of the furry blankets felt like she was being wrapped inside a cloud. The motion of the carriage was like being rocked in someone’s arms. And then she was in someone’s arms. Charles’s. Grace didn’t want to think about what this meant. She just wanted to feel it. This sense of being in the one place in the world she most wanted to be. This feeling of being protected.
Precious...
Finally, she had to raise her head. To check whether this was real. Had she slipped in the snow and knocked herself out cold, perhaps? Was this dream-come-to-life no more than an elaborate creation of her subconscious?
If it was, it couldn’t have conjured up a more compelling expression in the eyes of the man she loved.
It was a gaze that told her she was the only thing in the world that mattered right now.
That she was loved...
And then his lips touched her own and Grace could feel how cold they were, which only intensified the heat that was coming from inside his body. From his breath. From the touch of his tongue.
She wasn’t unconscious.
Grace had never felt more alive in her life.
It was the longest, most tender kiss she had ever experienced. A whole conversation in itself.
An apology from Charles, definitely. A declaration of love, even.
And on her part? A statement that the agony of his silence and distance since they’d last been together didn’t matter, perhaps. That she forgave him. That nothing mattered other than being together, like this.
They had to come up for air eventually, however, and the magic of the kiss retreated.
Actions might speak a whole lot louder than words, but words were important, too.
Charles was the first to use some.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s been crazy...but when Kylie told me this morning that you were thinking of leaving, I got enough of a shock to realise just how much I’d messed this up.’
‘You didn’t even answer my text message,’ Grace whispered, her voice cracking. ‘The morning after we’d...we’d...’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I woke up that morning and realised how I felt about you and...and it was huge. My head was all over the place and then my mother rang. She’d seen something in the paper that suggested we were a couple. That photo of us all in the park.’
Grace nodded. ‘Helena showed it to me. She said that there’d been a reporter in the department pretending to be a patient. That you’d told her we were just colleagues. Friends. That it would never be anything more than that.’
She looked away from Charles. A long, pristine stretch of the wide pathway lay ahead of them, the string of lamps shining to illuminate the bare, snow-laden branches of the huge, old trees guarding this passage. The snow was still falling but it was gentle now. Slow enough to be seen as separate stars beneath the glow of the lamps.
‘I’d thought I would be able to find you as soon as I got to work. That I could warn you of the media interest. I thought...that I was protecting you from having your privacy invaded by putting them off the scent. And...and it didn’t seem that long. It was only a day...’
Grace squeezed her eyes shut. ‘It felt like a month...’
‘I’m sorry...’
The silence continued on and then she heard Charles take a deep breath.
‘I can’t believe I made the same mistake. For the same reasons.’
‘It’s who you are, Charles.’ Grace opened her eyes but she didn’t turn to meet his gaze. ‘You’re always going to try and protect your family above everything else.’
She was looking at the fountain they were approaching. She’d seen it in the daytime—an angel with one hand held out over a pond. The angel looked weighed down now, her wings encrusted with a thick layer of snow.
Their carriage driver was doing a slow circuit around the fountain. Grace felt Charles shift slightly and looked up to see him staring at the angel.
‘She’s the Angel of the Waters, did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘The statue was commissioned to commemorate the first fresh water system for New York. It came after a cholera outbreak. She’s blessing the water, to give it healing powers.’
He turned to meet her gaze directly and there was something very serious in his own. A plea, almost.
For healing?
‘I do understand,’ Grace said softly. ‘And I don’t blame you for ignoring me that first time. But it hurt, you know? I really didn’t think you would do it again...’
‘I didn’t realise I was. I went into the pattern that I’d learned back then, to focus on protecting the people that mattered. My mother was upset. It was Thanksgiving and the family was gathering. The worst thing that could happen was to have everything out there and being raked up all over again.’
Grace was silent. Confused. He had gone to goodness only knew how much trouble to create this dream sleigh ride for her and he’d kissed her as if she was the only person who mattered. And yet he had made that same mistake. Maybe it hadn’t seemed like very much time to him but it had felt like an eternity to her.
‘What I said to that reporter was intended to protect you, Grace, as much as to try and keep the spotlight off my family. I had the feeling that you never talk about what you’ve been through. That maybe I was the only person who knew your story. I didn’t want someone digging through your past and making something private public. You’d told me that that was the worst thing you could imagine happening. Especially something that was perhaps private between just us—that made it even more important to protect.’
He sighed as the carriage turned away from the fountain and continued its journey.
‘I needed to talk to you somewhere private and it just wasn’t happening. I couldn’t get near you at work. There was the family Thanksgiving dinner and I was running late. I knocked on your door but you weren’t home.’
‘I was Skyping my dad. I couldn’t answer the door.’ And she could have made it easier for him, couldn’t she? If she’d only had a little more confidence. She could have texted him again. Or made an effort to find him at work instead of waiting for him to come and find her.
He hadn’t been put off by her scarred body. He’d been trying to protect her from others finding out about it. It made it a secret. One that didn’t matter but was just between them. A private bond.
‘I know that you don’t actually need my protection,’ Charles said slowly. ‘That you’re strong enough to survive anything on your own, but there’s a part of me that would like you to need it, I guess. Because I want to be able to give it to you.’
They were passing the carousel now, the brightly coloured horses rising and falling under bright lights. There were children riding the horses and they could hear shrieks of glee.
‘The boys are missing you,’ Charles added quietly. ‘They were drawing pictures for you this morning and I said that you’d love them and probably put them in a frame and Max said...he asked if you’d come back then.’
‘Oh...’ Grace had a huge lump in her throat.
‘We need you, Grace. The boys need you. I need you.’
He took his hands from beneath the warmth of the blankets to cradle her face between them.
‘I love you, Grace Forbes. I think I always have...
The lump was painful to swallow. It was too hard to find more than a single word.
‘Same...’
‘You were right in what you said—I will always protect my family above everything else. But you’re part of my family now. The part we need the most.’
They didn’t notice they had left the carousel behind them as they sank into another slow, heartbreakingly tender kiss.
When Grace opened her eyes again, she found they were going past the Wollman skating rink. Dozens of people were on the ice, with the lights of the Manhattan skyline a dramatic backdrop.
‘I thought I had to ignore how I felt in order to protect the people around me,’ Charles told her. ‘But now I know how wrong I was.’
He kissed her again.
‘I want everybody to know how much I love you. And I’m going to protect that love before everything else because that’s what’s going to keep us all safe. You. Me. The boys...’ He caught Grace’s hand in his own and brought it up to his lips. ‘I can’t go down on one knee, and I don’t have a ring because I’d want you to choose what’s perfect just for you, but...will you let me love you and protect you for the rest of our lives—even if you don’t need it and even if I don’t get it quite right sometimes? Will you...will you marry me, Grace?
‘Yes...’ The word came out in no more than a whisper but it felt like the loudest thing Grace had ever said in her life.
This sleigh ride might have been a dream come true but it was nothing more than a stage set for her real dream. One that she’d thought she’d lost for ever. To love and be loved in equal measure.
To have her own family...
She had to blink back the sudden tears that filled her eyes. Had to clear away the lump in her throat so that she could be sure that Charles could hear her.
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, a huge smile starting to spread over her face. ‘Yes and yes and yes...’
EPILOGUE
IT WAS A twenty-minute walk from the apartment block to the Rockefeller Center but the two small boys weren’t complaining about the distance. It was too exciting to be walking through the park in the dark of the evening and besides, if they weren’t having a turn riding on Daddy’s shoulders, they got to hold hands with Grace.
