The Mills & Boon Christmas Wishes Collection. Maisey Yates
he said, “It’s your mom, Clio. You act this way because of your mom. You don’t let any man close in case they push you away, because you grew up lonely, with a mother who was absent almost all of the time, even when she was sitting right beside you.”
It felt like I’d been punched. It was one thing for me to recognize that, but another for my best friends to notice. “It’s not because of that,” I said, thinking I’d come to terms with all of it a long time ago. With Mom and everything that had happened. Or… maybe I’d been trying to heal everything too quickly? Sure, she’d admitted she hadn’t been there for me and that had helped, but had I really dealt with everything that had happened? All the years of feeling hurt and lonely. Was it time for me to finally open my heart up to someone again? Someone who could smash it into little tiny pieces?
At a quarter to midnight, headphones in, Bonnie Tyler crooned to me as only she could. Tears stung my eyes, and I swatted at them angrily. What Micah and Amory said had shaken me up, but I knew they were speaking from a place of love. Still, it hurt. Sure, I could forgive my mom as an adult, but the memory of my childhood would always be there.
There was a light tap on the door, and I took an ear jack out. “Yes?” I called, wondering if Amory had a sixth sense when it came to me weeping away to Bonnie Tyler.
“Up for a little midnight yoga?” Kai whispered through the crack in the door.
I froze. Firstly, I wasn’t climbing up a snow-covered mountain, I’d be swept away in a mini avalanche, I was sure of it. Second, I was a puffy-faced mess. No, I had to avoid him at all co…
He opened the door and walked in. Damn it!
Surveying me and the multitude of screwed-up tissues surrounding me, he frowned. “What’s wrong?”
I took a shuddery breath, trying to formulate a lie. An eyelash malfunction had been used already so that was out. Work issues – no, he knew too much. In the end I settled for the truth.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person on the planet who doesn’t know her own mother.” I wanted to slap myself when I realized what I’d said, and to Kai of all people, whose birth mother had died before he’d even known about her. Wasn’t he suffering the very same fate, albeit in different circumstances? “Sorry, I mean…” I tailed off.
“Don’t apologize.” With a smile, he walked over and settled on the bed beside me. “And why has that suddenly upset you tonight?”
I tried not to sniffle and snort because, how unattractive was that, but it was impossible. Once I started the ‘woe is me’ game it was hard to stop. “Micah and Amory were giving me a kind of pep talk, and then they mentioned that the reason I don’t really ever put myself forward…” Urgh, how to say it without mentioning Kai’s name? “Put myself out there, you know, in life, is because I’m scared of getting rejected. Which stems from the way I grew up beside my mom, but not with my mom.”
He put an arm around me and pulled me close; leaning into his warmth, I felt calmer. “And what do you think? Is that how you feel?”
“I guess I stopped thinking about it, because why keep reliving it? Mom was Mom, and I knew from early on things would probably never change. The thing is, I didn’t think I’d internalized it, and put up barriers. But I guess I did and just pretended I hadn’t. And for Micah to recognize that in me, well…”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think your mom’s able to see much out of her peripheral. It’s like tunnel vision; she gets through each day the only way she knows how. But to me you come across like the girl who knows what she wants, but is careful and considered about it. Except maybe when you bought Cedarwood on a whim… but everything else you’ve told me about has been well thought out. I don’t think it’s necessarily a barrier, more a process of yours, and that’s OK. We all deal with things differently.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the thrum of his heart. “I know you’re right, about Mom I mean. Being back, it’s made such a difference. I can see it now and I hope together we can move past it.”
He stroked my arm softly as we both stared off into the darkness, contemplating it all. “What about you, Kai? Have things got any clearer for you?”
Turning to face him I realized how close we were, almost coiled together like lovers, but somehow it felt like more than that. It felt deeper, as if Kai was someone I could trust and lean on, someone who’d listen and understand when I talked.
“Things are better for me,” he said, sighing softly. “There’s a lot to be said for having space to think. Up the mountain, where it’s just me and the birds, I realize I’m just a tiny speck in this huge, wide world. You know? So yeah, my parents could have been honest with me from the get-go, but I can’t hate them for hiding it. I get it. They would have said something like, ‘We’ll tell him when he’s old enough to understand, when he’s ten,’ and then I’m suddenly ten and it’s not the right time, and then twelve and that’s not either, and before long it’s too late, and they sleep with that knowledge every night and it eats away at them, but they don’t know how to say it, how I’ll react. And so they try and forget.”
“But then they did tell you.”
“And look how I reacted. Which is exactly why they didn’t tell me before.” He scrubbed his face with his hand. “I’ve come to terms with it, more than I thought I would a few days ago anyway. Like when I hike, and I’m surrounded by the fog, the low-slung clouds, I think if the worst thing that ever happens to me is knowing this secret, then I’m doing OK.”
“We humans do like to complicate things.” In Kai’s arms the world started to make sense. Big things, past hurts, loss and loneliness dimmed, and all I could feel was his particular kind of calm washing over me. I didn’t want to say anything to ruin the moment. I was happy just being, euphoric even, and grateful to the universe for showing me the kind of person I wanted to love. And that was Kai. I’d tell him, before he left, but not right now. Right now I wanted to enjoy the moment, this realization that I was ready to take a risk on love. Just the knowledge of that made me smile.
Stars twinkled through the snow-dusted window as we lay there and I fell asleep in his arms.
Friday rolled around bright and clear with the snow glistening across the ground. After a long day at the lodge, I’d showered and changed and hotfooted it to Mom’s house. We worked quietly together assembling dinner and Aunt Bessie was joining us as a last-minute surprise. It was the perfect way to finish off a long week of planning, ordering, decorating and overall panicking that we could pull off the Gatsby party. As I chopped potatoes into rough cubes, certain even I couldn’t mess up mashing them, Mom was baking some chicken concoction of hers. I wasn’t sure chicken needed so long in the oven, but I kept my lips zipped. She was the one who had been taking lessons from Aunt Bessie, so what did I know?
Aunt Bessie sashayed in, kissing our cheeks and unwinding her scarf as she went. “How are my two favorite people?” she said, her voice high with happiness.
“Good, good,” we said. Mom and I had been working beside each other in perfect synchronization. There’d been no tension over Isla’s discovery of the maze, and no real mention of her phone call to me about it, and I was hoping this was a good omen for the evening. Maybe she would show me the maze herself, of her own free will.
Aunt Bessie put some groceries in Mom’s fridge, including the obligatory box of donuts. She gave me an encouraging smile and double-checked the cubes I’d cut. Then she opened the oven and lifted the foil off Mom’s chicken dish. “Annabelle, what’s this?” she asked. “I thought you were doing the basil lemon chicken recipe I sent