Page 78 of A Mountain Springs Christmas
“You’ve got your coat,hat, and gloves?” Nick asked as he grabbed his keys and the bag he’d filled and opened the door leading to the garage.
“Check, check, and check,” Holly said. “But not check on my other shoe.”
She hopped on one foot toward the door as she put her shoe on the other foot, then he, Holly, and Rosy all went into the garage, hopped into the car, and put their seatbelts on. He pushed the button hooked to his visor to open the big garage door at the same time he started the car. He looked into the rearview mirror as the door raised, but saw lights turning onto his driveway. Squinting at the brightness, he tried to make out whose car it was.
“Huh,” he said. “I think Rachel is here.”
Confused, he turned off his car and they all got out, meeting Rachel, Aiden, and her dog in his driveway. “What are you doing here?”
Rachel looked a bit… sheepish, was it? “I came to talk to you. But you’re just leaving— I’m sorry. Do you need to go?”
He shook his head. “I was coming to talk to you.” Did he dare hope that she wouldn’t have shown up at his house today unless she had been every bit as unsettled as he was about how they’d left everything?
“You were?”
He nodded. “I wanted to tell you that I think I might have made a mistake.”
“Yeah? I made a mistake, too. A really big one.”
Hope started to fill him more. “Was your mistake in ending things? Because if it wasn’t, this conversation is going to get awkward very quickly.”
She chuckled softly. That was good. Right? “I might have freaked out because of my planner.”
He nodded. “I got freaked out because of my deceased wife.”
“Okay, you win.”
“I guess I didn’t have things figured out because dating again is so new. But then my father-in-law shared a lot with me that I needed to hear—things I hadn’t considered that made me look at our relationship in a different light. And I realized that I didn’t need to be freaking out about the things I was freaking out about.”
“Aww,” Rachel said. “Tell your father-in-law I think he’s pretty great.”
He definitely would. He needed to thank the man for himself again, too. “What about you?”
“Some friends set me straight. Aiden helped, too.”
“Tell Aiden I think he’s pretty great.”
“Don’t worry,” Aiden said from where he and Holly stood half a dozen feet away. “I heard. Does this mean that you two are going to start dating again?”
Both he and Rachel chuckled, then looked at each other again. She was so beautiful, her dark hair falling in waves just below her red knit cap. The snow was coming down in bigchunks, landing on the cap and her hair. He couldn’t believe he almost let fear keep him from this woman, and he was so grateful that she was willing to talk about making things work.
“I would like to,” he said. “What do you think? And don’t feel obligated to say yes, even though it’s still your Season of Yes.”
She smiled and stepped closer to him. Their coats were brushing, their faces close enough that he could feel her warm breaths. “I would like to, also. Season of Yes or not.”
“Yes!” Aiden and Holly both said, giving each other high-fives. It suddenly made him wonder how much matchmaking behind the scenes the kids had done that he hadn’t known about.
“Can us seeing each other again start today? Because it feels like it’s been a million years since I last saw you, and this heart of mine has been going through some serious withdrawals.”
She smiled up at him. “Mine, too. And we can definitely start today.”
He had thought once at the beginning of their relationship that it felt like he had jumped out of a plane. This moment felt like their parachutes had safely deployed and they were landing more or less gently on the ground.
Holly and Aiden ran off to play in the snow in their front yard as more fell from the sky. He reached out to brush a snowflake from Rachel’s cheek. “So I won Aiden over, huh?”
“Yeah, but that was mostly because you showed him all the tools at The Home Improvement Store, and to a kid like Aiden, you opened up his mind to crafts on a much bigger scale.” She chuckled. “In all seriousness, though. You totally won him over. All the way. I think you won us all over.”
Bailey, the good girl that she was, took that moment to come over and sit at his feet, looking up at him like she just knew he was about to tell her how great she was.
