Page 45 of Christmas Charms
My face grows warm as our laughter dies down and I realize Aidan is studying my disheveled appearance.
“How did you get here? Did you roll up to the firehouse in a giant snowball?” He gives the pompom on the top of my hat a tug, and my hair spills over my shoulders in a tumble of messy waves.
“Sort of. I’ve been…playing in the snow.” I brush past him and head toward the table full of gifts, eager to get off the topic of my big fat failure of a snowman.
Plus, Aidan’s nearness is making me breathless. I can feel my pulse pounding at the base of my throat, and I need to focus on something other than his soulful blue eyes.
I pick up a boxed jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the box shows a shaggy white dog with a red velvet bow tied around his neck, sitting in a snowy field at the edge of a forest. “This is sweet. It reminds me of Fruitcake.”
“We have a lot of that particular puzzle. A card company donated them to our toy drive. Do you think you’ll still find it cute after you’ve wrapped a few dozen of them?”
“Absolutely.” I slide out of my coat, ready to get started. If my affection for Christmas dogs hasn’t waned in the twenty years since I was the Parade Sweetheart, I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.
Aidan sits across from me, and we wrap the pile of the puzzles until each one is covered in glittery paper and smooth satin ribbon. Christmas carols are playing from the fire station’s sound system, and we work in silence for a while until Aidan picks up an action figure from the pile of gifts and holds it up to himself.
“Look, it’s my twin,” he says with a wink.
I roll my eyes. “You’re not going to let that little comment go, are you?”
He shakes his head and grabs a fresh roll of wrapping paper. “No, I’m not, mainly because you were right.”
“I was?” My hands go still, and I look up from the half-wrapped doll on the table in front of me.
Aidan is focused intently on folding his sparkly red paper into straight lines—so much so that I have a feeling he’s purposefully avoiding my gaze. “I work a lot. It’s pretty much all I do these days, so I understand where the action hero comment came from. I’m the last person who should be giving you hard time about being in a hurry to get back to your job.”
“What you do is important, though. You’re legitimately a hero.” I’m very aware of the dangers involved with being a firefighter. Before my dad retired, my mom prayed for him every single time he left for work. As a little girl, my heart would jump to my throat every time I heard a siren.
“There’s more to being brave than willingly walking into a burning building,” Aidan says quietly.
Michael Bublé’s voice swells around us, singing about kissing on a cold December night. A sparkle of gold glitter from an earlier roll of wrapping paper is stuck to Aidan’s forehead, and a lump forms in my throat because this is the first real heart-to-heart we’ve had in nearly a decade. I’ve missed talking to Aidan like this.
I’ve missedus.
When Aidan finally looks up, his smile is bittersweet. “In a way, I guess it’s easier to put my life on the line than my heart.”
Okay…wow. That’s quite an admission, and it feels like an arrow straight to the center of my chest.
Aidan shakes his head. “Don’t. I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t mean it as any kind of slam against you. It took me a while to admit it, but you were right to say no all those years ago. We were too young to build a life together back then. We both had a lot of growing up to do, and in the end, it wasn’t just you that let our relationship die. That’s on both of us. I could have fought for you, for what we had—I could have waited, convinced you we could take things at your pace. But I didn’t. I let us drift further and further apart.”
It’s the absolution I’ve been waiting for, but somehow, I always thought it would make me feel better than I do when he says it. Honestly, the only thing I feel right now is sad.
Sad for me, sad for Aidan and sad for what could have been.
“It’s always been hard for me—you know that,” Aidan says. “After my dad died, I wanted to be the man of the family. Strong. Stoic. I’ve never had an easy time opening up to people. You were always the only one.”
I nod gingerly, because I do know. When I first met Aidan, he was closed like a book. Getting to know him, seeing him open up and share his thoughts and feelings with me, took time. While I’ve been away, I just assumed he’d found someone else he trusted with his heart. I never asked my parents if he was involved with someone else, because I was afraid of the answer—even while I was dating Jeremy.
Aidan is a good man. He’s kind in ways that make my heart twist. It’s taken me a while to realize that that sort of man is a rarity. They certainly don’t stay single forever.
He shrugs and gives me a boyish smile. “I suppose it’s something I need to work on.”
“Has there been anyone else?” I ask in a voice just shy of a whisper. “I mean, since me? Since us?”
“Not anyone serious.” Aidan averts his gaze. “You?”
“Yes. His name was Jeremy.” I swallow hard. Susan knows all about my big breakup, and I’m fairly certain she’s told Aidan at least a little about it, but he deserves to hear it from me. “It was quite serious, but we broke up right before I came home for Christmas. I was actually supposed to be in Paris with him and his family right now.”
“Paris? Wow.” Aidan glances at our surroundings. The Owl Lake Fire Department is about as far as a person could possibly get from the Champs-Élysées. “Is it okay for me to admit that I’m glad you’re here instead?”
