Free On Thin Ice by Bernadette Marie Page B

than a bakery where you picked up your breads and muffins, she wanted to have a place where you could sit and enjoy the company of others.
    Her bakery in Santa Barbara hadn’t been too far from the college campus. She’d had a nice little following of students who would meet to study. In the mornings, there was the small group of mothers who would meet when the kids were in preschool. They would just have woman time. That’s what she wanted again. A place where people could come together, much like Maggie’s, but on a smaller scale.
    She flipped over the paper she’d made her list on and began to design the dinosaur she’d be creating the next morning. How many dinosaurs had she cut out of sheet cakes in her life, she wondered. Cake decorating wasn’t a skill she’d been born with. However, she’d perfected it. Oh, she couldn’t do some of the things she’d seen on TV, but a dinosaur wasn’t out of reach.
    If she cut it just right, she might have just enough cake to make a little something to take with her for her night with Christopher. Something special that they could share with each other, off each other.
    Her body heat rose. She wiped her hands on her pants and sucked in a breath. She was going to spend the night with Christopher Douglas. It wasn’t just sneaking around and having sex. This was a grown-up-relationship kind of thing and it was scaring the heck out of her.
     
    Christopher whistled as he pulled up to his mother's house. He'd thought that moving back home was admitting defeat, but in fact, it had turned out pretty well.
    He swung open the front door and he heard his mother moving around in the kitchen. Thanksgiving was a week away, but as he stepped over storage boxes full of holiday decor, he knew his mother, like most of the residence of Aspen Creek, was ready for Christmas.
    He'd already seen the city workers out hanging wreaths from the light poles. Thanksgiving night they would light the Christmas tree in the center of the lake. The memory of watching the lighting as a child filled him with a comfortable warmth. There were carolers, food vendors, fireworks, and the arrival of Santa.
    Oh, the arrival of Santa was always his favorite part. It had taken him and Wil the better part of four years, when they were young, to realize that Harvey was in fact Aspen Creek's Santa Claus on that particular evening. She'd been too afraid to sit on his lap anyway, and wasn't it funny how Santa always knew just what mischief he'd been in.
    Christopher listened to his mother's rendition of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” before he cleared his throat to announce himself.
    "You’re setting up already?"
    "Already? I'm already behind." She skirted around him with the manger that would go on the coffee table, atop the white glitter fabric. "Samantha said she already had her lights hung and had been designing wreaths for the last month. Esther said her tree is up. But you know she don't have a real one and all."
    Christopher laughed. His mother said that like it was a crime to have an artificial tree.
    She moved past him again and pulled the figurines out of another box. "How about you and Wil go pick me out a tree on Saturday? It'll be like old times."
    "And do you want a tree like the ones we used to pick you out?"
    "Heck no. No Charlie Brown Christmas around here. I want big and full."
    "Well, it'll have to wait until Monday. I'm picking Wil up on Saturday and taking her to Denver for the weekend."
    Maggie stopped unwrapping the baby Jesus she had pulled from the box and stared at him.
    "I can't help but be a bit surprised. Just yesterday she told me she hated you. "
    He laughed. "Today she seems okay with me."
    Maggie finished unwrapping baby Jesus from his protective paper and set him on the table.
    "Don't go breaking her heart."
    She hadn't even turned toward him when she said it. He felt the weight of fifteen years of guilt settle in his gut. Even his own mother held his adolescent mistakes against