Free His Holiday Heart by Jillian Hart Page B

herself. All around her were windows. Tiny flakes winged to earth like poetry, and she let the serenity of the landscape, of the meter of the snowfall and the sweeping grace of the mantled fir trees lull her. But as beautiful as it was, it wasn’t enough to draw her away from the cold pit of pain dark and deep within her.
    Spence had done that, stirred her up with his callous words. The man you didn’t marry, what was wrong with him?
    No, Spence hadn’t meant to harm her, she realized; he had meant to drive her away with a harmless insult. He couldn’t know what she had lost. The ache sharpened, the one in her soul she tried to silence, and most days she was fairly successful.
    But today she heard that ache like wind through the trees. She padded to her bedroom and pulled open the bottom chest drawer. In the back tucked away, with other remembrances of dear moments of her life, was the picture still in its frame.
    She brushed her fingertips across the smooth glass. Time had forever frozen the image of a much younger her, when she kept her hair long and when love used to light her up like midsummer. Her soul ached seeing the little boy with tousled black hair and big chocolate eyes, just like the man also in the picture. Their dear faces, one strong with character and heart, the other, sweet with a child’s innocence, made her vision blur.
    There were some things prayer couldn’t fix. The sharp ache of loss that followed grieving and acceptance was one. Time could not heal it, only dull it. Some losses stuck with you forever, and you were never whole again.
     
    It was dark by the time he had dug out the apple-green car enough to get the driver’s side door open. Snow had drifted against the car, so he’d had to shovel that away too and his frostbitten hands felt numb, thick and useless as he fought the door handle.
    Lucy. He had done his best to avoid her the rest of the time at Katherine’s. It hadn’t been easy. His gaze had continued to malfunction, automatically finding her whenever she was in his visual field. The buzz that filled his brain when he spoke to her had become permanent. He could remember how delicate her hand had felt in his. If only he could forget.
    He dropped into the driver’s seat and yanked off his glove. His right hand was red from cold and numb enough that it took three tries to get the key Katherine had procured for him into the ignition. The engine turned over, the heater blasted on and an upbeat song blared through the speakers. He hit that off, turned the heater to defrost and hit the headlights.
    If he had been trying to get Lucy out of his head and out of his life, he had failed. Her car smelled like her—like lilacs and sunshine and sugar cookies. A tiny crystal angel hung from the rearview mirror, swinging on a length of apple-green yarn. A pile of paperbacks was strewn haphazardly over the front passenger’s floor, and a pile of notes written on flowery note paper littered the front passenger seat. The top note said—not that he was snooping, but his eyes happened to notice—idea for next story: a bookstore? Or a coffee shop. Check out Ava’s bakery for research.
    That explained the sugar cookie smell. He noticed a small bakery box in the backseat—sugar cookies from Ava’s shop.
    He scowled and searched the dash for the rear-window defroster switch. It was self-defense that had him gathering up criticism at her car—further evidence why he should not be interested in sunny, gentle-hearted Lucy. She left her books on the floor. That was no place for a book! Look at the paper she wasted and tossed around and left in a heap, besides lacking the basic common sense not to park on the street when the snowplow would be coming by.
    None of it worked—mostly because his heart wasn’t in it. All he could see was the image of her standing at the sink, rinsing plates and bowls, glasses and silverware with her left hand, waving away every offer to take over. She had washed the hand