Free A Little Christmas Magic by Alison Roberts Page A

bedding, with only his nose poking out. She bent and kissed the cold little nose.
    ‘It’ll be okay,’ she whispered, just in case he wasn’t really asleep. ‘I promise.’
    She would just have to make it okay, she decided as she forced herself to go back downstairs instead of going to hide in her room, which was what she would have preferred.
    Somehow she would have to put things right.
    Adam didn’t hear Emma coming down the stairs but he knew she was on her way by the subtle change in the dogs. The way they pricked their ears and Benji’s tail made an almost apologetic sweep of the tiles that he couldn’t suppress.
    He didn’t look up, however, so he was still sitting there at the table with his forehead resting on one hand and a whisky glass encircled by the other as she came into the kitchen. He hadn’t cleaned up the mess of charred paper yet and all he’d done with the plates of half-eaten food had been to push them to one side to make room for the whisky decanter and two glasses.
    Two glasses?
    Well … he had to start somewhere, didn’t he?
    ‘I’m sorry.’ It was harder than he’d expected to get the words out. A shame it made it sound like he didn’t really mean it but he did. He was absolutely appalled at how he’d behaved. And in front of the
children
…
    He shoved the empty glass towards the closest chair at his end of the table. ‘Help yourself.’
    She probably didn’t even drink whisky, he thought, as he remembered her refusal the other night. The nightwhen he’d had the impression that she understood exactly how he was feeling.
    Could he make her understand
this
?
    The fact that she sat down in the chair and then reached to pull the stopper out of the decanter gave him a glimmer of hope. At least she was prepared to listen. He waited until he’d heard her pour herself a dram and then the clink of the stopper going back. He still couldn’t look up to meet her gaze, however.
    ‘It was the tree,’ he said. ‘It was in the same place.
Exactly the
same place.’
    There. He’d said it. Only maybe it wasn’t enough because all he got back was an expectant silence. He risked a glance up from the amber liquid he was swirling in the bottom of his glass.
    Blue eyes, she had. With a hint of grey, like the sea when there was a storm on the horizon. Right now they looked as big as oceans, too. She looked as though she could already see all she needed to know but she wanted to hear the words as well.
    Adam took a sip of the warmed whisky and felt the fire trickle down his gullet.
    ‘The tree was right there beside the fire,’ he said finally. ‘When I got back home on Christmas Eve. It was covered with all its decorations and the lights were still flashing as though nothing had happened. All the presents were underneath, waiting for the bairns in the morning.’
    Still Emma said nothing.
    ‘I’d had to go all the way to Edinburgh,’ Adam continued. ‘To identify Tania’s body. I’d been thinking all the way that she would be terribly burned and it would be the worst thing I’d ever seen but there wasn’t a markon her, apart from the soot in her hair and around her nose and mouth.’
    It had still been the worst thing he’d ever had to deal with, though. The shock of seeing his dead wife had been terrible enough. To be told she hadn’t been alone in her bed had been an additional blow he hadn’t been able to handle.
    The police had been so understanding. Apologetic, really, at having to deliver the extra blow. Sympathetic. It could be kept quiet, if that’s what he would prefer.
    Of course he would. Nobody would ever know. Emma certainly didn’t need to know, even though it was tempting to tell her, thanks to the look of appalled empathy in her eyes. Did he want her to really understand? To feel … sorry for him?
    No.
    He cleared his throat. ‘She’d died from the smoke inhalation, not the flames.’
    Flames. How shocking had it been to see that paper chain erupt? The children