Not Just For Christmas Page 6

  Epilogue

  ‘Dad, come on!’ Molly shouted. She was running rings around the two of them in the parking lot of the animal rescue, Baxter hot on her heels. ‘Jo, tell him!’

  Jo laughed. ‘We’re coming, we’re coming!’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ David said. ‘She’s just excited, that’s all.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t she be?’ Jo said. ‘It’s not every day that a girl gets her first proper pet. I’m surprised she hasn’t exploded by now.’

  Jo had been surprised when David mentioned it for the first time, a week or so earlier, in a conspiratorial whisper during their third date – their third proper date, at a restaurant in town, with no lost dog in sight. ‘It’s just that she’s so good with Baxter… I figured maybe it might be time to get her a dog of her own. A rescue, you know?’

  ‘Trying to get rid of me?’ she asked playfully. Sure, she lived forty minutes away… but what was forty minutes? It was easy enough to drive down to North Riverton a couple of times a week with Baxter in tow so the three of them could go for a walk in the park. Mrs. Rodriguez didn’t seem to mind all that much, and Molly was thrilled every time she saw Baxter, so it hadn’t taken them long to fall into an easy routine.

  David took her hand in his across the table. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Not even close.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘The only problem,’ he said, ‘is that I don’t know the first thing about dogs.’

  ‘And you think I do?’

  He grinned. ‘No. But I’d still like you to come with us. Moral support, if you like.’ His meaning was clear: Any excuse to spend some time with you.

  It had only been a month since that first kiss, but it had been an absolute whirlwind. After eighteen months spent living as though her life was on pause, Jo was surprised to find that even through the harsh Connecticut winter, everything seemed a little brighter when David and Molly were around. There was just something about him, she supposed – a vague, ineffable quality; a sense that he was fundamentally decent, fundamentally good. How could she not have found herself developing feelings for him, with that in the background? Whenever he saw her, his face lit up like a beacon, as though she was – next to Molly, of course – the most important person in his life. It made her feel safe, wanted, loved.

  When was the last time Richard had greeted her with that level of enthusiasm? Not in a long time – not for years before they decided to call time on their marriage, that was for sure. Maybe not even while they were dating. Maybe never. But David… oh, with David things were different. He was thoughtful and kind, infinitely patient. When he kissed her, she felt every nerve in her body stand to attention – which, thankfully, was a regular occurrence. When she was in his arms, the rest of the world no longer seemed to matter.

  But he wasn’t the only one who seemed to be oddly enamoured with her. Before too long, Molly was almost as excited to see Jo as she was to see Baxter. She’d grab her by the hand, pull her into the kitchen to show her whatever drawing she was working on at the time – invariably a dog, which made guessing just what the abstract scribbles were significantly easier – or just to tell her about what was happening at school. She seemed as comfortable with Jo as Jo felt with her father.

  That was a good sign, she thought.

  It had been a month, and only a month – far too soon to start making any sort of plans, far too early to be taking it anything other than day-by-day… but she was fine with that, for now. There would be plenty of opportunity to take things slowly, to let them develop at their own pace.

  She could wait. She was used to waiting.

  ‘Dad!’ Molly’s foghorn voice bellowed from the doorway. ‘The dogs are waiting!’

  Well, someone had to be patient, anyway.

  David squeezed her hand gently. ‘Go on inside,’ he said. ‘Don’t make any trouble. We’ll be in in a second, OK?’

  That was all the encouragement she needed; the little girl grabbed Baxter’s leash and left the door swinging in her wake.

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’ Jo asked. ‘You know, with her alone in there.’

  David grinned. ‘She’ll be fine. It’s just for a second. I’m mostly worried that she’ll fall in love with every dog she sees and by the time we get inside she will have signed me up to adopt a full sled team.’

  ‘We should probably hurry, then. I don’t think you could afford the food bill, even on a doctor’s salary.’

  ‘Just a second.’ He leaned in close, until his lips were pressed against hers. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that all morning.’

  ‘Couldn’t do it in front of Molly?’

  ‘However did you guess?’

  ‘Gross,’ Jo said, and smiled.

  David rolled his eyes. ‘You know, I’m starting to think you and my daughter are spending a little too much time together. She’s a terrible influence, you know.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘You bet.’

  This time, it was Jo’s turn to instigate a kiss. She stood on her tiptoes, wrapped her hand gently around the back of his neck and pulled him close to her. She nipped playfully at his lower lip, savouring the feeling of his body pressed up against hers, remembering how delicious it had felt to wake up next to him that morning. If we’re going to kiss, she thought, we’re damn well going to kiss properly. ‘How was that?’

  He grinned, and did his best to recompose himself. ‘Oh, better. Much better.’ He stepped forward and opened the door for her. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  She felt a warm glow as she crossed the threshold that didn’t just come from the indoor air. It filled her top-to-toe, inside and out, and she sighed with happiness.

  So ready, she thought. More than you could know.

  I hope you enjoyed the book you just read.

  If you did, please consider leaving a review on the site you bought it from. Reviews like yours will help me keep writing, and will make it easier for me to get my work out to other readers.

  If you’d like to be kept up to date with news of my latest releases, you can join my mailing list at hazelredgate.com.

  To show my appreciation, here’s a sample from another book in the Love at Christmas collection:

  White Christmas

  ‘Can you see me now?’

  Amy blew the chat window up to full size, and a series of grainy pixels filled the display. If she closed her eyes down to tiny slits, she could just about make out a familiar scene: the living room at her parents’ house in Connecticut, the bright splash of green in the corner that could only have been a Christmas tree and, up-close and wrestling for centre-stage, the smiling faces of George and Patricia Marsh.

  ‘Yeah, Mom,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I can see you.’

  It wasn’t great, but there wasn’t a lot she could do about that. The Lane-McArthur Research Facility wasn’t in the most accessible of spots; in fact, it would have been hard to pick somewhere more remote if you tried. With the weather outside, it was lucky that the connection was even this good.

  ‘Amy? Honey? Can you see me?’

  ‘Yeah, Mom. You’re coming through loud and clear.’

  The older woman smiled. ‘And your father?’

  ‘He’s right next to you, Mom. You’re both coming through fine.’

  The woman on the screen crackled faintly, and then frowned. ‘Well, I don’t know, do I? All this webchat stuff might as well be Greek to me. We had to get your sister to set it up, and honestly, you’d think I’d been torturing her the way she carried on…’

  ‘I’m right here,’ a voice called from the background. ‘And you were torturing me. Do you have any idea how many toolbars I had to uninstall before I could–’

  ‘Megan says hello, by the way.’

  A bangled hand shot up from somewhere around the sofa, and Amy waved back into the screen. ‘Hey, Meg,’ she said. Beyond that, there was no reply, but it wasn’t hard for Amy to imagine the look on her younger sister’s face.

  ‘So?’ her
father asked. ‘What’s the weather like up there?’

  ‘It’s… it’s pretty cold, Dad. Minus eighteen.’

  ‘Sounds nippy. You’re keeping bundled up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Using the scarf your mother made you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Patricia sniffed. ‘Of course she’s using it. She must be freezing. Aren’t you, honey?’

  The truth was that, well-meaning though her gift might have been, the scarf that her mother had knitted wasn’t quite as suited to the arctic climate as she might have intended. It was currently folded up underneath her pillow in her bunk, a security blanket that served as an emergency line straight back to her home, ready to be called upon whenever she needed it. Seeing everyone gathered together like that – today of all days – made her think that she’d probably be making use of it sooner rather than later.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Thanks. It’s been really helpful.’

  ‘And is everything OK up there? You’re eating alright?’

  ‘I’m eating fine, Mom,’ she sighed.

  ‘Well, there’s no need to be like that. I just worry, that’s all. Honestly, you being alone for Christmas… it’s not right.’

  ‘I’m not alone. Some of the crew are here with me still. There are plenty of –’

  And with that the pixelated image of her parents froze solid, and was replaced by a large buffering symbol that chased its tail around and around without any signs of slowing. Well, Amy thought, so much for that. The Lane-McArthur base had just about everything a polar research facility could want… except, it seemed, for a decent internet link back to the mainland. At 82 degrees north, for some reason Google hadn’t got around to sending an engineer to install it yet. (‘Although fingers crossed for 2035,’ Kenny said whenever the issue was brought up.) Until they did, outgoing connections to the Big Island – especially ones as data-heavy as video chat – were on a strictly limited basis, and usually for emergencies only. A brief exception had been made today, given the holiday, but it seemed that even that act of charity had its limitations. The circular buffering symbol span on and on, then finally gave up the ghost. NO CONNECTION, the screen shouted back at her. TRY AGAIN?

  Amy closed her laptop and frowned. Yeah, she thought. And a very Merry Christmas to you too.

  ~~~

  The four remaining staffers were sitting around in the break room, resting after dinner. As Christmases went, it hadn’t been that bad, all told. The last supply drop to Alert, the nearest town (if you could call it that; it was less a town and more a military outpost, and even that was some fifty or so miles away across the ice) had been in October, before the weather got so cold as to render the airfield practically unusable until he following March. The food they had stored away for the special occasion, requested from the mainland – in particular, a tin or two of cranberry sauce, thin slices of pre-packaged turkey and instant mashed potatoes – had been cooked and eaten and mostly enjoyed, for what it was worth; a box of Christmas crackers, still left over from last year, had been popped and party hats put on at jaunty angles, to give the impression, however fleeting, that everyone involved was having fun.

  ‘Come on, folks,’ Kenny said. ‘Cheer up. It’s Christmas.’

  Hardly, Amy thought. Sure, that’s what the calendar might have said, but as far as she was concerned this didn’t even come close. Christmas wasn’t so much about a date as it was about a feeling. Christmas wasn’t being locked in a room with practical strangers, miles from anything. It was her home in Connecticut with her parents and her three sisters, a real log fire burning in front of a real pine tree, bought from a farm a little way outside of town – the same farm that the Marsh family had gone to every year since she was a little girl.

  It didn’t matter that she hadn’t lived there for almost five years by then. Every year, she had made her way back to the old house, to the one place that had always felt like home, like a wandering traveller on some sort of sacred pilgrimage. They all had, all four of the Marsh girls. Her mother was right. Amy not being there for the first time just felt wrong, somehow.

  Christmas was familiarity, and tradition. Lane-McArthur was all function, all the time. Kenny had tried his best to rally the troops, but ultimately there wasn’t all that much he could do. ‘Well, fine,’ he said, when his repeated suggestions of a game of charades were shot down. ‘If you guys want to be the Buzzkill Squad, I’m going back to my bunk.’

  He stomped theatrically out of the break room, leaving just the three of them behind. Deborah waited until the sound of his footsteps retreating down the hall got fainter and fainter, and then grinned. ‘Oh, thank God for that,’ she said. ‘You know I love the little guy, but if I had to listen to him humming Deck the Halls to himself one more time I honestly think I would have just wandered outside into the snow. Death by frostbite would have been less painful.’

  Normally, that would have got a laugh – Kenny was, fundamentally, a pretty good boss, despite how grating his constant optimism could be at times – but Amy wasn’t in the mood.

  Deb’s forehead crumpled with concern. ‘Are you doing OK, kiddo?’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter? You look a bit…’

  She didn’t finish her sentence, but Amy knew exactly what she meant. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just tired, I guess.’

  ‘First Christmas on base?’

  Amy nodded.

  ‘Yeah, that’ll get you. First time’s always the roughest. I can’t even begin to tell you how homesick I got the first time I volunteered to do a winter run.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, you bet. I was bawling my eyes out. I had this little… what do you call it? A little macaroni-model thing that Petey had made me at kindergarten the year before – you know, Merry Christmas, I love you Mommy, that sort of thing. Anyway, I had that hanging up in my room, and I just went back in there after dinner and lost it. I was inconsolable for about three days. I just couldn’t help thinking: what was I even doing out there, missing out on six months of my babies growing up? What kind of mother would ever do such a thing? Of course, that was before the uplink was anything like what we’ve got today. I got a crackly phone call on the day, that was it. Another one in February, and home in March. We had emails and stuff, but it’s not really the same, you know?’ She paused for a second. ‘Well, of course you know. You’re here too, aren’t you? We’re all in the same boat now.’

  All of a sudden, the mood in the break room seemed to have shifted. Deb’s normal boisterousness had given way to a soft sort of sadness. In the moments that followed, the only sound that Amy could hear was the wind whipping up outside, battering sharp little snowflakes against the windows.

  ‘So why did you do it?’ Amy asked, then immediately regretted it. ‘I mean, I don’t want to pry. I’m not…’

  Deb held up a hand to stop her. It was still wearing a brace from a bad sprain she had picked up a week or so earlier. ‘No, I got you,’ she said. ‘Truth is, I kind of had to. It was a bit of a boys’ club back then. I mean, it’s still a bit of a boys’ club, but a lot less so. When my supervisor recommended me for a slot up here, I jumped on it, even if it did mean working the winter shift. What else could I do? I was young, fresh out of grad school, looking to make a name for myself… plus, it wasn’t like grant money grew on trees even then. You kind of had to take what you could get.’

  ‘So how come you decided to come back, then?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you here pretty much every year?

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Deb snorted. ‘Honey, my kids are fourteen and seventeen now. I’m not even sure they’ve looked up from their PlayStation long enough to notice I’m gone.’

  ‘You didn’t want to spend Christmas with them?’

  ‘Oh, sure I wanted to spend Christmas with them. I always do. But it’s their father’s turn this year, and I didn’t feel like third-wheeling it all the way back to Georgia while he shows off his new wife. I’d rather take my chances with the polar bears.’


  You and me both, Amy thought. Deb was all of five feet and a quarter-inch tall even in her outdoor boots, but her years of motherhood had equipped her with a glare that could have melted the snow for miles around. Whoever this new woman was, Amy couldn’t imagine her being much of a challenge for Deborah’s formidable will. Somehow, without ever really trying to, the older woman had found herself fitting into a sort of den mother role for the citizens of Lane-McArthur. It had been a much busier job in the summer season, when the staff numbered twenty or thirty, crammed in together like sardines, but now they were on a skeleton crew – just enough to ensure that everything would stay ticking over until the base could start full operations again in the spring – she seemed to be at somewhat of a loss. Sure, Kenny was technically the one in charge, but everyone who came to Lane-McArthur discovered very early on that if you needed something, Deb was the person to try and find. When the sound of the weather outside grew properly unbearable, it was nice to know there would always be a friendly face in the break room.

  ‘What about you, Abs?’ Deb asked. ‘You got anywhere else you’d rather be?’

  Over in the corner, Luke looked up from the novel he was reading for the first time. ‘Hmm?’ he asked. ‘And don’t call me that.’

  ‘Sure thing, Abs,’ Deb grinned. ‘I said, do you have anywhere else you’d rather be right now?’

  ‘Than here with you two lovely ladies and Kenny? Of course not.’

  ‘Charmer.’

  ‘You know it.’

  ‘Honestly, Abs, if I was fifteen years younger…’

  ‘I’d be babysitting you?’

  Deb let out a raucous hoot of laughter. ‘You see?’ she gestured to Amy. ‘Do you see how the young one mocks me? No respect. No respect at all.’

  Luke put down his book. ‘Oh, you love it,’ he said.

  ‘And you are an incorrigible flirt. Honestly, I’m old enough to be your mother,’ she said, the lilt in her voice suggesting that it wouldn’t in any way have stopped her. ‘But seriously, though. Anywhere else in the world right now. Where would you be?’