She sat still, a pair of scissors in her hands and a faraway look on her face.
Then she put the scissors down and finished tidying away the mess. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Yes, you can. There’s something you want, I can tell.” Whatever it was, he wanted to buy it for her. He wanted to give her something she really wanted and see her smile on Christmas morning.
“I’m not really a possessions person. You know that.”
He did know that. What she loved more than anything was being outdoors. She loved being on her skis, enjoying the beauty of the mountains. The forest. But he couldn’t see any way of giving her that as a gift. “Jess wants to decorate the house. Will you help?”
“Of course.” She put the DVDs back on the shelf. “Do you have decorations?”
“Not many. Let’s go to the kitchen and we can talk about it over dinner.”
“I’m tired. I’m going to skip dinner and have an early night.”
Tired? Tyler tried to remember what time she’d arrived home last night and whether that would have given her time to go back to Josh’s house.
“Do you want me to bring you something up? I can heat soup.”
“No, thanks. I’m going to have a long bath and then go to bed.”
Distracted by a disturbing mental vision of Brenna naked in the bath, Tyler backed away and crashed into the door. “If you change your mind, shout.”
* * *
SHE TOOK A long bath and then lay on the bed with a book on climbing, but instead of reading, she watched the snow settle on the forest, layer upon layer, piling up on branches and obscuring the winding trails around the lake. She heard Jess and Tyler leave to go to his mother’s, and then heard him return alone.
She turned the light out and tried to sleep, but her stomach growled, protesting at her decision to skip supper.
Checking her phone, she saw it was midnight. She’d missed a text from Kayla asking if she was going to join them at the main house for “girls’ breakfast.” Realizing it was days since she’d spent any time with her friends, she was about to text back and then remembered Kayla’s habit of never switching her phone off. The last thing she wanted to do was wake her and Jackson in the middle of the night.
She slid out of bed and stood for a moment, looking out the window. The snow gleamed, ghostly white. The frozen surface of the lake shimmered under the light of the moon.
Pulling on a sweater, she walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs to the beautiful living room with the huge glass windows that faced over the lake and the mountains.
She’d thought she could never love anywhere as much as Forest Lodge, but she’d been wrong. Lake House was perfect and Tyler, for all his apparent lack of interest in anything but skiing, had style.
The house was still and quiet, and she curled up on one of the deep, comfortable sofas and stared at the snow falling against the darkness of the night, thinking about Christmas. Thinking about the times she’d hovered near bunches of mistletoe, hopeful, thinking maybe, maybe this Christmas he’d finally kiss her.
He’d asked what she wanted as a gift, but she had everything she wanted except one thing.
Him.
She watche
d as the snow erased all traces of the day before. Animal tracks would be covered, branches coated in thick dollops of snow, the trails around Snow Crystal hidden under the heavy cloak of winter. This was how she loved it, smooth and untouched, before the snowplows came to clear the roads and tracks, before the sun coaxed the snow into submission.
Deciding that hot chocolate might help her sleep, she walked through to the kitchen and then noticed a flicker of light coming from Tyler’s den.
Assuming someone had forgotten to turn off the TV, Brenna walked across and pushed the door open.
Tyler lay sprawled on the sofa.
Brenna was about to creep out again when she noticed what was on the screen. It was footage of the downhill race when he’d fallen.
It was the one recording she’d never been able to watch.
She’d been there. She’d lived through the actual event. It had been the worst moment of her life.