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Fucking idiot.
He loved Julie Long—loved her certainty and her competence and her independent streak, her passion and her sense of humor and her crazy, giant house and the way she kept taking him back and forgiving him for being a complete asshole.
Carson loved the way she loved the town he’d tried to a
bandon, loved that she’d befriended his parents, loved that she’d called him back here to try to mend his relationship with his father.
And if he didn’t tell her soon, it might be too late.
He shoved off his shoes and flung his pants into the corner, stood up, and found the pile of clothes he’d left behind in her closet. Duofold shirt, flannel button-up, dirty work jeans. This was who he was here, with Julie. This was the man he hoped she wanted.
He tugged on his boots, glanced in the mirror and saw a frantic stranger staring back at him with red cheeks and black eyes and flattened, straggly hair.
Nothing to be done about that now.
He thundered down the stairs to the first floor and stuck his head back in the library. “You know where Julie went?”
A rude interruption. It took the guests a few beats to process the question, and Carson gripped the jamb in both hands, tilting his torso into the room, ready to burst from the doorway and run just as soon as he had a direction.
“She’s still at the church, I think.”
He must have looked confused, because the woman clarified, “The Methodist church? She took a bunch of people to the Christmas Eve service. We’re Catholic, so we’re holding out for the Midnight Mass. She said she’d be back in time to drive us if you want to wait.”
He was already gone. He snagged his coat off the hook and burst out the back door.
Six blocks to the church, four of them uphill. He took the first two at a sprint.
Heavy, wet snow fell on his bare head and cooled the back of his neck as he ran. His boots slipped. His breath came out ragged and too loud, and when he started uphill, his thighs and lungs screamed at him to stop.
Carson ignored them. He got a stitch in his side, and he ignored that, too.
He owed her this. He owed her more than this.
He owed her the rest of his life, and half a lifetime’s penance.
When the slick sidewalk and the tilt of the road made running impossible, he staggered. He lurched. The snow stuck to his boots and made them heavy. Gravity tugged at him, but he refused to be subject to it.
His frantic pulse beat out her name. Julie. Julie. Julie.
In the churchyard, he didn’t even pause. He pushed open the oversized entry doors of the Potter Falls Methodist Church in the middle of the Christmas Eve service and brought it to a grinding halt.
“Julie!”
Over the top of a hundred grayed and graying heads, he found hers. Hair the color of wheat in October. Blue-purple eyes, and an expression that shifted from annoyance to surprise to a kind of soft, hopeful awe.
He stood there, stunned, dressed all wrong, and tried to remember how to breathe.
A cacophony of whispers broke out. The pastor cleared her throat.
Julie got to her feet and turned all the way around to face him.
She smiled, and Carson’s heart broke open.
After that, everything happened fast. He stalked to the front of the church and forced his way down the pew where she was sitting, stepping on toes and almost landing in Mrs. Miller’s lap, until he finally collided with Julie, who’d worked her way toward him from the opposite end. Two of her tourists slid to either side and cleared a space, and he had her in her arms, picked her up off the floor. She smelled like cinnamon and looked like Christmas, all red and green and gold, with tears in her eyes.
He kissed them away, kissed the corners of her mouth, kissed her nose and her chin and her lips, and he smoothed his hands over her temples and her hair, held her head, and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jules. I’m so sorry.” He just kept saying it, over and over again, until she silenced him with a kiss that banished his panic and set something at ease inside him that had been wounded and dark and restless for a long time.
She laughed and clutched his shoulders when he kissed her neck. Her jaw. Her cheeks. She didn’t stop crying, but she laughed.
