CHAPTER 12 Mistletoe Is a Legal Gray Area

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It was Rafe who saved them, and he did it with a goose leg.

“Coincidence?” He rose from his seat holding one aloft like a scepter. “My dear Voss, you have clearly never been to a Hale Christmas. We are a family of very tidy coincidences. My grandfather proposed to my grandmother on a Tuesday because it was the only day the ferry ran. My cousin Tobias lost his hair and his fiancée in the same week.”

“Rafe!” said Tobias.

“Too soon? Forgive me.” He bowed. “My point, sir, is that the Hales and the Marchettis have both been cursed by controlling elders. It’s hardly shocking that two exhausted young people found one another in the wreckage. Some people find love in a bar. Some at a gala. We are a family of ship captains. We find it in storms.”

A small, startled laugh rose from the cousins. Then another. Winifred pressed her napkin to her lips. And Odalys said, in a voice of perfect, glacial calm, “Mr. Voss, I am eighty-one. I have buried a husband, a son, and a daughter-in-law. I find that I have lost patience with the word ‘coincidence.’ I shall instead call it providence, and you will pass the cranberries.”

Anders Voss passed the cranberries. And so, the storm broke without breaking.

Across the table, her father had gone very quiet, watching Odalys Hale as a man watches a ship he has misjudged.

But Elodie did not breathe properly until the plates were cleared.

The tradition at Hollin Hall, she learned, was that after Christmas Eve dinner, the whole house moved to the ballroom, and the neighbors came. They arrived by sleigh and by snowmobile and on foot, bundled in scarves, carrying lanterns and covered dishes and sheet music, a flood of cheerful Vermonters who knew the Hale family well enough to be rude to them. A violin was found. Someone began to play. By ten o’clock, the great room that Julian’s great-grandfather had built to be sad in was full of dancing.

“I have never seen it like this,” Julian said, wonderingly, at her side. He stood against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching Tobias dance with the deaf great-uncle’s wheelchair. “It’s usually twelve people, silence, and a cold goose.”

By the doorway, Anders Voss stood alone with a glass he was not drinking, watching Julian with the polite, thoughtful stillness of a man doing sums.

“Maybe you needed a new family tradition.”

“Maybe.” He glanced down at her. “You haven’t eaten.”

Across the floor, to the astonishment of the entire room, Elodie’s father bowed to Odalys Hale, and the old woman, after a long, narrow look, gave him her hand.

“I’m too happy.” It was out before she could stop it. She flushed. “I mean, too tired. It was a long dinner.”

“You stood up to your father.”

“So did you.”

“I stood up to a man who insulted my dead,” said Julian. “You stood up to the man who raised you. It’s not the same thing.” He turned toward her, and in the light of the swinging chandeliers his face was soft in a way that made her chest tighten. “Thank you. I don’t think there’s a clause that covers what I want to say.”

“Then don’t say it. Dance with me.”

He froze. “I don’t dance.”

“You skated.”

“I fell.”

“Beautifully.” She held out her hand. “Come on, Hale.”

He took it. They went out onto the floor among the swirling couples, and he held her in a careful, formal, old-fashioned frame, one hand at her back and the other clasping hers, and for the first few measures they both stared at the middle distance like two people being photographed. Then the music slowed. Somebody at the piano began a waltz. And she felt him breathe out, deep and slow, and his hand at her back relaxed, and he drew her a little closer.

“You’re humming,” he said into her hair.

“I’m not.”

“You are. It’s the one from the diner jukebox.”

“Oh.” She had not noticed. “It’s an old Sinatra. My mother loved it. She used to sing it while she tempered chocolate.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

So she sang it, softly, with her face turned into his shoulder, six bars of a song about a person who could not be anything but yours. He did not say anything. His hand pressed gently against her spine. And all around them the ballroom turned, and the snow beat softly at the windows, and the whole world seemed to have narrowed to the width of his arms.

The music stopped. The room applauded. And then, with the sudden, roaring chorus of a crowd that has been waiting all evening to do it, a great cry went up.

“Mistletoe!”

She looked up. Directly above them, suspended from the center chandelier on a long red ribbon, hung a fat, glossy bundle of white berries and green leaves.

“Rafe,” said Julian, through his teeth.

“I don’t know what you mean!” Rafe called from across the room, radiating innocence, “but it’s the law of the house!”

“Is it?” said Elodie, breathless.

“Legally,” Julian said, with great gloom, “it’s a gray area.”

The crowd was clapping now, a slow, rhythmic, merciless beat. Forty faces. Her father’s among them, at the edge of the room, his arms crossed, watching. And Anders Voss beside him, with his glass tilted toward the light.

“Section four,” she whispered. “Subsection c. Public displays, audience required, kiss of reasonable duration.”

“I wrote that.”

“It’s a very good clause.”

“Elodie.” His voice cracked. He was not looking at the crowd at all. His eyes were on her mouth, and then, with enormous effort, on her eyes. “If you want me to stop, say so. Now. I mean it. I will walk out of this room and take whatever consequence there is.”

“Julian.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want you to stop.”

He bent his head. And it was meant, she knew, to be brief. Courteous. A kiss of reasonable duration, performed for an audience, a line in a contract. But his lips touched hers, soft and slow and impossibly careful, and something in them broke open like a dam. His hand came up to her jaw. Hers curled in his lapel. The chandelier swung above them, and the music, the clapping, the hundred watching eyes, all of it fell away, until there was nothing in the world but warmth and the faint taste of cinnamon and the shaking of his breath against her mouth.

When at last he drew back, an inch, two, they stared at each other, stunned. She saw her own astonishment in his eyes. She saw, behind it, something far deeper, something that did not look like a performance at all.

“That was not,” said Julian unsteadily, “a reasonable duration.”

“No,” she whispered. “It really wasn’t.”

At the edge of the room her father had not looked away. She saw him lift his glass a quarter inch, in what might have been salute or warning.

A great cheer went up. Somebody banged a drum. Tobias cried, loudly and openly. But Elodie barely heard it, because across the ballroom, a figure in a cream dress had set down her champagne glass and walked out through the French doors into the snow, and Julian, over her head, had seen it, too.