Chapter 2 — The Man Who Hated Christmas

He stared at my boot like it was a personal insult.

For three full seconds, neither of us moved. The wind screamed behind me, driving snow into the entryway, and I could feel my body shaking so hard my teeth were clicking together in a rhythm I couldn't control. His jaw tightened. Something shifted behind his eyes, not warmth, not concern, but calculation. The math of liability.

He stepped back.

I pushed through the gap before he could change his mind. The door swung shut and the silence hit almost as hard as the heat. My legs buckled. I caught myself on the wall, fingers so numb I couldn't feel the surface, and stood there dripping onto what was probably a ten-thousand-dollar rug.

"You have tonight." His voice hadn't changed. Same flat tone. Same clipped delivery, like every word cost him money and he resented the expense. "Guest wing is down the hall, last door on the left. You stay there. You don't wander. You don't touch anything."

I looked up at him, still shaking, water running down my face from the ice melting in my hair. "Thank you" was the reasonable response. The polite one.

"Do you talk to all your guests like they're trespassing, or is that just for the ones who nearly died getting here?"

His eyes narrowed. "You're not a guest."

The house stretched out behind him and even through the fog of hypothermia, I could see it. Enormous. Vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, a stone fireplace wide enough to stand in. But something was wrong with it. Something I couldn't name at first, like a song played in the wrong key.

Then it clicked.

There was nothing on the walls. No photos. No art. No Christmas decorations anywhere, not a single string of lights or a wreath or a tree. December eighteenth in Aspen and this house looked like it had been staged for a real estate listing. Beautiful, immaculate, and completely empty of anything that suggested a human being actually lived here.

I looked closer. Faint outlines on the paint where frames used to hang. Rectangular ghosts of a life someone had deliberately erased.

"You also don't interact with my children," he said.

That caught me off guard. "Your children?"

"They're asleep. If you're quiet, it stays that way." He was already turning, dismissing me the way you dismiss a task you've completed. Check a box. Move on.

"I'm sorry," I said, and the shaking made it come out sharper than I intended, "but are you seriously giving me a list of rules right now? I just crashed my car in a blizzard. I walked half a mile uphill through knee-deep snow. I can't feel my hands."

He stopped. Turned back. Those dark eyes found mine and held them, and for a moment I saw something flicker underneath the ice. Not sympathy. Something more like surprise.

"You walked?" His gaze dropped to my boots. Soaked through. Then back up. "In this?"

"Didn't have a lot of options."

He studied me for a beat too long. Like he was recalculating something. Then his expression closed again, a door slamming shut behind his face, and whatever crack I'd seen sealed over.

"I'll get you a towel."

"What a man living in a house this big is afraid of one stranded woman is beyond me," I muttered.

He heard it. I knew because his shoulders went rigid and he stopped walking for half a second before continuing down the hall without turning around.

A sound from the staircase. Small feet on hardwood.

"Daddy?"

The voice was tiny. A boy, maybe five or six, appeared at the top of the stairs in pajamas covered in rocket ships. Wide eyes, messy brown hair, and a gap-toothed grin that broke across his face the second he saw me standing in the foyer. He practically flew down the steps.

"Hi! Who are you? Are you staying here? Do you like hot chocolate? Mrs. Flores makes the best hot chocolate. She puts the little marshmallows in it."

He was standing in front of me now, vibrating with energy, and something in my chest cracked open. The fearless warmth of a child who hadn't learned to be suspicious yet.

"I'm Tessa." I crouched down to his level, still dripping, still shaking. "And I love hot chocolate."

"I'm Luca!" He grabbed my hand like we were already friends. His fingers were warm and impossibly small around mine. "Are you staying? You should stay. It's really boring here. Daddy doesn't let us do anything fun."

"Luca." Dominic's voice cut across the foyer. Sharp. A warning.

Behind Luca, on the landing halfway up the stairs, I saw the second child. A girl. Same age, same dark hair, but where Luca was all open sunshine, she was pressed against the railing like she was trying to disappear into it. Watching me with eyes that were far too old for her face. Narrow. Suspicious. Already braced for something.

"Can she stay, Daddy?" Luca tugged on my hand. "Please? Can she?"

The girl on the stairs spoke. Quiet. Almost a whisper, but it carried through the silence of that sterile house like a bell.

"People always leave." She looked directly at me. "She will too."

The words landed in my stomach like stones. Six years old, and she already knew that. Already believed it deeply enough to say it out loud to a stranger.

"Bed. Both of you. Now." Dominic's voice left no room for negotiation. Luca's face fell, but he released my hand and trudged back up the stairs. The girl, Lily, hadn't moved. She held my gaze for one more second, testing something, measuring something, then turned and disappeared down the upstairs hallway without a sound.

Dominic didn't look at me. He walked to a door at the end of the ground-floor corridor, opened it, and stood aside. The room beyond was large, clean, and cold. Not just temperature cold, though the heating vent clearly hadn't been opened. Cold like a hotel room that no one had ever slept in.

"The roads should be clear by morning." He paused in the doorway. His face was stone. "Don't get comfortable."

The door closed.

I stood in the middle of the room, still in my soaked coat, still trembling, and listened to his footsteps recede down the hall.

I peeled off my wet coat. Pulled off my ruined boots. Crawled under the covers fully dressed because my body was shutting down whether I wanted it to or not.

Sleep didn't come. The shaking eased by degrees and I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to the wind scream.

Then I heard it. Through the wall. Faint, muffled, but unmistakable.

A child crying.

Small, hiccupping sobs. The kind a kid makes when they're trying to be quiet about it, pressing their face into a pillow so no one hears. It went on and on, and I waited for the sound of a door opening, footsteps in the hallway, a father's voice.

Nothing came.