A huge television was mounted above a solid old barn beam mantel. It was on, with no sound. A football game in process. A wall of glass—the kind that folded back in the summer to make indoor and outdoor space blend perfectly—led out to a vast redwood deck.

Through falling snow, Stacy could see a deep and quiet forest beyond the deck and past that, the silent, jagged walls of the mountains.

To one side of that deck, where it did not impede the sweeping views from the great room, steam escaped from the large hot tub that her arrival had pulled McAllister from.

The tub seemed as if it were made for entertaining large groups of people of the kind she had written about in her former life. She had never attended a gathering worthy of this kind of space. Or been invited to one, either. As reporter, she had been on the outside of that lifestyle looking in.

The room made Stacy uncomfortably and awkwardly aware she was way out of her league here.

What league? she asked herself, annoyed. She wasn’t here to marry the man! She just wanted to talk to him.

Besides, it seemed to her that a room like this cried for that thing called family. In fact, she could feel an ache in the back of her throat as she thought of that.

“Are you coming?”

She realized she had stopped and he had kept going. Now he glanced back at her, and she sensed his impatience. She was trying to savor this unexpected glimpse into a different world, and he wanted their enforced time together over!

Given that, it would be foolish to ask him the question that had popped into her mind the moment she had entered the grandeur of this room. But ask she did!

“Do you spend Christmas here?” She could hear the wistfulness in her own voice.

He stopped, those formidable brows lowered. “I don’t particularly like Christmas.”

“You don’t like Christmas?”

“No.” He had folded his arms across his chest, and his look did not invite any more questions.

But she could not help herself! “Is it recent? Your aversion to Christmas?” she asked, wondering if his antipathy had something to do with the death of his brother-in-law. From experience, she knew that, after a loss, special occasions could be unbearably hard.

“No,” he said flatly. “I have always hated Christmas.”

His look was warning her not to pursue it but for a reason she couldn’t quite fathom—maybe because this beautiful house begged for a beautiful Christmas, she did not leave it.

“A tree would look phenomenal over there,” she said stubbornly.

His eyes narrowed on her. She was pretty sure he was not accustomed to people offering him an opinion he had not asked for!

“We—” He paused at the we, and she saw that look in his eyes. Then, he seemed to force himself to go on, his tone stripped of emotion. “We always go away at Christmas, preferably someplace warm. We’ve never spent Christmas in this house.”

Her disappointment felt sharp. She ordered herself to silence, but her voice mutinied. “It’s never had a Christmas tree?”

He folded his arms more firmly over his chest, his body language clearly saying unmovable. She repeated the order for silence, but she could not seem to stop her voice.

“Think of the size of tree you could put there! And there’s room for kids to ride trikes across the floors, and grandparents to sit by the fire.”

He looked extremely annoyed.

She could picture it all. Generations of family sitting in the two huge distressed leather sofas faced each other over a priceless rug, teenagers running in wet from the hot tub, eggnog on the coffee table made out of burled wood. Toys littering the floor.

Over there, in that open-concept kitchen with its industrial-sized stainless-steel fridge, the massive granite-topped island could be full of snacks, the espresso machine pumping out coffee, or maybe you could make hot chocolate in them, she wasn’t certain.

“I guess in your line of work,” he said gruffly, “you’re allowed a certain amount of magical thinking.”

What kind of work did he think she did? And why couldn’t she just leave it at that?

“It’s not magical,” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s real. It can be real.”

He looked annoyed and unconvinced.

Why had she started this? She could feel something like tears stinging the back of her eyes.

“You have that about-to-faint look again,” he said, coming back to her. “I think you hit your head harder than we realize.”

“I think you’re right,” she said. She ordered herself to stop speaking. But she didn’t.

CHAPTER THREE

“IF I HAD a room like this? That is what I would want to fill it with,” the woman said. “The important things. The things that really last. The things that are real. Love. Family.”

Real. Kiernan could tell her a thing or two about the reality of love and family that would wipe that dreamy look off her face. But why? Let her have her illusions.

They were no threat to him.

Or maybe they were, because just for a flicker of a moment he felt a whisper of longing sneak along his spine.

He shook it off. He just wanted to have a look at the bump on her head and send her on her way. He did not want to hear about her sugarplum visions of a wonderful world!

“Nothing lasts,” he told her, his voice a growl.

Stacy went very still. For a moment she looked as if she might argue, but then his words seemed to hit her, like arrows let loose that had found her heart.

To his dismay, for a moment he glimpsed in her face a sorrow he thought matched his own. He was intrigued but had enough good sense not to follow up! Not to encourage her in any way to share her vision with him.

“Follow me,” he said. “I think I’ve got a first-aid kit in my bathroom.”

His bathroom? Didn’t he have a first-aid kit somewhere else? He did, but it was outside and around the back of the house, where the staging area for outdoor excursions was, where he stored the outdoor equipment.

No, it was sensible to take her to the closest first-aid kit, to keep her out of the cold, to not take her through more snow in those ridiculous shoes.

But through his bedroom? Into his bathroom? It occurred to him that he should have sat her down in the kitchen and brought the first-aid kit to her.

He was not thinking with his normal razor-sharp processes, which was understandable. He told himself it had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of a beautiful woman in his fountain and everything to do with Ivan.

He hesitated at the double doors to his master suite and then flung them open and watched her closely as she preceded him. He saw the room through her eyes, which were wide and awed.

The ceiling soared upward, magnificent and timber framed. But here the floors, instead of being hardwood, were carpeted with a thick, plush pile that their feet sank into. There was a huge bed, the bedding and the abundance of pillows in a dozen shades of gray.

She was blushing as she looked at the bed, which he should have found amusing as all get-out. Instead, he found it reluctantly endearing.

Who blushed anymore?

Something that heightened color in her cheeks, the way she caught her plump lower lip between her teeth, made Kiernan’s mouth go dry, and so he led her hastily through to the bathroom. Again, he saw it through her eyes. A wall of windows opened to the deck and hot tub area.

There was a shower a dozen people could have gotten into, and her blush deepened when she looked at that.

He’d never shared this room with anyone, but let her think what she wanted. It might keep him safe from this niggling awareness of her that was bugging him the way a single gnat could spoil a perfect summer day on the hammock with a book.