Page 81 of Kiss Me at Christmas
“I hardly think Lyra is going to care if I go,” she snapped. Though from Lyra’s response to her when they met, she knew that was a lie.
“Please.” James’s eyes were beseeching. “You can hate me; I won’t blame you. You can never speak to me again, but please…just stay for ten minutes, look at her paintings, and then make your goodbyes. Please don’t ruin her big night because of me.”
Harriet wanted to turn around and walk out but she couldn’t. She couldn’t walk out on that sweet girl, nomatter how much of a nincompoop her father was. None of this was Lyra’s fault.
It took every ounce of Harriet’s willpower not to cry. She wanted to scream in his face. She wanted him to see that he had stripped away her self-confidence and her trust in her own judgment. But instead, she squared her shoulders, fingers curled so tightly around the stem of her wineglass that she thought it might snap.
“I’ll stay,” she said. “But you keep away from me. Don’t speak to me. Don’t make eye contact. I don’t want to see you.”
As she turned away from him, Emma stepped forward and spoke close to James’s face. “How dare you.” Her voice was low and dangerous.
And then she felt Emma’s hand in hers.
“Ten minutes,” she whispered in Harriet’s ear. “And then we’re gone.”
The drive home was quiet. The snow was falling like it meant it, and Emma was having to concentrate on the dark roads, her face serious, eyes squinting as she gripped the wheel like she was steering a schooner through rough seas.
Harriet was glad for the chance to not talk as her mind ran over and over it all. There was a thunderous ache roaring inside her. She didn’t care that James had a daughter; she wouldn’t care if he had twenty children scattered about the world. What hurt and confused her was that he hadn’t told her. She had laid herself bare to him in so many ways, and all the while he had kept a huge part of himself hidden. The balance of power was off, and it made her feel vulnerable and unsteady.
The snowflakes flurried down, hitting the windscreenlike scraps of torn paper before being batted away by the wipers.
“Has he called yet?” Emma asked as they pulled up outside Harriet’s building.
She checked her phone; she’d kept it on silent specifically so that she could miss his calls.
“No,” she sighed.
“We left early, the party’s probably still going strong.”
“It would have been nice if he’d at least tried to appear desperate to make things right between us and given me the chance to ignore him.”
“It’s the very least he could do.” Emma was thoughtful for a moment. “But then he’s one of those overly rational types who probably thinks there’s no point in calling someone who’s clearly not going to answer.”
“Do you think he’s with Lyra’s mum and he’s just been stringing me along? Be honest.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to have faith in a man who neglects to mention that he has a daughter.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like he hasn’t had ample chances to mention it. What would you do in my position?”
Emma drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she considered her answer. “Well, if it were me, then I would probably burn his house down first and ask questions later. But that’s me. If I were you, then I think maybe I’d hold judgment until he’s explained his reasons. I mean, other than this admittedly major faux pas, has he given you any reason to think he might be a downright rotter?”
Harriet let out a long sigh. “No.” The answer came more easily than she would have liked, given how angry she was with him, but it was true. So either that made her a really bad judge of character or he hadheld back for reasons that had nothing to do with being shady.
“Then hear out his explanation. And if it’s a crock of shit, then we can burn his house down together.”
“I’ll bring the matches.”
Emma stared hard at her, studying her face as closely as she had the snowy roads home.
“Seriously, on a scale of one to ten—one being disappointed but not enough to cry, and ten, likely to spend the night wailing like a banshee and/or drown in your own tears—how gutted are you? Because I can stay, Pete won’t mind.”
The sting of having been lied to was still acute; boulders of anger and embarrassment clanked and churned in her gut like a washing machine set on the heavy-soil function. But she managed a weak smile for her bestie.
“I’m a solid seven. But I don’t need a babysitter. I need to lie in a hot bath and soak out all the poison I’m feeling so that I can sleep tonight.”
“Are you actually going to treat yourself to a bubble bath?”
“Do you know, I might.”
