Snowbound Bride-to-Be Read Online Free PDF Page A

was trying to run away from, attractive?
    There was no ring on her finger, so he knew the answer to his question even before she answered.
    “It’s all mine,” she said, and her chin lifted proudly. “I inherited the house from my grandmother, restored it, named it the White Pond Inn, and have been operating it on my own ever since.”
    “I thought it was the White Christmas Inn,” he reminded her dryly.
    “Christmas transforms everything,” she said with grave dignity, “it makes all things magic, even my humble inn.”
    Well, she obviously believed .
    “Uh-huh.” He didn’t want to get into it. He truly didn’t want to know a single thing more about her. He didn’t want to like the fact that despite her corkscrew hair waiting to pop into action, and despite her falling-off doorknob, she was trying so hard to keep her dignity.
    Show me to my room. Please . But somehow, instead, Ryder found himself asking, “What makes a young woman tackle a project like this?” He didn’t add, on her own , though that was really his question.
    Ryder was an architect. He and Drew had drawn up plenty of plans to restore places like this one. Underneath all the cosmetic loveliness, he was willing to bet the abundance of decorations hid what the falling-off door handle had hinted at. Problems. Large and small. Way more than a little scrap of a woman on her own would be up to.
    “I’m a dreamer,” she said, fiercely unapologetic, and again, in the way she said that, he caught sight of her pride and stubbornness. And her hurt. As if someone—probably a hardhearted jerk like him—had mocked her for being a dreamer.
    Whoo boy . He bit his tongue, because it was obvious to him this house did not need a dreamer. A carpenter, certainly. Likely an electrician. Probably a plumber.
    Despite biting his tongue nearly clear through, his skepticism must have clearly shown on his face because she felt driven to convince him—or maybe herself—that the house needed a dreamer.
    “I actually saw it for the first time when my grandmother got sick. My mother and she had been, um, estranged, but one of the neighbors called and asked me to come home to help care for her. This house was love at first sight for me. Plus, it had been in our family for generations. When Granny died, I inherited, and I had to figure out a way I could afford to keep it.”
    That was a warning, if he’d ever heard one. He did not like women who believed in love at first sight. As a man who lived in the wreckage of dreams, he did not like dreamers nor all their infuriating optimism.
    Aside from that, the words told him an even more complete truth, whether he wanted to know it or not, and he didn’t. He saw the glitter of some defense in her eyes that told him things he would have been just as happy not knowing.
    Hurt . Clues in what she was telling him. Something missing in her family, that had filled her with longing? Despite the happy Christmas costume, there was a reason a woman like that took on a place like this. And he was willing to bet it had little to do with family heritage, and a whole lot to do with a broken heart. She had decided loving a house was easier than loving a person.
    He heartily approved, though he wondered if a dreamer could be pragmatic enough to pull that off.
    This ability to see people more clearly than they wanted to be seen, and certainly more clearly than he wanted to see them, was one of the things Ryder hated since the fire. He sensed things, often seeing past what people said, to some truth about them. It was a cruel irony, since he was desperately trying not to care about anything, that he could see things he had never seen before, things that threatened the walls and armor of the defenses that kept some things in him, and some things out.
    Pre-fire, Ryder had been a typical man, happily superficial, involved totally in himself. Building a business with his brother, hanging out with his buddies, playing in a semi-serious hockey