The Thief Who Saved Christmas

Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

ANABELLE

Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. I need a reset, a couple of hours to pour myself into crafting, but Weston wouldn’t understand. He knows about my diagnosis, but he’s one of those people who says things like “all people are a little autistic,” and “there’s no real way of diagnosing it, Belle.” He thinks I’m making excuses, when I’m only trying to explain myself.

Saint Nick bats at my ankle as I arrive at the door to my room. I reach down to pet his head, keeping the chocolate shirt out of reach. Then I let him in and close my door behind us, taking in the room I’ve repurposed for myself.

After I inherited the inn, I moved out of the single-room apartment I’d been renting in a complex full of college students and moved in here. Weston didn’t approve, and neither did my parents. But I love this building—from the way the old wooden floors creak under my feet to the rasp of the brick under my fingers. I even love the smell, which reminds me of opening an old book and sniffing along the spine. Every last inch of this place reminds me of my grandmother.

There’s a queen-sized bed with an old-fashioned canopy—an antique—a washstand, an old rolltop desk and chair, and of course, one of my Christmas trees in the corner. There’s a workbench between the bed and the desk, precisely in the middle of the thick red carpet, and my fingers itch to go to it, to create. I found two ruined Santa Clauses at thrift stores last week, metal and wood, and I’m combining them into what Jo calls one of my Franken-Santas. They’re what my business is most known for—Santas created from the ruined remains of other Santas.

But Weston is cross with me, and he’s been so impatient lately. So have I, to be honest.

When Weston and I first met, I could barely believe that a man like him would be interested in me . He seemed so accomplished and put-together. He uses an accountant to prepare his taxes and employs a maid and a gardener even though his house isn’t terribly large. I was drawn to his organized life. It felt safe and comforting, and I was charmed by the way he’d tell everyone we met about It’s Christmas Again. He’s the one who insisted I get business cards, and he’s passed out more of them than I have.

But he’s always seen my Christmas business as an eccentric hobby, and he’s made it very clear that my decision to run the B&B myself is “misguided.” Lately, every time he’s around, I feel stifled, and my skin seems to revolt from his touch. I want to enjoy having his arm around me, the way I used to, but it’s begun to feel like he’s restraining me, not comforting me.

I throw the ruined green blouse in the trash, and then I tug off Ryan’s warm, soft sweater, sighing slightly because I like the way it feels against my skin, and change into a fresh blouse. As I finish straightening the blouse, I hear a creak from the next room over, and suddenly I’m deeply attuned to the fact that Ryan’s in there. What’s he doing?

What’s he thinking ?

It’s never been easy for me to guess.

I find myself pressing my palm to the cool wall dividing our rooms as if it were a beating heart and not made of plaster and wood. I feel a slight vibration against it, as if he’s leaning on it from the other side, his hand pressed to the same spot where mine rests, and my pulse starts to race.

Coming to my senses, I recoil from the wall as if it stung me. It was kind of Ryan to lend me his sweater, and kinder of him to stand up for me, but I don’t know him. He’s a stranger. A stranger who swears and keeps secrets and does God only knows what.

Grandma Edith asked me to be good to him, and I will be, but I should keep my distance. He’s unpredictable, and unpredictable things are inherently dangerous.

I fold the sweater up primly, meaning to set it outside of his door, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not yet. It’s just so soft, so blue. Exactly the sort of thing I’d like to wear to bed.

You can’t keep it , a voice in my head insists.

Ryan told me I could, but if I keep it, then it would mean something. That we’re friends, maybe, and I’m far from sure it’s a good idea to be his friend. So I promise myself I’ll launder it and return it. Sometime.

Giving the sweater a final, wistful glance, I grab my coat from my closet and head downstairs. Weston is sitting at my desk, his head bent over my computer, and a strange feeling of something’s wrong comes over me.

I hurry down the rest of the steps, but by the time I reach the desk, he’s already shut the laptop.

“What were you doing?” I ask, hearing the accusatory thread in my voice. Feeling my heart pound.

You trust Weston , I remind myself. It’s okay if he uses your things.

But my laptop is more than just a thing.

Everything for It’s Christmas Again is on there.

All of the spreadsheets for the B&B, too.

My spreadsheet of Christmas presents is on there, for goodness’ sake. It feels like a violation. My heart screams that it is one.

Weston glances up with a slight smile on his lips. “Shutting down your laptop,” he says. “We’re going to be gone for a while. You don’t have anyone checking in today, do you?” His gaze shifts up the stairs, his mouth firming. “That guy must have taken the last room.”

“I don’t,” I admit, “but you should have asked.” Everything inside of me is screaming red alert. Weston knows I don’t like people using my laptop, scrolling through my documents. It’s hard not to wonder if he did it on purpose. Maybe as revenge for borrowing Ryan’s sweater.

“Sorry, Belle,” he says as he gets up and puts an arm around my shoulders. My gut reaction is to shrug him off, but that’s not what a normal girlfriend would do. “But you need a real break. You’ve been working too hard. I’ve barely seen you for weeks.”

A sliver of guilt slips into my heart. He’s right. I haven’t made time for him. I’ve been completely focused on taking over the inn and meeting the Christmas rush for It’s Christmas Again. Everything else has slipped away. Again . I wish I had the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time, to pause and reflect and then resume, but my brain has always been monomaniacal.

And there’s another reason I’ve pulled away…

My grandmother didn’t like Weston.

She thought he belittled me and treated me like a child because of my differences, and now that she’s gone, it’s all I can see whenever I’m with him.

You know you’re not good at this.

This is too hard, Belle. Let me do what I do best, while you do what you do best.

Maybe he’s right, and I can’t successfully run the B&B. Certainly, I’m not naturally suited for customer service work. Talking to strangers exhausts me. But I love this place more than any other place on earth, and the thought of handing it off to someone else makes me want to weep.

It would be like reliving the horror of losing Grandma Edith.

“Let’s go,” Weston says, shuttling me toward the door. I feel like I’m a Band-Aid he’s pulling off someone’s knee. But I go with him, because he’s familiar, he’s stood by me, and because I don’t know what else to do. I can feel emotions stirring deep inside of me, but I can’t identify them yet.

Just before we walk out the door, Weston turns to me with a huge grin on his face. “Are you ready for an adventure?”

No, absolutely not. What I’d like to do, if I’m being honest with myself, is go inside and slip on the cozy borrowed sweater and work on my Franken-Santa.

But I force a smile and say, “Yes, of course.”

He opens the door with a flourish and practically pushes me outside.

A horse-drawn carriage has pulled up outside of my bed and breakfast. The attendant is standing beside it, wearing a red overcoat, breeches, and a black tri-cornered hat.

“We’re going on a carriage ride,” Weston announces with an expectant grin.

I can’t think straight. The carriages pass the B&B several times of day, but they only ever stop here to pick up guests, never me. I love the horses—they’re adorable and majestic—which I guess I must have mentioned to Weston at some point. But it’s always seemed cruel to me that their lot in life is to walk back and forth down the same cobbled road with blinders on. It feels like torment.

I’d like to say no, thank you, or maybe I’d rather not , but those don’t seem like options anymore now that he’s gone and done it. The carriage rides are expensive.

The next thing I know I’m being helped into the painted wooden carriage by the attendant. As soon as we’re seated on the bench, Weston grabs a gray blanket from beneath the seat and spreads it over my lap. It’s scratchy, but I’m too stunned to push it off. Especially when he unearths a thermos.

“Hot chocolate,” he says, and even though reading people isn’t my specialty, I can tell he feels wounded. Maybe he’s even hoping for an apology, but I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for drinking a cup of hot chocolate with Ryan—or to pretend I do and apologize for it.

“No, thanks,” I say, feeling annoyed. Angry. “As you pointed out, I already had some.”

He tucks the thermos away, watching me as if he’s expecting something he’s not getting, and if he stares at me for long enough, I might give it to him.

The poor horses begin walking, clopping down the same route they can literally retrace with their eyes shut—since they can’t see a thing—and the cart moves in a discordant rhythm over the cobbles. There are plenty of people out on the street—tourists dressed in heavy coats and hats, plus people who work here, some in colonial costume, some not, and college students. The air smells crisp with an earthy undertone that suggests our horses, or their equine friends, have deposited manure along the way.

“Isn’t this romantic?” Weston asks, his blue-eyed gaze digging into me. Again, there’s an edge of aggression to what he’s saying, as if he’s daring me to disagree with him.

He must resent the distance I’ve put between us. I can count on one hand the number of dates we’ve been on this past month. And I’ve barely even kissed him since the funeral.

“I’m sorry I’ve been preoccupied,” I say, trying to meet his eyes.

He stares back at me for a long moment and then says, “You’re forgiven.”

Silence falls between us as the carriage clops along. What am I supposed to do? Glance out the window? Hold Weston’s hand and look into his eyes? The thought makes me squeamish, and I find myself remembering the way he looked at me earlier, when I was wearing Ryan’s sweater—as if I were a mess he had to clean up. It’s a look I’ve gotten from him before.

And then the sight of him at my computer…

I feel jumbled up inside, and with so many sensations overlapping—the chill air, the scratchy blanket against my leg, Weston’s heat beside me but not around me, and the horses huffing air in steamy breaths—it’s hard for me to stop and untangle myself. Most of the time I can manage it, but it’s a practice that requires either quiet or crafting. Because my brain is most at peace when it’s doing something it loves.

Weston is still looking at me, and it occurs to me that I should probably say something. Am I supposed to be making small talk? Asking about his work?

We’ve fallen out of rhythm with each other. I used to be able to read his silences better, and he used to act like he cared about my preferences.

I squirm against the bench, my gaze flitting out the front window to see the poor horses as they continue on their thankless journey.

“You should have used the bathroom before we left the inn,” Weston says, his tone that of a parent speaking to a child.

“I don’t have to.”

My response sounds more hostile than I’d intended, and he angles his head sharply and gives me a disapproving look. He probably has something he’d like to say, but the carriage comes to a stop.

Apparently it was intentional, not because of a carriage traffic jam, because the driver comes around to the back with an eager smile on his face and helps Weston down first and then me.

We’re in front of the governor’s mansion.

Weston thanks the man and hands him some cash before hustling me toward the square. Then, to my shock, he lets me go and hurries forward, taking the bell from a waiting town crier.

An uncomfortable feeling of impending doom takes hold of me as he rings the bell with a hideous clang. Tourists passing by pause in their tracks, and several people start to cluster around Weston. A trumpeter with a red-tasseled trumpet steps forward and starts playing the wedding march, the sound making my ears ring and my whole body shudder in horror even as I’m frozen in place, incapable of movement.

Weston looks handsome, standing there with that bell, his blond hair tousled by the wind and his cheeks pink from the cold. His ice-blue eyes are on me as he calls out, “Hear ye, hear ye!” at the top of his lungs.

More people gather around, drawn by the fuss, and I feel myself shrinking within my coat. Maybe if I shrink fast enough I can miss the scene he’s creating.

Still speaking loudly, Weston says, “Anabelle, come here.”

I’m swallowed by the urge to turn and run back to the inn.

Literally. Just turn and run. There is nothing, nothing, I hate more than being the center of attention for a bunch of strangers. I can handle strangers one or two at a time, but put me in front of a crowd of them, and I stop functioning.

Weston knows this. He knows.

I feel frozen and immovable. Stuck.

I’m Lot’s wife, turned to salt.

I’m a woman made of stone.

He smiles at me. “There she is,” he says, pointing directly at me. “That’s my beautiful girl.”

He walks toward me, drawing all of those staring eyes with him. Something cracks inside of me as Weston pulls a little velvet box from his pocket and pops the lid open, to a series of gasps and cheers from the crowd. In my peripheral vision, I can see people lifting their phones to take photos of us, videos maybe. A few of them are carrying backpacks, probably students from my alma mater William & Mary, the college that’s a stone’s throw away, but most are tourists. One person has an honest-to-goodness camera. The thought of this moment living on in the memories of strangers is horrifying.

I barely even see the diamond ring through the pressure pressing in on me from all sides.

Glancing around with a grin on his face, Weston says, “Anabelle, will you do me the honor of being my wife?”

I meet his eyes for a second, horror spiking through me. I want to ask him why. Why now, why like this?

He’d have to know this would be excruciatingly painful for me and not at all the way I’d like to discuss something so important…

He’d have to know I’d be horrified by every single detail of this experience.

I can practically hear my grandmother saying, But it’s gratifying for him , Anabelle. The man likes to put on a show.

For some reason, I flash to Ryan’s face, smiling at me.

Ryan, standing up for me.

He’s a stranger with many objectionable qualities, yet even he cares more about my safety and well-being than my boyfriend.

I say one word clearly, and as loudly as that bell.

“No.”

Apparently, not clearly or loudly enough, because Weston shoves the ring box at me again and says, “What? Did you say—”

“No.” I jerk away from the box. “It’s over, Weston.”

And then I run.