All I Want For Christmas Is You Read Free Page A

wasn’t a live thing, choking off her air.
    That her heart wasn’t shattering into a thousand pieces in her chest.
    She felt rather than heard him move. One minute, she was standing alone at her mother’s sliding glass doors, her reflection staring back at her through the frozen glass.
    The next, a shadow stood behind her.
    His hands were strong on her shoulders, the heat from his palms radiating through the chill in her bones.
    He was solid and steady behind her. A thousand emotions surged inside her, storming toward the gates, threatening to drop her to her knees.
    It was too much. The sympathy in his touch, the ragged pain in her chest, the burning behind her eyes.
    She sucked in hard, deep breaths, wrestling everything back into the box that she locked then threw into the darkest corner of the abyss where she could safely ignore it.
    She’d deal with the emotions in that box some other day.
    It was only when she was certain she wouldn’t shatter that she turned to face him.
    And felt the loss immediately as his hands slipped from her shoulders.
    “Natalie is glad you’re here,” she finally said carefully as tiny feet pounded on the ceiling above them.
    A neutral topic. One she could handle.
    She hoped.
    “She was pretty upset when she called me,” he said. He didn’t move, but he didn’t crowd her either. He was simply there. Right there. All she had to do was reach for him. A single touch to cross the chasm between them.
    It wouldn’t fix things, wouldn’t fix them. Because it wasn’t their relationship that needed to be fixed. It was her. And she had no idea how to say the three hardest words in the English language. I need help.
    “What did she say?” Sam asked, steering her thoughts away from the emptiness inside her.
    His eyes reflected the frozen landscape in the glass behind her. Dark and whip-smart and so often filled with laughter.
    Today they were filled with worry.
    “That something was wrong.” His voice was thick, filled with recrimination.
    “She’s not wrong.” It hurt to admit that.
    “I can’t help if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, Sam.”
    She retreated a single step, her back colliding with the slider behind her. The cold seeped through her fleece. “You can’t fix this, Patrick.” You can ’ t fix me.
    “So that’s it? You’re just going to walk away and take my daughter and leave, and I don’t even get an explanation as to why?”
    “She’s not—”
    “Don’t.” He held up one hand, shutting down the words she’d been about to speak. His eyes flashed violently. “Don’t tell me she’s not mine. We never got around to the paperwork, but I’ve raised that little girl like she was my own. Don’t you dare say she’s not mine.”
    Sam swallowed the lump in her throat. “Patrick.”
    He shook his head and stepped away, out of her space. “I can’t do this right now. Do you want to meet here or at the place I’m staying for the trip to go see Santa?”
    “You don’t have to go. You look exhausted.”
    He pinned her with a deadpan look. “That’s what happens when you catch a red-eye to the middle of nowhere because your daughter says she’s scared.”
    She wasn’t prepared to deal with his anger. She supposed that was why she’d told him and then left the following day.
    She hadn’t wanted a confrontation. She’d been hoping things could just… dissolve quietly. Without any nastiness.
    He hadn’t fought her when she’d said she was leaving. She’d assumed that meant he was relieved. That he was going to just let her go.
    But he was here now.
    “You didn’t have to come. You could have just called me.”
    “Phone calls didn’t seem to be the right way to discuss things,” he said quietly.
    Hell, she’d run away to Maine in order to put some distance between them. Because obviously the distance between them for the last year hadn’t been enough.
    She could see his reflection in the glass behind her. The worry in his eyes. The hurt.
    It