The Christmas Baby Surprise. Shirley Jump

Carol said. “If there’s one thing this place is perfect for, it’s thinking.”

      “I’m counting on that,” Emily said, then got to her feet for a second slice of bread. It didn’t help her think, but it sure helped her feel like she’d come to the right place. Something about being back at the Gingerbread Inn filled her soul, and right now, Emily Watson needed that more than anything.

      * * *

      Cole Watson bounded up the stairs of his house—okay, technically it wasn’t his right now, even if he was still making the mortgage payments—with a bottle of wine in one hand and a dozen roses in the other. He reached for the front door handle, then paused.

      This was Emily’s house now. That meant no barging in, something she’d made clear more than once. He lived in a condo across town. A space of his own that was as empty as a cavern, and still echoed loneliness when he walked in at the end of the day. That was his home, like it or not, and this place no longer was, which meant he had to stop acting like he could barge in, grab the remote and prop his feet on the coffee table. He rang the bell, even though it felt weirder than hell to ring the bell of a house he still wrote a check for every month. Waited. No answer. Rang it again.

      Nothing.

      He fished out his key—she’d never changed the locks, something he had taken as a good sign—unlocked the door and went inside, pausing in the vast two-story foyer. Even fully furnished, professionally decorated, the massive house felt empty, sad. Seven thousand square feet of gleaming marble and granite, and it seemed...

      Forlorn.

      The same copper bowl he remembered them buying on a trip to Mexico sat on the foyer table, waiting for his keys. A neat stack of mail addressed to Cole sat beside the bowl under the Tiffany lamp he had bought for their first anniversary. In the parlor to the right, the same white love seat and armchairs that Emily had hated and he had bought anyway sat, facing the east garden. And down the hall, he could see the wrought-iron kitchen table and chairs, a gift from his mother years ago.

      The house was the same, but...different. Off, somehow.

      Then Cole spied the slip of paper atop the mail and realized why. He laid the wine and roses on the foyer table and picked up the note.

      

      

      Went out of town. Don’t know when I’ll be back. Don’t call me. I need some time to think. To figure out my next step.

      Emily

      

      

      The cold, stark words hit him hard. They were separated. Did he think she was going to leave him some gushy love note? Still, the reality stung, and reminded him that the marriage he thought he had and the one he did have were two very different things.

      Went out of town. Where? Why? With someone?

      That thought pained him the most, and drove home the other fact that Cole had yet to face. If he and Emily couldn’t repair their marriage, then at some point she would move on, find someone else. Another man would see her smile, make her laugh, hold her in the dark of night.

      And rightly so, because they were over and had been for a long time. Didn’t matter if Cole was having trouble accepting the fact.

      Against his hip, his cell phone buzzed. He flipped it out and answered the call. “Cole here.”

      “We’ve got a wrinkle in the product launch,” said Doug, his project manager. “There was a bad storm in Japan, and the plant that’s supposed to make the screens for us was damaged pretty heavily. They aren’t sure when they’ll be back online.”

      “Call someone else.”

      “I did. There’s a backlog on the materials. Seems we wiped out the inventory. It’ll be two weeks before they can produce more—”

      “I’ll take care of it. Get me on the first flight to...” Cole fingered the note in his hands. I need some time to think. To figure out my next step.

      The next step. There were only two options—get back together or get divorced. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which way Emily was leaning.

      Don’t call me.

      She didn’t want him to contact her. The bridge he’d hoped might still be there between them, the connection he’d been counting on when he’d shown up with wine and roses, was gone. She’d underlined the words. Made it clear she didn’t want him coming close.

      His marriage was over.

      “Cole? Did you want a flight to the plant in Japan? Or to the manufacturer in Poland?”

      Cole Watson, who had never had an indecisive moment in his life, stood in the empty foyer of the house he no longer lived in and wavered. “Uh...”

      He glanced at the note again. Figure out the next step.

      Then he glanced at his left hand. At the gold band that still sat there, and had for the past ten years. He imagined it gone, imagined this house gone, sold. Neither of those thoughts gave him more than a flicker of loss.

      But then he glanced at the five letters at the bottom of the note. Emily.

      Gone.

      That thought ripped a seam in his heart. He crumpled the note in his fist and dropped it into the copper bowl. It circled the bowl, then landed with a soft plunk in the center. “The screens can wait,” he said to Doug. “I have another matter to take care of first.”

      “But, but—”

      “Don’t worry, Doug. I’ll handle it.” Cole could hear the panic rising in Doug’s voice. The man had a tendency to panic first, think second. “By the time I’m through, we’ll look back at this moment as a blip on the radar. A momentary setback.”

      But as Cole hung up the phone and tried to figure out where in the world his wife might have gone and how he was going to deal with whatever next step was coming his way, he realized he wasn’t talking about the screens at all. He was talking about his marriage.

      CHAPTER TWO

      IN THE SMALL but cozy bedroom where she’d spent many a childhood summer, a blank computer screen and blinking cursor stared back at Emily, waiting for her to fill it with words. Something it had been doing for the past twenty minutes. She’d type a word, backspace, delete. Type another. Backspace, delete. What had happened to her? In college, she had been able to write short stories like a chicken producing eggs. Now when she finally had time and space to write, she couldn’t manage to get a word onto the page. This was her dream, and all she could do was stare at it.

      Her focus had deserted her. Heck, it had left town months ago. She needed to get her priorities in line again. Somehow.

      A light fall breeze whispered through the couple inches of open window, dancing with the white lace curtains and casting sparkles of sunshine on the white-and-blue space. The low sounds of a radio playing downstairs, probably while Carol worked, made for a harmony with the chatter of the birds outside. It was a serene, perfect setting, the kind of place any writer would love to have. Well, any writer without writer’s block, that was.

      Emily crossed to her bag, and tugged out the envelope she’d tucked into the front pocket. Melissa’s last note, mailed to her, and she presumed, also to the other girls.

      

      

      Dear Gingerbread Girls,

      I’m laughing as I write that little nickname for us. Remember those crazy summers we had at the Gingerbread Inn? All those adventures in town and late at night? It’s no wonder someone dubbed us the Gingerbread Girls. Heck, we were always together, thick as thieves, Carol used to say.

      I miss that. I know we’ve all got older and have gone on with our lives, but oh how I miss those summers, those