Maybe This Christmas. Sarah Morgan

had tried everything in an attempt to stamp the O’Neil out of Jess, but nothing had worked.

      Pride mingled with the slow simmer of anger.

      The Carpenter family had paid a fortune to slick lawyers to make sure Janet had custody of Jess. For twelve years he’d had to put up with only seeing her in the summer and at Christmas, but then Janet had become pregnant again. The combination of a new baby and Jess hitting her teenage years had culminated in her sending Jess to live with him.

      Tyler had vacillated between relief and happiness that his daughter was finally where he’d wanted her all along, and fury and disbelief that Janet had sent the child away.

      As far as he was concerned, family was family, and they stayed that way even when the going got tough. You couldn’t sign off or resign. Walking away wasn’t an option. He’d been eighteen when Janet had told him that their single encounter had left her pregnant, and no matter what emotions had rippled through the O’Neil family at the time, he’d never doubted that he’d had their support.

      The Carpenter family had been less accepting, and Janet had never forgiven him for making her pregnant. She blamed him for the whole thing, as if she hadn’t been the one who had walked into the barn that day wearing nothing but a smile. And that blame had permeated her relationship with her daughter. It was no wonder Jess had arrived at Snow Crystal feeling insecure, unwanted and vulnerable.

      “What do you think, Tyler?”

      Realizing he’d been asked a question he hadn’t heard, Tyler woke up and looked at his brother. “Yeah, go for it. Great idea.”

      “You have no idea what I said.” Jackson folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “This is important. You could try paying attention.”

      Tyler suppressed a yawn. “You could try being less boring.”

      “The high school ski team is a coach down. The team is losing more than they’re winning. They want our help.”

      “I said less boring.”

      His brother ignored him. “I said we’d help out at the school for a couple of sessions. We can talk theory and give a waxing demonstration.”

      “Waxing?” Kayla’s eyebrows rose. “We’re still talking skiing, yes? Not grooming?”

      Tyler gave her a look. “How long have you lived here?”

      “Long enough to know exactly how to wind you up.” Smiling, Kayla made a note on her phone. “Helping the high school team will be good publicity. I can do something with that locally.”

      Tyler stared moodily at his feet and waited for them to ask him to do it.

      Once, he’d skied alongside the best in the world.

      Now he was going to be coaching a losing high school ski team.

      Regret ripped through him along with sick disappointment and a yearning that made no sense. What was done was done.

      He was about to make a flippant comment about how he’d finally made it to the top, when Jackson said, “We thought Brenna might do it.”

      Brenna was the obvious person. She was a PSIA level three coach and a gifted teacher. She was patient with kids and adventurous with expert skiers.

      Glancing at her, Tyler noticed the change in her expression and the stiffness of her shoulders. You didn’t have to be an expert in body language to see she didn’t want to do it.

      And he knew why.

      He waited for her to refuse, but instead she gave a tense smile.

      “Of course. Kayla’s right. It will be good publicity and good for our reputation.” She gave the answer Jackson wanted and listened while he outlined details, but there was no sign of the smile that had been evident a few moments earlier. Instead she stared hard out the window and across the snow-dusted forest to the peaks beyond.

      Tyler wondered why his brother hadn’t noticed the lack of enthusiasm in her response and decided Jackson was too caught up with the pressures of keeping the family business afloat to notice small things. Like the rigid set of her shoulders.

      He felt a rush of exasperation.

      Why didn’t she speak up and say how she felt?

      He knew she didn’t want to do it. Unlike most of the women he’d met, he found Brenna easy to read. The expression on her face matched her mood. He knew when she was happy; he knew when she was excited about something; he knew when she was tired and cranky. And he knew when she was unhappy. And she was unhappy now, at the news she’d be coaching the high school team.

      And he knew why.

      She’d hated school. Like him, she’d considered the whole thing a waste of time. All she’d wanted to do was get out on the mountains and ski as fast as she could. Lessons had got in the way of that. Tyler had felt the same, which was why he sympathized with Jess. He knew exactly how it had felt to be trapped indoors in a classroom, sweating over books that made no sense and were as heavy and dull as old bricks.

      But in Brenna’s case, it hadn’t been a love of the mountains or a dislike of algebra that had driven her loathing of school, but something far more insidious and ugly.

      She’d been bullied.

      On more than one occasion, he and his brothers had tried to find out which kids were making Brenna’s life a misery, but she’d refused to talk about it, and none of them had witnessed anything that had given them clues. It hadn’t helped that she was younger, which meant that they rarely saw her during the school day.

      Tyler had wanted to fix it, and it had driven him crazy that she wouldn’t let him.

      If it had been one of his brothers, he would have sorted the problem, so he couldn’t see why she wouldn’t let him help.

      On one occasion, she’d walked back from school with grazed knees and a cut on her face, her schoolbooks damaged from her encounter with whoever had pushed her in the ditch.

      “I don’t need you to fight my battles, Tyler O’Neil.” She’d dragged her filthy, muddy schoolbag onto her skinny shoulder, and he remembered thinking that if he ever found out who was doing this to her, he was going to push them off the top of Scream, one of the most dangerous runs in the area.

      He never had found out.

      And presumably the person, or persons, responsible were now long gone from Snow Crystal, leaving only the memory.

       Was she thinking of it now?

      He ran his hand over his jaw and cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to think of Brenna as vulnerable. He wanted to think of her as one of the boys. He’d disciplined himself not to notice those sleek curves under the fitted ski pants. He’d trained himself not to notice the sweet curve of her mouth when she laughed. She was a colleague. A friend.

      His best friend. He was never, ever going to do anything to jeopardize that.

      Shit.

      “I’ll go into school. I’ll coach the race training camp and whatever else needs doing.” Even as he said the words, part of his brain was yelling at him to shut up. “Brenna has enough to do around here.”

      Jackson’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You?”

      “Yeah, me. Why not?”

      “The question is more ‘why would you?’”

      He waited for Brenna to admit how she felt, and when she didn’t, he searched his brain for an explanation. “They are the stars of tomorrow.” He regurgitated something he’d read at the top of Jess’s school report and then decided he needed something more plausible. “And there’s no feeling quite like basking in the adulation of teenage girls. I don’t get anywhere near enough adulation around here, so I’ll do it.”

      “No.” Brenna finally