Reid spent a quiet day with Ashton. They exchanged gifts and enjoyed an early dinner Martha had prepared for them before she left to spend the day with her own family. Later that evening, after Ashton had gone into the city to visit some high school friends who were home for the holiday, Reid poured himself a brandy and sat listening to Mozart on the stereo. The fire cast an amber glow on the ten-foot Christmas tree.

He missed Kate with an intensity that almost frightened him. After Cindy died and a respectable amount of time had passed, the women in his social circle got busy trying to find him a new wife. He’d sat through countless dinner parties and blind dates with a progression of “perfectly suited” women who wanted nothing more than to take care of him and his precious little boy. Well, a few of them were probably more interested in his money, but he didn’t keep any of them around long enough to find out. Not one of them had stirred in him what Kate did.

After a while his friends mercifully gave up on him. Reid buried himself in his work and taking care of his son, and the invitations stopped coming as one by one his friends quit calling. He hadn’t even realized how isolated he’d become until Kate stormed into his life and made him see what he’d been missing all these years.

Reid heard Martha come in through the kitchen door. She had finally begun to slow down over the last year, and he worried about her driving at night. But whenever he broached the subject, she would give him the withering look that had worked on him since he was a child, and he would drop it.

“Hi,” she said. “Did Ashton leave?” She tended to drop the formality she used around guests when they were alone.

“He was here all day, but he wanted to see his friends. How was your day?”

She sat down across from him. Every snow-white hair on her head was perfectly in place—as always—but he could see weariness in her soft brown eyes. “Tiring. The whole crowd was at Buddy’s,” she said, referring to her son.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Heavens, no. That’d be the living end of me. Thank you, though.” She studied him intently.

He raised an eyebrow. “Something on your mind, Martha?”

“As a matter of fact, there is. You know I care for you like my own, and I know my place in this house, but I can’t stand by and say nothing when I see what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?” he asked casually, but his heart began to beat faster.