Page 25 of The Christmas Stroll

The hardware store had put a volunteer on a ladder, a boy home from college by the look of him, wrestling a string of lights along the lintel while the wind did its best to take both him and the lights.

Maggie caught the cold brass door handle to steady the ladder’s foot; Will simply walked over, took the loose end of the lights out of the wind, and held it while the boy worked, saying something that made the kid laugh and stop swaying quite so alarmingly.

It was just so natural, Maggie realized. Will always seemed to know who needed reassuring, or who just needed someone to hold the other end.

They wound the last of the light coil along the lantern posts down the block, checking each string was fast against the weather.

Above the gallery at the top of Main, a chimney was going, and the smell of woodsmoke came down through the snow, clean and sweet, mingling with the clove and orange still drifting out of another shop’s open door.

Maggie stood a moment with her hands full of lights and her mouth full of sugar and realized that today, she had not built a single contingency plan.

She was simply in the snow on Main Street with old Nantucket friends and neighbors and The Flour Jar’s legendary stollen, and it had not occurred to her to do anything else at all.

It was almost dark, the street lamps coming up gold against the falling white, by the time the others joined them.

Lucy appeared first, having shut the shop after the afternoon’s last departing ferry, a knot of volunteers gathered up behind her the way she gathered everyone.

Sophia Moretti, the Italian women who ran those gorgeous cooking retreats out at her beach cottage - was in stylish leather boots; two college kids home for the holidays, thrilled to be conscripted into anything; a woman who ran the health food shop smelling faintly of bayberry, Lila Harrington from the Dune Deck and Adam Foster who it was rumored would eventually be taking over the O’Rourkes’ place and turning it into a restaurant.

What had been a boring Stroll errand turned loose and loud within minutes, the whole cluster of them working down the last stretch of lights, laughter carrying and boots crunching, somebody producing a thermos, somebody else declaring the lantern star the best thing on the wharf and being immediately shouted down.

Maggie was laughing at something Lila had said, when the first snowball hit the lamp post beside her head, and burst into a soft white star. The whole group went quiet for one guilty second.

“Wasn’t me,” Lucy quipped innocently, already backing toward a parked truck, both hands empty.

“It absolutely was you,” declared Sofia Moretti.

Maggie looked at the burst of snow on the lamp post. She looked at Lucy and then at Will, standing three feet off with the last of the lights still in his hands and a look on his face that suggested he knew exactly what was coming.

She bent and packed a snowball between her mittened hands, slow and deliberate, tamping it round, and all of sudden she felt fourteen years old again.

It caught Will square in the middle of the chest, a clean white splash across the dark wool, and for one heartbeat the whole of Main Street held still - the snow falling, the gold lamps, the volunteers frozen mid-step - until it all broke apart into pure undignified chaos.

The college kids scattered behind lamp posts. Sofia, to everyone’s astonishment, produced a snowball the size of a grapefruit and lobbed it at Lila with a deadly aim. Lucy cackled from behind the parked truck and started supplying ammunition to anyone within reach.

While Will wiped the snow off his coat, grinned at Maggie across the white-glazed cobbles, and bent to pack a fresh one with the unhurried confidence of a ball thrower who had never once - in his whole life on this island - missed.

Chapter 19

The fight lost all shape inside a minute. Alliances quickly formed and again dissolved. Lila defected to Lucy’s truck and was declared a traitor by the college kids.

Somebody’s snowball missed entirely and took the STROLL WEEKEND SPECIAL sign clean off the bridal boutique window, and everyone pretended not to have seen.

Maggie had Will pinned behind a lamp post and was pressing her advantage, laughing so hard she could barely pack the snow, snow in her collar and in her hair, and her cheeks stinging pink with the cold. She drew back for one more throw, one more aimed dead at the center of his chest - and her boot found the ice.

The cobbles had since glazed under the fresh snow, and her heel went out from under her, the street tipped, and the gold lamps and the white sky swung across Maggie’s vision as she went down.

Incredibly, she did not hit the ground though.

Will’s arms came round her before the cobbles could, one hand flat against her back and the other closing at her elbow. He caught Maggie’s whole weight and stopped her, held her, so that she hung a foot above the frozen street with her face tipped up toward his and her breath coming fast and white in the cold air between them.

She could feel the warmth of his hand through her coat. Could see the snow melting in his dark hair, faint blond at his temple, the lines gone still at the corners of his eyes.

He had stopped laughing. So had she.

The whole of Main Street dropped away. The shouting, the boots, Lucy’s cackle from behind the truck - it all went somewhere very far off, and there was only the snow coming down slow around them, the golden lights and Will’s breath mingling with hers, close enough that Maggie could feel it on her face.

He did not let go. That was what she noticed, and what made her heart hammer behind her ribs. He had caught her and stopped her and he could have set her back on her feet, but instead his hand stayed flat against her back and his eyes stayed on her face.