Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online

airport runway until he crashed into the fence, breaking Lance Steppen’s femur and totaling the two-year-old LR3 he had borrowed from Kelley and Mitzi without asking.
    “I don’t think it’s that dangerous over there anymore,” Kevin says.
    “Four soldiers today,” Isabelle says.
“Morts.”
    “Dead?” Kevin says.
“Really?”
He doesn’t follow the news except for ESPN SportsCenter, but he knows Isabellewatches his mother every night at six o’clock, along with the rest of the country. Four soldiers killed—but that will never be Bart. Dad and Mitzi can worry all they want, but Bart has always led a charmed existence, and Kevin knows it will stay this way. Bart’s Humvee might roll over a land mine planted by rebel forces outside Sangin, but Bart will do a double somersault and land on his feet, unharmed.
    “Yes,” Isabelle says. “Anyway, your father is walking in the house like a ghost, not talking, just floating and staring, picking up the sugar bowl, then setting it down. Opening the cabinet that holds
les plats de Noël,
then closing it. Mitzi did not prepare for the soiree tomorrow night. She must have been planning this and assuming Kelley would cancel. So I have been all day preparing hors d’oeuvres. I am going to order cookies from the bake shop. Your father says in secret that Mitzi’s cookies are…”
    “Inedible,” Kevin says. He has a flashback to being a teenager, he and Patrick dropping Mitzi’s gingerbread men from their third-story bedroom window. They never broke, never even cracked. “So, is the party still on, then?” Kevin has a hard time imagining the Christmas Eve party happening without Mitzi. She’s always the mistress of ceremonies, in her short Mrs. Claus dress—red velour with white fur trim—and her high black-suede boots. Mrs. Claus to George’s Santa Claus—Kevin gets it now. He can’t believe his father has been so completely cuckolded.
    “Oui,”
Isabelle says. She frowns at him, and then she dissolves into tears.
    He wipes her chin with his thumb. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Please don’t cry. It’s happy. It’s good.”
    “I do not know what to do!” Isabelle says.
    “Hey,” he says. “I’m going to help you.”
    “I do not know what help you are thinking of,” Isabelle says. “I might be sent home, Kevin. With our baby.”
    Just the word, “baby,” lights Kevin up. A baby, his baby, his and Isabelle’s baby.
    She cries into her open palms. Kevin understands what he has to do. He has to ask her to marry him. He should get down on one knee right here in the parking lot. It would change everything. Her tears would dry up immediately.
    But…
    Many thoughts collide in his mind.
    Propose! Ask Isabelle Beaulieu to be his wife! She is
so beautiful,
with her long blond hair, and she is so sweet and kind, hardworking and humble. In six months, his ardor for her has doubled and quadrupled. When he is at the Bar and she is at the inn, he thinks about her nonstop.
    But…
    He’s scared. Scared and scarred. There might as well be stitches in a jagged ring around his heart.
    He has heard enough platitudes and received enough “words of wisdom” in regard to Norah Vale to last severallifetimes.
It wasn’t meant to be; It’s for the best; They’re all bitches; Love stinks.
Nothing makes his anguish over what happened with Norah any better. She broke his heart, trashed his dreams, and left him flat broke. She walked away with nine years of his life, ruined his chances for a college degree—twice—and demolished his faith in humankind.
    No more women,
he vowed.
    Then along came Isabelle. The second he saw her smile, the instant he heard her lightly accented voice, he was a goner.
    News of the baby, delivered first thing that morning, in a note slipped under his bedroom door, made him whoop like a rodeo cowboy.
    “My family will be happy,” he says. “We’ll just tell everyone the truth: we fell in love, and now we’re pregnant.”
    She cries