Their Christmas to Remember Read online

  Her frown didn’t convince him she believed him, or said she had trouble picturing it.

  “When do you want to make them? Do we need special supplies?” he asked, to get back on the subject before lunch ended.

  “I’ll take care of that. And speak with Dietary about whether it’s okay to bring in gingerbread men for the whole ward.” She went with it.

  Get the information, get it all sorted out, get her to stop looking quite so lost. “Will it take long?”

  Really, he was off his game with her. He could always make people smile. Finding the unserious in the serious? He could always do that. But today he’d had to rely on a confessional about his parents’ depraved natures being broadcast to half of Europe on the regular, and this morning he’d almost kissed her—would have if they’d not been interrupted.

  Clearly, he was out of his depth with her.

  “No. I already did the legwork—a bakery to bake the house parts, make the frosting, and edible gingerbread men to bring in.”

  She spoke at length about the plans, and all he had to do was supply the location and show up. Tomorrow evening.

  “We’ll wear the ugly jumpers for that. Or maybe the tree. You decide.” He stood up, ready to put some space between them, and maybe grab a sandwich before he got back to work. But before he could make himself go, he looked down at her again and asked, “Are you all right?”

  Her smile was a little tight, but much better than that little sad bird mouth she’d had for the first half of their conversation, and she nodded.

  It would have to be enough. He didn’t know how to do more. Never had.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANGEL GAWKED FROM the back seat of the cab as it stopped in front of a church in Tribeca.

  This couldn’t be it. Wolfe had said it was a small church converted to a house, but the building the cabbie stopped in front of would’ve been a regular, or big, church back home. The kind about two hundred people would attend Sunday worship. Somewhere she would’ve gone to pray that the mistletoe fiasco never be spoken of. Only fancier.

  “Are you sure this is the place?” she asked, fumbling for her phone to double-check.

  The cabbie gestured out of the window. “Do you know him?”

  There was Wolfe, striding down the walk to meet her. Her stomach bottomed out.

  She’d been half hoping this would all end in some funny mix-up where she couldn’t find his place and had to take all her cookie paraphernalia home to eat the equivalent of three gingerbread houses alone, because sometimes a girl needed to eat her feelings. Especially when her feelings were stupid.

  “Yeah, I know him.” She sighed, unable to help herself, and paid just as the door opened.

  Wolfe leaned through to look over what she’d brought and eyed the stack of boxes on the other side of her, reminding her of the tree-lighting, when he’d flirted without reservation, and ducked into her cab to kiss her cheek.

  Now he looked all business. “Need a hand?”

  There was no getting out of this now. The only things she could afford to destroy were the things she’d brought with her, and whatever remained of her self-esteem.

  “Need two.” She carefully shuffled half the boxes to his hands, then took the remaining half for herself, and climbed out. “Be careful, they’re carefully wrapped, but they’re still cookies. I got enough for three houses, one for you, one for me and one for spare parts when we break everything.”

  “Good thinking.” He nudged the door closed with one leg and then nodded sideways toward the door to his churchy house. “Let’s go put these in the kitchen and I’ll give you a tour. See if you like the place I picked to put the tree.”

  She felt herself already bristling—what did she know about that kind of thing? “It’s your house, we’ll put it where you want to put it.”

  “I told you, I don’t do Christmas. I don’t really care where it goes.” He carefully opened the door, and she was at least momentarily mollified to see that he didn’t have a butler, or a private doorman to handle the lowly tasks, like turning doorknobs, for him. If he hadn’t said his kitchen had never been used, on seeing the house she’d have expected him to have a live-in private chef.

  Even having steadied herself to expect opulence and given herself a stern lecture about not touching anything, the instant she stepped through the heavily carved, solid wooden door, she froze.

  It wasn’t garish—despite having been a church, there was no trace of gilding, and it didn’t need it. There were white walls and gorgeous, dark walnut beams and woodwork. Just from where she stood, to the left she could see into what was probably once the sanctuary, and there were marble columns. An archway the other direction was one of those pointed-top curvy ones that she couldn’t picture gothic cathedrals without, and which probably had a name. A name that he knew. A name she would’ve probably learned had she not been intimidated by art history classes after the first and only mandatory one she’d been required to take as an undergraduate.

  “Angel?” His voice was gentle, but full of questions. Then he actually asked a question. “What’s wrong?”

  And directly ahead, there was an elevator. Good God Almighty, the man had an elevator. He was not a normal person, and neither was she. They represented such drastically opposite ends of the spectrum that it made this all worse somehow. As if she should just be there to clean the chimney, otherwise she didn’t belong.

  “Is this the house?” The plush furniture she spied where there should be pews said house, but her feet stayed stuck by the door, her fingers curled into the boxes so hard they dented.

  He put his boxes down on a table near the door and came to take hers away. “This is it. Let’s get these into the kitchen.”

  “No! Let’s go to the other house. You said there was a parsonage? Let’s use that house. This is...this is...”

  “Angel?” He repeated her name after she repeated herself at least seven hundred times, breaking the cycle and pulling her big eyes to him.

  She knew they were big, because they were opened too wide and starting to feel dry and hard to focus. Then there was the clammy feeling blooming over her whole body that probably meant sweating for no reason.

  “There is a parsonage. It’s a guest house. Lyons stayed there when he was recovering, and a few friends have visited and stayed there.”

  “So, it’s furnished. Good! Good... Let’s go there. Let’s film there instead.”

  “The parsonage has a really small kitchen.” Wolfe shook his head, and he didn’t even seem to be trying to get rid of the concern she saw there.

  Unlike her. She was doing everything short of using her fingers to squish her features to remove the freakish bent she knew they’d taken, return to something more normal or at least less cartoonishly horrified.

  “We’re going to need a lot of room to put these together. And there’s better lighting here to film by.”

  Film. Right. Right. They were going to live stream. For the kids. For Jenna, the twelve-year-old with stars in her eyes, who would love to see Wolfe’s big, fancy house.

  “What’s freaking you out? Is it because it’s a church? Did you have a bad experience in a church?”

  There! He’d given her an out. She could con her way out of this, and that was a lesson from her early, family-led education: when you were drowning or about to be caught, use whatever lifeline was available.

  She could just lie.

  Lots of people had bad experiences in churches, probably. But she couldn’t explain this reaction outside something really traumatic, which was a Big Lie. She didn’t like Big Lies. Little ones were bad enough.

  “No.” She forced her suddenly stiff hands to the buttons on her coat and started working them open. Normal actions. Civilized people took off their coats when entering someone’s home. This was Wolfe’s home. And if the universe wanted to
draw a line around exactly why her crush on him was especially dumb, this was it. The man was so far out of her league he shouldn’t even know her name. He shouldn’t have to mix with someone like her.

  “What is it?”

  “Why do you think I should be so much better at deciding where to put your Christmas tree when this is where you live?” Was her voice high? It sounded high. “I mean, I’ve never had a Christmas tree that wasn’t cut down in the middle of the night from someone else’s private property and which we had to move furniture out of the house to even make a space to set up. So, you know...just...you pick where the tree goes.”

  And she’d never wanted one since. That wasn’t what she’d meant to say, but that was what came out. She got the coat off, then looked around for a place to put it, the panic still there but starting to sting more because of embarrassment. If she’d built up any good karma with her work and trying to lead a good life, then how fast she’d babbled all that out would make it hard for him to understand. His brother had implied that she and her Tennessee mountaintop people were practically incomprehensible anyway.

  He took her words without comment but stepped to her and disengaged her hands from the wool collar she was wrenching into a misshapen mess and took the three steps needed to carry him to what was apparently a coat closet. A coat closet with a fancy pointed arch on the top of the door and wrought-iron hinges like a medieval castle.

  “Here.” He left the boxes of cookies on the table, took her hand and led her stiff-legged through the fancy archway to some stairs. The stairs were closed in and carpeted, they looked like normal stairs. Just up. A bend in the middle past which she couldn’t see. White walls. Very nice wood railing. And, most importantly, nothing to break.

  Halfway up, closed in the small space, the panic started to fade back into a weird buzzing at the base of her skull. And warmth in her hand. His hand, big and warm, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing in the way she did when trying to soothe a patient or worried parent. It worked. Provided enough distraction to get her out of her own head.

  “Wolfe?” she said when they reached the landing, before making the turn to continue up. The man had seen enough, she could either let him jump to conclusions that could be worse than the truth or tell him something now that her brain had resumed function.

  “I’m a little intimidated by fancy things. All day I’ve been telling myself just don’t break anything. Just don’t break anything. Like parents everywhere say when they take their children into shops with glassware around. Don’t break nothing at Wolfe’s fancy house.”

  He kept squeezing her hand but nodded and gave a little tug so she stood closer, not commenting on another grammar slip; they were emotional tells he was growing grateful for. “I don’t have a lot of breakables lying around, but if you break something, what do you think I’m going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Sue me for breaking a Ming Dynasty vase. Vaze? Vace? However you say it.”

  “Do I look like a Ming Dynasty vase sort of bloke?”

  She gestured helplessly around, then ended up pointing an accusing finger at him. “You live in a church mansion. What if I fell through the stained-glass window? You have a stained-glass window in your house, and it’s probably bigger than my whole apartment.”

  “We’ll skip the tour, then. Go back downstairs. I’ll blindfold you and lead you to the kitchen so if you break anything in transit, it’s my fault.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Or I can carry you. Toss you over my shoulder, then you can look at my bum the whole way, and I know you wouldn’t hate that.”

  “Wolfe!” She squawked his name and, although she left her hand still tucked into his, shoved at his chest with her poking hand. Fat lot of good it did—he didn’t even wobble. “I don’t need a close-up view of your butt. This has nothing to do with you. It’s the same feeling that comes every time I think about that danged ball we’re supposed to go to. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”

  “I get it,” he said, the teasing light in his eyes dimming. “You didn’t have much growing up, right?”

  She nodded.

  “If you don’t have money to pay for accidents, the idea of breaking anything is scary.” He filled in her silence, adding, “There’s nothing at the ball valuable enough to worry over. They have insurance against roving bands of unruly southern belles.”

  “I’m not a southern belle,” she said softly, letting go of his hand in favor of the railing to go back downstairs. Then under her breath, “I’m one of those Conleys from Tarpin Holler.”

  “What was that?” He was just behind her on the stairs.

  She stopped at the foot of the stairs, gestured for him to move ahead of her and lied. “I said I want to follow.”

  “You said foller,” he corrected, but, when he moved past, took her hand again. “You know, things that happen make us the balls of neuroses we always end up. But they aren’t stone. You can get over this by spending time in my fancy house.”

  He couldn’t understand, and she didn’t have the heart to explain it to him. Instead, she just walked where he led. At least he hadn’t been put off by “foller.”

  There was that to enjoy, and the warmth of his hand. Human contact, non-professional human contact. Felt good. It’d be nice to think that she’d be responding this way to any attractive man taking her hand right now—not just Wolfe—but Angel knew how her luck worked. Against her. It was him. It was this crush that had maybe become more. She’d lusted after him before even knowing him, but all this—especially knowing that he disliked Christmas but still did all this for the kids? Controlling her reaction was hopeless.

  Of course, he would be even better than he’d seemed. Of. Course.

  He led through a short alcove that functioned as a hallway, and housed what she could only consider a reading nook with comfy chair, lamp and table, through the corner of the sanctuary, which she wasn’t ready to see, to a proper hallway and a big, bright, white kitchen full of marble countertops, stainless-steel appliances—really big ones—and a tall beautiful window with yet another pointy arch on top. Church windows. Clear glass, not stained. Less valuable, her mind supplied. Less scary.

  “See? It’s not riddled with breakables. They’re all stashed away in cupboards.” He steered her over to a massive island in the center, spun her and picked her up to put her right on the counter. The concern she’d spied in his eyes earlier had entirely diminished when he’d begun teasing her in the stairwell, and now they practically blazed with mischief.

  The twinkle in his eyes acted like a filter, only allowing new, attention-claiming emotions into her mind, and shoving that anxiety to the background.

  “What?”

  He stayed there with her so that her legs naturally parted to keep from putting any pressure on her knee stitches. He was right there, hips at the insides of her knees, and a little higher, his hands, large and warm, cupped the outside of each thigh and slid up, up, up, narrowing her whole world down to just this heartbeat, just this breath. But the eye contact the man gave, there was no breaking away from that.

  “I could give you something else to worry about, make you less nervous about the household breakables.”

  “I thought you had a code.”

  “Found a loophole,” he said, leaning in, his hands forming to her hips, then squeezing and sliding up. Waist. Ribs.

  “What is it?” Was there any voice there, or was that all breath?

  “We’re not at work.” He smiled, melting away all desire to ask further questions.

  His hand on her jaw, long fingers cupping behind her head, he leaned in and she leaned in too.

  “Been thinking about this since yesterday. Or longer.”

  He caught her upper lip between his, then just pressed tingling warmth into her. It was like a ravenous kiss that got distracted and stilled to soak in
the sparkling tide of sensation that rolled out from it. Slow and savoring, with soft surprised noises from one—or both—of them.

  The man kissed as if he had all the time in the world, and she were some rare, exotic wine to savor. To roll around on his tongue, to breathe in.

  Whatever else he was, whatever else she lacked, didn’t matter. It would end, she was leaving, going far enough away consequences couldn’t follow.

  She clutched at his shoulders, because her own spine seemed to be melting and she could end up a puddle on his fancy counter without an anchor. Finding some inner well of courage, or complete loss of sense, she pulled him closer and deepened the kiss.

  When she slipped her tongue into his mouth, he gave up all semblance of control. The world tilted, and she couldn’t tell which way was up, then he had her on her back, stretched out on the cold, pristine countertop, and he stretched out with her, kisses too hungry for artistry.

  With the counter for a bed, he cradled her head on one arm, his other threading into her hair, hot ragged breaths filling the cool kitchen air, bouncing off the marble—needy, desperate echoes.

  She became aware of some bells sounding in her head when he backed off enough to brace his forehead against hers. “You’re ringing.”

  “I’m ringing?”

  “Please tell me it’s not recording us again.” His breathless words identified the ringing. Not in her head, on her phone. In her pocket.

  She had to force her fingers to uncurl from the fabric of his formerly smooth button-down, and she leaned to fish the phone out of her back pocket. “It’s an alarm to get started. Not recording. We’re supposed to start in five minutes.”

  “Five minutes,” he repeated, and then caught her cheeks again for a much gentler few kisses. “You know I’m not done, right?”

  “You’re not done,” she echoed, acutely aware of how relieved she sounded, then sighed. “Goodness, I’m just repeating everything you say.”

  “But do you feel better about the house?”