Together for Christmas (28 page)

“Oh yeah? Well, don’t feel sorry for
me!
” she said, jerking up her chin in a dramatic way. “Because
I
can have anyone I want.”
Except you,
her poor naïve heart insisted on whispering. Ignoring it, Heather stomped across the suite. “And there’s no reason I’d want a glorified carpenter for a boyfriend!”

Alex flinched. His troubled sidelong gaze met hers. His shoulders slumped another fraction of an inch. But he didn’t argue with her assessment of him. Heather decided that meant she was right about him. He really had been planning to hurt her.

Who was she kidding? He’d already hurt her. A million times over. He’d allowed her to hope things could be different.

That was the worst thing anyone could do to someone else.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “That’s what I figured. That you wouldn’t want someone like me for your boyfriend.”

Heather wanted to disagree. After all, she’d spoken hastily and (admittedly) untruthfully. She loved his expertise at his job. She loved him, too. She didn’t care that Alex was neither famous nor sophisticated. But she had too much pride to give in. She had too much pragmatism (now that Alex had demonstrated how to practice critical thinking) to simply accept him at his word. Especially not when there was damning evidence right at hand.

Those cell phone photos of her had been
awful
. Furthermore, Alex did not, after all, have any chicken pox spots. Heather could see that for herself now, plain as day, after his shower.

He’d been faking. He’d been pretending about . . . everything.

Maybe he’d even been the one feeding the tabloids those bogus stories about Heather and her supposed bohemian boy toy.

Four minutes later, Alex had dressed. Thirty seconds after that, he was at their suite’s door. There, he stopped.

He’s going to say he didn’t mean it,
Heather prayed. Then she could say
she
hadn’t meant it, either. Everything would be fine between them. That was the way arguments worked, wasn’t it?

That was the way, in her experience, relationships worked.

“If you ever decide to get real,” Alex said, “look me up.”

“Ha!” Heather burst out, feeling as though her heart might be splintering somehow. “As if
that
will ever happen.”

That I’ll call you, I mean,
she thought.
Not that I’ll get
“
real
.” But by then it was too late. She was terrible at this.

Alex cast her a final glance over his shoulder. “I hope it does happen. You deserve it, Heather. You deserve . . . everything.”

His measured tone only made her want to shriek.
Don’t go!
was what she, specifically, wanted to howl. But she didn’t.

“I
already
have everything,” Heather said smugly.

Alex’s nod seemed to confirm it. But his eyes disagreed.

So did her heart. Because she didn’t have
him
. She didn’t have love. And above everything else, Heather wanted that most.

Why couldn’t she just say so? Why couldn’t she fix this?

Was she just that dumb, that the obvious solution escaped her?

With a woeful look, Alex raised his palm in a good-bye gesture. It felt like the last thing she would ever see him do.

“You can’t go out there!” Heather blurted, unable to resist a last-ditch effort to make him stay. “You’re contagious!”

Alex hesitated. Her heart performed a somersault.

If he stayed, it would be a bona fide Christmas miracle.

Reminded of that, Heather got even more desperate.

“And it’s almost Christmas. Stay until Christmas!”

It was as close to begging as she was willing to come.

It almost seemed to work, too. Alex actually turned around. He gave her the ghost of a smile, making her heart lurch. “You really
don’t
pay attention to anyone except yourself, do you?”

That stung. It confused her, too. What did paying attention to people have to do with Alex enjoying a few sugar cookies, some gifts, and maybe a karaoke Christmas carol or two?

Willing, now that it was crunch time, to swallow her pride a tiny bit, Heather smiled. “Please stay for Christmas.”

Alex shook his head. “I’m Jewish. I told you that.”

Uh-oh. Vaguely, Heather remembered that. “I . . . forgot?”

But before she could concoct a more reasonable excuse for not paying attention to something as important as his heritage and personal beliefs, Alex opened the door . . . and left their suite.

Stuck on her own with her troubling thoughts, Heather scowled at the empty doorway. “I don’t have to remember!” she yelled after him in her haughtiest tone. “
I’m
Heather Miller!”

But for the first time in her life, that didn’t help.

Because all at once, being Heather Miller was anything but fabulous . . . and facing down the rest of the night alone was going to leave her with far too much time to think about that.

Chapter 17

Downtown Kismet, Michigan
T-minus 16.25 (kiss-filled) days until Christmas

After Casey hastily parked his car downstairs near the coffee shop, he and Kristen hurried hand in hand toward her apartment. A light snowfall blanketed the quiet downtown Kismet streets, squeaking under their boots and diffusing the light from the garland-wrapped wrought-iron streetlamps. They reached an obscure door, just to the left of the coffee shop’s decorated plate-glass window, and turned-off-for-the-night neon sign.

“It’s just in here.” With gloved hands, Kristen fumbled through her purse. She extracted a jangling set of keys, her breath frosty on the night air. “Down the hall, up the stairs—”

“Sounds too far to go,” Casey said, and kissed her.

Their mouths met in the semidarkness, open and hot and seeking more, and kissing Kristen felt exactly as good to Casey then as it had just moments ago, when he’d kissed her in the car. Within seconds of making his move, he’d been crushed against the driver’s side door as Kristen had all but pole-vaulted over the center console to meet him (more than) halfway.

Panting and kissing and touching, unwilling to wait a second longer, they’d fogged up the car’s windows and tried to get closer. They’d nearly succeeded, too—until a late-night dog walker had happened past with a jingle-bell-wearing schnauzer on a leash and inadvertently broken the spell between them.

Now though, there was nothing except Casey and Kristen and a handy exterior doorway where they were partly sheltered from the chilly night air. Bringing his hand to her head, cradling her cozy knit cap in his palm, Casey pulled her nearer.

He opened his mouth at a new angle, teased her with his tongue, and felt a heady sense of gratification when Kristen moaned beneath his kiss and grabbed him right back. Because they were both so bundled against the cold, all she caught hold of were his quilted coat and long woolly muffler, and Casey cursed the stupid wintery Michigan weather all the more as he realized how much more
naked
they both could have been in California. Or Cozumel. Or Anguilla. Or Kauai. Or anyplace else where freezing subzero temperatures didn’t reign supreme every December.

Briefly, Casey wondered if Kristen would like going away with him at Christmastime. If she’d like margaritas on the beach and sand between her toes and sunshine and surf and sex. It was possible, he thought as he kissed her again, that he could have his usual escape-from-Christmas getaway
and
have love, too.

Surely those two things could coexist. Couldn’t they?

But then Kristen whipped him against the building’s exterior door, using his shoulders
and
his daydreaming as leverage, and then she took control of their kiss herself, and Casey forgot all about . . . everything else. If it wasn’t Kristen’s mouth or her warm minty breath or her impatient gloved hands roving all over him, he couldn’t feel it. Or think about it.

All he knew was her warmth. All he wanted was her touch. All he felt was
her,
lithe and eager in his arms, and he knew, in that moment, that he didn’t need anything else ever again.

Except maybe more. More more
more
. The only way that was happening, Casey realized dimly, was if they made it inside. Because while going on as they were—all but ripping off each other’s multiple layers of coats and scarves and clothes beneath the municipal banners announcing the annual Kismet Christmas Parade and Holiday Light Show—was definitely
fun,
doing so while inside Kristen’s apartment would be even better. And hotter.

In every sense of the word.

“We should go inside,” Casey murmured, caught up in kissing her neck. Her jaw. Her mouth. Her ear. Essentially everyplace that was exposed. “I don’t want you to get too cold.”

Kristen laughed. “There’s zero chance of
that
happening. Not with all
this
going on between us.”

The amusement in her tone intrigued him. So did the flirty invitation she’d offered by slipping her arms deftly between his overcoat and suit jacket. Clearly more versed than he was with cold-weather gear, Kristen squeezed him closer. Then she did everything except stand on his feet to reach his mouth again—including holding his jaw steady for her next kiss.

“Mmm,” she moaned. “I like it right here, just like this.”

Honestly, Casey did, too. Dizzy with wanting her, he gave in to their next kiss. And then the next. And the next. Tendrils of her hair tickled his fingertips; exhalations of her breath warmed his neck as she kissed him. She wriggled with apparent delight, then did it again. Casey was pretty sure Kristen might be capable of making him forget himself enough to risk indecent exposure
and
frostbite, all for the sake of feeling her hands on him everywhere, without the impediments of all his clothes.

But there was something invigorating about feeling the cold air against his overheated, exposed skin—about knowing that he and Kristen couldn’t
quite
forget themselves as long as they were still kissing in a doorway like a pair of insatiable long-lost lovers.

The chill of that door penetrated through the back of Casey’s coat, but Kristen’s body heat seared him from its front, and as he kissed her again, he realized that she was the only woman he’d ever known who’d actually thrown him against a door and kissed him as though she couldn’t get enough of his mouth, of his body, of
him
—all the way through—and he realized that he liked that a lot, and he further realized that Kristen’s gloved hand was sliding purposefully downward, over his shoulder, past his chest, over his belly, lower and lower, until . . .

Whoa
. Another few inches and he wouldn’t care anymore that they were in public.

Deliberately, Casey caught hold of Kristen’s wrist. Their gazes met. In the evening shadows, Kristen’s eyes sparkled up at him. Her mouth curved in a smile that looked far too audacious for its own good, promising him she was up to no good. Her smile all but guaranteed that—if left to her own devices—Kristen would make him lose control in a heartbeat, right there on the deserted Kismet street, with snow falling on his head and his body headed straight for hypothermia.

“On the other hand,” she told him, “I can’t touch you the way I want to out here on the sidewalk. We’d better go inside.”

As far as Casey was concerned, she could have anything she wanted, as long as it involved her and him and nakedness.

“Since I can’t feel my toes anymore,” he said, “inside sounds
great
. I think I might be getting frostbite.”

Kristen laughed. “That’s not frostbite. All your blood has rushed elsewhere.” She gave him a cheeky look. “I think I know where, too. I’ll make it a point to double-check in a second.”

“Anything that’s mine is yours,” Casey promised.

Kristen wasted no time in making her move, but it still took much too long to reach her second-floor apartment. After all, there was the exterior building door to unlock, then the hallway to navigate, then the stairs to ascend . . .

By the time they reached the landing that led directly to Kristen’s apartment, Casey thought he might be losing his mind.

Could unfulfilled lust do that to a person? Just then, it felt as though it could—and as though the only way to stop it was to grab Kristen’s arm, pull her close, and kiss her again.

Gratifyingly, she melted against him in response, her keys jingling as she brought up both hands to his chest. Completely inflamed now, Casey caught her head in his palms and kissed her with a sense of purpose that kept him rooted in place, even as snowflakes melted and turned to wet spots on his coat and his head and even his face and his eyelashes, and he knew he’d
definitely
never kissed anyone who made him feel the way Kristen did, which was why it suddenly seemed imperative that they get inside her apartment and get on with things, because if these mushy, sentimental feelings kept welling up inside him, Casey wasn’t sure what would happen. It made him feel a little crazy and a lot uncertain, and since he didn’t like uncertainty . . .

“Is it this one?” He took her keys and, at Kristen’s wide-eyed nod, unlocked the only door on that floor. A few seconds later, they’d practically dived inside her apartment together. Without looking around, Casey found the first available empty space: the wall beside her front door. “Aha. Home at last.”

As a sort of
welcome home
maneuver, he kissed Kristen against that wall, then caged her in with his arms and kissed her again. She felt
so
good and
so
right, and as she glanced up at him between kisses, wearing a smile that was as uniquely
her
as it was ridiculously alluring, stroking his face with her gloved palm as though she cherished him and needed him and
wanted
him beyond all else, Casey felt another glimmer of that schmaltzy feeling that had blindsided him a minute ago, and he knew that he had to get things going between them in a more purposeful and sexual way, or else he might start feeling . . .