Their Christmas To Remember

He looked at her for a long second, his blue eyes pale in the center with deep indigo rings around them, giving them a mesmerizing quality under the best conditions. But when he grabbed eye contact like that, and held it, he had to see those frustrating feelings swimming around in her own eyes. It was just right there, and it didn’t take someone who’d survived childhood by reading other people’s intentions to see it.

His eyes were probably the heart of his damnable attractiveness. It wasn’t that the rest of him wasn’t wickedly handsome—the man had a jaw so square it screamed masculinity, and that mouth. If he didn’t stop smiling...heaven help her. She could imagine Lyons laughing about it tomorrow, even if she’d never actually seen him smile.

Just as she felt her heartbeat hit the high millions per second, he broke his gaze away to fix on her phone, not mentioning her lapse into starry-eyed staring. A few taps and he announced, “We’re a couple of minutes early. She might not be watching yet, but you know anyone following you will be able to see this, right?”

“Well, sure.” She knew that. She wasn’t dumb. At least, not all the time. She just didn’t know how to start the danged thing. And she really hoped no one else at the hospital would be watching. Being around Wolfe was hard enough. “If someone starts watching, they’re going to be bored pretty quick and turn it off. It’s for Jenna, so we’re basically just going to walk around and look at stuff.”

“Then why were you looking up facts for the tree?” He kept the phone on her, clearly recording, which was not how she’d planned this going. She was going to hold the camera, not have her graceless, stuttering inadequacies immortalized online. “I was just going to tell her what it was and let her know she can look up where the tree came from to see the farm and stuff. I don’t know. I didn’t really have time to come up with a good plan.”

She snapped her fingers for him to hand the thing back over to her and stop recording her.

“So, you’re not going to play tour guide,” he reiterated, still recording.

“No.”

He watched her a moment longer, which was at least ten times longer than she wanted him to look at her, then handed the phone back. “Good thing I’m here. The poor kid needs some entertainment.”

She looked at the screen and saw four viewers watching, as well as a comment pop up from Jenna. “She’s here. She wants us to go to the tree.”

Soon, she expected, the other three watching would drift off somewhere more entertaining. Any second now.

He gestured for her to follow. “Get me in screen. You’re just awful at being a cameraman, love.”

That was teasing. It sounded like teasing. Not real criticism.

He put his gloves back on and gestured again for her to follow him into the plaza. Was she supposed to film him walking?

While not paying attention to his backside. Oh, Jeez, Jenna did not need a long screengrab of that man’s behind while he walked. This needed to be PG, even if her mind had sunk to the depths of at least PG-13 at that precise moment.

Jerking the screen up and off him, she panned it over the crowd and toward the tree as they walked. Let Jenna get a feel of what it was like to walk into the plaza. That was the experience. Not McKeag’s butt.

He glanced back at her, then, seeing that she was not filming him, fell back until he was in step with her. “You’re quiet.”

“I’m in awe of the majesty of—” your behind “—the crowd.” She sighed. “I’m trying to keep it level and not be all super shaky.”

“No stabilizer?”

“I have no idea. It’s a new phone. It should do all the things.”

To his credit, he didn’t laugh at her ineptitude. His smile was potent enough, especially when his hand moved to the small of her back and steered her to the left around some people she would’ve totally seen before running into while futzing with the phone. “She says the cookie place is on the far side of the plaza.”

“If it takes cookies, I’ll buy a dozen.”

If someone could shout an exclamation point with their eyes, Angel attempted it—eyes so wide they might pop clean out of the socket. She jabbed him in the arm with her elbow, so he didn’t miss it, and shook her head. Finger over the microphone, she whispered, “Kids take that kind of thing literally. You can’t say you’ll buy a dozen, she’ll expect a dozen and she needs some actual nutrition, not just empty calories.”

His adulting skills were also lacking in the child-bribing department. Which somehow made him more attractive.

“Yes, ma’am.” He all but saluted, then turned the camera to him, discreetly moving her fingertip off the microphone. “Lass, you know you can’t eat a dozen cookies and nothing else, right? I’m just prone to extravagance, my mum used to say. But I think your mum would whack me with the IV pole if I tried to give you a dozen cookies. So, it’s two. Any others that may come back to the hospital must be shared.”

She crossed her eyes and shook her head. “There is a two-cookie limit on what will be allowed onto the floor. If you bring a box, all the children—even the ones who can’t eat right now—are going to want a cookie and we haven’t cleared that with Dietary. This has to be a secret. Secret cookies come in small numbers.”

She puffed, then realized it probably sounded like hurricane force winds with her face so close to the camera and switched to reading comments again.

The administrator was watching.

Crap.

“Um, we’re...yes, ordered to only bring two.”

Back to their tree quest.

He led through the crowd, and she tried to pretend that the gentle steering wasn’t nice. It was kind of chauvinistic, really. That was exactly what she’d think if she saw some other woman being led around like that, but somehow he made it feel comforting. Probably nothing to do with him; it was a side effect of the ball of nerves in her chest every time she ventured into a proper New York crowd. That many people, packed so close? It was just plain scary. Riding the subway had made her break out in a cold sweat the first couple of times she’d tried it.

The presence of anyone she knew would’ve felt comforting. Safe. It wasn’t anything to do with him.

When they reached the denser crowds, he took her hand instead and cut through the sea of bodies until they were in the crush, three bodies back from the railing that kept the tree safe from the public. That was worse. Even with his fancy gloves, her hand in his wiped all thoughts from her head. All she could do was catalog sensations. All the tingling. The parts of her that trembled and heated. Insanity.

“Look up.” His voice was in her ear. She tilted her head back to look up at the tree, and he steered her arm, tilting the camera back.

They’d arrived just in time. The MC began to speak, and she missed every single word the man said. All she could do was stare up at the tree, focus on keeping it steady and try really hard to ignore the feel of him behind her. The crowds of New York were something she could never hope to get used to; they literally pressed so tightly together that the crowd seemed to move like one organism—which meant everyone directly beside her was touching her. So why was it that she only really felt him at her back? His heat. His solidity. The fan of his breath on her neck...

Someone flipped a switch and the tree blazed to life, thousands of lights instantly glowing.

It towered over the plaza and glittered as if covered by the wealth of the Rockefeller family. As if someone had opened some vault of jewels and strung the sparkling strands from bough to bough, spiraling upward to a crystal star that wiped out pretty much every thought she’d had before coming down.

So far gone from the strands of threadbare tinsel of her childhood trees. No hulking fire hazards of multicolored lights. No icicles dripping from everywhere because icicles were cheap and covered a multitude of tree imperfections. Icicles, it was well known, could kill your pets while making your Christmas tree seem full and high class. Not true, at least on one count. She hoped not many people lost pets to icicles.

No icicles here, not as she’d known them—though there did seem to be some crystal, icicle-like ornaments among the perfect, colored glass balls.

Did her family still celebrate the holidays? Maybe they’d only ever tried for her. It had been the one time of year she could count on receiving a gift, and only learned as a teenager that most of those gifts had been stolen. For her. For them. She didn’t know anymore.

“Ready?” he asked, breaking through the cold fog that rolled over her any time she thought about her estranged family.

“For what?” She looked over her shoulder, but he was already sliding between her and the next nearest body, so he stood more to the front and she could get part of him in frame with the tree.

“This is a stately Northern Porcupine Cone Tree. It was brought to this country approximately three hundred years ago by immigrants from the land of...”

Porcupine Cone? Was that a tree? No way. Three hundred years?

She felt her brows coming down even before he smiled extra bright at her.

He did not have the information.

“I don’t remember where they came from, but it was very far away.” He gestured up and down, denoting the height, and she finally caught on that he’d changed his accent. He now sounded like a remarkably proper BBC documentary narrator. “This magnificent beast of a Christmas tree is approximately seven hundred feet tall. The Rockefeller family employs twelve brigades of elves—one for each of the days of Christmas—both to make the lights and ornaments and put them onto the tree in the dead of night when the rest of the world is sleeping.”

She should stop this, shouldn’t she? Her smile said she wanted to hear more of this silliness, but he was lying to the kids and they would believe him. Well, might believe him.

But it was kind of amusing? To her, at least.

“Unfortunately, this year there was a terrible scandal in the Elf Union as Old Man Winter outsourced the production of the ornaments to South Pole elves, paying them significantly lower wages than the North Pole Union allows. And thus began the much misunderstood War on Christmas.”

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