Page 14 of Take Me Home for Christmas

Because Mia was a good person. A great person. And the story, while a little bit messy, sounded like something someone would do who really loved their mom. “I heard you needed a fake boyfriend.”

“Yes, a fake boyfriend. I—exaggerated to get my mom through chemo. She’s doing okay now, but she wants to meet him.” She eyed me suspiciously. Snow had settled like a white blanket on her hair and her nose and had melted on her eyeglass lenses. She looked completely adorable.

“Well, I’m sure you’d want a really cute one.” I spread my arms wide to demonstrate that I totally fit the bill. “I can definitely handle cute.” Outside, I was being my usual charming self. But inside, my stomach was flipping pancakes.

“Stop trying to make light of this.” She frowned and sounded irritated. Which threw me, because usually, my attempts at humor made her laugh. “This isn’t a joke.”

I held up my hands. Guess my charming self wasn’t so charming after all. “Okay, sorry. I just want to help.” That calmed me for a second. Because it was exactly true. “What’s the fake boyfriend’s name?”

Before my eyes, she turned as red as Rudolph’s nose.

Wow, that must be a doozy of a name. “Is it Alfonso? Reginald? Obi-Wan Kenobi?”

“Brax, okay?” She threw up her hands. “His name is Brax.”

What?It took my brain a second to catch up. “You named your fake boyfriend after me?” Or did she just really like my name?

She shifted her weight and looked uncomfortable. “I told my mom about you when we were dating last summer. But right when we broke up, she’d just been through surgery and was about to begin chemo. So I pretended that we didn’t.”

She seemed to be bracing herself for my judgment. But I got how the whole thing happened, and I wasn’t about to judge. What I really got was how much she loved her mom. “Okay, so all I have to do is be myself.” Despite my cut and dried logic, I got a warm feeling in my chest. Mia had told her mom about me while we were dating. What did that mean? That I’d been important enough to mention?

“You have to be yourselftimes ten.” She stabbed the air with her finger. “Make that timesone hundred. You have to be a wonderful, kind human being who is completely and totally in love with me!”

Ouch. I was going from feeling flattered to reeling from the fact that she didn’t think I was that great a human when she added, “And stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you pity me.” She turned away, fists balled.

Mia, who was an empath, a sensitive and loving soul who usually read me as accurately as a cell phone clock, couldn’t have been more off course. I put a hand on her arm. “It’s not pity.” Even now, I could feel something between us—a pumping in my veins, a stirring in my blood, a heat all through my limbs that I could not rid myself of, no matter how hard I tried.

What was I doing?

Jumping off a bridge without a bungee cord, that was what. Still, I had to help her. It was that simple. “Look, no matter what you think, Iamyour friend.” I stepped forward to show my resolve, but getting closer to her made me see the freckles she tried so hard to hide, and that made me soften even more. “And I have your back. Besides, I’m really good at Christmas carols, decorating, and eating delicious home-cooked dinners.”And shooting the bull.Because I had no concept of what normal families did, except from the Hallmark Channel, which Gabe sometimes forced me to watch. “So…okay?”

Pedro and Bianca were now thumping on the glass. Pedro caught my eye and gave me a thumbs-up, which, fortunately, Mia didn’t see.

Her jaw was so set, I could tell it was killing her to get the words out. “There are requirements,” she said.

“Go ahead,” I coaxed.

“Fine. Be wonderful to my mom. No, more than wonderful. Amazing to my whole family.” She poked me in the chest for emphasis. “And attentive to me. The best damn boyfriend ever. Minimal shows of PDA are expected.”

I frowned. “What are you considering minimal?”

She counted on her fingers. “Sitting next to me. Smiling at me a lot. Kissing me—on the cheek.” Maybe she noticed my brows shoot up because she said, “Don’t worry, my parents are pretty straitlaced. They’d never put us in the same bedroom.”

That was exactly what I’d wanted to hear, yet a strange disappointment spread through me. Little did she know that holding her hand and kissing her wasn’t going to be the problem; keeping the PDA minimal, however, was. I managed to shake myself out of my testosterone-driven male fantasies and tried to be the man she needed me to be.

And then I felt a little nagging pull in my stomach. Brunner and his all-but promise of that BCP job. “Look, for these next few days, I think we should table any discussions about the job.”

“Agreed,” she said cautiously. “There’s nothing we can do about that now anyway.”

Honestly, I didn’t want to think about what Brunner had said. It was cringy; it made me uncomfortable. But would it be worth ignoring it to land the job of a lifetime? To use the leverage that came with the job to make things better? At some point, I would have to sit down with Mia and talk it all out. But for right now, tabling the discussion for the holiday seemed like the sane thing to do. “When do we leave?” I asked.

“When are you off work?” she asked.

“I have to round on Saturday.” Christmas was Tuesday, and we had to be back to work the day afterward. I could survive a long weekend, right?

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