Page 40 of Take Me Home for Christmas

I’d walked through the kitchen and halfway down the basement stairs—would he really resort to heading down there?—when I stopped myself. What was I doing? How many books had I read where looking for someone in the basement was a very, very bad idea?

As I ran back up the stairs into the kitchen, I rationalized that I was looking for him because I was worried about him. Trapped in a house full of D’Angelos with nowhere to go.

All right, all right, the truth was, I was thinking about those kisses. They were…amazing. Wonderful. Full of hope and promise. They’d been the real thing, I feltsureof it.

The thing was, when you work so closely with someone and lives are on the line, you get to read the other person—their moves. Their thoughts. You anticipate their actions. Some part of you senses what is real and what isn’t.

So here was the real reason I went looking for him: no matter what Brax said, his lips said something different. His words to me were full of passion and longing. And I needed to know why.

I walked over to the antique hutch in the kitchen where my mom displayed my grandmother’s dishes and some photos and searched for one in particular. There sat my sister and I, side by side at the pond, both of us grinning wildly. Two cute twins with identical grins. Gracie had just caught a fish and was holding it up, close to our faces. She’d been so proud of catching that ginormous fish herself.

I’d begged my dad to throw it back in the lake. He’d gently told me that it was big enough to keep, that we didn’t have to toss it back in. Gracie begged to be able to take it home for dinner.

I’d worried endlessly about killing the fish. I asked about its family. I even imagined its mother looking for it. Needless to say, I didn’t eat any fish that night.

My sister had been so bold and unafraid. She’d known what she wanted and she went for it. Whereas I was the overthinker, the overplanner, the one more governed by fear.

I closed my eyes and conjured Grace as I thought she might look today. A little like me, of course, only more stylish, more artsy, more boho, like the free spirit she was.

“I get what you’d want for me,” I said to the photo. To be courageous. To not back down, which I’d gotten really good at, especially after being hurt by Charlie. To realize my power. To make things happen in my life.

Brax’s actions didn’t match his words. Why?

Using my phone light, I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, a little freaked out that I’d actually started to check out the basement. And I was talking to photographs. But that was better than lying in my bed crying, right?

My phone went off, and I jumped.

Want to talk?the text said.

I was instantly filled with the most intense relief I’d ever felt. Accompanied by something far more dangerous—the thrill that Brax wanted to talk too. That he thought we had unfinished business too. That being on the same wavelength might not be a fantasy after all.

Worst of all, I was buoyed by the wildest hope—that we weren’t done.

Where are you?I texted back.

Where are you?He countered.

The basement stairs.

That’s creepy.

Followed by:So you’re walking around the house in the dark looking for me.

I didn’t answer that.

I’m on the third floor, he texted.Please come up.

The third floor? How had he even found the third floor?

I bolted first up the main staircase and then a more narrow one to a room under the dormers, my mom’s sewing room. It had a peaked roofline and a killer view of the surrounding hills out a big palladium window. It was also completely freezing because the furnace just didn’t do a great job pumping heat all the way up here.

From the landing, I could see a lump on the couch, huddled in my down comforter. Aha! As I shone the light, the lump moved, and hands lifted to shield a face.

“Brax?” I was halfway too full of hope. The kind you feel when things aren’t right with someone you really care about, and you’d do anything to fix them. “What are you doing up here?”

He popped his head up. “I figured going back to your room would be a bad idea, and I wasn’t sure where else to go.” He looked—well, “adorably rumpled” was the descriptor that popped into my head. No. I wasn’t going to think he was adorablyanythinguntil I got some answers.

“Can we talk?” he asked, sitting up.

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