Page 1 of Everything Christmas

Chapter One

Moving day, mid-July...

Standing in front of her big picture window, Merry watched with a growing sense of unease as the moving van pulled away from the curb and disappeared down the street. It had taken four burly men, equipped with dollies, sliders, and a set of vivid-orange lifting straps nearly two hours to move her furniture and dozens of heavy cartons filled to the brim with her belongings into her new house.

With a quick glance at the towering stack of boxes against the wall in her living room, she could feel the enormity of the task that lay ahead weighing her down. It would take weeks, possibly months, to unpack everything alone. She wanted to kick herself for being too much of a tightwad to pay the extra charge to have the movers do it.

Collapsing onto the couch, she fell sideways with an exhausted groan, burying her face in the haphazard mound of pillows and cushions. Merry lay motionless until the rumbling and growling of her empty stomach became too insistent to ignore. Her last meal, a granola bar and juice at a gas station somewhere in Georgia, had been over twelve hours ago. Knowing there were no groceries in the house, she clenched her fist and pounded the decorative throw pillow beside her face.

Maybe she’d just order in. Pushing upright, she pulled her phone out of her back pocket. When instead of a screen filled with brightly colored icons, she stared at the red outline of a battery and wanted to hurl the worthless piece of crap through the window.

“Why is nothing ever easy?” she muttered. But questioning fate was as pointless as holding in the power button on her dead phone.

Tiredly, she glanced at the mountain of boxes. Inside one of them was her charger, but she didn’t have a clue which one.

As she sat in a fog, trying to decide whether to get up and look for it or just face plant back into the pillows and pass out right there, movement in the window caught her attention. Across the street, a man dressed only in running shorts and shoes stretched against a tree. With his sweat-drenched body shimmering in the golden glow of the late evening sun, he’d clearly just finished a run.

Tight and toned, with rippling muscles everywhere, he had the body of a Greek god. Merry’s gaze greedily gobbled him up, especially when he bent to pick up a water bottle and his shorts pulled snugly against his tight rear. Her breath caught in her throat. Had she ever seen a more perfect man?

She could have stood there all day watching the play of muscles in his back as he reached above his head and stretched some more, but he suddenly twisted at the waist until he was facing her condo. Their eyes met from across the street and held for a ten count at least. Then he smiled—a slow curve of his lips, a flash of perfect white teeth, and the crinkle of laugh lines at his temples—and gave her a quick nod before walking up the drive and entering the condo directly across from hers.

Holy Moly! The Adonis was her neighbor.

Checking for drool, she brought her hand to her chin. But it never got there. She hissed and recoiled in pain when her knuckles collided with the window. That’s when she realized she was pressed against the glass like a wide-eyed child peering at the treats behind a bakery counter. However, instead of salivating over a tray of chocolate chip double doozies oozing with frosting, she’d been gawking at her incredibly attractive new neighbor like she was sex-starved.

She rubbed her hand to ease the ache then patted her chin. No drool. That was something, at least. Mortified and with her empty stomach still growling, Merry rushed to the kitchen to grab her purse.

How could she have gotten off the couch and walked across her cardboard box-littered floor without knowing it? Low blood sugar must be to blame for completely embarrassing herself in front of the man. The grumbling of her empty stomach propelled her to the door. She needed to get food in the house.

An hour later, with her groceries put away and a deli pizza in the oven, Merry headed out to the front porch with her new watering can. While at the store, she’d also bought two petunia-filled hanging baskets. Merry smiled as she hung them from the hooks already screwed into the overhead frame.

Having just arrived in East Tennessee, she Googled the weather forecast. According to her search, the scorching-hot days would give way to milder temperatures and cooler nights by mid-to-late October. Although the blooms wouldn’t last long once the nighttime temperature dropped, she couldn’t resist them on clearance. She found gardening relaxing. The burst of vivid pink as she came and went for the next six weeks would help tide her over until spring, when the bulbs she planned to plant in the barren mulch beds bloomed in a profusion of early spring color.

The flash of blinding headlights reflecting off her front windows made her turn. A cherry-red convertible zoomed down the street in complete disregard of the posted speed limit. At the last moment, the car made a sharp turn into the driveway across from hers.

The ear-splitting music abruptly ceased as the door opened. A stiletto heel attached to a long, slender leg appeared before the blonde emerged from the driver’s seat. After slamming the door, she took a moment to adjust her minuscule skirt and fluff her long hair, ensuring a practiced tousled look. Then, with palpable confidence in her step, she strutted toward the front door. It opened well before she reached it and, clearly expecting her, the Adonis emerged from within.

A high-pitched squeal escaped the woman’s lips as she gracefully rushed up the steps. In those shoes, Merry would have broken both ankles and her neck. But she traversed the porch identical to hers without incident and promptly flung herself into his arms. Appearing as eager for the greeting as she was, he lifted her off her 5-inch spiked heels, and they kissed as if they hadn’t seen each other in a decade.

She turned away when his big hand slid down the blonde’s back and curved possessively over her ass. Naturally, a man that good-looking would have a girlfriend.

Setting aside her short-lived hot-neighbor fantasy, Merry busied herself watering her plants while trying to ignore the make-out session going on barely fifty yards away. When she was out of water, she couldn’t resist another peek. She was in time to see the blonde entering his condo, but her neighbor was nowhere in sight.

“You can’t hang those there,” a deep voice rumbled from behind her.

Merry squealed and jumped simultaneously then whirled around. The golden Adonis stood on her bottom step as gorgeous up close as he’d been at a distance. Tall and broad, his muscular forearms crossed over his massive chest were the size of her thighs. Well, maybe that was an exaggeration, but they were huge.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said in a deep, silky-smooth voice, as gorgeous as he was.

She pressed a hand over her racing heart—less so from fear than his gorgeous presence and more so to distract from the rush of desire between her thighs and the subsequent dampening of her panties.

“That’s all right,” she assured him. “I didn’t hear you walk up. And, sorry, I didn’t catch what you said.”

“You can’t hang those baskets on the front porch. You’ll have to move them out back.”

Looking from him to her flowers and then back, she blinked in confusion. What was he saying about baskets? And why was she acting like her IQ had dropped by forty points?

Shaking herself mentally, she asked, “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with them?”

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