Page 23 of No Business Like Snow Business

“Still not a word,” he said as we walked around a group of older residents who’d stopped to chat in front of the pretzel stand.

“Hello, Harvey!” one of them called.

“Hi, Dottie!” I gave her a wave. Dottie was one of the ladies in Grandma’s quilting club. She was also in the town’s knitting circle.

Sterling waited until we’d passed the group before he spoke again. “I don’t know much about Freddy at all. He was never really talked about, and he left home years before I was born. It’s weird, when you’re a kid, to have a sense of things like that. I don’t ever recall being told about Freddy. I just knew, for as long as I could remember, that he was one of the subjects we didn’t discuss.”

I couldn’t imagine any subject in the world not being discussed in my home. Then again, I’d inherited the chatterbox gene from Grandma, for sure.

Sterling must have seen the lack of understanding in my expression. “When I was eight or nine, I found one of my father’s old school yearbooks. He and Freddy were only a year apart, and they were both on the rowing team. I remember that I showed him the page with all the rowers on it, and he just glanced at it and closed the book. He said, ‘That’s all in the past, Sterling. It’s none of your business.’ So I never mentioned it again.”

“Wow. That’s cold.”

Sterling looked a little uncomfortable. “It’s the way he is. The way my family is.”

“Not you though.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t I?”

“You’rehere, Sterling, in Christmas Falls.”

“I’m here for the business as much as for Freddy.” His brow creased and he looked away, suddenly super interested in the struggles of a little kid trying to pull her mittens off.

I didn’t really believe it—I’d seen him express actual human emotions when he talked about Freddy—but if he wanted to believe he was just that wealthy, businessy guy in order to preserve the illusion, then that was fine. “Okay.”

We wandered away from the pretzel cart, heading for the edges of the park. It was a little quieter here, out of the way of the tourists and their excited kids, and the Christmas Falls locals who were all stopping to catch up. The trees at the edge of the park offered us shelter from the bustle.

“I think Freddy would have liked it here,” I said.

Sterling looked back at me, his brow creased. “We can’t know that.”

“He wasn’t faking that smile in the photograph.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Sterling agreed softly. He drew an audibly shaky breath.

“Hey,” I said gently, and reached out to...okay, I wasn’t actually sure. Put a friendly, supportive hand on his shoulder or something. But instead of doing that, I touched his bicep and then slid my hand gently down the sleeve of his beautifully tailored woolen coat. It was only when my fingers reached the cuff of the coat and fell away that I realized I’d juststrokedhim. A man I’d known about a minute.

“I’m so—” I began, but I didn’t have a chance to finish because Sterling stepped forward and suddenly we were kissing.

My body froze for the space of a few heartbeats, as shocked as though I’d suddenly plunged into icy water, but then I finally got with the program and grabbed Sterling by the coat to make sure he didn’t think he should step away or anything stupid like that.

Was it a good kiss? Hell if I knew. Objectively, it was the first kiss between two people who hadn’t quite figured out how to fittogether yet, like which way each of us was going to tilt our heads so we didn’t smack our noses together, or how much tongue was the right amount. That sort of thing. So maybe not the greatest kiss in the world as we bumbled our way past those awkward first few seconds. But screw objectivity. Sterling was hot, and we were kissing, and everything was incredible. Heat bloomed in my blood and flooded my body, and my heart raced, and there was nowhere else I wanted to be in the entire world than in this moment forever.

It didn’t last, of course.

“Harvey?”

Shit.

I stepped away from Sterling and turned to find myself looking into the startled face of Steven, my ex.

Great. So now I was stuck in the moment Ileastwanted to be in. Thanks, universe.

“Oh,” I said, like a dumbass. “Steven. Hey.”

Steven glanced between me and Sterling a few times, as though he couldn’t be sure of what he was seeing. Which made two of us, actually. Steven and my self-doubt had always made a great couple. I felt a sudden rush of pure delighted spite that Sterling was so much better looking than Steven. Not that Steven was a bad-looking guy. It was just one of those things where I had no sense of objectivity again: my knowledge that he was a cheating asshole had colored my perceptions of his face. When we’d first met, I’d thought his features were angular and interesting. Now he just looked like a rat.

“I’ve been trying to pin you down,” Steven said. I was pretty sure he didn’t get to do that anymore, but before I could point that out, he added, “For the museum photographs.”

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