Page 86 of Not Your Average Vixen
She glanced at the photo booth. “Is that it?”
He nodded.
“I don’t remember a whole lot,” she said, but she was a terrible liar. The tremble to her bottom lip gave away that she remembered just as much as he did.
“It’s better that way. It wasn’t a big deal,” he replied, luckily a good enough liar for them both.
A storm brewed in her eyes. Part anger and part outright confusion; she stared at him.
Seeing him—all of him.
A chill passed through his body that had nothing to do with the temperature, and all he wanted to do was confess like the sinner he was. Confess everything about his parents, his lonely childhood, how he hated who he’d become, and what the Abbotts meant to him. Like a tidal wave forming in the depths of the ocean, poised to crash upon the shore in a fury of sound and energy, he wanted to let everything out as if she possessed some special power to tame the tumultuous sea of longing and loathing he’d lived with for as long as he could remember.
But why her? Why did she have to get to him? Why couldn’t she have been nothing but a quick fuck in a hotel room? How had she gotten under his skin in so little time?
“Bridget, I—”
“What?” she asked, the storm in her eyes intensifying.
“I’ll take those cookies!”
He and Bridget startled as the Kringle Care’s woman hurried up to them.
“Thank you so very much! You truly are an angel,” she said, taking the box out of his hands and carrying it over to the families gathered near the frozen lake covered with ice skaters.
“Did you have something to say?” she asked, concern edging out the anger.
But he didn’t want her pity.
“I was going to ask if this place looked different to you—you know, now that you’re not completely blitzed out of your mind.”
“Unbelievable,” she bit out with a shake of her head, but before she could lay into him, Carly called out to them.
“Birdie! Uncle Scooter! Over here!”
“We’re doing a snowball fight competition,” Cole called excitedly.
“Boys versus girls,” Carly added, taking his hand as Cole took Bridget’s.
Cole pushed up his red glasses. “It’s like capture the flag with snowballs. If you get hit, you’re out.”
“The boys are the green team, and the girls are the red team,” Carly added.
The children pulled them over toward the west side of the square that backed up to thick snow-covered foliage dotted with evergreens and willowy white wisps of leafless aspens.
“Doesn’t this look fun, Scooter!” Grace said as the snowball attendant handed her something that looked like large salad tongs with ice cream scoopers on the ends.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s a snowball maker,” Tom answered, grinning ear to ear as he formed a snowball, then chucked it at his head.
Soren veered out of the way just in time.
“Isn’t it great!” Cole exclaimed, making a snowball, then handing it to the judge.
“Not too shabby,” the man said, pretending to assess the weight of his great-grandson’s ball of ice.
Another Santa lookalike clapped his hands. “Gather around, folks. Welcome to Kringle’s version of capture the flag. We’re losing daylight, so you’ll be the last group to go out today.”
