Page 22 of Mistletoe Love Match
Why had he taken her hand in his? The truth is, he didn’t know what had come over him. It happened like a reflex or magic.
Magic.
There was no such thing as magic, and there was no such thing as Santa Claus. He was a pragmatic guy, perhaps a bit of a killjoy, but he hadn’t always been like that. And the part of him which had once embraced the wonder of the season couldn’t help but acknowledge that it was rather remarkable that he and Calliope had ended up in this exact Christmas cottage on this particular night.
“The story of Santa and Mrs. Claus is a lovely tale,” Calliope continued with a furrowed brow as she paced in front of the fireplace. “Even if they were real people, and we’d spent part of an evening with them, what kind of alias is Krangle? Calling himself Nick Krangle is a bloody daft way to hide his identity if he is the real Santa. Merging Saint Nick and Kris Kringle to come up with Nick Krangle is . . .” She paused, and her expression softened.
“Is what?” he pressed.
She blushed, and Christ, she was damned adorable. “I have to take it all back.” She gazed at the Christmas tree, and a dreamy expression took hold. “My head knows the truth about those people, but my heart wants to believe that there’s more, that the possibility of something so wondrous could exist.” She flitted her gaze toward the tree and touched the antler of a wooden reindeer ornament. “I’m not usually such a sap. That’s Callista’s department. She’s the sweet one, and I’m the bitch. You must think I sound like a knob-headed prat.”
He took a step toward her. “I’ve been with you almost every day for the last few months, but I’m still not sure what a knob-headed prat is.”
Mischief sparkled in her eyes. “What about a wanker? Can you define that word, Dr. Wanker?”
A dizzying current raced through him. He tried to hide it, but he loved the feisty side of her. He parted his lips, prepared to concede he was familiar with the termwanker,thanks to a beautiful knob-headed prat calling him one nearly nonstop, but something from above caught his eye. More mistletoe. Who’d have guessed it?
She followed his line of sight. “It seems to find us, doesn’t it?”
But he wasn’t interested in the plant. He stared into her gray eyes and noticed something new. “They’re a little bit green.”
“What’s a little bit green?” she asked.
“Your eyes. There’s a whisper of green. No, sage. It’s barely perceptible. But it’s there.” He cupped her face in his hands. A man could lose himself in eyes like this. “They’re utterly beguiling.”
She trembled beneath his touch. “I’ve got an identical twin, Alec. Callista and I share the same color eyes.”
“That might be true, but hers don’t call to me the way yours do. Your eyes tease me, they taunt me, they challenge me. They make me question everything I thought I knew.”
He didn’t usually talk like this. He wasn’t a romantic by any stretch. He wasn’t the type to moon over a woman, and yet, he couldn’t hold back. Was it this place? Had the peppermint-scented cottage hypnotized him? Perhaps Mrs. Krangle had served them cookies with some sort of truth-eliciting ingredient baked in. Maybe the Dagbys and the Krangles were right in thinking that the magic of the season could do miraculous things.
Or was it her? Calliope Cress—the woman he couldn’t get out of his head.
Whatever it was, it had left him enchanted and breathless as he drank her in.
A ghost of a grin pulled at the corners of her mouth, and he wanted to kiss her until he didn’t know up from down or mistletoe from whatever the hell other plant had green leaves and red berries. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t name one. He was training to be a medical doctor, not a botanist.
He dismissed all thoughts of plants and tipped her chin up. “I have it on good authority that it’s a Christmas tradition to share a kiss beneath the mistletoe.”
Unlike at the community center, Calliope didn’t bolt. She pressed her hands to his chest and pushed up onto her tiptoes. “It would only be one kiss,” she purred.
The sound of her sultry voice went straight to his cock. “We don’t really have a choice,” he conceded, leaning in, so ready to feel her soft lips, but the damned Christmas spirit had other plans. His phone pinged. The jarring sound pierced their dreamy, almost-mistletoe-kiss moment. “I should get that, right?” he rasped. His heart hammered in his chest, beating out a message telling him he should chuck the cell phone into the fireplace and get busy getting-busy with this enchanting woman.
Calliope chewed her lip, then dropped her hands to her sides. “You should answer it. It could be our families calling. We don’t want them to worry.”
She was right, but it didn’t lessen the sting of disappointment.
Reluctantly, he searched his pockets for his phone. The buzzy energy popping and fizzing through his veins receded when he saw the identity of the caller. “It’s your brother.”
Erasmus Cress was great. They got along famously, and the boxing champion treated his sister like a queen, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t protective of his little sisters. He’d seen the man eyeing Anders when he was around Callista—and the guy wasn’t smiling.
“Why is my brother calling you?” Calliope mused.
He stared at the tiny icon.Shit!“It’s a video call.”
Her rosy glow intensified into a tomato-red hue. “Answer it, Alec. We don’t want him to think that we were about to . . .” She trailed off, but it didn’t take a genius to fill in the blank.
They were on the brink of ripping each other’s clothes off—for the third time in one day.
