Page 36 of Stay this Christmas
I wanted to touch her again.
“What do you think?” she asked.
I tore my gaze away from her deep blue eyes and focused instead on the paper between us. She’d made additions to one side, scrawled notes about my part of the bargain.
Sam’s Christmas list:
Go rock climbing: Decorate a tree.
Learn to kick some butt: Bake cookies.
Stargazing: Holiday market.
Conquer a fear: Ghost romance.
Sounded fair. Kind of.
“Should I ask what a ghost romance is?”
She flashed a haughty smile. “If you want to know, you’ll help me conquer a fear.”
“Which would be?”
Her happy little smile drooped. “I haven’t decided yet. The rest of the list, I can do on my own.”
“Harps, that’s not real Twister.”
She rolled her eyes, but a pink flush swept up her neck toward her cheeks. I’d missed this, too. Making her blush over the smallest things had been my primary motivation for being such a flirt with her.
“I’ve already established I’m skipping that one.”
It was the best one on there. I’d just said I could be her friend, so probably shouldn’t tell her all the things I wanted to say. Like how I’d kiss her anytime, anywhere, no mistletoe required.
“Shame.”
Her mouth twitched, all pert and lovely.
“To the list.” She held her hand out to shake on our deal.
I clasped her hand in mime of a formal business transaction. Nothing very formal about the way her hand felt in mine, exactly where it should have been all this time. Or the way our eyes held, and the crowded bar might as well have disappeared into nothing. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t pull her hand away, either.
For a moment, this was more than just shaking on an agreement to self-improvement, or a bid to spend time with the woman I desperately wanted back in my life. A spark of something ignited between us—faint, maybe, but there. It gave me hope that what we’d had all those years ago hadn’t been completely lost.
That would be worth all the Christmas crap this town could throw at me.
I finally released her hand before I could do something stupid like spill my guts and send her running from The Broken Hammer once and for all. I laid some money on the bar for our drinks and stood from the barstool.
“There’s just one thing,” I said, close to her ear.
Her throat worked as she swallowed, and she moved her head as though to clear it.
“Oh?”
I pointed at the paper still in front of her. “The ‘New-Me list.’ You don’t need to be a new you. You’re perfect just the way you are.”
Not over the line. A friend would tell her something like that. Although probably not while fighting the urge to brush a finger across her lower lip to test its fullness.
She drew in a sharp breath as though debating what to say, holding my gaze. The moment dragged on, and whatever she might have been thinking, she kept to herself.
