Page 21 of Grumpy Glitter Christmas
For the next three hours, they worked.
Grant held the ladder while Felicity climbed up to drape garland along the top of the teller counter. He handed her zip ties and floral wire with the efficiency of a surgical nurse. When she asked for the “medium gauge wire, not the thin stuff,” he knew exactly which spool she meant.
It was... not terrible. It was almost—and she barely dared to think it—pleasant.
“Higher on the left,” Grant said from below, his hand steadying the base of the ladder. “There’s a gap.”
Felicity adjusted the garland, tucking in a stubborn pine bough. “How’s this?”
“Better. Now secure it before gravity reasserts itself.”
She grinned, twisting the wire into place. “Gravity is a real buzzkill.”
“It’s a fundamental law of physics, Ms. Adams. It doesn’t care about your aesthetic vision.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. My aesthetic vision transcends physics.”
From the bench, Ida’s voice rang out, clear and delighted. “Look at them, Ruth. Teamwork makes the dream work!”
Ruth’s quieter voice followed. “You’ve been waiting all morning to use that phrase, haven’t you?”
“Maybe I have. It’s relevant!” Ida declared.
Felicity’s cheeks warmed. She didn’t look down at Grant, but she could feel the weight of his presence below her—solid, steady, reliable. Her stomach did a strange little flip that had nothing to do with being six feet off the ground.
“Can you hand me the next section?” She asked, her voice a little too bright.
“Of course.” His hand appeared in her peripheral vision, holding the garland. Their fingers brushed as she took it, and she felt the same jolt of static electricity from before—small, insignificant, impossible to ignore.
She cleared her throat and got back to work.
An hour later, they were wrestling with the string of fairy lights that would wrap around the main support column near the entrance. Felicity had laid them out on the floor in what she thought was a logical configuration, but somewhere between planning and execution, they had achieved sentience and decided to form a knot of truly impressive complexity.
Grant crouched beside her, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his brow furrowed in concentration. “This is irrational,” he muttered, tugging at a loop that only tightened further. “Lights are inanimate objects. They shouldn’t be capable of malice.”
“And yet,” Felicity said, trying to work a strand free from what appeared to be a Gordian knot made of spite and copper wire, “here we are.”
“I thought you were good at problem-solving,” she added, shooting him a sidelong glance.
“Financial problems,” he said, his tone dry. “These lights are operating on pure chaos theory. I suspect entropy is personally involved.”
She laughed—a real, surprised laugh that echoed in the quiet lobby. “Did Grant Whitaker just make a physics joke?”
“It’s a fundamental property of the universe, not a joke.”
“But you said it to be funny.”
He paused, his hands stilling on the wire. A muscle in his jaw twitched—she was learning to recognize that as his version of amusement trying to break through the permafrost. “Perhaps.”
They worked in silence for another few minutes, their heads bent close together over the tangle of lights. Felicity could smell his cologne—something clean and understated, like cedar and winter air. She could see the small scar on his left hand, a thin white line across his knuckle. She wondered absurdly how he’d gotten it.
“Got it,” she said finally, pulling a crucial loop free. The entire knot loosened, the lights falling into a somewhat more manageable coil.
“Well done,” Grant said, and there was genuine approval in his voice.
She looked up, startled, and found him watching her with an expression that was almost... soft. For a heartbeat, the noise of the bank faded—the hum of computers, Ida and Ruth’s stage-whispered commentary, the distant sound of the vault lock clicking—and it was just the two of them, crouched on the floor, surrounded by lights that caught the winter sun streaming through the windows and threw tiny rainbows across the marble.
Then Grant cleared his throat and stood, brushing off his perfectly creased trousers. “We should get these installed before lunch.”
