Page 56 of The Holiday Grump
“Better safe than sorry.”
As I steered up toward Locke Heights, I formed a plan. Step one: get her to my house. Step two: get her warm, fast.
I knew what I had to do.
CHAPTER 19
Noelle
So far, Fredrik’s house had been shrouded in mystery. I’d pictured a grand old house, but reality still managed to surpass my imagination.
It was a mansion. Bigger than anything I’d ever lived in, or even regularly visited. If this place had Finnish roots, they weren’t the cozy kind I associated with my Moomin-mug–collecting grandma.
Faintly lit by two spotlights flanking the iron gate, the house sat farther back from the road than its neighbors. Imposing, beautiful, and lonely.
As Fredrik parked at the front door, another violent shiver rattled through me. I couldn’t control the jerks anymore, and I’d stopped trying.
He gave me a hard look. “Let’s get you inside.”
“I feel a lot better.”
“And I’ll believe you as soon as you can say that without your teeth clattering.”
Holy hell. Why was my body betraying me like this? I felt the cold more easily than most, but I was sitting in a heated car. I should have been fine. Instead, winter had worked its way under my skin and taken over.
Fredrik slipped an arm around my shoulders and guided me to the front door. My tremors had turned me into a hunchback.
“I feel like an old lady being helped across the street by a young man,” I joked.
“If it helps, I don’t feel like a young man.”
The entrance hall was dark and grand, and I kept shaking as we shed our shoes on a rack crowded with work boots and sneakers. My eyes snagged on a shiny new pair of Timberlands.
“Are those yours?” I asked, pointing.
He looked at me, puzzled. “Yeah.”
“Why aren’t you wearing them?”
I glanced at the pair he’d just taken off. The stitching had come off one, leaving a trail of thread across the floor. The soles were starting to peel off.
Something shadowed his gaze. “They’re not my thing.”
“What? Non-leaking shoes?”
“Brands.”
“Then why buy them?”
I couldn’t stop myself; the questions kept firing out, powered by nerves and shivers.
He steered me through a long hallway into a kitchen and dining room that looked like it belonged in a lifestyle magazine: gleaming countertops, wide-plank floors, and afarmhouse table. Everything was polished and beautiful, like a home for a family of seven that had been cleared for the photo shoot.
Fredrik, with his pained frown and his shadowy bookstore, didn’t fit the picture at all.
Through a doorway, I glimpsed a living room with moody olive-green couches and a massive stone fireplace, with flames licking against glass doors.
“It’s so beautiful,” I murmured.
