Page 58 of Holiday Interference
No teasing. No armor. Just a look that feels like a truth neither of us is ready to say out loud.
My pulse ticks up.
She notices. Of course she does.
But she just leans back into the cushions and pulls the blanket tighter around herself like she’s afraid if she doesn’t, she might reach for me again.
Hell, I might let her.
The thing is—I’ve never felt safer than I do with her right now. In this ridiculously expensive apartment, watching Christmas movies, drinking cocoa like a couple of kids playing grown-up.
But I also know safety like this doesn’t last.
And the more I let myself pretend it does, the harder it’s gonna be when it’s over.
Still, when her hand drifts over to rest lightly on my thigh, I don’t move it away.
I cover it with mine.
And we stay like that.
Together. Under no mistletoe.
But maybe under something that matters just as much.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Noelle
His hand is stillon my hip when I wake up.
Loose and warm, it’s possessive in that lazy, half-asleep way that saysmineeven if no one actually said it.
The sheets are a tangle of limbs and heat and skin that still hums from everything we didn’t stop doing until hours after midnight.
I blink against the pale light seeping through the window. It’s quiet. Not snowstorm quiet, but real quiet. The kind you feel in your bones.
Outside, the world is holding its breath again—but not for the same reason.
Last night was…
God.
Last night was everything.
The way he kissed me like he was starving.
The way he touched me like he needed it to survive.
The way we’d curled up on the couch afterward—bare skin under throw blankets, tangled and laughing throughThe Grinchlike we hadn’t just come undone in every way two people could.
He’d kissed my temple when I dozed off. I remember that. The warmth of it. The safety.
I shouldn’t remember it like that.
I shouldn’t want it again.
But I do.
