Page 85 of Holiday Interference
The laugh that slips out of me is rougher than it should be. Realer. “Guess that means you’ll have to keep coming over.”
She lifts onto her toes and presses a kiss to the corner of my mouth—slow and lingering, like it’s meant to stitch something in place.
“I’m already here more than I’m not,” she says, so quietly I almost miss it.
“Not complaining.”
The air around us changes.
I feel it in my shoulders, in the spot behind my eyes that always goes tight when I’m holding too much in.
We spend the next half hour unwrapping boxes of ornaments and bows that I picked up on a grocery run.
When the box is empty, I step back and take in the tree. Still crooked. Still imperfect. Still perfect.
She sighs, happy and soft, then squints at the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “What’s that?”
I follow her line of sight to the tiny bunch of mistletoe I hung above there earlier. She didn’t notice it when she came in.
I cross the room and pluck it down, then turn toward her.
She watches me, cautious now. Curious.
“A beautiful, intelligent woman once told me that if two people stood under the mistletoe it meant they were safe together.”
She glances up at me, her voice even softer than before, a smile playing on her lips. “That’s beautiful. But did she tell you the Hallmark version?”
“No, she did not.”
“Here, let me show you.”
And then she steps in, lifts her chin, and kisses me.
Her lips meet mine like we never stopped. Like we’ve always been this.
My arms wrap around her waist before I can think twice. Her body presses clos,e and something deep in me exhales.
The lights from the tree flicker behind her.
And I swear—if there’s a better kind of peace than this, I don’t need it.
EPILOGUE
Cal
New Year’s Eve
I should’ve beenready for this.
The sheer size of the place. The skyline slicing clean through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The hum of money and power and something slicker than either of those things.
But all I can do is stare at Noelle.
She steps into the penthouse like she owns the damn city. Hair curled just enough to make me want to run my fingers through it, lips glossed, smile soft but sure.
She’s wearing a deep green dress that hugs her hips and dips low enough in the front to short-circuit my brain. I’m pretty sure I blacked out for a second in the elevator just trying not to drag her back down to the parking garage.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she whispers, nudging her elbow into my side as the doors close behind us.
