Page 439 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
He looked over at me with a furrowed brow and his lips pressed together in a thoughtful line. “Yeah, of course I am. Are you?”
I swallowed hard. “I think so.”
“Should we get out of here?”
“Please.”
Chadwick put on his seatbelt and reversed off the curb. His poor car groaned and cracked in response, and he told me that was what insurance was for.
“I just had to make sure you were out of the road,” he said. He leaned forward and peered out the windshield as the snow grew worse and swirled around us. Visibility became even more terrible. He made an uneasy sound in the back of his throat. “I don’t think we should drive across the city to your place in this.”
“There’s a hotel two blocks down the street I’ve stayed at before. You can drop me off there.”
“Nonsense, I have a guest room and I’m ten minutes away. You can crash at my place and ride out the storm.”
Crash at my boss’s house during a blizzard in New York City?
This was how all Christmas Hallmark stories started, wasn’t it?
“I shouldn’t,” I said.
“I’m not really asking,” he said, shooting me a stern look with a clenched jaw. His hair was wet, and he looked cold as hell. Not wanting to delay him getting home and dry, I sat back in my seat and nodded.
“Fine, guest room it is.”
CHAPTER 14
CHADWICK
Son of a bitch, was I cold.
The chill had really bit into me when I was out on the road with the couple in the sedan, whose car had finally come to a stop in a giant puddle that stood up to my ankles. The snow had soaked through my peacoat, leaving it heavy and damp, and the snowflakes that had fallen down the back of my neck certainly hadn’t helped.
I pulled into the long driveway of my home in Manhattan, rolled into the garage, and turned off the ignition. As soon as the heat stopped pumping through the vents, I started shivering.
Tinsely unclipped her seatbelt. “Let’s get you warmed up.”
“Nothing some dry clothes won’t fix,” I mumbled through frozen lips as I got out of the car.
“I think you need more than that. A hot shower will probably do the trick.”
She followed me inside, where the lights automatically turned on gently, fading from dim to brighter as we made our way deeper into the house and toward the main living area, where the kitchen flowed into the main sitting room which was sunken down lower than the rest of the house. A massive sectional sofa consumed the lower “pit,” as I called it, where a glass fireplace stood in the middle of the room between the pit and the dining room on the other side.
“Wow,” Tinsely breathed. “This place is incredible.”
“Not too shabby, right?” I managed without my teeth rattling together as I shrugged out of my jacket and stepped out of my wet shoes.
Tinsely moved through the house and stood at the wall of windows that let out onto my back deck, where the snow had piled almost two feet high. Christmas lights strung up around my gutters painted the snow in a rainbow of colors.
I moved up beside her. “You know, there’s a hot tub out there calling my name.”
She didn’t look up at me, but I saw her expression in the reflection of the window, and she blushed. “I don’t think going in a hot tub with my boss is appropriate.”
“Not even to spare him from a case of what could be extremely severe frostbite?”
She crossed her arms and turned to me. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”
“Is there really a difference between swimsuits and underwear?”
