Chapter 8
Noel
En Route to Maplewood, New Jersey
The drive feels longer than usual.
I’ve made this trip hundreds of times, but tonight every second drags, every noise feels too sharp.
Holly sits beside me in the passenger seat, her overnight bag tucked neatly at her feet.
The quiet hum of the truck’s engine fills the space between us.
She’s staring out the window, watching the city give way to the softer sprawl of the suburbs, the Christmas lights smudging against the dark glass like tiny fires.
I should be focusing on the road, on the mirrors, on the possibility that we’re being followed.
My entire body is tuned for threat—muscle memory after years of combat and protection work—but the real danger is sitting right next to me.
Because I can smell her.
Vanilla and cinnamon.
A hint of something floral from her shampoo.
It seeps into my bloodstream, settling low and hot, stirring something I haven’t felt in a long time.
I’m not some untouched saint.
I’ve been with women before—casual, simple, uncomplicated.
But lately, life’s been nothing but work. I go from one op to the next, eat, train, sleep, repeat.
I don’t think about softness anymore. About warmth. About coming home to anything other than silence.
And yet, here she is.
Holly Winters—chaos wrapped in kindness, fire wrapped in tinsel.
Something about her makes me wonder what if.
What if an ex-soldier like me could have something soft to come home to?
What if I could have laughter in the house again, not just the hum of security monitors?
What if Christmas really was still a time for miracles?
I grip the steering wheel a little tighter, knuckles flexing.
She shifts beside me, the soft leggings and oversized sweater she changed into when we stopped by her place barely make any sound despite her nervous energy.
Her hand brushes her thigh in a nervous rhythm, and it’s not in me to resist tracing the action.
Like her movements are calling my eyes to witness her impossible beauty.
At some point she pulled her hair up in some sort of claw clip, and now there’s a dozen curls bouncing around her face in the cutest possible way.
This woman is a knockout, and it kills me that she doesn’t even seem to know it.
Every soft breath she takes seems to pull at something inside me I thought was dead and buried.
She breaks the silence first.
“Wow, it’s pretty over here.”
I glance out the windshield. We’ve just crossed into Maplewood, the streets lined with tall oaks dusted in snow, every house twinkling with white and gold lights.
The town looks like something out of an old postcard—quiet, safe, too gentle for the world we just left.
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
“So, why here? Why not the city?”
“Actually, I grew up here,” I tell her.
She turns to look at me, surprised.
“Really? This is your hometown?”
I nod, eyes fixed on the curve of the road.
“Yeah. I live in my parents’ old place. It’s my childhood home.”
Her voice softens.
“And your parents?”
“They passed within a month of each other. Three years ago.”
Her hand tightens around her seatbelt strap.
“Oh, Noel. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s alright.” My tone comes out gruffer than I mean it to, but she doesn’t flinch. “They had me late in life, so I was a bit of a surprise. But they were great. The real deal. A hundred percent in love till the very end.”
She exhales, a small, wistful sound.
“Sounds like a storybook.”
I smile faintly, the memory cutting both ways.
“Yeah. Guess it does.”
For a moment, the cab fills with that heavy kind of silence—the kind that doesn’t feel empty.
Her gaze lingers on me, soft and curious, and I can feel the pull again, that invisible thread tightening between us.
Lust rises in me, but it’s more than that. Holly is nothing like what I expected when Connor Callahan ambushed me in Remy Falco’s office and told me I was going to be working an assignment for his wife’s friend.
I expected a Manhattan socialite or a trust fund brat. But Holly Winters is anything but.
Truth is, I shouldn’t want her like this.
She’s my client.
My responsibility.
The line between duty and desire is razor-thin, and I can feel my boots slipping toward it every time she looks at me.
And as we turn onto my street, headlights glinting off fresh snow and the warm light spilling from the windows of my house, something deep in my chest stirs.
For the first time in years, coming home doesn’t feel like returning to an empty shell.
It feels like hope.
And damn it, I don’t know which scares me more—the faceless prick who’s been threatening her, or the woman herself for making me believe again.
Guess there’s only one way to find out.