Chapter 5
SILVER
I had my back to the pass-through window when I heard the bell chime for our first customer of the day. I bent over to shove two trays of star-shaped sugar cookies into the oven. Someone gasped behind me, and I stood up so fast my head spun.
When I turned around, I couldn't believe my eyes. Hart Comet stood at the counter, licking his lips.
He met my gaze and waved. "Hi, Silver!"
I gave him a halfhearted wave. At least he'd shortened it from "Hi-yo, Silver, away!" as his cousins would have said. They were all too young to remember The Lone Ranger television show, but I still cringed every time someone compared me to the famous horse.
Hart wasn't his cousins. When Gold got off the phone with Santa 30, she tried to convince me to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to talk to him today.
Now that the day had arrived, I couldn't forget the hot rush of humiliation when Bopp said Hart had been on another date less than 48 hours after we'd agreed to see each other again, not to mention the hot sex we'd had Friday night.
Hart didn't owe me exclusivity. I knew that, but my beast felt the betrayal on a visceral level, deep in his chest. He wanted to take to the air. Worse, he wanted to burn. Starting the fire in the bakery's wood ovens this morning wasn't enough.
I placed my hand over the ache deep in my chest, willing it to ease with cleansing breaths.
All I had to do was talk to him. My knack for talking about the most boring and mundane things would scare him away, eventually.
No wonder he'd gone on another date on Sunday.
I'd bored him half to death with talk of gingerbread cookies on Friday night!
Speaking of which, the first batch of reindeer-head gingerbread cookies was already out of the oven, but not quite cool enough to ice. Taking a deep breath, I plated two of the warm cookies. I could do this.
I pushed through the swinging door and did my best to smile at Hart. "Cookie?"
"Gingerbread!" He grinned. "Yes, please. They look delicious."
"They're not iced," Gold whispered as I walked past her.
"I like them plain," Hart said. "Or iced. Honestly, I love anything you make here. It all tastes like smoke and sugar to me."
"Smoke?" Gold frowned at me. "Hmm."
"Everything tastes like you," Hart said when we reached the table.
"Mate," my dragon insisted, though he still wanted to burn the cookies to ash.
"I'm sorry," Hart said. "I got carried away. I should've started with an apology. I'm really sorry about yesterday. My cousin set me up on a blind date for Sunday, and I went along with it. I should have told him about you."
I nudged the plate of cookies toward him. "Thank you for explaining." It wasn't the forgiveness he was looking for, but it was the best I could do. My dragon was still leery, if not furious.
"I meant what I said yesterday." He gazed into my eyes. "I would love to get to know you better. I said date, but we're both starting our busy seasons. Little moments like this work for me, if they work for you."
I nodded but then fear gripped me. "What will we talk about?"
"Anything and everything," he said.
"I'm so bad at small talk."
He grinned. "I have just the game for us."
"Game?" I hesitated. Comets were known for their reindeer games. Hart didn't look malicious, but I wasn't ready to trust him.
"You'll like it, I promise. I'll bring it with me tomorrow."
"Tell me one thing," I said. "Why did you approach me at the party? Did your cousins put you up to it?"
He reached across the table and took my hand in his. "Not a chance. They think I want someone like Tinsel. They're wrong."
His words warmed my heart more than the bite of warm gingerbread cookie I took a moment later. The noises he made while he ate made my pants tighter, but my heart wasn't ready to forgive, not yet.
The next morning, Hart returned with a small box. The packaging looked Scandinavian, but inside, the cards were written in English.
"This is the game," Hart said once we sat at our usual table in the front corner by the window.
This time, I sat with my back to the door.
Gold had control of the front of the house while I was on break.
Yes, it seemed odd to take a break so early in the morning, but I enjoyed sitting with Hart while Gold finished Santa's order.
"How do you play?" I asked.
"We take turns asking and answering the questions. You can read all five questions on each card, or you can pick the one you find most interesting. When I take it home for the holidays, we ask one question at a time and everyone answers, even the person reading the questions."
I'd been around a long time, and I'd never heard of a game like this. "No one wins or loses?" I asked to be sure.
"Everyone wins," he said. "We learn more about each other."
I liked the idea, but, "I'm not great with words."
"You don't have to be. Some questions only need a one-word answer." Hart pulled a card from the box, flipped it over, and perused the questions. "Here's one. Do you sleep on your side, stomach, or back?"
I blinked at him. "What kind of question is that?"
"An easy one?" He laughed. "I sleep on my side most of the time, for what it's worth."
Sleep made me think about bed, which made me want to be there, spooned around Hart. I shook my head to push the thought away. "I'm a side sleeper, too."
"See? It's easy." He leaned over the table toward me. "Describe a time when you were in the right place at the right time."
"Order's up!" Gold's harsh shout startled both of us, and she smirked.
"Saved by the dragon," Hart said. "We'll start with that question tomorrow." He set the card face-up in the tray before sliding the lid onto the box. "Is there a safe place to keep these until then?"
"Under the counter." I took the box and walked with him to pick up his order. "See you tomorrow." I still couldn't believe my luck.
As he walked away, I already knew tomorrow's answer, if only I had the guts to tell him.
The next morning, after Hart placed his order with Gold and I grabbed the card game from the shelf beneath the counter, I blurted my answer to yesterday's question before we even sat down. "Friday night, when I saw you at the Halloween party."
"Hmm?"
Ugh. I'd been too eager, and he'd forgotten all about it. Unlike me, he was a normal person who didn't fixate on future conversations, most of which never happened.
"Oh, the question." He grinned. "That's my answer, too. It felt like fate, seeing you there. Donner invited our whole team, but I was the only one who showed up."
"Oh. Is that bad?" I asked. "Would you rather have hung out with them?"
"Dude, I don't even know if that was a true statement. The team may have arrived later, but all I saw was you."
I nodded. "It's because I'm so big."
He barked a laugh, and then he covered his mouth with his hands to hold it in. "That's not what I meant!" he choked out between his hands.
"It's all right," I said. "Everyone laughs at my size."
His eyes widened, and he dropped his hands to the table, gripping so hard his knuckles turned white. "Not me. I love your size." He sighed. "Let me try again. Even if my entire team had arrived to congratulate me on my time trial win, I wouldn't have cared. I wanted to spend time with you."
He looked so earnest. I wanted to trust him, but the moment passed in awkward silence.
Hart grinned and nudged the card box closer to my hand. "Pick one." He grabbed the frosted gingerbread cookie with a licorice gumdrop nose and red and white icing around its neck and bit into an antler.
"Okay." I took a card and read the first question. "If you had four more hours in each day, how would you spend them?"
Hart dropped his half-eaten cookie onto the plate and reached for my hand. Instead of telling me his answer, he sang the Jim Croce ballad from 1972, "Time in a Bottle."
"Oh my goddess," Gold shouted from behind the counter. "What is that racket? New rule. No singing allowed!"
"You knew I was singing!" Hart grinned at her. "My cousins say I sound like a cat yowling."
Gold hugged her apron to her chest. "They're not wrong."
"I loved it," I said. "Did you mean it?"
"Every word." He squeezed my hand before letting go to grab the rest of his cookie and shove it in his mouth. Before he could start choking on the crumbs, I ran to the refrigerator and poured him a glass of milk.
"Ooh. Milk and cookies," he said once he'd washed it down. "My favorite." He smacked his lips. "What about you? What would you do with four extra hours?"
I shook my head. "That's not fair. I would love to spend them with you, but—"
"But you have a business to run." Hart nodded and patted my hand again. "It's all right. I'll be here, watching you work." His smile faded to something more like alarm. "I mean … not stalking you, or anything. Only if you wanted me to be here."
"Order up!" Gold shouted. Once again, we'd both forgotten she was there. Hart jumped a few inches in his seat, and I turned toward the sound of her voice before the words registered.
"I do want you to be here," I said as I walked him back to the counter. I wrapped the untouched reindeer cookie in wax paper and tucked it on top of the rest of the order. "The game is fun. I like playing it with you."
He grinned. "Me, too. See you tomorrow?"
I nodded.
"Thursdays are our slow mornings," Gold said, tapping my calf with the toe of her work boot. "You could take a longer break, if you wanted. Get out of here for an hour."
I couldn't hide my astonishment. Gold liked to visit the other bakeries around town on our slow days. Someone was stealing our Thursday morning business, and she considered herself quite the sleuth. She even wore her houndstooth coat and fedora when she investigated.
"We could scout around," I said.
She swatted my arm. "Go on a real date!"
"What are we scouting?" Hart asked.
Gold sighed. "There's no helping you two. If you must know, someone is stealing our business on Thursday mornings. Santa 30's order is the only one we can rely on all five weekdays." Santa 30 was the only Santa who came in on the weekends as well. He was our best customer, no contest.
"Hmm." Hart stroked his smooth chin, and I wondered what he would look like with a beard. "I'll ask around and see what I can find out. It should be pretty easy when I tell the team I'm going on a breakfast date."
Gold clapped her hands. "Perfect. And I'll get some Christmas shopping done while you're out on the town!" She loved to shop online vintage and novelty websites all over the world. Last year, she'd gotten me a jade and obsidian bracelet from the Philippines.
"It's a date, then!" Hart tucked the bag of pastries under his arm and waved before picking up the box that held the two carafes of coffee and hot chocolate. He twinkled with a magical aura, and I wondered if Santa 30 had anything to do with it. He really liked our sugar cookies.
I tried not to think too much about how much I liked Hart.
It was less than a week since the Halloween party, and my heart was still a little sore about his date on Sunday.
Finally, we were going on our own date. I didn't want to get my hopes up too high, though, even when my dragon insisted he was my mate.