Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
NATALIE
Gabe tastes of the most delicious combination of strawberries, cream, and unexpected thoughtfulness.
And this time his kiss is soft and gentle, not frantic and hungry like in the theater.
The touch of his mouth, his tongue, not only makes my belly flip and my core tremble, but warms me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, just as much as the blanket he’s wrapped around me, the fire he lit for me, and the thick rug that he’s making my toes curl into.
I peel my lips from his and ease back a little to take in the mystery behind the green eyes roving my face.
“What’s all this really about?” I ask him.
“The kissing?” he asks, brushing my cheek with the back of his fingers.
“Hah, no.” That wild first time in the theater was amazing, but it also somehow wasn’t the real me. Real Me needs to know the depths of him more before we do this again. “I mean moving up here to spend the holidays in a house on a hill with no neighbors for miles and being a grumpy old fuck about me decorating it.”
He rests his forehead against mine and jerks his thumb toward the front of the house. “You still need to take that shit down.”
“Not the point.” I tap his chin and the dark bristles tickle my finger. “The point is, why do you so badly want to spend Christmas being sad and alone?”
“Being alone doesn’t necessarily mean being unhappy. Sometimes being alone makes you the happiest you could ever be.”
“Well, that is about the saddest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Nothing sad about it. It’s logic. If being around people makes you unhappy, being not around people makes you happy.”
“Even at Christmas?”
“Especially at Christmas.”
“But surely your mom and dad don’t count? You seem pretty close.”
“Yeah, we are. But Christmas is…” He closes his eyes and shakes his head, like he regrets starting that sentence.
“Why is Christmas hard, Gabe?”
He drops back from crouching, to kneeling, sliding his hands down my thighs until they come to rest on my knees. “How did you know I was going to say hard?”
I have no idea how I knew. No idea how I feel like I could finish every one of his sentences. It’s like I have a direct mental connection to the inside of his head. But I can’t tell him that. He’d definitely dismiss it as woo-woo bullshit.
So I laugh it off. “I read six-year-olds’ minds for a living, remember? ”
He replies with a smirk that sends my belly into a somersault and makes me want to kiss it right off his chiseled, bearded face.
“Thank you for telling me I have the mind of a child. And there was me thinking you might be getting over the whole not-liking-me thing.”
“Nope,” I joke.
He heaves a huge breath that makes his broad, square chest swell to barrel size.
“Okay.” He focuses on drawing circles on my knee with his thumb. “I wasn’t totally honest earlier, when I said my issue with Christmas is that it’s commercial bullshit.” He looks up at me. “I mean, it is commercial bullshit. But it’s a longer story than that.”
“Do you see me rushing off?”
He chuckles and makes a resigned nod. “Do you have siblings?”
“No, why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Because only someone else who’s an only child might get it.”
“You mean you’ve never explained this to anyone before?”
He sucks on his lips and shakes his head.
Holy shit. Is Gabe Woods about to tell me a secret? His Christmas-hating secret?
“You can trust me. I won’t betray you like the asshole ex and asshole agent did.”
He reaches up to cup my cheek. “I know.”
I lean into his hand. The surety in his voice, the tone that says he knows that to be true, that the man who no longer trusts anyone trusts me, makes me feel twenty feet tall.
“I’ve dreaded Christmas since I was a kid,” he says.
As someone who has only ever skipped toward it with my arms wide open, hoping to scoop up all its delicious Christmassyness, it’s hard to comprehend someone actually dreading it. I channel my inner Aunt Lou and rack my brain for possible reasons.
“Why the dread? Did you lose someone important at Christmas, or something like that? Something that tainted it for you forever?”
“No.” His head flops forward. “And now that you’ve said that, this will sound even more pathetic than it was already going to.”
I take hold of one of those solid biceps with one hand and tip his bristly chin up to look at me with the other. “I promise that whatever you say won’t sound pathetic.”
“Nah. It doesn’t matter.”
Dammit, I’m not letting him shut down on me, not just when we were right on the brink.
Grabbing his upper arms, I shake him as much as I can. It sends him off-balance, and he has to put a hand on the floor behind him to stop himself from toppling backward.
“Just tell me, you great idiot.”
“Please don’t ever become a therapist.”
“If you’re not going to tell me, there’s no point in me being here. I might as well head home.”
The second I stand up he hooks his fingers in the belt loops of my jeans and yanks me back down to sitting.
“Okay, okay. I dreaded Christmas morning because I knew I would have a giant pile of presents.” The words come out in one rush, almost blurring together, as if giving himself no option to back out of the sentence.
I don’t know what answer I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t that .
“That doesn’t sound like a thing most kids would dread.” I can hear the puzzlement in my own voice.
“Yeah, well, I knew my parents couldn’t afford them.”
“Ah. So you’d have preferred they paid the bills rather than get you the new Death Star Lego or whatever.”
He nods.
“Did you ever explain that to them?”
“I tried. But they’d just brush it off like I couldn’t possibly mean it ’cause I was just a kid and all kids want as many presents as possible.” His eyes meet mine, a natural connection zaps between us and, in an instant, I’m sure he knows I get it.
“So you just faked enjoying it every time? For their sake?”
“Yup. I’d unwrap the gifts painfully slowly, careful to at least try to save the paper for next year. But then they thought I wasn’t excited because I wasn’t frantically ripping everything open. So then I worried they thought I wasn’t grateful that they’d gone without all year to get me those gifts.”
My heart breaks for little Gabe who couldn’t figure out the right way to handle it. “You felt like it was lose-lose whatever you did.”
“Exactly.”
“And even though you have all the money in the world now, that feeling still stays with you. You can’t shake it off.”
“Yes.”
“So that’s why you sent your parents away on that cruise. And that’s why you want to spend the holidays here all by yourself, with no reminders of Christmas anywhere, because then you’ll finally be able to relax over the holidays for the first time in your life.”
“You get it.” He looks at me like I’m the Holy Grail he never thought he’d find. “You totally get it.”
“I do,” I reply, almost in a whisper.
“There is one thing I like about Christmas now, though,” he says.
“The pink tree?” I point at Sophie Sullivan’s unlit tinsel tree on the other side of the fireplace.
“No. That’s an eyesore,” he says. “The thing I like about Christmas is how much you like it.”
Wow. A flock of butterflies flutter from my chest to my belly.
“I like how much you like making people happy,” he says. “The kids, the folks at the retirement home. And I’m sure the Sullivans would have been delighted with your efforts if this had still been their house.”
“Maybe my people pleasing tendences aren’t such a bad thing, huh?”
I search his face, looking for the miserable jerk who threw me into the snow a week ago and who lies to his mom and dad.
But what I find is a good guy, someone who cares about his parents’ feelings, someone who’d paint a bird’s nest for Abigail, give his gloves to Grayson, ice my ankle, lay out his coat so I didn’t sit my bare ass on a grimy old theater seat, and fly ice cream over from Italy for me.
He rises to his knees and pulls me against his solid chest, a wall of muscle that could protect me from anything, and rests his chin on the crown of my head. “But you still don’t like me, right?”
“Can’t bear you.” I press my cheek against his left pec, right over his thumping heart. “And not only are you annoying, you’re also incredibly unattractive.”
“Criticism about my personality I can take. But if you’re criticizing my God-given good looks, well, now you’ve crossed a line, my little mugger bunny.”
He rolls back onto the floor, pulling me on top of himself, making me cry out with surprise and delight.
With my hands trapped inside the blanket and against his chest, I can’t push my hair out of my face. So he does it for me.
“And there’s a price to pay for that,” he adds.
I look down into those hazel green eyes that flash with the light from the fire. But behind them is an inner spark all their own. The spark of a man who’s turned himself into an island and pushed people away to protect himself. And is trying to have just one Christmas where he doesn’t have to endure painful flashbacks to his childhood.
“And what’s that price?” I ask.
“Lying here without moving a single muscle while I lick you all over.”