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The truth was, we’d both been caught up in the moment. We’d been sitting too close to one another, and with the attraction stringing between us since we’d met, sense had gone out the window right along with the storm outside.
That was all it had been. I couldn’t read more into it than that.
BOONE
I laidin my bed and stared at the dark ceiling for a long time, listening to the wind. My heart paced, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake how good it had felt to hold Grace, to have her in my arms. To kiss her.
The mellow tone of her voice refused to leave my brain. The idea of sirens calling sailors to their deaths had always been a fictional notion. I’d loved Amy and I’d been attracted to her, too.
But I wasn’t sure I’d ever had anyone call to me like Grace did.
With her as striking and lovely as she was, wearing my clothes as she had been, with our conversation coming so easily, with her body so close to mine—the guard I’d worked so hard to maintain around her had completely crumbled.
I’d opened up to her. Said things I never should have said. Done things I never should have done. Yet, it took everything in me not to go back out there and kiss her again.
I rolled to my side, hoping a new position would be the key to relaxing, to drifting off like I wanted to. The wind continued wailing against the window, seeping through its cracks like it always did.
The cold was welcome against my flushed skin, but I could imagine how someone who wasn’t used to it might be that much more affected by it. That thought only resonated with me that much more because that was what Grace was to me.
She was a weather change I wasn’t prepared for. A heat wave my icy heart couldn’t withstand. I’d given in. I’d melted. And I didn’t regret that fact for a second.
That thought gave me pause. I shifted beneath the blankets, thumping onto my back once more.
It wasn’t only her kisses that wrecked me. Her comments about her job wouldn’t leave me alone, either. What kind of life would that be, to sit at a desk all day and talk to strangers on the phone? She clearly wasn’t happy doing it.
I grunted at this. I shouldn’t care what made her happy. I should never have let her in, and now that she’d wriggled her way into my brain, she wouldn’t leave.
The wind outside rattled the window panes. It was a good thing this cottage was made of stone, or it would do some serious damage against its structure. I hoped the barn held up.
Tossing the covers back, my flushed skin welcomed the icy cool. I placed my feet on the cold floor and strode to the window, parting the curtains and feeling the sheer chill coming from the glass.
Sure enough, the snow continued to swirl, eddying through the darkness. Kind of like the storm that Grace presented coursing through me right now.
Resting my hands on the windowsill, I pressed my forehead to the chilly glass, letting the bite seep into my skin. I had to get Grace out of my personal space.
I’d never seen a storm pick up the way this one had. It went from still and calm to chaos in seconds. And what was with the melody in the air just before the weather started its tantrum?
“No way,” I said, inhaling and staring out into the night once more.
This time, the chills sweeping down my spine had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. I crossed to the bed and sank onto its edge, staring at the window. Staring at nothing.
Junie had said the radio had been meddling in others’ love lives. Even her own.
But that was ridiculous. Santa’s radio couldn’t be the reason for the storm.
I rose and shuffled the curtains closed, leaving the room in complete darkness rather than the slices of moonlight that had swept in. As much as I tried to deny it, I couldn’t think of any other explanation for the melody that both Grace and I had heard.
My hand scraped over my face, and I rubbed my arms, returning to the blankets and sinking back onto the bed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it?—
The problem was, Idid.
I’d been told the story enough times it had become gospel truth. Was Santa out there, somewhere? Spying on Grace and me? Interfering with our lives?
Were the feelings mushrooming in my chest real at all, or were they a magical result of the radio’s interference?
That was what I got for considering again. Grace’s comments earlier had had me momentarily rethinking my lack of Christmas tree—something I hadn’t even contemplated opening my life up to again.
But she’d gotten me to consider it. To give Christmas a second chance.
