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I smile sweetly.

He knows.

Of course he knows.

After a year of marriage—real marriage, not twenty-three-pages-and-an-expiration-date marriage—the man can read my face from across a crowded room.

And right now my face is apparently saying I would very much like to climb Santa like a Christmas tree.

This is probably why he looks annoyed. Or possibly aroused. With Maverick, the two expressions are remarkably similar.

“Okay, Maisie,” I say, lifting my camera. “Smile for me.”

The little girl beams. Maverick does not.

“Santa, how about a little smile?”

Nothing.

“Smile,” I say again.

“I am smiling.”

“No, you’re not.”

The little girl twists around to look at him.

“You look mad.”

“I do not.”

“You do,” she says.

I snort.

His eyes cut to mine.

I take the picture.

Perfect.

Hope’s Haven, Big Wood’s non-profit women’s shelter, opened eleven months ago. Maverick would tell you it was four months late and seventeen percent over budget. But he paid for everything anyways and would do it again.

Do it again for twelve women and twenty-one children who have called this place home since the doors opened.

Some stayed a few nights. Some stayed a few months. All of them had somewhere safe to sleep. Somewhere warm. Somewhere to figure out what came next.

Today, the common room is overflowing with Christmas decorations, presents, cookies, volunteers, and enough children hopped up on sugar to power the entire state of Tennessee.

And my husband is Santa.

Again.

Technically, this is his second year.

The first happened three days after our first Christmas together when the Santa we’d hired for the Hope’s Haven ribbon-cutting party came down with the flu.

Maverick had argued with me the entire time he’d put on that Santa costume.