by Lindsey Kelk
A) I was lying about the police and B) there was a chance I’d watched one too many cop shows.
‘Wait, wait,’ the whimpering ball of a former man choked on the floor. I held my pose, one leg pulled back and ready to strike again. ‘I’m Mason, my brother Keith sent me over to help you with the tree. I’m guessing you’re Jenny? Nice to meet you.’
Casting the light from my iPhone over his face, I bit my lip and winced. Plaid shirt, sandy hair, no visible weapons. Balls.
‘Oh fuck.’ I dropped my leg and rubbed a hand over my face. I hadn’t foiled an attacker, I’d assaulted my neighbour. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, rolling onto his side and sitting up. I pretended not to notice him subtly groping his nether regions. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have kids and I’m pretty sure you broke a couple of my fingers, but I’m okay. Could you maybe help me up?’
*
Gingerly we climbed up the steps out into the snow, Mason’s arm looped around my shoulders, every step eliciting a sharp intake of breath. Penises − not photogenic and really not nearly as hardy as they should be. How had men fought so many wars? Why didn’t they all just kick each other in the junk and run away?
‘Why the hell were you sneaking around the back of the house?’ I asked as he collapsed into the snow, although I was pretty sure what I meant to say was ‘please don’t sue me’.
‘Looking for you?’ he said, looking up at me for the first time with watery blue eyes. ‘Keith said he left you in your car, but it was empty and there was no one on the porch other than an enormous tree and a messed-up looking turkey. Then I thought I heard something round back. I was coming to check it out.’
‘It was just me,’ I said, totally breezy. I flipped my hair over to one side of my head and offered him what I hoped was a charming smile. He did not sound happy and I figured there was a good chance I was going to have to flirt myself out of a lawsuit. Again. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you were a murderer.’
‘Yeah, not so much,’ he said, taking my hand and pulling himself up out of the snow. ‘And my brother thinks the city is dangerous.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I looked down at his feet and pasted on my most regretful expression. Woah, his enormous feet. ‘I didn’t mean to kick your ass.’
‘Yeah, you did,’ he replied, brushing the snow off himself and awkwardly stepping from side to side. ‘But it’s okay.’
‘I thought Keith said the two of you were twins?’ I asked, taking my first proper look at him with non-litigious eyes.
‘We are,’ Mason replied. ‘We’re not identical.’
He was not kidding.
While Keith seemed like a really nice guy, his brother was a stud. At least a half-foot taller than Keith, they had the same sandy-blond hair but his eyes were a much lighter blue, almost grey, and a instead of sandy-coloured stubble he had a full, dark blond beard. I’d never been much for a full beard − they reeked of hipsters and cheap beer and a man too lazy to shave, as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t spend all that money on moisturizer to wake up every day with stubble rash. But this beard … I wasn’t sure if it was because I was tired, or full of adrenaline, or maybe I had oxygen poisoning from being out in nature for too long, but there was something about that beard that was totally hot.
‘Are you staring at my beard?’ Mason asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ I shrugged, unable to tear my eyes away.
‘Are you wearing a Santa costume?’ Mason asked.
‘Uh-huh.’ I shrugged again, pulling my coat closed around myself.
In spite of everything, he started to smile. I looked away, my eyes focusing on the open basement door, a flush coming over me from head to toe. At least that solved one thing − I definitely had oxygen poisoning. If I wasn’t sure before, the thought of being turned on by a beard confirmed it.
‘Keith said you might need help with the tree but didn’t want to ask for it.’ When he smiled, his grey-blue eyes crinkled up at the edges and actually sparkled, like actual Christmas-tree lights. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Keith is very perceptive,’ I replied. ‘But yeah, the power is out. It’s a fuse thing. Or a circuit breaker.’
‘Do you know which?’ he asked. ‘Do you know where they are?’
‘There was a rat issue? In the basement?’ I gestured behind me, ignoring his question. ‘So no, I don’t. Know. I don’t know which. Where.’
It was just as well Angie and Erin were a couple of hundred miles away − they would have died laughing watching this. First I beat his ass and then I can’t even put a sentence together. Mason nodded, flashed another smile my way and then carefully jogged back down into the darkness.
‘I see ’em,’ he called out to me. ‘Looks like the circuit tripped. Just. One. Second.’
And just like that, every light in the house flickered on at once. I stumbled back, blinking, feeling like the Wise Men when they found baby Jesus. Only I’d found something even better – electricity, hot running water and an attractive Manhattanite who knew his way round a circuit box. It was almost enough to move my ass to tears.
‘Thank you so much,’ I said, rushing Mason again as he emerged from the basement, although this time I threw my tiny fists around him in a hug instead of at him in an attempt to kill him. ‘You literally saved my life.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He graciously accepted the hug and squeezed me back with biceps that were in no way upsetting. ‘Assuming my hand is just sprained and not broken, you want me to help you get the tree inside?’
I nodded, breaking the hug and pulling back, pausing just for a second to take a deep breath. He smelled like coffee and worn-off aftershave and outside and my future children.
‘Thank you again,’ I said, a little breathless. ‘I really do appreciate it.’
‘Yeah, sure, I mean of course.’ Now it was his turn to get a little flustered. I did a miniature happy dance inside. ‘Let’s get inside before you freeze to death in that dress.’
‘You don’t like it?’ I asked, walking back towards the front of the house, as much of a sway in my step as I could get away with in enormous hiking boots and a floor-length North Face coat.
‘I said get inside,’ he said, swatting the top of my head gently.
And just like that, I was in love.
Chapter Nine
It took a couple of goes to get the tree into the house, and there was only one place where we could get it all the way vertical, but once it was in and the smell of freshly-cut fir free began to flood through the house, I began to relax a little. Mason volunteered to bring in the food from the car while I searched the house for Sadie. She wasn’t hard to find − for a beautiful slender woman, she snored like a fat old man. Hidden away under a dozen duvets with a roaring fire burning by the bed, she was curled up like a cat in one of the biggest bedrooms. It was like a reverse princess and the pea. I could barely see her under all of the blankets.
I reached out to wake her, and then stopped myself and backed slowly out of the room. It wasn’t like I was threatened or anything, but I had just been blown out via text message after my first date in months and I didn’t feel like competing for Mason. It was stressful enough hanging out with a hot blonde, but she was a legitimate supermodel. She had made out with Leonardo DiCaprio and done God knows what with Adam Levine. She could sleep through this one.
‘I feel like this is going to be a dumb question,’ Mason said, resting the last box of food on the counter as I hopped off the last step, incredibly happy with my decision to let sleeping beauty sleep, ‘but do you have anything to drink in here?’
‘Somewhere, in one of those boxes, we have everything to drink,’ I replied. Yeah, I had a headache, and yeah, I still needed to send the pitch to Stephen and decorate the house and put the turkey in the oven, but it was the season. Plus it never hurt to get a guy a little drunk when your flirting was a little rusty. ‘I just need to send a quick email and then I’m going to mix up a cocktail that w
ill knock your socks off.’
‘You already knocked my everything else off,’ he commented. ‘Really, I’d take a beer. Or a shot. Or a beer and a shot and an Advil.’
‘Again, I’m really, really sorry about that,’ I said, perching on the edge of the couch, grabbing my laptop and slipping out of my sleeping-bag coat. ‘Just let me do this and I’ll get you all the pills and all the booze.’
‘Not all at once, if that’s okay,’ he said, picking through the huge cardboard box he had just deposited on the counter. ‘You’ve already tried to kill me once today.’
‘It’s funny − ’ I opened up my emails and tapped in Stephen’s address without even looking at any of the other messages. Now to add Erin’s notes to my presentation and − whoosh − done. ‘Cause I thought your brother was trying to kill me and then I actually nearly did kill you.’
He scoffed, holding up a giant carrot. ‘Yeah, it didn’t hurt that bad. I may have overreacted just a little. Just so, you know, you could feel like a big man.’
‘Totally appreciated,’ I said, setting the laptop on the coffee table in front of me. ‘Now, you still want that drink or do you have to run off and creep up on unsuspecting women in the dark somewhere else?’
Mason unzipped his own fleece jacket and tossed it onto the back of the nearest chair. ‘Hang out here, drink, and with a girl who tried to beat me to death with her bare hands, or go back to my brother’s place, get shouted at by my mom and crawled all over by toddlers?’ He rested his hands on his hips and shrugged. ‘I’ve got time for a drink.’
*
As was so often the way, one drink turned into two, turned into snacks, turned into a Candy Cane cocktail and ended in Mason sticking around to help me trim the tree. I knew I was being a little crazy, and I knew I was drinking on an empty stomach, but something inside me had flipped and it wasn’t the same something I’d felt with Joseph C. Davies. Mason probably wasn’t about to drop half a grand on a fancy wallet, but he was making me laugh − and seriously, dude, there was something about that beard.
‘Your brother said you live in Manhattan,’ I said as he clambered up to the top of the stepladder and placed a big glass bauble on far too small a branch to bear its weight. ‘Whereabouts are you?’
‘If I tell you, are you going to go all vigilante in my neighbourhood?’ he asked. I shook my head and smiled. Beamed, actually. Of course I wasn’t going to do that, I was just going to be casually hanging out there morning, noon and night until we accidentally ran into each other, you fucker. ‘I’m in Gramercy,’ he said finally.
‘Oh, no way.’ I passed him another ornament and checked out his butt as he moved down a step. Excellent butt. ‘I’m in Murray Hill.’
‘Oh yeah? You work around there too?’
‘Midtown,’ I nodded. ‘I’m in PR.’
Even though I was really proud of my job, it was fair to say I’d met a lot of men who were sometimes intimidated by it, and really no one, male or female, had worked out a way to say ‘Actually, I’m the executive account director’ without sounding like a massive douche.
‘Actually … ’ I paused for a quick hair toss. ‘I’m the executive account director of a PR company.’
What the hell, I loved saying it. And if he was that easily scared, he was no good to me.
‘That’s awesome,’ he said, coming down the ladder and holding his arms out for a box of baubles. ‘I work at Ghost magazine.’
‘Isn’t that at Spencer Media?’ I asked, beginning to add my own bauble selection to the lower half of the tree. ‘My friend works there. She’s the editor at Gloss.’
‘She’s the editor?’ He sounded impressed. ‘Amazing. I’m only an editor. Entertainment editor, actually.’
‘That’s cool,’ I replied, working really hard on sounding nonchalant and making sure I got the baubles in the right place. Angie would kill me if this tree sucked. She was a total asshole when it came to tree decorating, but she would understand how I had got distracted when she saw the beard. ‘It must be fun.’
‘Kind of keep waiting for them to come and tell me to get a real job,’ he agreed. ‘You know?’
He reached across to the dining table for his drink and I stole a quick glance while his attention was elsewhere. He really was handsome. Not my type at all − a little quirky, what with the abundance of facial hair and all, but definitely handsome. His sandy-coloured hair was thick and looked a little out of control, curling over his collar at the back, and his nose was crooked, begging me to ask the question how it got that way. Most importantly, now he was standing right in front of me, I could tell how tall he was. And he was so tall. He was Jenny-gets-to-wear-her-highest-heels-out-on-a-date tall, and I loved that in a man.
‘I do,’ I said, not at all picturing myself saying those words again on a beautiful white sandy beach at sunset, wearing a tasteful but sexy white gown and holding a big bunch of peonies. I hoped you could get peonies in Maui because my heart was set on them for the bouquet, and now I’d imagined him barefoot in a tasteful but relaxed navy-blue suit, transfixed by my beauty as I walked down a petal-strewn altar, my heart was kind of stuck on Maui.
‘We’re almost all out of ornaments,’ I said, swiping my hand along the bottom of the empty box, rustling crumpled newspaper and bubble wrap. ‘Tree’s done.’
‘I think we did a pretty good job.’ Mason stepped back to observe the tree, arms folded across his chest, his navy-blue shirt straining across his back. ‘Good teamwork.’
‘Really good,’ I said, desperately trying to think of a reason why he shouldn’t leave. ‘My friends are gonna be super impressed.’
‘I’m pretty impressed,’ he said, draping a casual arm around my shoulders. ‘Now, are you going to tell me why you’re wearing that outfit?’
I ducked my head and peeled his arm off my shoulder, missing the warmth of his skin on my skin right away, but there was something I had to do. I crawled down beside the tree and plugged the tree lights into the power strip. Without a word, Mason walked over to the panel of switches on the wall and lowered the living-room lights. The tree glowed in all its poorly decorated majesty, and I couldn’t help but let out a little gasp of joy.
‘We did a good job,’ he said, resuming his position by my side.
‘Yeah, we did,’ I lied, allowing myself to lean my head on his chest.
We’d done a shitty job. We’d done a two-beers-and-one-vodka-cocktail job. The lights were unevenly placed and there was no rhyme or reason to the ornament placement. The whole thing looked like blind toddlers who had never heard of Christmas or baubles or trees had put it together.
He didn’t say anything else, he just moved very slowly, the arm around my shoulders pulling me towards him before he leaned down to kiss me. I hadn’t kissed a man with a beard since college, and I was incredibly happy to discover that it was not an unpleasant experience. It was soft and warm and gentle, but there was something incredibly hot about having to lean back so far to kiss a man so tall, a feeling of being out of control but protected at the same time. Okay I’d had too many drinks, but the bottom line was, making out with Mason was hot.
‘I didn’t see any mistletoe,’ I mumbled as the kiss ended, pulling my head away and hiding underneath my hair. I suddenly felt uncharacteristically awkward and shy, and even worse than that, I was blushing.
‘Sorry,’ he said, pushing my hair away from my face. ‘I got kind of carried away.’
‘It’s fine.’ I kept my eyes on the floor, the smell of fir tree and Candy Cane cocktails and wildly attractive man altogether too much. Did that mean he didn’t want to kiss me again? Because that wasn’t an option. ‘I guess that means you’ve forgiven me for beating your ass earlier?’
He tilted his head to one side, dramatically considering the question. ‘That depends,’ he said, forearms on my shoulders, hands still woven in my hair behind my head. ‘Can I get your number?’
‘You’re not going to send me a picture of your dick, are you
?’ I asked, wrinkling my nose.
Mason laughed out loud, a big, deep booming sound that made all my most sensitive ladyparts vibrate. ‘It’s Christmas, not your birthday,’ he replied. ‘I was thinking something more along the lines of asking you out for dinner.’
‘Controversial.’ I closed my eyes as he leaned back in for another kiss. ‘But I like it.’
Chapter Ten
‘We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!’
‘It’s still Christmas?’ I groaned, lifting my head off the arm of the sofa and opening my eyes to see Angie, James and Jeremy crashing through the door of the house. ‘Bah, humbug.’
‘Jenny, the place looks amazing,’ Angie yelled, bouncing onto the couch and throwing herself on top of me. ‘Look at the tree!’
‘Now I know for sure that you’re wasted,’ I said, letting her pull me into a hug, the shock of her freezing-cold coat waking me up fast. Rubbing my temples, I silently willed the headache I had cocktailed into submission not to come back. ‘I should have kept drinking instead of taking a nap.’
‘Did Sadie help you?’ Angie walked closer to the tree, cocking her head to take a closer look and immediately rearranging half a dozen ornaments. I knew she wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. ‘It really is lovely. And bloody massive.’
‘We’re bringing in the presents!’ James shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Presents and booooze.’
‘Sadie did not help,’ I said, forcing myself upright. ‘Sadie has been asleep.’
‘You did all this by yourself?’ Her wide, dilated eyes looked around at Erin’s beautiful living room in all its festive glory. ‘Jenny.’
‘I had some help,’ I admitted, a tiny little smile on my face. After the make-out to end all make-outs, Mason had helped me decorate the rest of the room before I reluctantly sent him back out into the starry night. While I was tempted to unwrap my present early, if I’d learned anything from Joseph C. Davies, it was that taking things slow wasn’t a terrible idea. ‘You like?’