“Is this for us?” I squeaked.
“You know I don’t have a car.” Jamie led me toward the sleigh. “And I know you like horses. Especially when you don’t actually have to ride them.”
“That is true.” Jamie helped me into the sleigh, and I slid under a thick fur blanket. Mmm, soft. “But this is like a whole big deal.”
“Well, you’re, like, a whole big deal, Dylan.” He settled in beside me and bent down, scrambling around by our feet. “Hot chocolate?” He popped back up with a thermos.
“Sure.” I took it and unscrewed the lid. Jamie put his arm around me, and I snuggled in as I took the first hot, creamy sip. I had never tasted anything so good.
“Ready, sir?” the driver asked.
“Ready,” Jamie replied.
The driver clicked his tongue, and, I swear to God, with a jingle of actual sleigh bells, we took off into the night.
“Are you terribly hungry?” Jamie asked solicitously as we whizzed down the lane.
“I mean, I’m not starving, but I thought there was dinner involved on this date…thing.”
It was a date. Not a date thing. Why couldn’t I just call it a date?
“Naturally. I was simply hoping we might make a detour before dinner, if that’s all right with you.” Jamie seemed different, somehow. Stiff, almost. He was nervous, I realized as I watched him swallow a few times, his Adam’s apple bobbing. The camera certainly wasn’t helping anything. Jamie kept glancing over at it. I guess it could have been worse—Cameraman Mike could have been sitting in the back with us—but the lens of the camera still felt awfully close.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll survive.”
“Survival is insufficient. Shortbread?”
He pulled a basket up from under his feet and pulled back the linen napkin on top, exposing golden rounds of shortbread dusted with sugar crystals.
“Thanks.” I took one and nibbled it nervously, trying not to think about Dusty’s baby bombshell. Now was not the time for babies on the brain. I would end up blurting something out, or act like a complete space cadet the whole night. Now was the time for compartmentalizing. And my awesome powers of denial. They had helped me attempt to tune out the cameras so far; I knew they’d help me here. “What else do you have under there? A chess set? Flare guns?”
“Nothing excessive. I simply wanted to be prepared.”
“You’re definitely prepared. You could give a Girl Scout a run for her money.”
I took a second round of shortbread while Jamie grabbed his own before placing the basket back down at his feet. He lifted up his arm and I snuggled in, deeper under the blanket and closer to Jamie. Was this really happening? How could this possibly be real life?
The cameraman in front of us shifted his weight as the sleigh rounded a bend rather quickly. Oh, right. It wasn’t real. Not really. None of this was. I was seized by a sudden urge to ask Cameraman Mike why, exactly, he was here. Countdown to the Crown was about Dusty’s wedding—not Dylan’s first date. I could imagine Krystal Hooper and everyone else back home feverishly fast-forwarding over anything involving me until TRC got back to the good stuff. Even with the admittedly impressive sleigh, I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to watch this. But Pamela had explained in no uncertain terms that we were never, under any circumstances, to address the camera crew directly. And the idea of crossing Pamela scared me more than I wanted to admit.
“Look at the stars, Dylan.” Jamie pointed to the sky. “How countlessly they congregate o’er our tumultuous snow,” he recited.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Robert Frost,” he answered. “Stars. Look up, Dylan.”
I looked. There were more stars than I’d ever seen in my life, twinkling above us in the velvet black sky. None of those stars were moving, but I made a wish anyway. Then another one—one for me and Jamie, and one for Dusty and the baby.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” I proclaimed solemnly. “How I wonder what you are.”
“Beautiful, Dylan,” he complimented me. “Really makes you ponder the mysteries of the universe.”
“That’s what I was going for. You should hear me do ‘I’m a Little Teapot.’ It’ll make you reconsider your entire notion of what humanity is.”
“Aren’t we all just little teapots?”
“Just waiting to be tipped over and poured out?”
He grinned. “I had always thought it was impossible to talk to girls,” he mused. “But with you, everything is so easy.”
“I feel the same way with you.” I was too shy, in that moment, to make eye contact, but I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back, like we were playing a two-person version of that pass-the-pulse game we did before the spring musical. That was pretty much the only thing I remembered from my brief flirtation with running a light board.
“I hadn’t thought it was possible to instantly feel so at ease with someone. It almost makes me reconsider my opinions on soul mates. Or love at first sight. Not that I think we’re soul mates. Or in love. Yet. Ha-ha.” Jamie emitted a strangled little laugh as he turned tomato red. “Erm, yes, more hot chocolate?”
“Dude, relax. It’s kind of nice to see you get flustered.” I sighed as I accepted the thermos of hot chocolate. “I feel like I’m always saying awkward stuff, and you’ve got it so together.”
“I can assure you, Dylan, I am the opposite of together. It’s simply the accent. For whatever reason it fools Americans into thinking we Brits are far more intelligent and self-assured than we actually are.”
“You may have a point there.”
The carriage started to slow, and even in the dark, I knew instantly where we were. You spend forty-five minutes freezing your toes off in front of an abandoned platform, and it has a way of staying in your brain.
“We’re going to the train station?” I asked. “Are we leaving Dunkeld?”
Maybe this was going to be some Bachelor-style fantasy date. Was it an overnight? I hadn’t brought pajamas. Or a toothbrush.
“Not exactly,” he answered, and as we pulled into the driveway, I knew why.
Just beyond where the sleigh came to a halt, the gravel driveway had been flooded and frozen over. All around the impromptu skating rink, streetlamps wrapped in greenery with big red bows cast a golden glow.
“Let me guess—you’ve also got ice skates hidden down there.”
Jamie pulled up a pair of large white ladies’ skates. “How on earth did you guess?” He handed me the skates and grinned. “I wanted to go back to where we first met,” he explained as he hopped down from the sleigh and made his way over to my side. “But I thought this would be vastly preferable to freezing in silence for forty-five minutes.”
I melted a little bit—some incredible thought and care had gone into this date. But then I sort of immediately froze up again at how straight-up Bachelor the whole scenario was. The winter wonderland date, usually complete with fake snow and snuggly ice castle, happened almost every season. If Jamie’s next words were “Scotland is the perfect place to fall in love,” then I was out of there.
An awful feeling settled deep into the pit of my stomach. Had Jamie planned this date? Or had it all been cooked up by TRC? Maybe this was how they were going to make me and Jamie interesting—by throwing us into some over-the-top romantic scenario that their production team had created so that single ladies across America would swoon. I was constantly scoffing at how stupid all the girls on The Bachelor were, to think their date had actually planned every rock-climbing/private-concert/hot-air-balloon escapade that had obviously been engineered by ABC. Was I just as stupid? I certainly didn’t want to be on a dumb magical Christmas date if Pamela had planned all of it.
“May I?”
Jamie was kneeling down by my feet in an entirely too Prince Charming fashion. I awkwardly stuck a foot out, and he slipped off one of my heels, placing it carefully on the floor of the sleigh. He loosed the laces on the ice skate and brought it up to my toes.
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“I’ve, um, got it.” I abruptly grabbed the skate out of his hands. “I can do the laces. I know how to tie a shoe.”
“As you wish,” he responded simply before disappearing around the other side of the sleigh.
Damn that Princess Bride-ing mofo! Chivalry was wasted on me. I knew I was supposed to be swooning. I was on a fantasy ice skating date created out of nothing at the less-than-romantic spot of our first meeting. Jamie was pulling a Cinderella on my abnormally large and not at all lovely feet. He looked so handsome in the moonlight it made my heart hurt. And yet I couldn’t quite enjoy it. I couldn’t shake my suspicions that the whole thing had been set up by TRC. Or even worse—what if Jamie had been set up by TRC? Maybe Pamela had encouraged him to take pity on Dusty’s weird sister, to play along with this date for the sake of engineering a halfway usable story line for the show. But then Jamie’s mouth twisted into a sweetly lopsided grin, and I hated myself for thinking that. He was real. He had to be.
I gingerly placed one foot out of the sleigh, wobbling as it came down onto the slick ice. Holding on to the sides of the sleigh for dear life, I brought the other foot down to meet it. This was probably the time to mention that I’d never successfully skated without holding on to something before.
“Going all right there?”
Somehow Jamie was already on the ice.
“Yuppers.”
Yuppers. Somehow, it didn’t sound quite so bad anymore. I took a big wobbly step toward him, holding out my arms for balance like an ungraceful ostrich as I struggled to remain upright.
“Goodness!” Jamie exclaimed as he skated toward me and wrapped his arms around my waist, finally steadying me.
“Goodness?” I repeated.
“I have a tendency to assume the vocabulary of someone’s rather dotty great-aunt when startled. Have you skated before?”
“Sure. But not in any kind of capacity that didn’t involve holding on to walls.”
“I shall be your wall, then,” he said gallantly.
“Thanks, courteous wall.”
“Dylan!” he exclaimed with delight.
“You’re not the only one who can quote poetry. Or a play, technically.”
Jamie began skating backward, hands around my waist, as he towed me away from the sleigh.
“Jamie!” I shrieked as I clapped my hands around his. “We’re moving!”
“That is the idea.” How the hell did he make this look so easy? “Keep your knees bent. It’s much easier to balance that way.”
Obediently, I bent my knees.
“How did you come to know so much about Shakespeare’s walls? Look up,” he commanded. “Not down at your feet.”
“Oh. Right.” I looked up into his clear blue eyes. A shock of dark hair had already come loose from whatever hairstyle he had attempted, falling temptingly along his brow. “We had to do scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in eighth grade. I played the wall.”
“O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall.”
“I can promise you there was nothing sweet or lovely about middle-school Dylan. I had braces and awful bangs and a somewhat tenuous relationship with personal hygiene. Also I was a practicing Wiccan.”
“How exotic! Did you have black nail polish and pentagram necklaces?”
“Of course. And I listened to satanic rock and tried to cast curses on the popular girls.”
“Did it work?”
“Never. But Heaven says it’s because she was counteracting all of my dark magic with light.”
“How lucky for those popular girls Heaven was there to protect them.”
“Lucky for me, really, that I was such a weirdo and still had someone to sit with at lunch.”
“Terribly lucky,” Jamie said wistfully. “Here. Let’s try you a bit more on your own, then.”
“Don’t let go!”
“Never,” he promised.
He released my waist but kept one of my hands tucked tightly in his as we skated side by side. Well, as Jamie skated and I concentrated on bending my knees and not falling over.
“How are you so good at everything?” I asked.
“Sorry?”
“You ride horses like a knight or something, you skate flawlessly…How are you so good at all these things?”
“I am passable at two activities,” he said, brushing off my praise. “That’s hardly excellence in all forms. I’m rubbish at most sports.”
“You say that now, but you’re probably, like, a champion fencer and a nationally ranked tennis player and a chess prodigy.”
“If only,” he said lightly. But I had a feeling he was all three of those things and just didn’t want to say it.
A particularly strong stab of ankle pain distracted me from my thoughts. How did Jamie make this look so effortless?
“I didn’t realize I had such weak ankles,” I mused. “I guess they have to hold up a lot of tall person, but you’d think they’d be used to it by now.”
“Are they bothering you?”
“They’re, like…throbbing. Can I do something for this? Can you strength-train your ankles?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. You’re the athlete, not me. This is the most physical activity I’ve had in ages.”
“Sure. Secret fencer-slash–tennis champion,” I muttered.
“Sorry?”
“What about your bike?” I asked at a normal volume as he towed me back over to the sleigh.
“That’s a means of transportation. I’m not one of those ghastly cyclists decked out in spandex who subsist on sports gels.”
“Does your bike have one of those little baskets on the front?”
“It most assuredly does not. Nor does it have streamers on the handles or a bell shaped like a ladybug.”
“You literally just described my childhood bike.”
I sank down to sit on the footboard of the sleigh. My ankles nearly sang with relief as I loosened the laces.
“Ready for dinner, then?” Jamie asked once we were freed from our skates and sitting back in the cushy seat again.
“Always ready for food.”
I half fell onto Jamie as the sleigh began moving, knocking me off-balance.
“Have you guessed where we’re going?”
“Hmm…” As we rose over the bridge, the lights and puffing chimneys of downtown Dunkeld came into view, like something that should be inside of a snow globe. “If we started at the train station, then we must be headed to the Atholl Arms?”
“Correct,” he said, pleased.
“I promise I won’t fall asleep on you this time.”
“Even if you do, it certainly won’t be any trouble to carry you home again.”
“You carried me into the van? Oh God. We’d just met. That’s mortifying.”
“Well, I’m relieved to know the thought of me carrying your unconscious body is no longer mortifying now that we’ve become better acquainted.”
“I’m sure I did something embarrassing while I was sleeping,” I said glumly.
“Not at all. You slept with your head on my shoulder. It was rather charming.”
We sat in silence for a moment, contemplating that. I was pretty confident that I’d drooled on him and he was just too much of a gentleman to say so.
“This is really nice, Jamie. This…this whole…everything…it’s really nice,” I finished lamely. And because that seemed wholly insufficient, shyly, I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“You missed, Dylan.”
“What?”
“You missed,” he said again, softly, as he leaned closer. The last thing I saw was his dark eyelashes fluttering closed before he captured my mouth with his. And then everything faded away except for me and Jamie, and I felt like I could never be cold again.
“Jamie! My goodness!”
At the sound of a shrill female voice, I opened my eyes to see a scandalized Tilly standing on the front steps of the Atholl Arms.
“You are the last young man I expect
ed to see ravishing a lady in a carriage!”
“He wasn’t,” I hastened to explain as I scrambled over Jamie and out of the sleigh. “I mean, it was a consensual ravishing.”
“The Consensual Ravishing,” Jamie said, as I knew he would the minute that idiotic sentence left my mouth.
As the cameraman hopped off the front of the sleigh, I realized I’d been making out with Jamie literally in front of the camera. Oh my God. I sank deeper into my seat, burning with mortification. How could I possibly have let my guard down? I had played right into TRC’s manipulative hands. I hated to admit it, but maybe Dusty had been right, and you did adjust to the camera eventually—because the minute I closed my eyes and started kissing Jamie, I had totally, completely forgotten it existed. And now Dusty and Mom and all the randos from the back of my calculus class were going to see it.
“At least you’re still all buttoned up, poor duck,” Tilly clucked as she bustled me out of the sleigh and into the warmth of the inn. “Loose hands of an aristocratic roué and all.”
“Aristocratic roué?” I mouthed at Jamie.
He shrugged wildly and mouthed back something that looked like “Romance novels.”
“I expected more.” Tilly waggled her finger at Jamie.
“Blame it on the moonlight, Tilly. I suppose we got a bit carried away.”
“Hmph. Moonlight,” she snorted. “Give me your coats, then, and off to dinner with ye.”
Jamie helped me out of my coat and handed it to her. We followed Tilly’s stiff back as she marched down the hall. The Christmas decorations at the Atholl Arms appeared to have multiplied since the last time we’d been there. At the end of the hall, just past a mounted deer head wearing a Santa hat, she pushed open the door to a private dining room. The walls were decked out with glowing candles and green garlands. In the middle of the room an elaborate table was set for two. And, in the corner, I kid you not, there was a string quartet. In tuxedos. As we entered the room, they raised their bows and began playing a sweet melody.
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