Snow Kissed

by Jessica Clare

  Grant glanced over at Brenna as if chagrined that the conversation was taking place in front of her. “Now is not the time, Mother.”

  “I’ve invited Bonnie’s daughter to dinner with us, son. I wanted to let you know before we all got to the restaurant.”

  Wow, that was bold of the woman. Brenna had to give her props for being on the ball . . . if it wasn’t such a dick move to pull on Grant. He needed time and space, something his mother clearly didn’t understand. Brenna felt oddly protective of Grant in that moment. It was clear that he was still wounded from his wife’s death.

  “You invited her to dinner?”

  “It’s just a little hello, son. Nothing to get all worked up about,” Reggie interjected, taking his wife’s side. “We both think it’d be good for you.”

  “Mother.” Grant’s tone was a warning.

  Justine ignored it. “She’s a lovely girl. I think you’ll like her. And she’s a marketing major, so you’ll have so much to talk about. She’s very pretty and career driven and very understanding.” His mother stressed the last word. “She won’t rush you.”

  That was really a low blow. Outraged, Brenna pushed forward. This was rude and cruel and thoughtless of them. And if someone was going to be thoughtless and obnoxious to Grant, it was going to be her, damn it. She was never cruel, at least.

  “Don’t,” Elise told her in a soft voice as Brenna pushed forward. “They always do this.”

  “Not today,” Brenna said cheerfully.

  She stepped between Grant and his parents. “You can’t invite this chick to dinner tonight.”

  “Brenna,” Grant said, now turning the warning voice on her.

  Justine regarded Brenna for a long moment as if sizing her up, and then smiled. “I’m afraid it’s too late, my dear. She’s already been invited to dinner.”

  “Then uninvite her,” Brenna retorted. “Having her there is rude.”

  Elise covered her mouth, her gaze flicking to Justine.

  “Uninviting her is even ruder,” Grant’s mother replied, the smile on her face still. Her voice had gone a little brittle, as if remaining polite were testing her patience.

  Now Brenna was getting angry. Grant put a hand on her shoulder, trying to pull her backward and separate her from his parents. Why was he defending them when they were harassing him? An idea struck, and she gave Justine a little smile. “I guess this ruins the surprise, then.”

  “Surprise?” Reggie asked.

  Brenna turned and put her hands on Grant’s collar, tugging him down and kissing him full on the mouth. She turned back to Justine, Reggie, and Elise. “Grant didn’t want to tell you guys until after dinner. He likes to keep people guessing.”

  “He does?” Elise asked, clearly shocked as her gaze flipped between Brenna and Grant and then back to Brenna.

  She glanced up at Grant, but he was still standing there, his mouth slightly agape, staring down at her. She leaned up and bit his lower lip, tugging on it in a sensual move of ownership. “So shy. It’s adorable.” She looked over at Justine and smiled again, this time a genuine smile since she now had the upper hand. “That’s why you can’t invite this girl. She’s just going to see me and my boo being affectionate all night.”

  And just to make her words have punch, Brenna gave Grant a slap on the ass.

  Undressed

  by

  Jen Frederick

  To Jess and DS

  Thanks for being such amazing friends and holding my hand this year.

  ONE

  Noah

  "YOU'RE MAKING A BIG MISTAKE." My trainer Paulie Generoli had been repeating this sentence since the moment I walked in the door at five in the morning. It was now seven, and my patience had just about run out.

  "I never would've guessed." I rolled my head on my neck and reminded myself that nothing I did ever really satisfied Paulie. It was why we made a good team. He pushed me hard. And I pushed back. I was actually surprised that he kept repeating himself—he had to know by now that I wasn't going to change my mind. "I told you. This is the first Christmas I've been able to spend with Grace. No matter what you say, I'm going."

  "Randolph, tell your fucking friend to get his fucking head out of his ass and to stop making decisions with his fucking dick," Paulie roared.

  Bo Randolph, my best friend for over a decade and my former Marine battle buddy, looked at me with a comical expression of helplessness. He didn't want to gainsay Paulie because Paulie was always on the verge of kicking Bo out for being too aggressive during sparring matches. Bo held up his hands in a classic gesture of surrender. "I'm Switzerland."

  Being neutral wasn't enough for Paulie. "Get out then, you worthless fuckhead."

  Paulie’s verbal abuse was pretty much all bark, no bite, but the grin Bo and I exchanged only served to ratchet up Paulie’s temper.

  "You think this is funny?" Paulie yelled. His voice was reaching dangerous decibels and his face was redder than the Everlast boxing gloves that were pinned up around Spartan Gym.

  "It'll be better for you both if you just give it up, Paulie. You know Noah. He's not going to change his mind." Bo dispatched this last piece of wisdom before gathering his hand wraps and towel and heading for the locker room for one of the cold showers so graciously allowed by Paulie.

  Spartan Gym was known for its no-frills workouts and the lack of heated water in the bathroom was just one of the things that Paulie thought made this a real gym as opposed to one where people went to show off.

  He was kidding himself, though. There were plenty of show offs in the Spartan Gym, but no one was angling for a date. Instead, inside the painted brick walls there was a constant battle to prove whose dick was biggest.

  It was mine, of course.

  The winners of this contest were those who could take the most knocks without crying mercy. Bo and I ruled this gym, but I was the king, especially having just come off winning my first professional MMA fight over Thanksgiving. Grace and I hadn't been talking then, and I was damned if I was going to let another holiday go by without spending it together.

  I'd endured too many years apart from Grace Sullivan. She'd shown more patience than any other girl in her right mind would've, and I'd almost lost her more than once through my own stupidity. I couldn’t keep taking advantage of her willingness to forgive me. This holiday, I had special plans—and they required us to be physically together.

  "You have a goddamn fight on New Year's Eve!" Paulie yelled at me.

  "I'm standing right in front of you," I said slowly. His endless screaming was firing up my own anger. "No need to yell."

  "I'm fucking yelling because you have no goddamn idea how to fucking prepare for the biggest motherfucking fight of your pathetic fucking life."

  I almost punched him then. Stepping in close so that the only thing in Paulie's field of vision was me, I leaned over him, my sweat probably dripping onto his bald head. “I've worked with you for more than seven months now, but if you don't let it go, this New Year's bout will be the last one we fight together."

  I didn't wait for a response. I spun on my heel and followed Bo into the locker room.

  "You think this is a mistake?" I asked Bo after we’d taken our ice-cold showers. The water temperature kept the showering time to a minimum, which required a carefully coordinated system of getting wet, soaping up, and rinsing off that took, at the most, three minutes. Any longer and my balls would crawl up my leg and try to hide themselves in my body.

  Bo gave a shrug and tossed his barely wet towel onto the metal bench. Still dripping with water, Bo began throwing on his clothes. It was just that cold in here. "Can't say. You're dedicated. You know what you want, and I get that it's important for you to see Grace. So if you don't see Grace, your head might be in the wrong place. And that's worse than missing a week of training."

  "I'm not missing a week of training," I insisted. This was a sore point for me. Yes, I had a fight on New Year's Eve and yes, I was going to spend three days
with Grace over Christmas. But I was going to be working out during that time, and then I'd be back in Paulie's hands the day after Christmas.

  "It's three days.” Fisting the towel in my hand, I said, “You know how important it is for me to get this prize money. And the win means sponsors, which means more income from fighting.”

  Bo clapped me on the shoulder as he walked toward the locker room door. "Then you're golden. Don't sweat it. I'll go distract Paulie for you."

  Alone in the locker room, I slumped on the bench with the towel wrapped around my waist. The cold water was beading up against my skin, but I barely noticed. I knew Grace wouldn't mind if I didn't come home. Hell, her brother was in a bowl game and he wasn’t coming home except for a couple of days before Christmas. In fact, we'd be driving from Las Vegas to Tempe, Arizona early the next morning after the fight so we could make Josh's game.

  I knew Grace would tell me that I should do whatever was best for my career, but between finishing classes, fighting, and running my own little business, I didn't have much time for her. Part of me, a big part, wondered how long Grace was going to stick around while her boyfriend's attention was scattered on everything besides her.

  I carved out a few hours in each afternoon for her and the nights were all hers, but when I got up at five in the morning to run and train before classes, I was falling asleep before midnight. This was a time for Grace to party and have fun, and I was holding her back.

  But if I didn't pursue all these avenues, I'd never have the money to make all the things happen that I wanted to happen. Grace came from money. When I was on leave from one of my last deployments before separating from the Marines, I’d gone to Grace's home. I flew into Chicago and drove the hour up the North Shore in my rented SUV. I was too cheap to spring for an upgrade on my own, but the counter person had given me a freebie when she saw my military ID.

  When I arrived at Grace’s address, I couldn't view the house itself because her driveway, which was behind a friggin' gate, was too long for me to see anything but acres of carefully tended grass and trees. The lawn looked like it belonged in front of museum or a hotel. I'd sat in the truck, staring at the house number etched on a brick post at the edge of the drive. It was the same number that had been on all the return address labels of the care packages and letters Grace had sent to me since she was fourteen. And no matter how long I had stared at it, it never changed.

  I’d known then and there that Grace and I weren't ever going to be anything more than pen pals. I was some trailer trash from a town in West Texas so tiny it could've fit into the entire lawn of one of these North Shore homes. While there were guys from all backgrounds that were in the Marines with me, including officers who'd graduated from Harvard, of all the fucking places, we were bound together by the same oaths and goals. We shit in the same dirt and ate the same awful MRE out on patrol. We carried the same rucksacks and suffered the same problems. Girls who cheated on you back home, parents who cried every time you skyped them, not having an ounce of privacy.

  But Grace and I didn’t have a thing in common—other than we both resorted to talking about the weather when we were uncomfortable—and I sure as shit knew that wasn't something you could base a relationship on.

  After sitting outside for what had seemed like an hour but was actually only about twenty minutes, I turned and went straight back to the airport. Once there, I’d paid the change fee to get a flight back to San Diego that same day. During the long wait, I’d penned a letter to Grace where I explained we were two different people from two different backgrounds with different futures. It was the last letter I sent to her, and I never got a reply back. My message had been all too clear.

  The last few months of deployment were excruciating. I got two more care packages that Grace must have mailed out before my last letter had reached her. One of them included a picture of her looking so sweet and gorgeous that everything from my teeth to my groin ached. I gave everything in the boxes away but the picture and then tormented myself by reading those last two letters of hers over and over again. The what ifs began to haunt me. I became a restless, surly son of a bitch and no one wanted to be around me. Only Bo had stuck by me because well, hell, I don't even know why. Somewhere in the desert, I figured out that if I could last out four tours of combat, I could do anything—including becoming what Grace needed.

  It had never really registered that Grace had fallen for me, an enlisted Marine, without more than two pennies to scrub together when I entered at age seventeen. I still had a hard time comprehending it. Sometimes, when she was lying next to me at night, I'd stroke her arm or leg, not with any sexual meaning—okay, not with a primary sexual intent—just to remind myself that the reality was that Grace was still with me despite my blow off, despite my two-year silence, despite my lack of funds. But I wondered when she’d wake up to the realization that there was someone better out there for her.

  AFTER DRESSING, I DROPPED OFF my finance project at Professor Billing’s office. It was an independent project where I was to conduct a feasibility study on the best franchise to purchase in the metro. I figured I’d get my three credit A because I’d not only finished the study but I’d bought an actual franchise.

  The self-serve yogurt shop I’d purchased from an elderly Asian man, who’d wanted to move to Denver to be closer to his family, had low running costs. The most expensive part of the business was the labor. But because it required only a couple of high school students to run the register and make sure that all the yogurt and fixings were available, even the wages part of the expense column was manageable. I figured that with the profits from this one shop, I’d be able to open two more before the next semester was out, and then I’d move on to more expensive and more profitable ventures.

  This project was really just a way for me to understand how to make money at something other than fighting.

  On the upside of his thirties, Professor Billings liked to shoot the shit with me about my professional mixed martial art fighting career and the time I spent over in Iraq and then Afghanistan.

  Billings claimed to have served himself, but I didn’t see how that was possible. He would have been too young to have made it through college and grad school and the military unless he had an early discharge due to a medical condition or something. But I never asked because poser or not, at the end of the day he was still responsible for my grade, and I didn’t need to piss him off by suggesting that his story about being military reeked. Even if his company chafed from time to time, he was my advisor, and I needed to make him happy.

  Learning how to make people in charge happy was actually one of the things the Corps had taught me. Every officer had their own quirks, and learning what buttons to push to ensure that the rest of the enlisted who served with you didn't have to suffer was worthwhile.

  As long as I wasn't emotionally involved with them, I could actually read people pretty well. But once my heart was part of the equation, all bets were off. I couldn't always tell what Grace was thinking. Everyone said she was easy to read—that all of her emotions flitted across her face like an open book. But I was too blinded by my fear that she would leave me to separate out my projections from her true feelings. And recently, she seemed to be hiding from me. That made me extra tense.

  Rolling my shoulders, I tried to release some of the tension that I'd tried to work out this morning at the gym. I had to keep up my grades to keep my scholarship and continue to get funds from the GI Bill. I had to win this upcoming Vegas match so that I could get more sponsors. I had to find a decent manager so that my little franchise would actually generate enough money to turn a big profit. I had to keep down my bile at the thought of crossing through the gates of the Sullivan family mansion. An irrational fear lurked in the back of my mind: that when I crossed over onto the hotel-like lawn, floodlights would shine down and dogs would attack me and sirens would sound off, repeating one word, "Fraud. Fraud. Fraud."

  Until I had enough money, I'd always feel like
Grace could do better than me. Inhaling deeply, I shoved everything out of my mind except for Professor Billings and my independent study. One task at a time. One step at a time. That's how I’d survived twenty mile marches in the sand, just reminding myself it was one step at a time.

  The door to Professor Billings’ office was open, but I knocked anyway. Showing deference was one way to prop up the egos of self-important people.

  "Come on in, Mr. Jackson," Professor Billings called out. He didn't stand as I walked in, ensuring that we both knew who held the power in this room. "And shut the door behind you."

  I complied and then dug out my study portfolio and set it on my side of the desk as I situated myself in the chair that sat in front of it. Billings hadn't offered a chair, but I took one anyway.

  With people like Billings, you had to walk the knife’s edge of assertiveness and obeisance. Too little assertiveness and Billings would have no respect for me. He'd give me a poor grade just for appearing weak. Too little obeisance and Billings would feel threatened, and again, his punishment would be a bad grade. No matter how stellar your work, a guy like Billings lacked the self-confidence to grade on the project alone. How much he liked you or thought you liked him would weigh just as heavily as your actual work.

  "That your independent project?" Billings tipped his head toward the bound paper portfolio I still had my hand resting on. We both knew it was. Another dick power move from Billings.

  "Yes, sir," I responded promptly and then slid it over to his side of the desk. I sat back and placed my hands on my outstretched legs, feet planted shoulder width apart. My stance conveyed that I was confident in my project, but Billings made no move to take it. Instead, he leaned forward, steepling his fingers together as he rested his elbows on the desk. Interesting. He was fidgeting.