by Wendy Knight
“What? What’s wrong?” He followed her gaze to her apartment door, where a man in a tool belt was just disappearing through, carrying something large. “Do you know him? Is he supposed to be here?”
“Yes.” Azura sighed. “He’s fixing the window.”
Clearly.
“He asked me not to be here. I’ll just—I’ll just go to the library. Do you mind giving me a ride?” she peeked up at him through her hair, all beautiful puppy dog eyes and in that moment, he would have given her a ride to the moon, had she asked. “I can walk but it’s pretty cold.”
“You’re exhausted. Why can’t you go inside?” He turned his body toward her, narrowing his eyes. “It’s your apartment, right?”
“I mean, I can go inside.” She gnawed on her lip. “I have to go inside to get my notes, actually. But I can walk, it’s fine—”
He was still struggling to tear his eyes from her mouth, but already shaking his head. “I’ll take you wherever you need to go, but you need to rest, Azura. You look like you’ve been through a war. And the library’s notoriously cold.”
“I have been through a war. With winter and Christmas and I may have lost the battle, but I haven’t lost the war.” She attempted a smile, failed adorably, and opened the truck door.
“Easy there. The ice is still prepped and ready for combat.” He made it to her side before she managed to slip and fall. “What if I take you somewhere warm that you can study or rest or watch TV or even play video games?”
“Video games during finals? Crew.” She shook her head, almost playful, the long dark hair shimmering around her shoulders in the weak light, captivating him. “As long as it’s warm, I’m in.”
“Azura?”
She froze, so Crew froze, as well.
“Who’s this?”
Crew looked from Azura to the man the voice belonged to. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth made movements but no sound came out.
“I’m Crew. I—broke her car so I’m her temporary chauffeur.” That seemed a safe enough answer, given the palpable tension suddenly in the air. Her grip on his arm tightened.
“Sorry, Jake. I know you said not to be here tonight. I’m just grabbing my notes—”
“Why is she hanging all over you if you’re just her chauffeur?” Jake crossed his arms over his chest, fist tightening on his hammer.
“Because she falls a lot?” Crew said through gritted teeth. He had no idea who this guy was, but it was difficult being polite when he wanted to punch him in the throat.
“Azura? Azura never falls. She’s more surefooted than a cat.”
“Not anymore.” Azura sighed. “I’m just grabbing my notes and then we’ll get out of your hair.”
“Is this who gave you a ride yesterday, too?” Jake’s eyes flashed. “Moving on so soon, Azura? And during the holidays. You’re usually so anti-social during the holidays.”
Azura let go of Crew’s arm and rose to her full height, which was much shorter than Crew but not much shorter than Jake. “I don’t owe you an explanation, Jake. We broke up. It’s over. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but you don’t get to act like this. If it’s going to continue being a problem, I’ll let your dad know and I’ll move out.” She crossed her arms over her chest, matching Jake’s pose. “But for your information, Crew is a friend. That’s it. A friend who has been kind enough to help me during this insane week.”
Jake dropped his arms to his sides, stuffing his hammer in his belt, his gaze dropping to the sidewalk below. “What happened to your face?”
“A candy cane happened to my face. Excuse me.” She shoved past him and disappeared into the apartment, leaving Crew to stand awkwardly with Jake. Apparently, she’d gotten tired of being nice and the claws Crew knew so well had come out.
“A candy cane?” Jake took his hammer back out of its loop, twisting it in his hands. “More fuel for her anti-Christmas fire, I guess.”
“House is all yours,” Azura said as she breezed back out. “Let Holly know how much I owe you. Crew, you promised me somewhere warm. Let’s go.”
He nodded as politely as possible to Jake and followed Azura to the truck. He half expected her to climb into the driver’s seat with the mood she was in, but she scrambled into the passenger side and had her belt buckled before he even got his door open. “Ex?” he asked mildly.
She scowled.
“He’s not over you?” Crew could tell he’d guessed correctly when her scowl deepened and the green eyes flashed dangerously. “How long has it been?”
“Two months,” she growled, slouching down in her seat. “We were only together for a few weeks though. It’s not like we were engaged or something.”
Crew smiled sideways at her as he swung out of the parking lot. “I don’t blame the guy. You’d be a hard one to get over.”
CHAPTER NINE
When Crew said he was taking her somewhere warm where she could study, she’d assumed he meant a coffee shop or the mall or even the hospital, because they had free Wi-Fi. But no. Crew took her to his apartment that was three times bigger than hers and had its own garage for his precious truck. “No ice,” he said with a grin when he switched the ignition off.
She adored that grin.
Holly had been blowing up her phone every chance she got, but since it was just over a week until Christmas, Santa’s village was jam-packed and she took her elf-duty very seriously. So the random bursts of texts were more amusing than anything, although Holly was trying her very best to be serious.
“Don’t go anywhere else today. Stay home. The Mistletoe Curse has struck.”
“Are you home? Are you even still alive?”
“Azuraaaaaaa!”
Azura replied quickly, before Holly could lose her mind. “I’m fine. At Crew’s house? I think. Jake is fixing our window. Going to study.”
Holly responded immediately, which meant she must have had a break in the steady stream of kids. “Crew’s house!!!! OMG what is it like? Are you secretly in love with him? You’re secretly in love with him, aren’t you?”
“Everything okay?” Crew stood on the other side of the door, watching with one dark eyebrow raised.
Azura shoved her phone back in her pocket, giggling nervously. “Everything’s fine. Holly just worries.” Sheesh, what if he’d seen that? Embarrassing wouldn’t have even begun to cover it.
She slid out of the truck and Crew shut the door behind her. He took her hand and led her inside and she tried not to notice the warmth that radiated from his touch all the way up her arm and to her heart.
She tried, but she failed.
“Careful. Steps here.” He glanced over his shoulder, eyebrows drawn together in worry.
Over steps.
Oh, how low she’d sunk.
“I’m not usually like this,” she said, carefully climbing the stairs so as not to prove herself immediately wrong. “I’m usually very on top of things. I think driving into that ditch rewired my luck organ or something.”
Crew choked, trying to turn the laugh into a cough. “Your luck organ?”
“It’s a thing.” Her lips quirked. “Where else would your luck be stored? They have medicine for when it doesn’t work right. Why would they have that if it wasn’t a thing?”
He swung open the door and stepped back, arm swept wide. “After you, m’lady.”
The room was a combination mudroom/laundry room and a small bathroom off to the side, and it was there that Crew led her. “My first aid kit is in here. I’ve got some more antibacterial ointment that will help with the pain, too. Have a seat.” He nodded toward the toilet seat and she sank down, watching him dig through the cupboard. His muscles, now that he’d taken his coat off, strained against his shirt and his dark hair curled just a bit at the nape of his neck. Even his ears were perfect.
It was a hard thing to have perfect ears.
“Do you even have any flaws?” she asked abruptly, and felt all the blood run to her face, pooling in her cheeks to form a blush that w
ould put any tomato to shame. “I mean—I don’t—”
Yeah, no recovering from that one.
He winked at her as he pulled the ointment out of the first aid kit. “Garrett will tell you I talk in my sleep. Katrina will tell you I eat too much meat. She’s vegan.”
So his flaws were that he ate enough protein to fuel his football player body and talked in his sleep. Yeah, not fair. Her heart was having a hard time staying in her chest and as he knelt in front of her, it tried to bash through her rib cage. She was sure he could hear it.
“You’re blushing,” Crew said quietly. He was close, so close. She could see the little flecks of gold in his dark, dark eyes. A small scar above his lip and a bigger one across his eyebrow, and yet somehow even his scars were beautiful. His fingers moved carefully across her face, meanwhile, giving her face an oily and super shiny look that wouldn’t be flattering on even a supermodel. “It’s adorable when you forget you’re not talking in your head.”
Adorable. He’d called her adorable.
Sort of.
“Does it hurt?” His voice had dropped to barely above a whisper while he concentrated on what he was doing and she struggled to swallow or even breathe, let alone answer him. She just stared, wide-eyed, trying to memorize every feature, every move.
“Your eyelashes are ridiculously long,” she said instead.
Had she not been trapped between his arms, she would have smacked herself in the head. Heaven knew she needed it right then.
His smile grew and he met her eyes. “My mom is Italian.”
Azura’s blood roared in her ears and she wondered if and then prayed that he would kiss her. His gaze seemed to search her very soul and she was afraid, suddenly, that he would find it lacking. “All done,” he said quietly.
“Thank—thank you.” There. Those were coherent words. Good job, Azura.
Crew pushed himself to his feet, his arms flexing against the sleeves of his shirt and she expected it to tear under the pressure. “So, I’m thinking we should get you some of that luck medicine because you definitely seem to have a deficiency. What is it?”
She tore her gaze from his muscles and tried to talk some sense into her suddenly shaking knees that didn’t want to hold her up. “Chocolate. Of course.”
He chuckled. “Of course. Will hot chocolate do or is there a specific kind luck organs require?”
His laugh, low and intimate, slid up her spine and coherent words failed her again. “Hot—hot chocolate is fine.”
Why did her voice squeak like that?
“This way.” He led her through the laundry room door, but her feet froze on the threshold.
His apartment was bigger than her house growing up, and probably one hundred times nicer. From the laundry room where they stood, she could see the kitchen with its tile floors and granite countertops and gorgeous black cabinetry. The living room beyond looked like it had been decorated by a designer, not a college kid.
Oh wait. His family owned the biggest lifestyle magazine in the country. His apartment probably had been decorated by a professional and then featured in the magazine’s pages. The public went crazy seeing the inside of these people’s lives, and then went crazy trying to emulate them.
That sounded like an exhausting way to live. She heaved a sigh, grateful for her cozy little bubble of life where no one noticed her and no one watched her every move. Crew had grown up under a microscope.
It made her sad.
Crew watched her silently, waiting for her to react or move or behave like a normal human who wasn’t pondering his entire upbringing, so she shook it off and gave him her brightest smile. “Heat?”
Slowly he nodded. “Yeah, heat. Right in here, there’s a fireplace.”
“‘Kay.”
He had a fireplace and a fifteen-foot Christmas tree and floor to ceiling windows. Maybe life hadn’t been so bad. Obediently, she followed him inside.
Crew chuckled, but his smile had dimmed, and she feared her reaction to his apartment hadn’t been what he’d hoped. Her awkwardness had stolen the show once again. “Do you want marshmallows in your hot chocolate?”
“That would be wonderful. It’s—you’re big on Christmas, huh?” Besides the giant tree, he had stockings hung on the mantel over the fireplace and decorations everywhere. She’d never been inside an apartment that didn’t belong to Holly that was so full of Christmas.
“Yeah. It’s always been a big deal in our family.”
He padded into the kitchen, so at ease among all of the wealth. He didn’t even seem to notice it. She slid onto the couch, afraid to touch the white leather for fear dirt or mud or whatever else she’d fallen in that day would get all over it. Her phone fell out of her pocket and she realized Holly had written her three more times, demanding details on the apartment and asking, again, if she was secretly in love with Crew Bacall.
She ground her teeth together. “It’s huge and gorgeous, just as you’d expect. I feel like I’m going to ruin everything I touch, and it would cost a lot more than my face.”
“I think your face would be pretty costly to replace. That was the weirdest sentence I’ve ever typed.”
Crew sighed from behind her. “Really, Azura?”
She dropped her phone and rose to her feet, blushing and praying he hadn’t seen Holly’s earlier messages. “I—no, Crew. I just—I’m not madly in love with you.”
His scowl died as a look of surprise took its place. “What? Did I ask if you were madly in love with me?”
Azura swallowed hard. “I—you—didn’t you see the text messages?”
“I saw one saying you would probably ruin everything you touched. This isn’t a china shop. You’re not going to break anything. What are you talking about?”
This. This was why Jake said she was anti-social at Christmas, when everyone was crazy. When she was crazy. And so awkward.
She flushed, rubbing the temple that wasn’t candy-cane burned. “Nothing?”
He held out the hot chocolate and waited, watching her. “Why aren’t you madly in love with me?”
Slowly, she took it, immensely proud of herself for not dropping it on his white couch and set it carefully on the coffee table where it was safe. “I don’t know you.”
“That hasn’t stopped anyone else.” It was said with too much sarcasm, and she realized that behind it hid a lot of pain. She needed to tread carefully but her complete and total social awkwardness made that oh so difficult. “I don’t fall in love during Christmas. It’s cliché.”
Yeah. If that didn’t make her look like weirdo, nothing would.
Awesome.
He looked like he was putting forth herculean effort to not smile. “So I just have to wait until January first and then you’ll be madly in love with me?”
“Now you’re mocking me. You distract me, make me run into a candy cane, let my bike get stolen, run my car into a ditch, and then mock me. It’s too much, Crew. Too much.” She picked up her hot chocolate and blew on the steam, watching it curl away from her into the air.
The handle broke.
She hadn’t even been holding it tight, just a regular holding-a-mug-of-hot-chocolate hold, and it snapped. The hot chocolate spilled down the front of her, soaking her jeans, her sweater—
And his very white couch.
She squealed, leaping to her feet and dancing around the room. “Hot! Hot! Hot!”
She’d just ruined his couch. And spilled hot chocolate all over places that should never have hot chocolate spilled on them. It was too much. Heat flooded her face and all she could think was that when she turned around, he was going to be standing there, and she just couldn’t face him.
It was too much.
Grabbing her bag off the floor, she ran.
“Azura!”
Past the kitchen, back through the laundry room, and out the garage, hitting the door opener as she went. By the time Crew made it to his truck, she’d ducked out and was sprinting down the street. She heard the bi
g truck roar to life, heard him back out, saw his lights, but she couldn’t face him.
Run run run run run.
Running was painful, given that she probably had blisters on her thighs that were rubbing against her jeans. She turned sharply off the road and raced through someone’s back yard, skirted a pool, and jumped the fence.
She felt her jeans tear as she landed on her knees on the other side, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t find her.
Dropping her forehead against the cold fence, she closed her eyes. “You are so awkward.”
She’d just run from the most amazing guy she’d ever met and was now hiding like a common criminal in someone’s backyard. It had been instinct. Self-preservation. An attempt to save her dignity that, in retrospect, had gone horribly wrong.
“I hate Christmas,” she moaned, pulling her legs tight to her chest and dropping her forehead to her knees.
CHAPTER TEN
“You’re not going home for Christmas?” Katrina looked like he’d just suggested she jump off the bridge they walked across and not that he wasn’t joining her for their annual Christmas road trip home. Her small hand tightened where it rested on his arm and she skidded to a stop.
The snow was light and beautiful, a winter wonderland after the harsh storms of the past week and a half. He’d barely been able to make it out of his apartment and had even stayed in the city overnight several times when he’d had to work late.
Which had been often, since finals were over. As often as they’d let him.
Anything, to distract him.
He’d known Azura for a couple of days. And yet he’d been right, she was hard to get over. She hadn’t responded to any texts, any phone calls. He’d gone to her apartment, but Holly had always said she wasn’t home.
It was his money. It had to be. There was no other reason for her to act like that so out of the blue.
She’d run from him. And he didn’t know why. Never in his life had he had to chase a girl down—and he’d definitely never failed at chasing a girl down. He chose to believe she hated his money and not that she hated him. Because he had it on good authority that he was freaking adorable. “Do you ever wish we hadn’t been born into this life, Kat?”