by Teri Wilson
“You must be Wade’s friend.” A woman with striking red hair pointed a slender finger at Felicity and grinned.
“Told you,” Madison muttered.
The entire coffeehouse went silent as every set of eyes in the Bean turned toward Felicity and Nick. Only two sounds managed to work their way into Felicity’s consciousness—the frantic rush of blood in her head and the cheery Christmas carol playing over the Bean’s sound system.
He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake...
So did every last person in Lovestruck, apparently.
Good gravy, what now?
Chapter Eight
Later that night, Wade and Felicity made their postponed debut as Joseph and Mary in the living nativity scene at the Lovestruck Christmas festival. Given his new, near-constant state of exhaustion, Wade would have preferred finding a substitute couple. Also, he wasn’t crazy about leaving Nick with a sitter. Neither was Felicity, even though Madison and Jack hardly counted as babysitters. They were more like an honorary aunt and uncle, with the added bonus of being official parenting “experts.”
Sort of. The Bee seemed to think so, at least.
In any event, the living nativity was only scheduled to run for two hours. Nick would be fine. Besides, the mayor wouldn’t hear of finding a substitute couple. She wanted Wade to fill Joseph’s sandals, period.
He did his best not to stare at Felicity standing beside him, once again dressed in her Virgin Mary costume. Keeping his gaze fixed forward was difficult, though.
For starters, a camel stood just to his right, and the beast had been gradually inching forward all night, pretty much obstructing Wade’s view of the crowd, and vice versa. He’d tried to nudge the animal back in place a few times, but his gentle prods had been mostly ineffective. Plus, Wade had heard a rumor from the previous year’s Joseph that sometimes camels spit. So far, this year’s camel seemed perfectly pleasant, but Wade wasn’t keen on taking unnecessary chances since being spat upon by a camel didn’t sound the least bit enjoyable.
Oh, the things he did for his hometown.
In all honesty, though, the camel had little to do with why his attention kept straying toward Felicity. Every time he saw her in her pretty blue costume, his throat grew thick. She took his breath away, even when she vibrated with nervous energy—which she’d been doing since the start of the Christmas festival two hours ago.
Wade chalked it up to stage fright. After all, Joseph and Mary were the biggest stars in the living nativity, behind baby Jesus, obviously. But the Christ child was played by a plastic doll instead of a person, which left Wade and Felicity as the center of the town’s attention. Other than the camel and a handful of farm animals, that is.
“How are you holding up?” he asked under his breath. Every fifteen minutes or so, the spotlight above the crèche went dark while the soundtrack to the nativity scene started over again at the beginning, focusing on the angel appearing to the shepherds and their trek to Bethlehem.
Felicity blinked up at him in the darkness, snowflakes swirling around her heart-shaped face. “I’m okay. A little cold, I guess.”
“I thought you might say that.” Wade winked at her. “I arranged a little surprise to warm us up.”
He opened the box that the wise men had just presented them for the fourth time in a row. Two paper cups from the Bean sat inside, alongside a generous chunk of warm, fragrant gingerbread.
Felicity gasped. “Is that...?”
“Hot chocolate?” Wade plucked one of the cups from the box and offered it to her. “Yes, ma’am, it certainly is.”
“This hardly seems Biblical, but at the same time, it feels like a miracle.” She took a sip, closed her eyes and let out a contented sigh that warmed Wade’s heart more than any amount of hot cocoa ever could. “Thank you, Joseph.”
“You’re welcome, Mary.” He broke off a piece of the gingerbread. “Try this. Alice made it, so it’s sure to be delicious.”
“Wow, you really are full of surprises.”
He shrugged. “I figured it might be a bit chilly, even with a space heater disguised as a bale of hay. Vermont winters are no joke.”
“I’m beginning to realize that,” she whispered. “I suppose we should probably hurry, though.”
“Why? Are the shepherds already headed this way again?”
“Not yet, but the camel is eyeing the gingerbread.” She grinned at him over the top of her steaming cup of cocoa.
“It’s good to hear you laugh,” he said before he could stop himself. “You’ve seemed a little nervous.”
“Really? I was going for beatific. Or at the very least, somewhat angelic.”
He ran a fingertip gently down the side of her cheek. “You always look like an angel. I don’t think you can help it.”
Her cheeks flared pink, and then her gaze dropped slowly to his mouth. Wade stopped breathing for a second as he reminded himself they had rules about this sort of thing—rules he desperately wanted to break in a thousand different ways.
Then the camel let out an ill-timed snort, and they both jumped. Hot chocolate sloshed out of the tiny hole in the lid of Wade’s cup and splashed on his hand.
“You’re doing it again,” Felicity said flatly.
“What?”
“Flirting. In a Biblical setting, no less.” She gestured toward the plastic baby in the manger and the surrounding farm animals, who all seemed bored out of their minds. Only the camel remained bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “It’s like you can’t help it.”
Maybe I can’t. Not when it came to Felicity, anyway.
He cleared his throat. “I’ll have to watch that.”
“You definitely should.” She gave him a firm nod and brushed gingerbread crumbs from the front of her blue silk robes. She couldn’t seem to look him in the eye all of a sudden.
Interesting. Wade felt himself grin as he popped the last of the gingerbread in his mouth.
“I’m serious,” Felicity said, casting a nervous glance in his general direction. Although she was still looking more at the camel than she was at him. “Haven’t you noticed that everyone is looking at us? And I do mean everyone.”
Wade squinted into the distance, where the majority of the town strolled from tent to tent, enjoying the Christmas festival. A crush of people watched the shepherds head their way.
“That’s sort of the point.” He gestured toward the sheep, the manger and the ridiculous camel. “It’s literally the entire reason we’re standing here.”
“Right, except they’re not looking at us in a Biblical way. They think we’re together.” She waved a hand back and forth between them. “As in, together. Like a couple. You should have seen the moms at the Bean today. They all acted like I was your baby mama or something.”
A muscle tensed somewhere in his jaw. Was he grinding his teeth all of a sudden? “Would that be so terrible?”
Felicity arched a brow. “Think about it. You probably wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any more casseroles.”
He didn’t care about the casseroles. He cared about her—and Nick—even though he wasn’t technically supposed to.
“We can’t have that, can we?” He slammed the wise mens’ box shut and tucked it out of sight.
A coldness had crept its way into his tone—a bite he didn’t like and was by no means proud of. He could have sworn he saw the camel flinch.
Listen to you. You sound like your so-called father.
Maybe he was just imagining things. After all, he’d spent the better part of his life avoiding emulating his dad. Plus, Wade hadn’t even seen the man since he was nine years old. It was strange how vivid the memories still were—the terrible way his father used to speak to his mother, the tears she always did her best to hide. The Saturday morning Wade had woken up to his favorite chocola
te-chip pancakes topped with pure Vermont maple syrup and the news that his dad had walked out and wasn’t coming back had been the best day of his life.
Until recently, anyway. The last couple days had been awfully nice. So nice that he didn’t want to think about them too hard, because he knew they hadn’t been altogether real.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I just...”
I just hate these silly rules. I want to know you, really know you. And I think you want that, too. But I can’t seem to figure out what’s holding you back.
Felicity turned soft eyes on him, and for a brief, breathtaking moment, he knew—he just knew—she didn’t care about rules or casseroles, either. Somewhere deep down, she had to know he wasn’t just flirting with her. The hot chocolate, the firemen he’d dragged to her yoga studio, the fact that he got up at night to help her with Nick, even though it wasn’t his turn...he wasn’t flirting. He was courting her.
Except he couldn’t do that, could he? They had an agreement. And they had a baby...
A baby who was depending on them. He could not screw this up.
“Smokey,” she whispered, and a tiny smile made its way to her lips—a smile that seemed as if she didn’t know whether to break his heart or to break every rule that had ever existed.
Wade had never wanted to kiss a woman so badly in his life. “Yes?”
The spotlight overhead flicked back on, flooding them with blinding light. The gold locket Felicity always wore glimmered in the brightness. Time was up. The shepherds had arrived, along with a few wise men, a donkey and all the prying eyes of Lovestruck—the ones Felicity seemed so keen on avoiding.
Wade turned toward the light and tried his best to act like Joseph, a man who’d loved a woman and her baby so much that he’d raised the child as his own. A family man in the truest sense of the word.
Playing the part wasn’t quite as hard as he’d imagined it would be.
* * *
The rest of the night sped by in a dizzying whirl of wise men, angel wings and assorted livestock. Felicity wasn’t sure why the living nativity included a pair of alpacas, as that didn’t exactly seem Biblically accurate, but they appeared to be a Lovestruck necessity. She just went with it. If the nativity scene in Love Actually, her favorite Christmas movie of all time, could boast an octopus and three lobsters, then she could get on board with a couple of curly-haired alpacas.
Her favorite moment of the night had been when Wade surprised her with the secret hot chocolate and gingerbread, of course. She’d practically been frozen solid up until then, and the gingerbread had been the best she’d ever tasted—warm, sweet and rich with the flavors of cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. If she thought too much about sipping cocoa beside Wade and the way she couldn’t stop looking at the charming crinkles near the corners of his eyes or the insanely appealing squareness of his jaw, she might have to admit that the warm gingerbread and hot chocolate hadn’t actually been the cause of the woozy, pleasant warmth that coursed through her. So she very purposefully didn’t think about it. She did her best, anyway.
She glanced at Wade sitting beside her in the front seat of his SUV as they made their way back to his cottage. He hadn’t said much since she’d complained about the Lovestruck moms thinking they were a couple. His initial response had been a lighthearted question.
Would that be so terrible?
Still, somewhere beneath his lopsided grin and those devil-may-care eyes of his, she’d seen something else—something that made her want to throw caution to the wind and put an end to the casseroles once and for all.
And then the lights came back on, and Felicity had come to her senses. Nothing about this crazy Christmas holiday was real. She and Wade weren’t a real couple any more than they were the actual Mary and Joseph.
Nick babbled in the back seat, drawing a smile from Wade. He glanced at her and sighed. “He seems happy. I guess getting a babysitter for a few hours might not make us terrible parents, after all.”
Parents. Gosh, that’s what they were, wasn’t it? For the time being, at least.
She nibbled on her lip. “I guess not.”
Wade looked back toward the windshield, but Felicity noticed a small furrow form between his eyebrows.
“Can I ask you something?” he finally said.
“Sure, so long as I get to ask you something in return.” It was only fair, right? There were certain things she didn’t want to discuss—with anyone—but her head was full of questions about Wade. She wasn’t about to pass up the chance to get to the bottom of his ugly-sock mystery.
He nodded. “It’s a deal.”
“Fine. What do you want to know?”
He drew in a long breath and released it. “How do you know so much about babies?”
“Oh.” Felicity hadn’t been sure what to expect, but it hadn’t been this. “Well...”
There were a million different ways she could have answered his question. She could have said something smart and safe, like that she’d babysat a lot as a kid or that she came from a large extended family with babies galore. Both of things had been true.
But Wade knew she’d been certified as a foster parent, and she had a feeling such a general question was his way of asking to know more about that, without overstepping. She hadn’t exactly been an open book.
Wade had opened his home to her. Plus his generous, casserole-laden freezer. And more, really. He’d brought the firemen to her yoga studio and snuck her hot chocolate and gingerbread in a box that was supposed to be filled with gold, frankincense and myrrh. She could trust him with at least the less painful parts of her story.
“I went through foster training, and then I became the foster parent to a newborn.” Felicity’s hand automatically went to her locket, and she wound the chain around her fingertips. “She was with me for six months, so I guess you could say I had a lot of on-the-job training.”
“Six months?” Wade glanced at her, and she did her absolute best to remain poised. Stoic. “It must have been hard to say goodbye.”
The hardest moment of my life. “It was. Very.” She flashed him as bright a smile as she could manage. “Okay, my turn now.”
He eyed her with concern. “How long ago was this?”
Felicity’s heart beat hard beneath her blue silk robes. “That’s two questions.”
“Indulge me, just this once?”
She made the mistake of glancing at him, just long enough to go all swoony at the sight of his lopsided smile. Ugh, why did that happen every single time?
“It was about six months ago,” she said.
“That’s not very much time.” He pulled the car to a stop, and Felicity realized they’d reached his driveway. Still, neither of them made a move to leave the car, and Felicity’s neck grew hot while he studied her. “I understand why you initially said no to taking care of Nick. What made you change your mind?”
She shook her head. Not going there, Smokey. Not unless you want a sobbing Virgin Mary on your hands. “That’s definitely another question.”
“Fair enough.” He winked at her, but as familiar as the gesture might be, he didn’t have his usual, flirty expression. There was something more honest about the way he looked at her—honest enough that she knew she wasn’t going to confine her one and only question to his fondness for nutty socks. “Ask me anything?”
“Why didn’t you want to name Nick after your father?”
His smile died on his lips, and she immediately regretted asking the question.
“Never mind. I shouldn’t have—”
He held up a hand and grinned again, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “No, it’s okay. You answered me, and now it’s my turn.”
Felicity nodded. The air inside the car seemed impossibly thick all of a sudden.
“My dad wasn’t...isn’t...a very nice person. I actually don’t
know if he’s alive or dead, because I don’t have a relationship with him anymore. He verbally abused my mom when I was a kid. One minute, he’d be talking to her like a rational person, and the next, he’d be calling her horrible names. My mother didn’t have an unkind bone in her body.” Wade’s voice dipped low, quiet. Felicity could barely hear it above the muffled patter of snow on the car windows. “Until I was nine years old, all I wanted to do was protect her.”
“What happened when you were nine?”
“That’s two questions,” Wade said, a half-hearted smile tugging his lips. He shrugged one shoulder. “My dad up and left. Sometimes I wonder if he realized that the way he treated my mom just ended up bringing the two of us closer together in the end. She meant the world to me. She passed away last year, and Cap has sort of stepped in as a father figure. Not that I should need one, considering I’m a fully grown man.”
He certainly was, and he had the broad shoulders and rock-solid biceps to prove it. Neither of which Felicity should have been thinking about right then. “Everyone needs a family, Wade. No matter how old they are.”
Wasn’t that why they were sitting here, side by side, with a baby tucked into the back seat? Nick needed a family, and somehow, some way, she and Wade had stepped up. Only now was she beginning to understand why.
Wade needs this. He needs this just as much as Nick does. Her throat went tight. As much as I do.
Wade’s expression softened, and when his lips parted, ever so gently, Felicity had the feeling he was going to say something else—something important. But Nick started whimpering in his car seat before Wade could get it out.
“Duty calls,” he said, and then he slid out of the car, leaving Felicity with a lump in her throat that she wasn’t sure would ever go away.
Chapter Nine
The following morning, Wade shed his Joseph persona and resumed his regular role as an LFD firefighter.
Switching personas was more disorienting than he would have thought, probably because his “normal life” was becoming less and less normal by the day. He’d been up three times in the night with Nick, and his home no longer resembled a bachelor pad in the slightest. In the wee, pre-dawn hours, an empty baby bottle sat atop his video game console in the living room. A baby blue knitted blanket from Main Street Yarn covered his leather sofa, and a pair of Felicity’s girlie high heels were in a heap in the corner of the room.