Jingle Balls: A Holiday Romantic Comedy Anthology

by Dylann Crush

  “Rose,” Ash said, his voice still low and sexy, but with a sharper edge to it as he spoke. “It was not for the best.”

  I had no words for that. At work I had the tough conversations, managed the difficult customers, fired employees. But in my personal life, maybe I was not used to being quite so bold. “Maybe not,” I said.

  “There was something there tonight. Something between us. The second we met,” he asserted.

  “It was just a first date,” I suggested, willing to let him spell out what I already knew, if he was brave enough to do it.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and though the silence was tense, the tension was laced with something else, something almost pleasant. It was like foreplay in a way, these long moments full of anticipation and pulled taut with possibility. “No, Rose. This was not a first date. Not for me.”

  “Not for me either,” I admitted, not quite sure what I was actually saying. Only that this had been more. Much more.

  “First dates for me are difficult,” he went on. “The women I meet generally know something about me, or infer things based on where we meet. In Alaska, they’re looking for a man I look like, but am not. A guy like the men I hire to fish on my crew. Here, they’re looking for the man my mother wants me to be. But you’re different. You weren’t looking for any man.”

  “I wasn’t,” I agreed.

  “And you found me.”

  I felt the weight of that statement. He wasn’t being coy or making a joke. And I understood the sentiment. “I think you found me too,” I whispered. “But what do we do about it? Our lives don’t exactly line up. We can’t—”

  “We don’t know what we can do,” he interrupted. “And I’m not saying it will be easy. But in my experience, the best things aren’t easy.”

  “True,” I agreed, my whole body tingling.

  “Have breakfast with me,” he suggested, and I heard a hint of uncertainty there, which was what made me completely certain this was a man I wanted.

  “Yes.” The word was out even before I thought to say it, as if my subconscious knew this was right even if the rest of my mind hadn’t caught up yet.

  “Tell me when and where.”

  God, I wanted to see him now. I wanted to tell him to come here, I didn’t want to wait through all those long hours ahead between morning and now. But PJ was asleep in my guest room. “Eight? At O’Hara’s Pancakes?”

  “Pacific Beach?”

  “Right.” Just down the street from my condo.

  “See you at eight, Rose.”

  “Okay. See you then.”

  “Sleep well,” he said.

  “You too,” I whispered. And I hung up, feeling the magic pulling at me again, lacing every second with possibility. I’d go to sleep now, and in the morning?

  Ash.

  8

  ASH

  Breakfast Magic

  I was at O’Hara’s at seven thirty. I hadn’t slept much after hanging up with Rose, but when I did, she filled my dreams. My mind pulled the few images I had of her from the short time we’d been together, and wove them into fantasies. In one, Rose was on my boat, in my cabin when I came down to grab a few hours of sleep after the crew hauled and reset the gear.

  She hadn’t spoken, but had simply beckoned me to her, peeled my clothes from my body and ridden me until I came—and then she’d vanished, filtering into the air around us like a genie. I was still hard, thinking about that dream.

  “Coffee?” the waitress wore an elf costume that made it hard not to smile. The entire place was decorated, Christmas music filtered through the bacon-scented air, and snowflakes hung in the windows. Even here in Pacific Beach where dogs and surfers filled the sidewalks, it felt like Christmas.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Shall I clear the other setting?” She asked, moving to remove Rose’s fork and coffee cup.

  “No,” I said. “I’m expecting someone.”

  And I was, every cell in my body tingling in anticipation of seeing her again.

  Twenty minutes later, I was scrolling through nonsense on my phone when the air inside the pancake house shifted, whirring to life and pelting me suddenly with energy that made me look up and around to see what had changed.

  Rose.

  She wore jeans and a long green sweater that wrapped her body, ending mid-thigh. It was tight, and looked soft, and I wanted immediately to run my hands over it. Her hair fell over her shoulder in soft waves, and those perfect lips were red. Again.

  “Rose,” I said, standing as she stepped closer.

  “Ash,” she said, looking up at me as she moved near. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

  We sat, and for maybe the first time in my life, I couldn’t stop smiling.

  But once pancakes and bacon, eggs and toast were gone, and we’d talked about everything and nothing for over an hour, Rose looked sad.

  “When do you go back to Alaska?” she asked.

  “After the holidays,” I told her. “January second.”

  She didn’t respond, only stared down at her hands on the table, where her fingers were twisting a ring in circles around her finger.

  “Rose.” She looked up at me, her expression sad. “Don’t worry about that.” I wanted to live in the now, to focus on what could happen over the next few weeks.

  “That’s what I do,” she said. “I look for potential threats, try to anticipate problems before they happen. And with you, with us, I just don’t see solutions.”

  I did, but I wasn’t ready to offer any of them quite yet. “Let’s live for today. Just for a little while. We’ll figure the rest out.”

  She had lifted her gaze to mine, and she held it now, her warm chocolate eyes seeking answers as we stared at one another. “We’ll figure it out,” she said on a sigh.

  “Okay?” I asked. It had occurred to me that she could decide things were just too uncertain, could tell me she wasn’t willing to risk it. But instead, she stood and reached a hand back to me. I took it, wrapping her small hand in my larger one, stepping away from the table with Rose at my side.

  She led me from the restaurant and along the boardwalk lining the beach without speaking. We walked slowly, holding hands and letting the cool air, the sounds of gulls crying around us, and the far horizon of the Pacific create the soundtrack around us. I wasn’t sure where we were going, but with Rose’s hand in mine, I didn’t care very much.

  We turned down a narrow street lined with trees and houses, and Rose led me up the path to a condo, two stories reaching up above the bungalows around it. She unlocked the front door and just before we crossed the threshold, she turned to face me.

  “Okay,” she said.

  And as I stepped through the door into Rose’s private world, my heart told me I’d never leave it again.

  Epilogue

  ROSE

  Making Deals with Fish

  Three Weeks Later

  Giving myself to Ash hadn’t been easy.

  Well, that’s a partial lie. Pulling him into my condo and slowly peeling the beautiful cashmere sweater from his strong shoulders, and sliding the dark jeans down his long powerful legs had been easy enough.

  He’d lifted the sweater from my body and taken me right there on the couch, though I was not a girl who was easily taken. The whole scenario had ended on the floor between the couch and coffee table, me riding him until we both hollered our releases, and then repeating the whole thing upstairs in my bedroom. That time I let him stay on top.

  It had been perfect—just as it had been almost every time between us since then.

  And these last three weeks have been perfect too.

  Ash had introduced me to his mother, and I immediately felt the weight of her expectations for him. And it was clear that while seeing him get serious about a strong Latino woman was not what she’d imagined for her only son, she was also a very warm and welcoming woman. We had become careful friends, and she had confided a bit in me about her fears and insecur
ities. Ash was right—some of them had to do with money—but he was also wrong. Most of them had to do with having no family except her son, and watching him leave time and again to risk his life in a job most people did because they had no other choice, or because they were seeking fortune. It was hard to understand why Ash did it.

  “To prove I can,” he said in answer to that very question as we lay together in my bed two days before he was going to fly back again.

  “You have nothing to prove,” I told him. “Or if you did, you just proved it to me a few minutes ago.”

  “Need me to prove that again?” he asked, pulling me against him and nestling his nose into my hair.

  “No,” I said, though it sounded good. “I need you to explain it to me. Why go risk your life over and over again when you don’t have to?”

  “Why do surfers surf?” he returned. “Why do pilots fly? Why do climbers scale El Cap without a rope?”

  “Because they have a death wish,” I said under my breath. This topic was one we’d avoided, kept tucked in the corners of our time together. But it was always there.

  He sighed and rolled me in his arms so he could look down at me, and his face was a mix of resignation and pain. “I go away so I can’t disappoint my mother here.”

  I almost laughed. Here was the biggest, strongest man I’d ever met, telling me he was worried about disappointing his mother. “Your mother isn’t disappointed,” I said. “She’s terrified you’re not going to come home.”

  He gave me a sad smile. “I know she thinks that. It’s easier not to admit to herself that I’ll never be the guy she wants me to be.”

  “And who do you think that is?” I asked.

  “My father.” The word dropped between us, dark and full of venom. Ash didn’t talk about his father much, but he had told me that his mother had never been happy with the man, and that Ash had been terrified of him.

  “Why would she want you to be like a man she didn’t like? And why would you want to be like him at all?” I pushed myself to sitting, genuinely confused. I didn’t have much family here, and I’d worked so much as an adult, the relationships I’d once had were distant now. I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t want to be him. That’s why I left,” he said, rolling onto his back and dropping his big hands over his eyes. “And Mom hated him, but he was her version of what a man should be like. She might say she doesn’t want me to be like him, but then she spends all her time forcing me into suits and dragging me to the country club.”

  “Maybe because that’s all she knows,” I suggested. “Your mother is a tentative woman. I don’t really see her changing her life drastically just because your dad is gone. She’s just following familiar patterns, clinging to what she knows.”

  “Maybe I should take my mom fishing,” Ash joked.

  “Maybe not in Alaska, but . . . Yeah.”

  He dropped his hands to stare at me. “You want to see Caroline Bailey with bait in her hands on a boat?”

  “You’re taking me too?”

  “We are not going fishing.”

  I reached for my phone and found a charter fishing service. “Let’s go fishing, Ash. Today.” I couldn’t have told you why this idea stuck in my mind the way it did, or why it felt like the right thing, but when the three of us were on a fishing boat, leaving San Diego Harbor later that morning, I knew it was perfect.

  Caroline sat at one side of the boat, her huge sunglasses covering her face and a huge hat on her head. But the thing that convinced me this was right was the way she was looking at her son, an enormous smile on her face.

  “Ash has never taken me fishing,” she told me as I sat beside her.

  Ash was busy chatting up the captain, so it wasn’t until later that he noticed how different his mother was out here on the boat. Gone was the uncertain, tentative woman who floated from room to room in the mansion her husband had left her in. The woman on the boat was laughing heartily, drinking a can of beer as the captain told her a story about a group of golfers who had decided fishing was their real calling.

  “She’s so different out here,” he said, coming to sit beside me. “I would never have expected it.”

  I nodded at him, joy spreading through me at his nearness, his happiness. “I think at some point we trade places a little bit,” I said. “The adults raise us as kids, and we live in their worlds. But when we’re grown, if we want to keep them close, it’s our turn to show them our worlds, the ones we were able to make because of their guidance, their care.”

  He leaned close to me and wrapped an arm around my waist. “You are the wisest woman I’ve ever met, Rose Gonzalez.” And after planting a kiss on my cheek, he took both my hands in his and slid off the bench, dropping to a knee in front of me.

  Caroline turned just in time to see this happen, and a hand flew to her mouth. She tapped the captain to turn and see too.

  “I never thought I’d find someone I really wanted to be with,” Ash said as everything inside me shook. “I never thought I’d find a woman who understood me, who challenged me, who encouraged me and with whom I would want to forge new adventures every day.

  “But you, Rose . . .” he paused, and I could see him struggling with emotion as he said the next words. “I love you. I know it’s all too fast, and it’s crazy. But I also know it’s right. Rose, will you marry me?”

  He was right. It was too fast. And it was crazy. And it was right. “Yes,” I said.

  Caroline shrieked and came across the deck to embrace us both when we’d finished kissing. She and I were both crying, and the captain was busy digging in one of the cupboards up front for something.

  “What are you doing?” Caroline asked him.

  He pulled out a notebook, the pages flapping in the breeze. They were covered with marks, like he was keeping score. He flipped to a half-filled page and made another mark. “That’s three hundred and six,” he announced.

  “Three hundred and six what?” Ash asked, his arms tight around me.

  “Proposals on this boat. It’s why I renamed her the Deal Sealer.”

  As we motored back into the harbor that evening, Ash’s arm around me and the warmth of his body pressed to my side, I dared to ask the question that had been on my mind all day, and for the weeks that had passed. “Are you still leaving in two days?”

  He looked down at me fondly, and then leaned in, kissing the top of my head. “I’ve asked my substitute to stay on for the season,” he said. “And I’ve listed the boat for sale.”

  I pulled away so I could see his face. If he looked upset, or sounded sad, there was no way I could let him do it. But he looked serene and peaceful as he gazed down at me. “You’re staying?”

  “I’m staying.”

  And as we drew up into the slip, surrounded by the merry bobbing of masts and lights all around us, I kissed my fiancé and squeezed his mother’s hand. “I didn’t know fishing could be so life changing.”

  “Someday I’ll take you to Alaska,” Ash said. “That’s real fishing.”

  “Ash,” I told him, “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  Also By Delancey Stewart

  The Singletree Series:

  Happily Ever His

  Happily Ever Hers

  Shaking the Sleigh

  Second Chance Spring

  The MR. MATCH Series:

  Book One: Scoring the Keeper’s Sister

  Book Two: Scoring a Fake Fiancée

  Book Three: Scoring a Prince

  Book Four: Scoring with the Boss

  The Kings Grove Series:

  When We Let Go

  Open Your Eyes

  When We Fall

  Open Your Heart

  Christmas in Kings Grove

  The STARR RANCH WINERY Series:

  Chasing a Starr

  THE GIRLFRIENDS OF GOTHAM Series:

  Men and Martinis

  Highballs in the Hamptons

  Cosmos and Commitment

  The Girlfriends of
Gotham Box Set

  STANDALONES:

  Let it Snow

  Without Words

  Without Promises

  Mr. Big

  Adagio

  The PROHIBITED! Duet:

  Prohibited!

  The Glittering Life of Evie McKenzie

  About Delancey Stewart

  I'm Delancey Stewart - contemporary romance author! My books run the gamut of settings and setups, but they always deliver humor, heart and heat. It's a guarantee.

  I write from my home in Denver, CO, where I manage a household full of boys and men. Okay, only one man. The hubs. But two boys. I mean, three if you count the hubs. (You see why I do words and not numbers. I was told there'd be no math in this bio. Someone lied.)

  I grew up in California and have had more jobs than anyone on earth (personal trainer, pharmaceutical rep, copywriter, tech writer, marketing director, wine seller, elementary school teacher... I'm not kidding. The list. It goes on.) But the one I love the most is writing, in part because I get to meet people who love books and stories as much as I do! Please don't hesitate to get in touch to say hello, and don't forget to join my newsletter!

  Find me at www.delanceystewart.com.

  Part XX

  Nuts About You

  By Sylvie Stewart

  About… Nuts About You

  Gunner Nix is God’s gift to baseball, which naturally turns me into Satan’s gift to awkwardness.