Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “I’ll make the tea and roll napkins or something.” She grins. “I can teach you to cook.”

  No. She can’t teach me to cook. But she’s taught me a lot about Damion.

  A few minutes later Dehlia leaves me in the sports center, and I watch Damion laughing and joking with a group of ten teenage boys. He glances my way. Our eyes meet and he sets down his paddle and walks toward me, and I have only one thought: I’m falling in love with this man. No. I don’t care if it’s too soon. This is Vegas, after all. I love him.

  He stops in front of me, lacing his fingers with mine.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “She told you.”

  “Yes. She told me. Why—”

  “I still can’t talk about it. I know it’s crazy—it’s fifteen years ago—but I still get … just … can’t.”

  “You are the most incredible person.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yeah, you are. And I’m going to spend as much time as you let me making sure you know it and showing you in any way I can.”

  “Just be with me, Kali. That’s enough.”

  “I am. I am with you.”

  He strokes hair from my eyes. “You know what you can do for me now?”

  “What?”

  “Help me convince these boys they aren’t ever going to beat me at Ping-Pong.” I laugh at his change of mood. “I bet I can.”

  “So you think you want to play me?”

  “Oh, yeah. I want to play you.” And we aren’t talking about Ping-Pong.

  “Game on, baby. Game on.” He drags me toward the tables, and, indeed, I think: Game on.

  Part Twelve

  The truth will set you free…

  Damion and I spend every second of every day we possibly can together during the next week. The charity fund-raising poker tournament finally arrives and is a huge success. We close the day with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar take home, and neither of us can wait to tell Dehlia. Damion calls her and invites her to dinner, then we head to his room—which has really become my room, too—to shower and change out of our work clothes.

  I head to the fridge of his full kitchen and grab a soda. “Can I ask you something?”

  He leans on the bar across from me. “Since when do you ask if you can ask anything?”

  “I know this event raised a lot of money, but it can’t be enough to support the shelter. It’s a huge facility, and Dehlia has a staff.”

  “I told you,” he says shortly. “I took care of it.” He turns and walks away, and I blink after him, shell-shocked at his sharpness.

  I set the soda down and follow him, finding him on the patio. I take one look at the way he’s leaning his hands on the wall, chin tucked to his chest, and I go to him.

  Gingerly, I settle my hand on his back. “Hey.”

  He lifts his head and looks at me, storm clouds overtaking the green of his eyes. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay,” I say cautiously.

  He pushes off the wall and scrubs his jaw. “You know how I said I handled the mob here at the casino?”

  Mob? Are we really talking about the mob? “Yes.”

  “There’s a guy I know from the shelter. He was there the day my mother died. He’s high up in the mob in Vegas now. I used my connection to him to get the mob out of the casino.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “I also used his love for Dehlia to get the facility funded. He donates a ridiculous amount of money every year. Blood money—I know it is. But, damn it, he’s doing one thing in his life right. One thing.”

  “I’m … confused about how I feel about it.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  I wrap my arms around his neck. “Then we’ll be confused together.” And I dare to take a risk. “Damion. I—”

  His phone rings, and he kisses me. “Hold that thought.” He sighs. “Terrance. Things are heating up with the investigation on the breach of security.”

  He takes the call and my moment is lost, but I vow to get it back.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving eve morning, I greet Dana—who has long since figured out that Damion and I are seeing each other—with a smile. “Where’s Mr. Ward?” she asks, glancing around the corner, still just as nervous with him as ever.

  “In a meeting. Relax. It’s a half day. You probably won’t see him at all.”

  She sighs. “Oh, good.” Then looks guilty. “I really can’t say that to you anymore, can I?”

  “Of course you can. He’s still intense.”

  She laughs, and I head to my desk to work through a stack of reports Damion has me compiling on the different properties. Come noon, I haven’t heard from him, and I dial Maggie to see what time she’s heading to the shelter tomorrow, but I get her voice mail.

  Another hour later, Dana and I wish each other a happy holiday. As I step onto the elevator to head to HR, I think of how much I like Dana. It was incredibly kind of her to want to find Natalie’s pictures for her. Sadly, though, Natalie never deserved Dana’s concern.

  I’m stepping off the elevator when my cell rings, and it’s Damion. “This security thing is blowing up. The ringleader of the security breaches was a management-level employee at one of the other properties. A dozen employees have been arrested for a plot to steal from the casino, including Natalie.” He hesitates.

  “What? What aren’t you saying?”

  “Maggie is one of them.”

  I stop walking and lean against the wall. “Oh, God. No. Damion. I’m sorry.”

  “Money makes people crazy.”

  I think of the woman who bribed him, of how that must live in his mind. “I don’t want your money. You know that, right?”

  “Kali, baby, you’re the one thing I’m sure of, and that’s good right now. It’s really good.”

  “Damion, I … I …”

  “Me, too. Me, too. We’ll translate that later.”

  I smile sadly, because I know how much he’s hurting. “Sooner rather than later. Can I come to you?”

  “No. I don’t want you in this. I’ll call you later and then I just want to lock ourselves away and forget this shit for the rest of the night.”

  “Yes. I’ll be here. Call me.”

  * * *

  At nearly seven o’clock, Damion has checked in with me several times but doesn’t seem close to being home. Home, I think, looking around his suite. I wonder if we shouldn’t get a real home. He’s never had that. Ever. I want him to have that.

  Another hour passes, and when my cell rings this time, it’s Terrance. “We need to talk.”

  My gut knots. “Why don’t I like how that sounds?”

  “Heads up: Natalie told Damion that you were in this, too, and that you were going to write a tell-all piece and expose him for what he is.”

  “Oh, God. No. It’s a lie.”

  “I believe you, and I think he does, too, but he’s had a hell of a day.”

  I remember him grabbing my hand and telling me no recordings. He’s going to be suspicious. People have lied to him. I’ve been lied to. I know what that feels like.

  “Kali, are you there?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He left the police station about an hour ago.”

  “I have to go.” I hang up and dial Damion. He doesn’t answer. I race for a drawer and rip away my robe and shove on jeans and a tank top, slide on my Keds. I don’t have a car, since I let go of my rental, so I decide to take a cab. I race for the door and stop. Where the heck am I even going? He isn’t at the police station. I dial Dehlia to discover he’s not at the shelter, either.

  The door buzzes and opens, and a weary Damion appears, dropping his briefcase on the floor. I launch myself at him and throw my arms around his neck. “I would never write a tell-all about you. I told her I’d investigate before I met you, when she told me a horror story. The minute I met you I knew she was lying. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. And I love you. And I think we should g
et a house that is a home and get away from work all the time. And—”

  He wraps his arm around me and kisses me. “I didn’t believe her.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. I told you. I’m sure of you. Of us, Kali. I love you, too.”

  My heart warms. “You do?”

  “Yes. I do. And we’ll get a real home on one condition.”

  “Condition?”

  “That you marry me. Be my wife, and neither of us will ever be alone again.”

  My heart swells. “I would be honored to be your wife.”

  He scoops me up and carries me to the bed, settles me on the mattress, and then braces his elbows above me. “Happy Thanksgiving, Kali.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Damion.”

  PHOTO: © DIEGO HARRISON

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author LISA RENEE JONES is the author of the highly acclaimed Inside Out Trilogy, which has been sold to more than twelve countries for translation, with negotiations in process for more; it has now been optioned by STARZ Network for a cable television show, to be produced by Suzanne Todd (Alice in Wonderland).

  Since beginning her writing career in 2007, Lisa has published more than thirty books, with publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Avon, Kensington, Harlequin, NAL, Berkley, and Ellora’s Cave, as well as crafted a successful indie career. Booklist says that Jones’s suspense truly sizzles with an energy similar to FBI tales with a paranormal twist by Julie Garwood or Suzanne Brockmann.

  Prior to publishing, Lisa owned a multi-state staffing agency that was recognized many times by the Austin Business Journal and also praised by Dallas Women Magazine. In 1998 LRJ was listed as the number-seven growing women-owned business in Entrepreneur magazine.

  Lisa loves to hear from her readers. You can reach her through her website, and she is active on Twitter and Facebook daily.

  Snowfall

  Mary Ann Rivers

  For the late, legendary Keith Barnes, who on the first day of Honors Biology my senior year, handed out a huge mimeographed piece of paper with the entire metabolic pathway of glucose in vertebrates and boomed, “There are no secrets here!” You also had poetry on the walls of your classroom, and so I believed you, and there weren’t.

  Christmas

  This is the time of year we want most to tell the people we love that we’re okay.

  I think that’s why we get on ladders and hang lights from the tallest eaves of our houses, from the very tops of trees.

  It’s to get some light in front of the darkness, to tell the whole world that we’ve made it, and that these lights, way up here? That’s what we think of the New Year, what’s coming—it’s all going to be light and joy and flame in the blackness and none of us have any reason to be afraid.

  All those carols we loved as kids?

  Now, they make us cry, because to sing them, to hear them, to pass a flame candle to candle while the lyrics come easy, is to acknowledge everything that has come since childhood.

  The darkness and the light.

  My favorite holiday is Christmas, mostly because it is the one time of year I come up for air and my mom is always there, waiting for me with a big Frasier fir wrapped in tinsel and lights.

  There are always piles of presents and the rule is you can’t get anyone anything they actually need, presents are for the most frivolous wants possible—a subscription to a champagne-of-the-month club, a turquoise pendant carved to look like a frog, a prism to hang from the kitchen window so washing dishes can happen inside a rainbow.

  We love Christmas, my mom and I.

  We spend it with each other and anyone else we love and can lure with impractical presents, tinsel, and lights into our tiny home. Sometimes there were boyfriends, blushing and overwhelmed. Always, our friends. As often as she could coax them, her parents.

  We even have our own little legend that anyone you’re angry with, at cross-purposes with, has misunderstood or misunderstands you, if you make up with them at Christmas, you’ll have love the whole next year.

  I knew, even before I finally left home after earning my PhD in Microbiology and accepting a postdoctorate position as a research scientist far away from home, that I’d always spend Christmas with my mom.

  No matter what happened, or what was going on, what either one of us was dealing with, or who, we’d spend as much of the holiday together as we could.

  We share the same philosophy, which is that whatever it is you’re doing, you do for love. Your work, the friendships you extend, the person you fall for and hope is the one—start with love.

  Even the hard things, the things that seem impossible.

  I’m a scientist, a microbiologist, and my very favorite slide is Staphylococcus aureus Gram-stained, its glowing crystal violet under a very modest 1,000x magnification.

  In my work, I’m surrounded by some of the rarest culture samples of bacteria in the world, with some of the most sophisticated methods at my bench to look at them, but my favorite are still those perfectly common purple spheres.

  Staph was the very first bacterium I ever saw, bent over my Swift Optical in AP High School Biology. My face got all hot while I slowly adjusted the stage, then the coarse focus, then, when all I could see was still a blur and I tried to figure out which eye to squint and which one to open and why I kept seeing my own eyelashes, I cranked the fine focus in frustration and then—

  Oh.

  Me and staph, love at first sight.

  I’ve been lucky in love.

  As a little girl, I loved school. I loved figuring things out.

  I loved the books, the other kids, and my teachers.

  My mom raised me on her own, and because she was still a kid herself, she was my first best friend, and we did everything together. She taught me about friendship, and how to overcome some of the worst kinds of challenges. Because she had to get a GED and work her way through college with a baby and a little kid, when I was in college and ready to see the world, she was too, and we traveled together.

  When she told me I could do anything I wanted, I believed her.

  She knew, because she did everything she wanted, and did it all with a kid.

  I love my work.

  It’s not easy to be a woman in the sciences, but ever since I fell in love with my microscope and the world I could see through it, I was determined.

  Test scores and my love of school meant I had choices when I graduated from high school, but I chose the University of Washington, in my own hometown, because they had the best bench science for their graduate students, and even as a college freshman, I had my eye on those labs.

  Just before I left home in August, left Seattle, left everything familiar and well explored, my mom took me to breakfast and asked why I wanted to be a microbiologist.

  It’s not that she isn’t proud of me.

  In fact, she’ll tell anyone who will listen about how I was on a design team in graduate school that integrated a special camera in a particular kind of electron microscope, how we had captured a poorly understood step in the process of phagocytosis.

  She’ll go on and on about that, like I won an Oscar for it.

  It’s that she really wanted to know, she wanted to know before I moved away from her, left everything I knew behind.

  My mom is connected like that, she wants to understand why people do what they do and love what they love. She writes poems, love poems, poems about all kinds of love.

  If I was willing to move two thousand miles away from my mom, from the sea and the mountains, from the view I had always seen through every window, she wanted to understand, and I wanted her to.

  I love her, and I love my home, and my friends and the work I’ve done here, but I needed to explain to her how it wasn’t that my world wasn’t enough, it was that my love of my home had showed me how much more of the world there was that I hadn’t seen.

  The possibility that there was even more to know, and to love.

  “What is it about it that
makes you so happy, Jenny?” she’d asked over coffee, the very last day before I moved from Seattle to Lakefield, Ohio, where one of the biggest bacteriological laboratories was housed within the biological-sciences campus of Lakefield State University. “Tell me how it makes you so happy and maybe I won’t miss you so much.”

  I had looked out over the water trying to find the words so she would understand, because I knew she absolutely wanted to, and my mom, a poet, was all about words. “It changes the way you see the world. Like—so I see, say, the sound.”

  “Puget Sound?” My mom had leaned way over to listen close.

  “Yeah. Just like it is now, steel blue and kind of choppy and it’s totally beautiful, I know because you’ve written a million poems about this exact view.”

  “I have. It is beautiful.”

  “So I see it, just like today, beautiful and huge and majestic. But then, I get to thinking about how it’s a little cold today. So I wonder how this changes the relative temperature of the water in the sound, and I imagine phytoplankton and zooplankton, and try to remember everything I know about cyanobacteria, because they’re so awesome and this pretty blue-green color. So, temperature, is what I was saying. I think, if I took a sample right now and did a simple wet mount, what would be there? What if I took another sample on a warmer day? And then what if I did that for a year?

  “Then when I look at the sound again, it’s still all huge and steel blue and majestic, but it’s also about 2 million other colors, and the other colors move. They move around and they are so busy. Even though I’m not even in marine sciences, I think that. I even think about what they are doing in marine sciences, with virus studies and the really cool paper I read about it and how viruses explain how life got started in the first place.”

  “Wow,” my mom had said. “You see a lot.”

  “Exactly. If I’m a microbiologist, I can look at the view and see the water and the origin of life, all at the same time. It’s like getting rewarded, by the amazing view, for understanding exactly where it came from.”