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

by Lisa Renee Jones

  When dates went wrong, she sometimes missed Henry, but more often she missed the guy whose name she didn’t know. She missed his minimalist conversation style, the intensity of his eyes on her, his dry sense of humor, and his kisses.

  She missed liking him. In fifteen minutes, with no good reasons at all, they’d actually enjoyed each other’s company. It was shocking how hard that was to achieve in dating. She tried to think whether there’d been another fifteen-minute interval, on all the ten-plus dates she’d been on in eleven months, when she’d believed that she and her date were both having a good time.

  Nope.

  She wrote:

  @OwenYouSomething Yes.

  His reply was almost instant.

  @Noramal Follow me and I’ll DM you

  @OwenYouSomething Done.

  And then, because her fifth-grade teacher had been fond of saying that discretion was the better part of valor:

  @OwenYouSomething How do I know you’re for real? I’ve heard from some serious weirdos.

  @Noramal He shoved another guy who tried to kiss you, after. And we ran like bats out of hell and he never asked your name.

  Because he didn’t want to know your name, a little voice in her head reminded her. And he probably still doesn’t.

  @OwenYouSomething How did you figure out who I was?

  @Noramal A friend just tweeted me to say she’d gone on FB after a year off it and seen something about it.

  @OwenYouSomething That’s crazy. I put stuff out on Twitter and FB but no one knew who he was.

  @Noramal He’s my friend Miles. Good guy. Can totally vouch for him.

  Miles, she thought. Nice name. But I have promises to keep. And Miles to go before I sleep.

  She recognized that the surge of excitement she was feeling would translate as desperation in a tweet, so she kept her response low-key.

  @OwenYouSomething I’d like to see him again.

  @Noramal Call him. Miles Shepard, 216-555-2760.

  @OwenYouSomething Seriously?

  There was a long silence at the other end, and she wondered. Whether Miles knew that Owen was tweeting her. Or whether Owen was acting on his own recognizance. The silence seemed ominous, either way.

  @OwenYouSomething He doesn’t know you’re talking to me, does he?

  @Noramal Just call him.

  @OwenYouSomething Should I not mention our little conversation?

  @Noramal Up to you.

  @OwenYouSomething I won’t get you in trouble?

  @Noramal I can take care of myself.

  @OwenYouSomething Thank you. I really appreciate this.

  @Noramal Just … be good to him.

  @OwenYouSomething You’re a good friend.

  @Noramal Let’s hope he thinks so, too.

  Amen to that, she thought. She saved the phone number to contacts, then got up, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of red wine. She stood in the circa-1970 kitchen, sipping the wine and trying to pretend that she wasn’t desperate to call him. As if there were an invisible TV audience, ready to respond with applause or a laugh track.

  She took a slug of the wine, set down the glass, and picked up the phone.

  Her thumb played over the swipe bar on the iPhone, waking it. She could call him. Right now.

  Native caution, which had been peculiarly absent on New Year’s Eve, forbade her to dial the number. Instead, she tapped open the Facebook app. Typed Miles Shepard into the search window.

  Miles Shepard. 1 mutual friend.

  No effing way. How was that possible? Social media was supposed to be the connector, and she’d spent weeks back in January trying to find him, when all along he’d been one degree of separation away. Not knowing his name had been the deal breaker, apparently.

  She clicked through, and her breath caught at the sight of Miles standing on the beach with several friends, his arm carelessly flung around another guy’s shoulder. He wore a T-shirt and board shorts and was grinning, squinting slightly into the sun. The light glinted off the water behind him. The grin made him look like a different man entirely. Someone mischievous and fun. The juxtaposition of that Miles with the dark serious one who’d kissed her so thoroughly on New Year’s Eve—

  It was sort of Oreo-esque in its awesomeness. Or like that advertisement for peanut butter cups, which claimed that peanut butter and chocolate were the best combination since Saturday and Sunday.

  Like finding out that the guy you’d been drunk sex-tweeting with was the hot guy at the bus stop.

  She flipped through some of his status updates. More photos of the beach trip with guys who turned out to be his college buddies. A kayaking trip with friends. Frequent photographs of funny signs, most of which made her giggle. A lettered roadside sign: CAMPING & ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SUPPLIES. A hacked traffic sign: PREPARE TO BE ANNOYED. Side-by-side shops: KIMBERLY’S KANDY SHOP and ROBERT P. TRUST, DENTIST.

  He’d posted several work-y updates from a conference for—she Googled it—people who ran nonprofits. She clicked on his profile. He was the executive director of a nonprofit that helped kids get three meals a day. She tried not to get all swoony about that. She wasn’t supposed to exult in his awesomeness, because he wasn’t hers in any way, shape, or form.

  He hadn’t posted a status update since last fall. Nothing too outrageously weird about that. She was a sporadic Facebook user, too. On-again, off-again, as her life got busy, sometimes not posting for as long as a year at a time.

  Their mutual friend was Stacey Heany. Nora sighed. It would have been more helpful if it had been someone she knew well. Stacey was an acquaintance from her teaching master’s program, someone she’d been friendly, but not friends, with.

  Still, Stacey knew Miles, so Nora swallowed her pride and messaged her.

  Hey, Stacey. It’s been ages—how are things with you? Weird question—you know Miles Shepard?

  The answer came back right away. miles! how do you know miles?

  Met him at a party. Sorry to be a weird stalker, but I didn’t get his name and just tracked him down and I wanted to make sure he was—I dunno, not scary.

  miles is totally not scary. but I havent been in touch with him in years. in the interim he might have become scary? but probably not, dont think he has it in him. really nice guy. college friend of mine. we hung out a lot senior year bc he was dating one of my roomies. youre interested in him?

  Yeah.

  As Nora wrote it, she had the urge to hedge her bets in some way. Cross her fingers, knock on wood. Typing it made it feel too real. As if she was committed now. To … calling, reaching out to him, whatever.

  go for it.

  I don’t even know if he’s single.

  hes the kind of guy you could just ask. straight ahead, totally. no bs.

  I will.

  report back?

  For sure!

  good luck.

  Thanks!

  She switched back to Twitter. She surveyed the DM conversation she’d had with Owen. Just call him.

  What was the worst that could happen? He could hang up on her. And the best that could happen…

  Remembering the way they’d kissed still had the power to rev her up—tightness in her chest, heat between her legs. Eleven months later. She activated the phone app, found Miles.

  She was pretty sure Owen’s reaching out to her hadn’t been at Miles’s suggestion or even with Miles’s knowledge. Which meant that her call wouldn’t be expected, and it might not be appreciated.

  But it also meant that she hadn’t invented what had happened that night between her and Miles. Someone else—Owen—had seen it, too, and believed in it enough to reach out to her.

  Regardless, she couldn’t keep going on bad dates without at least giving this a shot. The situation deserved that much. Miles deserved that much.

  She deserved that much.

  She tapped the number and held the phone to her ear.

  It rang three times, and then a voice at the other end of the line, l
ow and clipped and male, said, “Hey.”

  “Miles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is … the woman you kissed at midnight at that New Year’s Eve party?”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Much longer than the amount of time she’d spent waiting for Owen to send his next tweet. Much longer than the amount of time it had taken the seconds to fall off the New Year’s Eve clock as she’d waited to find out if Miles’s mouth would deliver on the knots of anticipation in her stomach.

  “My name’s Nora,” she said, because he still wasn’t talking. She took her phone away from her ear and looked to see if he’d terminated the call, but the minutes were ticking up. He was still there.

  “Hi, Nora,” he said finally. His voice was deeper than she remembered. She wasn’t good at pinning people’s ranges, but she suspected his would be considered a true bass. “This is … unexpected. Do you mind if I ask how you got my number?”

  “From Owen. He found me on Twitter and told me to call you.” She felt bad about outing Owen—no good deed goes unpunished—but she didn’t want Miles to think she was a crazy stalker. Even if she kinda was.

  “Figures.” There was a hint of a laugh behind it, so she guessed Owen would live another day.

  “I didn’t think about why I was calling, exactly. I just called.”

  “Okay. I can live with that.”

  He said “I can live with that” like it was a good thing. Like he was happy to have her on the phone, for whatever reason. That was the thing about him, she decided. He didn’t talk a lot. He said very little, when it came down to it. But he made things count. He said them as if he meant them. And when you’d been with a guy who meant nothing he’d said for the last nine months, that was worth something.

  “Can you talk for a little while?”

  A long hesitation, enough time for her to worry about what would happen if he said no. That would be it, right? She’d stalked him, and if he hated the idea, that would be that. No more Miles. No more fantasy of finding him and—

  She wasn’t sure what happened next in the fantasy, after she found him.

  “Yeah.”

  Relief, light in her head and chest. And then…

  Okay, smarty-pants, you’ve got him on the phone. What are you going to do now?

  “It turns out you know my friend Stacey Heany.”

  “Yeah?”

  It stood to reason that he didn’t have a much more expansive talking style on the phone than in real life. But that last “yeah” had sounded deeply suspicious. She hadn’t wanted to get his back up. She wanted to put him at ease. She wanted to make him grin the way he’d grinned in that photo on his Facebook page.

  “She said you were a straight-ahead guy.”

  She had time to get nervous before he spoke. “Did she?”

  If the sound of his voice was any indication, she wasn’t doing a good job of putting him at ease.

  “I just—I thought it would be good to make sure you weren’t a psycho.”

  He laughed, and a ripple of relief went through her. “That’s reasonable.”

  “So … I don’t know. Where are you? Are you home? What’s home for you?”

  He laughed again, a deep rumble that sent a tingle from her ear down her jawline. “I’m standing in my kitchen.”

  “A house?”

  “Yeah. A bungalow built in 1918, outside of Cleveland.”

  That was more detail than she’d expected, and she instantly changed her picture of him so he was no longer in a modern bachelor pad in an unremarkable apartment building.

  “Kitchen needs to be redone,” he added.

  She laughed. “You think about this a lot?”

  “All the time. There are cracks in the tile backsplash. The range is thirty years old. The dishwasher barely works. I play dishwasher roulette with it every night, because the display panel is broken and I hate the idea of committing it to the landfill, so I don’t really know what kind of wash I’m selecting.”

  The details felt terribly, wonderfully intimate. She liked picturing him standing over his dishwasher, a little exasperated and yet for some reason nursing it along, oddly fond of its quirk. Even the fact that he ran it every night said something about him, that he was orderly in that particular way, that he bothered with dinner and dishes despite being a bachelor—

  She hoped, anyway, that he was a bachelor. And not happily married with four children. She thought of the scene in the George Clooney movie Up in the Air when Clooney finally decides he wants to commit himself to the woman he’s been seeing on his travels and shows up at her house, only to discover that she has a family she’s been hiding from him.

  “You’re so trusting.”

  Those had been Henry’s words after she’d pulled up webmail on her laptop, where he’d accidentally left himself logged in, and, unavoidably, she’d read an email he wrote to the woman he’d been screwing behind her back. Once she’d extracted the truth about the affair and how long it had been going on, she’d demanded what anyone in her shoes would have:

  “How could you do that?”

  And Henry, willfully ignoring the intent of her words, had instead answered the practical question. “Honestly, Nor? It was like taking candy from a baby.”

  He could do it because she’d let him. Because she’d been trusting and blind, an ostrich with its head in the sand, someone who’d check to see if “gullible” had been removed from the dictionary, someone who fit every cliché of naïveté that flashed through her head as she lay in bed at night and vowed never to be such an idiot again.

  She wasn’t being an idiot now, was she?

  Pursuing a man she hardly knew because of a drunken kiss?

  Okay, clearly she was being an idiot. But she was an idiot with her eyes wide open this time, which was why she’d messaged Stacey. She knew there were potential pitfalls here, and she wouldn’t let her heart get ahead of her head. She’d guard herself more carefully. That was the lesson she’d learned from the Henry brouhaha. Because she’d be pissed if she’d felt all that hurt, borne all that loss, cried all those tears, for no reason.

  But, at the same time, she’d be pissed if Henry had made it impossible for her to give this a chance, too. If he’d taken away from her one of the things she liked best about herself: The way she always gave people the benefit of the doubt. The way she believed the best of them until it was proved that the trust was misplaced. Which it rarely was. Because, with the exception of Henry, people tended to become the people you believed them to be.

  “You’re single, right?”

  He let out a pained laugh. “Oh, yeah.”

  Straight ahead, totally. No BS. The echo of Stacey’s reassurances. “I figured. But, you know, there are guys”—my ex-hole, for one—“who wouldn’t hesitate to pick someone up at a party even if they were with someone else.”

  “I know. I’m not that guy.”

  She believed him. Sort of. Even with Stacey’s word, she believed him only provisionally. She required further evidence. Thank you, Henry. Fuck you very much.

  “You live alone?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you in your house?”

  “Apartment. Davis Square. You know where that is?”

  “No.”

  “Somerville. My kitchen needs to be redone, too. But it’s not my problem. It’s my landlord’s.”

  “I miss being able to foist everything off on my landlord.”

  “It’s a grass-is-greener thing. I wish I could hammer a nail or paint a wall or fix a toilet without asking for permission. Not,” she amended quickly, “that I’m actually handy.”

  “I was going to say, if you fix toilets, you’re my dream woman.”

  She knew it was a joke, but her face got warm, anyway.

  “I’m going to attempt to retile my kitchen this weekend.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “You might want to withhold ju
dgment on that till we see how it goes. I’ve been attempting a lot of house fix-up projects lately. Some have gone great, like replacing the vanity in my master bath. Some have gone not so great, like attempting to deal with the old caulk in my tub.”

  He pronounced “caulk” cock, and she had a Beavis and Butt-Head moment, which she kept to herself. And a quick set of visuals that she pushed out of her mind.

  “When I was prying out the old moldy stuff, I was in the tub, covered with crap, swearing at the top of my lungs, for, like, three days straight.”

  It was probably wrong—hopelessly un-feminist and objectifying—that she wished she’d gotten to see that, a dirty guy working hard to fix things.

  “The re-caulking”—re-cocking—“went better.”

  She was sure it had. Heh.

  “And when you’re not lying in tubs covered in grime and swearing? I saw on Facebook that you’re the executive director of a nonprofit getting kids access to meals? Pretty cool.”

  “I’m taking some leave right now.” Something tight in his voice alerted her that this was not his favorite topic.

  “Needed a break?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Maybe. Not right this second. It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  Silence. She could feel it stretched out, too taut, between them. “What about you? Where do you work?”

  Okay, she got it; they wouldn’t go there. Not now, not yet. But it was hard, because she wanted it all, every gory detail: the moldy caulk, the sweat and effort, the dust in his eyebrows, what he ate for dinner before he put the dishes in the balky dishwasher, every emotion that had led to his uneasy decision to take time off from his job. She wanted all of him, poured into her ear in his low voice, into the quiet closeness of this moment, so different from the rowdiness of the party. And yet not so different, because somehow even then they’d been insulated in their intimacy, the noise far away, outside them.