12 Christmas Romances To Melt Your Heart

by Anthology

  “Then why did you—”

  A shrill whistle interrupted the words, and I wanted to kiss whoever did it. Logan stood at the entry to the kitchen, hands cupped around his mouth.

  “Food’s going onto the tables now. Let’s get everyone together so we can give thanks.”

  Everyone scattered, as the men rose slowly from the couches. A few minutes later, Joe sauntered over to me, and I spied Alexis talking with her dad.

  “Hey, kid. Be careful with the girl, okay? She’s only sixteen.” Last thing I needed to do was explain to Uncle Nolan how I’d let his wife’s cousin hook up with an underage girl.

  Joe scowled, but his face went red. “Nothing happened. We just talked. Geez, Trent.”

  “Just sayin’. I know what it’s like to be eighteen.” Man, did I know. I wished I could go back and undo some of the shit I’d done back then.

  “Okay, everyone.” Logan was talking again. “Happy Thanksgiving. Jude and I are both so glad everyone could be here with us to celebrate. We’re all blessed, and this is the time of year when we need to remember to give thanks.”

  The room fell silent as Logan bowed his head. “Thank you for all the people in this room. Thank you for the children who’ve been born this year, who’ve grown and stayed healthy and especially for those who haven’t given their parents and grandparents extra gray hair.” A ripple of laughter spread over the crowd. “Thank you for the men and women who’ve found love, and thank you for those of us who’re even more deeply in love than ever. Thank you for homes, for families, for food and most of all for this amazing community where we live. May we always remember where home is. Amen.”

  His final word echoed, and then Logan clapped his hands once. “Let’s eat!”

  I’d never seen so much food in my life. I loaded my plate and found an empty seat at one of the tables on the deck. The sun was bright and warm, offsetting the cool breeze blowing in from the water.

  “Kind of wild, isn’t it?”

  I almost choked on my mashed potatoes as Elizabeth swung her leg over the bench and sat down next to me. She set her plate on the table and looked out over the ocean. “I mean, we’re eating Thanksgiving dinner on the beach. Outside, at the end of November. It’s not bad, it’s just weird.”

  I managed to swallow my food. “Yeah, I guess so. It was never that cold in Georgia on Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t warm enough to eat outside. And the beach . . . we didn’t have that.”

  “I lived up north for a few years here and there.” She stabbed a piece of turkey with her fork. “I remember snow one year for Thanksgiving. I was so excited. I realized what all those holiday songs were about.”

  Part of me knew I should keep the conversation on this impersonal, weather-related level. Just like I would with anyone else here. But before I could overthink it, I heard myself asking her, “So you’re from the south?”

  Elizabeth chewed for a minute, eyes unreadable as she swallowed. “I was an Army brat. My family originally comes from Tennessee, but I lived . . . a lot of places.”

  She didn’t say it with much enthusiasm. I guessed moving around so much must’ve been tough on a kid. “Where did you live in the north?”

  “Oh, let’s see.” She cast her gaze up, as though the answers were in the sky. “We were stationed at West Point for two years when I was in elementary school, and that’s where I saw snow for the first time. And then we were in Virginia when I was in middle school, and Maryland when I was in high school. Only for one year, though, and then my dad went TDY unaccompanied to South Korea, so my mom and my brothers and I went back to Tennessee while he was there.”

  “TDY?” The acronym rolled off her tongue with ease, but I didn’t know many military terms other than what I’d heard in movies.

  “Temporary duty. Unaccompanied means he couldn’t take us.”

  “Ah, okay. Is your father still in the Army?”

  “Yep.” She didn’t want to say anymore, so I didn’t push. Hell, I knew what it was like to want to avoid certain subjects.

  “How did you—”

  “Listen, I wanted to say—”

  We both spoke at the same time, and Elizabeth laughed. “You go first.”

  “No, ladies first. Besides, yours sounded more important.”

  She sighed. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for throwing you under the bus in there. I don’t know why I did it. You had every right to turn me down. You’d just done me a big favor, and I should’ve been a little more gracious about it.” She licked some gravy from the edge of her fork, and as her tongue darted out, I felt a familiar tightening under the zipper of my jeans.

  Damn. I didn’t want to want this girl. She was sexy, no doubt. Her hair was silky as it fell over her shoulders, and her eyes were wide and luminous. That mouth . . . yeah, I could imagine doing things to that mouth. And the way her body had moved in the short skirt she’d been wearing that day in the truck—shoot me now. Another time, another place, I’d have had her on her back in the cab of my truck, the skirt pushed up around her hips and her legs wrapped around me.

  But that was another me. I’d changed, or I was trying to change. Moving to Michigan and working with Uncle Nolan was supposed to be my new start, and I’d be damned if I’d fuck it up.

  I didn’t want to hurt her, though. She might’ve looked like she had it all together, like it didn’t matter if a guy like me didn’t fall at her feet, but I’d seen the flash of vulnerability on her face, both last week in my truck and this afternoon. I probably didn’t owe her anything, but I wasn’t going to be a dick, either.

  “You were plenty gracious.” I laid my butter knife diagonally across my plate. “And it wasn’t anything you did or said. Thing is . . .” Damn. There wasn’t any way for me to say this without sounding like an idiot. “I’m kind of taking a break from girls right now.”

  Elizabeth frowned, her forehead wrinkling. “Taking a break—oh!” Her eyes went wide. “Are you—I’m sorry, are you not into, um, women?”

  “No! I mean, yes, I’m into women. I’m not gay. I don’t have a problem with it. Being gay, I mean. But I’m not.” Yeah, real smooth, buddy. “It’s actually kind of the opposite. I was sort of a little too into girls. I almost got into trouble, and it made me stop and think about what I was doing.”

  “Okay, now I’m intrigued.” She wiped her lips with a napkin and turned sideways on the bench so that her body was angled to face me. “Let me get this straight. Are you on a sex fast?”

  I blew out a breath and wished I could bury myself in the sand under the deck. “I guess you could call it that, yeah.”

  “Unbelievable.” She shook her head. “A woman decides not to have sex for a while, and men call her frigid. A guy does it, and it’s some noble quest. A sex fast.” She balled up the napkin and tossed it onto the table. “Well, I’ve been on a sex fast, too. Only I didn’t choose it. And I’m ready for it to end.”

  Shit. That’s what the other day had been about. She was reaching out for a little mindless fun, no strings attached, and she propositioned the one guy who couldn’t—or wouldn’t, rather—scratch her itch. I felt even worse.

  “I’m sorry. The funny thing is, a couple of months back, I’d have been all over that. I mean, God, you’re hot. Saying no to you wasn’t easy. But I’m really trying to make a change in my life. In who I am. Just bad timing, I guess.”

  “Bad timing.” Elizabeth laughed without much humor. “Story of my life.” She stared out over the ocean and took a deep breath. “So it’s not going to happen between us. We should at least be friends, right? You’re only going to be here for a little while, and I’ve got some time. All my single friends in town have hooked up or moved. If I’m not going to be having hot sex, I might as well have scintillating conversation.”

  I grinned. “Not sure anyone’s ever accused me of scintillating conversation, but I’d be willing to give it a try.”

  “Good. It’s a deal then. So why don’t you start by telling me what p
ut you off sex?”

  Whoa. “Jumping right into the deep end?”

  She lifted one shoulder. “I’ve never been a fan of small talk. I grew up around people who did nothing but schmooze. They’d be talking with you and looking over your shoulder for the next more-important person they could chat up. So my feeling is, why have a conversation that doesn’t mean anything?”

  “Fair enough.” I had to admire this woman who told it like it was. “I slept with a girl who took things between us to be more serious than they were. It wasn’t the first time it happened, but this time . . . it went further. She was really hurt when I told her I didn’t feel the same way she did.” There was more, of course. Jenna’s face flashed across my mind, and I winced. Much more, but I wasn’t willing to talk about that yet. Maybe I never would be ready. Some pain never went away, and some sins could never be atoned.

  “So a girl you slept with couldn’t handle a one-night stand, and that was your life-changing experience? That put you off casual sex?” Elizabeth sounded skeptical.

  I shrugged. “Maybe it was just the timing. You know, maybe I was finally mature enough for the lesson to penetrate my thick skull.”

  She nodded slowly. “When you say you were ‘a little too into girls’, you mean lots of meaningless sex, right? That means you were a real man-whore?”

  “If you want to call it that, yes, I guess so.”

  “How many? A different girl every weekend?” She leaned forward, and I caught a whiff of her hair. It smelled like sunshine and oranges.

  “Ah, sometimes. It wasn’t always sex. Sometimes just heavy making out.” But mostly it was sex. I kept that to myself.

  “Did you ever have a girlfriend? Like back in high school or whatever?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I started pretty young, and I kept moving.”

  “And no one in your family ever said anything to you? Your mom was okay with this?”

  My throat tightened. “My mom didn’t have much to say about anything in my life. She was too busy fucking up her own.” Yeah, there was some bitterness there.

  “Oh. So you weren’t close.”

  “Not exactly. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about that.” I pushed my empty plate away.

  “Okay.” She must’ve sensed something in my tone that told her I was serious about this line. “So let’s go back to your man-whoring. Did you always take them back to your place? Or did you go to theirs? Or did you do it in the dark hallway of some sleazy club?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Look, I’ve told you more than I wanted to. Can we change the subject? Let’s talk about you for a little while. Put Elizabeth under the microscope.”

  “Okay, okay.” She spread her hands between us. “Ask me anything. I’m an open book.”

  I was more comfortable with this line of conversation. “How did you end up in Florida?”

  “Oh, that’s a sad story.” She leaned her head on her hand, giving me wide eyes. “I went to college in Virginia, and then I went on to law school, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do. I figured it bought me another three years to figure it out. I got to be friends with another student, and we really hit it off. She used to come down here to visit her grandparents and loved Florida, so she talked me into moving down here with her and opening a practice together.”

  “So far, so good. Doesn’t sound that sad.”

  “Oh, just wait.” She held up a finger. “We got down here, rented an office, set up our practice. Our first day being open, we went to a bar to celebrate. Darcy—that’s my friend, my law partner—danced with a guy she met that night. And then she went home with him. And three weeks later, she told me she was marrying him. He was in the Air Force, stationed in Ohio, and six weeks after we hung up our shingle, Darcy moved up there.”

  “Holy shit. She left you with everything down here?”

  “She did. We’d gone into the practice fifty-fifty, so I had to buy her out. I’m just about finished paying her back. It’s what kept me down here—I couldn’t afford to move until I got out from under that debt.”

  “Do you want to move?” I looked around at the beach, the beautiful house, all the people who surrounded us. Looked like she had it pretty good. I wasn’t sure I’d want to leave.

  “I don’t know. Some days I think I don’t. I’ve made some friends now, and I like the weather in January and February a lot better than I like snow and ice. But I miss the change of seasons, and it kind of feels like I’m stagnating here. Going nowhere. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I do. Same way I felt in Georgia. That’s another reason I moved to Michigan.”

  “Because you needed to start over and become a reformed man-whore instead of a practicing one?” The teasing light in her eyes made me smile.

  “That’s it exactly.” I turned on the bench, lifting my plate and reaching for hers. “I think I heard someone say there’s pie inside. Can I bring you a piece?”

  Elizabeth winked at me. “Sure. If you’re not going to indulge my need for mindless sex, you might as well make yourself useful. Make it the chocolate pecan, okay? I happen to know Emmy made that, and she’s got the gift. Plus, they say chocolate’s a good substitute for sex. You know, when you’re not getting any. Like me.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Listen, if you’re going to keep talking about sex, it’s going to be hard to be your friend. A friend would be supportive and encouraging, not tempting and undermining.”

  She threw up her hands. “Fine. Just bring me the chocolate. I’ll try to keep the sexy talk to a minimum.”

  Chapter 3

  December 5th

  Elizabeth

  “I understand, Mr. Greig. I know it’s Christmas time, but I sent your first invoice in March. Your case settled last January. You haven’t paid anything, and I have expenses, too.”

  A blast of angry male voice burst out of the receiver, and I held it away from my ear, cringing. This was the part of my job I most hated. It was also the top reason I was almost definitely going to hire a secretary early next year, no matter how much paying that salary cut into my bottom line.

  “Yes, I know you didn’t plan to be sued. But you were, and you retained my services to represent you. Oddly enough, the electric company doesn’t seem to understand when I tell them I can’t pay my bill because you didn’t budget enough money to cover my fees.”

  There was a loud click on the other side of the phone, and I sighed as I hung up. At this point, I had two options: I could write off his unpaid bill, or I could farm it out to a collection agency. Neither was appealing to me, but I really couldn’t afford to let my invoices slide.

  “Tough day?”

  I looked up to the doorway of my office. Trent leaned against the wall, his worn baseball cap in one hand.

  “Unfortunately, it was a typical day.” I stretched my back, twisting in my chair. “I hate making collection calls, so I leave it for the end of the afternoon. And then I go home all mad and frustrated. Sometimes I’m forced to drink multiple glasses of wine.”

  Trent smirked. “I feel the same way, but with me it’s usually beers. Or shots of whiskey.”

  “I’d be with you there. I’m an equal opportunity imbiber.” I glanced at the clock. “Are you leaving?” The Christmas tree lot stayed open until nine o’clock during the week, and Trent worked just about every night.

  “I was supposed to work, but Uncle Nolan found out that they’re having a big Christmas light ceremony tonight on Main Street of Crystal Cove, so I’m heading down there to man a booth. I have to hand out flyers advertising the tree lot. Oh, and I’m giving away candy canes, too.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “I’d rather be here selling trees, but Uncle Nolan doesn’t want to go, and he doesn’t trust Joe or Andy to handle it. So I get the honor.” He tapped one finger against his thigh. “You wouldn’t want to go with me, would you?”

  “Me?” I wrinkled my nose. “You want to take Scro
oge into the heart of Christmas central?” I’d been candid with Trent about my feelings toward Christmas from the day he’d offered to bring me a tree for my office, free of charge. He teased me about my anti-holiday stance, but he never pushed me to change.

  Trent blew out a sigh. “You’re not Scrooge. And I don’t feel like sitting there by myself. As my one and only friend in the state of Florida, I’m pretty sure you’re required to go with me.”

  I stood up and leaned against my desk. “Hmmm. Maybe it’s not a bad idea. I mean, who knows? I might meet someone who’d be willing to help me end my sex fast.”

  “Nice.” Trent scowled. “Do you really think I want to be part of you picking up dudes?”

  I stuck out my tongue at him. “If I were picking up chicks, you’d be all over that. And you’re not interested in me, so why shouldn’t you help me find someone who is?”

  He stared me down for a solid minute and then shook his head. “If you think . . . never mind. I’m heading down there in about twenty minutes, if you want to meet me by my truck.”

  Turning, he stomped out through the foyer, and I heard the door close a second later. Shoulders slumping, I closed my eyes and dropped my chin to my chest. Over the last two weeks, I’d forged a surprising friendship with Trent Wagoner. He was more than I’d originally pegged him to be; he made me laugh, and our conversations tended to go deeper than I would have expected. I’d talked him into going to the movies with me, and I’d cooked dinner for him twice, on his rare evenings off.

  And while he never gave me any indication that he was interested in anything other than friendship, I had to admit to myself that spending time with the man without jumping his bones was getting harder and harder. When he smiled at something I’d said, I wanted to take his face in my hands and cover his lips with mine. When I saw him lifting a bundle of trees, muscles flexed, I wanted to take off his shirt and run my hands over those pecs. And don’t even get me started on that tight ass, showcased in his jeans. Yum. It’d been featured prominently in more than one of my dreams.