by Ember Flint
CONTENTS
A Holly Jolly Deal
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
Epilogue 2
A Forever Safe Christmas
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A Holly Jolly Deal
By EMBER FLINT
Wall Street financial wizard Christopher Winters might be the undisputed ruler of every stock market he plays in on the planet, but behind the ice-cold tough facade and the brainy bravado, he keeps hidden a heart that hasn’t belonged to him in fourteen years and his charming smiles never reach his eyes.
He was lucky to meet his one true love early in life, but there’s a problem: she has never seen him as anything more than her nerdy childhood friend.
Now every year in December he gets to spend an entire week in close quarters with her, since their families are tighter than ever, relaxing in the snowy Aspen by occupying every waking moment obsessing about what he can’t have, avoiding awkward moments all over the place and being constantly scolded by his matchmaking mother about how bad it is of him to insist on being single while they all celebrate Christmas together.
Isn’t that nice?
Hope Snow loves the Season to be Jolly with all her heart. Every year she can’t wait to leave San Francisco and the fancy art dealing world behind to go spend time with her family and the Winters during their traditional 7-days-of-Total-Christmas-holiday in their usual frosty paradise.
The best part is that she gets to see Chris, her dearest friend in the whole world, but, of course, there’s also a worst part and that is being constantly nagged by her mom about finding the one, settling down and having half a ton of babies, as if she needs a yearly-reminder about how broken she must be for being unable to fall in love!
Not this year, though.
She has a plan this time around or better yet: she has a deal in mind and the only thing she needs is for Chris to play along.
And Christopher?
Well, he loves her too much to refuse, but how far can you push a man in love before his control finally snaps?
Dear Reader:
This is a standalone, No-cheating and HEA-guaranteed sensually-sweet holiday novella that features an obsessed OTT Alpha at the end of his twinkling-lights-rope, a sassy but totally clueless curvy heroine who’s been waiting under the mistletoe all her life for her first kiss and plenty of naughty times that would make the baddest of Santas blush.
These two may have no idea of what’s going on in their hearts, but oh boy: when they do catch up, even the snow-capped Aspen gets tropical ho-ho-hot, so you might want to ditch the hot cocoa in favor of some icy beverage while you read this, fair warning!
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Ember Flint
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. To request permission, contact the author.
Note from the Author: this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes.
The use of actors, artists, movies, TV shows and song titles/ lyrics throughout the book is intended for a storytelling purpose only and should in no way be seen as advertisement. Trademark names are used in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.
Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental. Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all sexually-active characters in it are represented as 18 or over. Also, in real life, remember: always safety first.
Cover design by: Ember Flint – Pink Diamonds’ Waterfall Designs
Edited by: New Wave Romance
To those of you who believe in the greatest Christmas miracle of all and also the only one that last all through the year: love.
Chapter 1
HOPE
‘All I want for Christmas’ by Mariah Carey is playing softly in the background as I focus on the direction of the strokes on the portion of the antique plein air landscape I’m examining.
I study the nuances and the style of the oil painting carefully until I’m satisfied it’s not an original Monet; though the broken color technique is exquisitely executed and certainly classifies this work as pure Impressionism, there are unmissable differences that can easily tell a trained eye we’re not in the presence of a re-discovered, long-lost treasure, but only of a very beautiful homage paid to a master. Definitely not worth the ten million dollars asking price. Too bad: my boss will be disappointed.
I put away the magnifier and seat back with a sigh.
I’ve got no more excuses not to get to the video-message that’s been sitting in my email account for the last two days.
Yep. Video message. Not email, not voicemail, but an actual video message. My mom, the Christmas maniac, upgraded her brand of crazy and pulled out all the stops this year; her intent is always the same: get us all to overdose on holiday cheer in preparation for our ‘Seven-Days-Of-Total-Christmas-Holiday’.
My father and his best friend, Daniel Winters, are both only sons and they have been more than brothers for each other since they met in second grade. They got in business together, opening their own construction company early in their twenties and worked side by side until about two years ago when they retired and left Snow & Winters Construction to those amongst their children who were willing to follow in their footsteps.
Another thing they did was marry two best friends, so it was a no-brainer for us all to spend most of the major holidays together for as long as I can remember.
When I was maybe three or four, they decided we should all leave San Francisco to celebrate Christmas with real snow and all the bells and whistles this particular holiday should have and does have anywhere but here in California.
They picked Aspen as a destination and we all had a blast, so much so that it became an annual tradition we haven’t missed once even though between the two ‘clans’, as my dad is fond of calling us, there are thirty-three of us now.
I huff to myself, glaring at the screen of the iPad propped on its little easel on my desk.
It’s not that I’m one of those Grinch-wannabes who doesn’t like the ‘Season to be Jolly’ and I’m not one to catch the infamous Holiday Blues around this time of the year, I actually freaking love Christmas and impatiently start to wait for it as soon as October kicks-in.
But there’s a but, or at least there’s been one for the last five years or so since my mother got in her head that ‘I need to settle down’. I’m the oldest of five siblings and while they’re all married and laden with kids, I’m stuck in a perpetual state of singledom —or singledoom according to some— that has been driving my mom up the wall since I turned about twenty-three or so.
We all still live in the same city and are a pretty tight-knit family so her nagging used to be a constant of every single one of our gatherings, until I threatened to move to Antarctica if she di
dn’t stop and my father put his foot down and told my mom to limit her torture to a single chosen occasion out of each year.
I guess I should consider myself lucky she actually listened to him, but I don’t have to be happy she decided to outsmart us all by picking the one family activity and or celebration that has the longest duration so that she could cram a year-worth of matchmaking and whining about my being alone into a single occasion, yes, but one that lasts seven days.
I shouldn’t be surprised she played the rule against me, she used to be a lawyer after all.
We both got something out of the deal, though.
I earned the right to be left alone about my romantic choices —or better yet, the lack of them in my life— for a year and she gets to matchmake me to death for seven days straight with no chance of escaping her with restrictions like no TV, no cell phones —unless it’s an emergency— no internet, about a million of family-activities packed into every hour of every day of our stay there, and snow all over the place slowing me down if I ever manage to outrun her.
Now, most people would think that’s a small price to pay for freedom and that I’m the clear winner here, since three-hundred and fifty-eight days are obviously more than the seven she gets, but those people don’t really know Noelle Bridge-Snow.
I pick up the tablet and stare at the thumbnail of the video. If I know my mom, she has already started her ‘please make me a grandma, daughter dear, campaign’ like she doesn’t have enough grandkids already.
I hit play and I can’t help but smile as the camera —probably held by my long-suffering father who loves my mom too much not to let her have her way— pans over to a scene that could easily have been plucked from a Hallmark Christmas movie.
My mom is sitting in an overstuffed armchair in front of a lit fireplace — even though we have had a temperature ranging from 70 °F to 75 °F all week. She’s wearing a Santa hat and a Christmas sweater that actually reads ‘Seven-Days-Of-Total-Christmas-Holiday’ spelled out in snowflakes made of white tiny twinkling lights.
The little kids from both families, all fourteen of them, ranging from six-years to four-month-old, are surrounding her, some sitting in front of her on a fluffy white rug —that I know for a fact she must have bought for the occasion, since it certainly doesn’t belong in a Californian living room—, some sitting on the arms of her chair. All of them are wearing the same sweater and green elves’ hats.
I burst out laughing.
They are too damn cute for words, but this is a bit much even for someone who loves Christmas as much as I do.
As I suspected, mom immediately launches on her spiel, cuddling my baby nieces, nine-month old Lyssa and four-month-old Molly, in each of her arms as she speaks.
“Hello and happy holidays, Hope,” she says.
Whoa. She went for personalized versions even, that doesn’t bode well for me.
I wonder what she said to the rest of my siblings. I’m guessing they got off easy, since they have all provided their quota of babies already.
“Ho-ho-ho! Happy holidays, Aunt Hope” the passel of kids — or at least the ones who know how to talk— choruses.
I shake my head, smiling at how adorable they look and at how devious my mom is to use them to do her biddings.
She reminds me about what’s gonna happen in only a week time.
As if I could ever forget that December twenty-two, otherwise known as D-Day in the Snow/Winters clans, is fast approaching, and come hell or high water, everybody is expected at the Frosted Ridge Ski Resort in Colorado for our annual Snow/Winters holiday get-together.
She passes Molly and Lyssa off to Potter and Kathleen, who are the two oldest at respectively six and five-year-old, and then my sister’s four-year-old twins, Avery and Francis make a big show of passing to their grandma a rolled and ribboned parchment.
Man, she went all out.
The kids are all being so quiet and well behaved, particularly the twins, that my sister Holly doesn’t call Rosemary’s babies for nothing, that knowing her I’m sure she must have conned them into obeying her by letting them have in one sitting more candy canes and popcorn they normally would be allowed to have in a whole year.
She starts to read a list of stuff I’m supposed to bring along to make our Snow/Winters holiday special.
I nod along as she has the kids rattle off innocuous items, like presents, warm clothes and candies and abstract stuff like love, laughter and Christmas cheer, but my jaw falls on the floor when she has little Sandra, who is all of two, remind me that it would be ‘extra special’ if I got Santa to bring them a new uncle for Christmas.
I roll my eyes. “What the fuck, Mom? That’s low,” I mumble to myself.
I interrupt the video just as my nieces and nephews start to sing about having a ‘holly jolly Christmas’ and stand up to go scowling out the window of my office.
Why can’t she leave me alone for at least one of these vacations I’ll never understand!
For once I would love to go there, celebrate the holiday in peace with my dear ones and have my empty personal life left unmentioned.
It’s hard enough that I know in my heart something must be wrong with me without being reminded about it yearly.
But maybe It’s my fault since I’ve never told mom it hurts my feelings whenever she talks about me starting to ‘seriously look’ for someone and then think about having a family of my own.
As if I need a yearly reminder about how broken I must be for being unable to fall for someone.
She thinks I’m single because I’m a workaholic and that I put my career above everything else and while it’s true I love my job, particularly since I left Sotheby's and the general auction houses’ world behind and started working as a free-lance art dealer for a single private collector, but I can’t blame the lack of romance in my life on it like my mom would want me to.
The truth is that I’m somewhat defective.
I don’t know how else to explain it.
I’m a twenty-eight-year-old woman who’s not only never been kissed, I’ve never been in love, not even a little and not even once.
There really must be something wrong with me.
When I was in middle school, I remember my girlfriends sighing as they daydreamed about this or that boy, and then in high school they were all excited for their homecoming dances, their first kisses, their first dates and first everything, while I stood back and never felt a thing.
At first I was honest about it with my closest friends, I was too naive to think they would find it weird, but then when they started to look at me funny by the time I was out of high school, I simply stopped talking about it.
I do have eyes, so I have found plenty of men attractive over the course of my adult life, but I’ve never had feelings for even a single one of them. I must be emotionally stunted or something when it comes to romantic relationship.
I haven’t talked about this in years, but I remember that whenever I did, my friends would get this blank look on their faces and after a while I just gave up, it wasn’t like I could make sense of it anyway.
I’m just… different, I guess.
Most people would have probably gotten over themselves already and went out on a date at some point, just to get rid of their V-card and be done with it, but I could never do it.
That’s the weirdest part about it, actually.
I know I’m a romantic at heart and the thought of sharing something as intimate as a kiss with someone I didn’t have feelings for has always rubbed me the wrong way, I’ve always wanted to be in love, truly, it’s just that it has never happened to me.
Not even my sister Holly, who’s about as the closest friend I have right now, knows about it, she could never understand: she fell in love at first sight with her husband when they were nineteen and they have been inseparable for the last six years.
I wish for once I could actually go back to how things were before my m
other started her ‘let’s get Hope married, bare-foot and pregnant’ crusade.
I remember I couldn’t wait to leave San Francisco and the sometime too fancy art-dealing world behind, to go spend some quality time with my parents, my siblings and all their kids and the Winters too.
Especially Christopher, Daniel’s oldest son.
I smile thinking about him as I hug myself, my eyes trained on the street ten floors below, all decked up in Christmas lights and green and red streamers.
Chris and I used to be so close, then something happened.
I still don’t know what it could have been.
Maybe it was nothing, though.
Maybe we just grew apart as we grew older, or it was the actual physical distance between us when he moved to New York City that made us transition from ‘best friends’ to ‘old friends’.
We’re just a year apart and I was a total tomboy growing up, so we did everything together, even slept in the same bed until we were about fifteen.
I giggle to myself thinking about the fun we used to have every summer as soon as school was out and we got on our bikes, and then every year in Aspen during our families’ gathering.
How we played in the snow until we were freezing, how hard he used to make me laugh…
I still remember the last time we were like that.
We were there, in the living room of one of the cabins our dads had rented out, everybody had already gone to bed, but we were still awake, sitting in front of the roaring fireplace, talking about our dreams, our hopes…
All of a sudden Chris had gotten very serious.
It looked like he wanted to say something, but then didn’t.
He pulled his hand away from mine.
I never got to hold it again after that night.
I sigh.
Just normal boy/girl stuff, I guess.
