Maggie Shayne - An Enchanted Season

She blinked. “I don’t—”

“He put his initials inside. They’re there. This is the same hat.”

She pressed her fingers to her lips.

“I think it’s a sign. I mean, how could my dad’s hat make its way from Flint, Michigan, to here? Why would it end up with you? Unless…somehow, we were…meant to…”

“Meant to…what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But I know I want to find out.” He handed her a card, in a large envelope, and she opened it. A couple of kids, a boy and a girl, building a snowman was on the front. She opened it and read the inside. “You’re why I love Christmas,” it read.

Her tears spilled over, and she flung herself into his arms.

“I want to buy this house,” he told her, holding her close. “But not to flip it. I want us to fix it up together, and spend time here together, and just…just see where things lead.”

“You mean you don’t know where they’re going to lead?”

He stared into her eyes, searching them. “Do you?”

She smiled. “Yeah. We’re going to live happily ever after.”

He smiled slowly as he lowered his mouth to hers. “Okay.”

“I JUST HAVE ONE QUESTION,” WILL THORNTON SAID CASUALLYas he stood on a ladder and nailed fresh evergreen swags above Charlotte Murphy’s front door.

“What?” Charlotte dragged her gaze off the seat of Will’s jeans with a significant amount of effort, refusing to feel guilty. Lord, Will was slow sometimes. Her arms were straining under the weight of the boughs she was holding for him and her feet were getting cold in a hurry. Checking out the view he provided at eye level from his position on the ladder was fair compensation for the discomfort she was enduring.

“Who just grabbed my ass?”

Charlotte almost fell off the front step. “What? What are you talking about?” Okay, so maybe she had entertained the idea once—or nine hundred times—of cupping his backside and giving a nice, hard little squeeze, but she would never act on it. Probably. She was pretty sure. But definitely if she did, she would know it. Savor it. Make it count.

“Someone just copped a feel, and since I can see you out of the corner of my eye, and your hands are full, I was just wondering if you could tell whoever did it that it’s not wise to grope a man on a ladder, unless she wants me to break my neck.”

Glancing around to confirm what she knew, Charlotte frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nobody here but us.” And her libido.

“Your sister did it, didn’t she? That sounds like Bree.” Will reached for another swag and Charlotte passed it up to him.

“Bree went shopping an hour ago.” Which was classic Bree. Ditch out doing the Christmas decorating for their house with an excuse about getting pomegranates for a centerpiece. Like there were any pomegranates in the tiny grocery in Cuttersville, Ohio. Bree just wanted to peruse the bookstore, gossip at the hair salon, and stay out long enough to avoid having to drag all the boxes of ornaments out of the basement.

“Abby?” Will asked doubtfully.

“Abby! My baby sister, who is only seventeen, need I remind you, did not touch your butt, Will. No one did.” For crying out loud, did he want someone to touch it? If she were a little bolder, she’d just reach out and smack it right now to really give him something to think about. But she wasn’t bold. She was the opposite of bold—she was pastel pink on the color wheel.

“Someone did. I know what I felt.” Now his voice sounded stubborn, his hammer pounding harder.

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Course not.”

That was irritating. He didn’t think she could, or would, or didn’t think she should ? How was it that he could suspect her little sister, a junior in high school, of grabbing him, but she was a no way, never happen? Was she so staid and boring and vanilla that it would never occur to him that she did actually have a sex drive, though it was well hidden and brought out only on special occasions like full moons and when the annual firefighters’ hottie calendar hit the bookstore in town?

“Then I guess it was just wishful thinking, Will, because we’re the only two people standing here.”

“Huh,” he said, leaning against the ladder for support and glancing left and right. “That’s really weird.”

What was weird was that never once in the last eight years had Will so much as suspected she liked him more than was appropriate for good friends. Yet she did. She loved him with a passion and urgency that was just downright embarrassing when she allowed herself to ponder it—or wallow, which was probably more frequently.

But he didn’t seem to be on to her. To Will, she was just Charlotte, his best pal. Damn it.

Irritating as hell, but there it was. And she’d never had the guts to do anything but wait for him miraculously to come to his senses and figure out what was standing right in front of him. Which was a really sucky strategy, because so far Will hadn’t been stricken with any epiphanies that they should really be Cuttersville’s number one couple.

“Maybe it was the wind.”

He scoffed and yanked another bough out of her arms. “Wind doesn’t squeeze like that.”

“Then it must have been a ghost,” she said in exasperation.

She expected him to reject that ridiculous suggestion as well, but instead his brown eyes went wide. “That’s a disturbing thought.”

“There are no ghosts. I was kidding. Ghosts don’t exist.”

“Your grandmother said they did.” Will took the last strand, much to her relief, and moved down the ladder so he could complete the arch around the door at the bottom left.

“My grandma—God rest her soul—was crocked. Sure she believed in ghosts, but she also said I’m a witch, and we know how crazy that is.”

Will grinned at her, revealing his white teeth and dimples. How could he not realize how freaking cute he was? Charlotte thought it defied explanation that he didn’t see the adoration that just had to be scrawled across her face. Apparently she’d missed her calling as an actress when she’d decided to open a coffee shop for a living, because Will didn’t give so much as a hint that he saw her as anything but asexual.

“Yeah, you’re not really the witch type.”

“Who is the witch type?” And why did that suddenly make her feel lousy? It was that excitement thing again…she was neither a butt grabber nor a spell caster in Will’s eyes. So what exactly was she to him? She probably didn’t want the answer to that.

“Bree’s the witch type.”

“God, don’t tell her that. She already thinks we should take up our ‘heritage’ and join a coven, and she’s forever running on about her so-called empathic abilities.” Charlotte stomped her feet a little to get the blood flowing. She wore only ballet flats, not boots, and the cold was seeping in. Ramming her hands deeper into the pockets of her black puffy coat, she waited impatiently as Will slowly pulled the ladder off the house and dropped it down.

“Actually, Abby acts devious enough to be one, too. She does that evil eye thing when she’s mad at you.”

“Again, don’t encourage her, either. She’s already gone completely Goth, right along with Bree. And Abby has been known to brag about the well-known fact that she was conceived in a cemetery.” A source of mortification since Charlotte had been old enough to understand it, she had often wondered what kind of woman got it on in the graveyard. Finally, she had concluded that the answer was simply that the kind of woman who got turned on in a graveyard was her mother. As for her father, it was no secret to anyone that he happily gave his wife whatever she wanted, which explained both Abby’s unusual conception and the fact that her parents were currently on a two-week tour of America’s most haunted prisons. There was just no point in wondering sometimes.