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We didn’t even have stairs, but what else could I say?

A cold gust of wind brought me back to the parking lot. Lost in my dreary thoughts, my eyes on the pavement, I yelped when I accidentally collided with a hard body. “Oh, sorry, I?—”

My eyes lifted.

My mouth snapped shut.

A very familiar man stood before me in a leather jacket and a knit cap that shielded waves of dark hair I never got to sweep my fingers through.

His lips parted, a breath of recognition hitting the air in a plume of white. Blinking a few times, he swallowed. “Hey. You’re?—”

“Halley,” I provided, because there was probably no way he remembered my name like I remembered his. Then I waited for the residual anger to crease his brows and shadow his eyes.

But all he did was nod once as snowflakes splashed across his navy hat. “Like the comet.”

My heart jumped, lashes fluttering.

It was nine degrees, but my skin sizzled with telltale heat as I pressed my lips together in an attempt to flatten the smile. “Reed.”

Reed, the man with green eyes and golden words.

Reed, the man I’d been dangerously close to going home with six months ago.

Reed.

The man I’d lied to.

I was confident he hated me, and he had every right to. I’d tricked him. I’d been so desperate for comfort, for connection, for more of his tender looks and touches, that I hadn’t cared about the consequences. Not even a little. I was selfish, and now he was wholeheartedly aware of that.

“Yeah.” He stared at me, bouncing on the heels of his boots, a reminder that the temperature was in the single digits. Popping his thumb toward the store entrance, he pivoted around and started walking. “Last minute holiday shopping?”

I took the question as an invitation to follow.

“Sort of.” Keeping pace on his right, I failed to give him all the details of my spontaneous Christmas Eve grocery store stop. “You?”

“Same.”

“I’m grabbing some ingredients to cook dinner tonight.”

“Cutting it close.”

I shrugged and peered down at my raw-bitten cuticles as we passed by a weathered-looking Santa Claus ringing a copper bell.

Reed shoved a hand in his pocket and plucked out a twenty-dollar bill, popping it in the man’s bucket.

Santa gave us prayer hands, his eyes alight with gratitude. “God bless you.”

As we stepped through the entry doors, I glanced at Reed, my bottom lip caught between my teeth. “That was nice of you.”

“It was decent,” he said, grabbing a shopping cart. “Bare minimum, we should all strive to be decent, don’t you think?”

I wasn’t sure if his comment was a thinly veiled reference to my awful lie, but because his eyes remained soft under the fluorescent store lights, I didn’t stew in the potential implication.

Then I cursed those bright lights when Reed’s focus zeroed in on my bruise.

“Whoa. What the hell happened to you?”

His hand lifted but faltered halfway to my face. He tucked his fingers in and slowly dropped his hand, the contact seemingly too intimate for this spontaneous grocery store meeting with a teenager who’d betrayed him.

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