Page 106 of A Lucky Shot

He rolled his eyes and stashed the portfolio into his overnight back. He resettled himself on the couch beside her, tugging her down beside him. “Noted.”

“Left or right?”

She’d vetoed one movie, declaring she didn’t want to watch massacres on Christmas day, and tapped on his right shoulder.

“Pride and Prejudice? Really?” he asked.

“You’re the one who made the short list!”

Josh leaned against her legs, his fingers idly circling her ankle bone. A shiver raced up her body, but she didn’t move away. His usually smooth voice burred low. “I know what women like.”

Cass moved to take it out of his hand, her cheeks warming. “Stop it. Let’s pick something else.”

“Nope, not only is it an underrated cinematographic masterpiece,” he said, fending off her attempted movie theft and holding the case out of reach, “Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen were my sexual awakenings. Well, at least one of them was.”

Tiny, delicate Kiera Knightly with the swan-like neck and fine lips. Nothing at all like her. Cass interlaced her fingers in her lap. “Weren’t you a late bloomer?”

Josh’s smile didn’t dim, but grew softer, and he dipped his head in a show of uncharacteristic shyness. “Actually, I was. I don’t think I looked at a girl until I was fifteen.”

Another tidbit of knowledge to add to her hoard. The thought of a nervous, awe-struck Josh who didn’t know his way around women triggered a surprising rush of affection. Cass pressed her lips together and rested against the blanket fort. “I thought you liked movies with ambiguous endings.”

“Sometimes you need a happily ever after.”

Cass itched to pick up her phone and dissect that comment with Libby for the next several hours, but Libby was having Christmas with a man who’d said unambiguously that he loved her and didn’t want to be away from her again. “Okay, I promise not to recite the whole thing to you.”

He turned to her with a shrug. “If you’re not reciting it, then I will. From ‘I have fought against my better judgment, my family’s expectations, the inferiority of your birth’ to ‘You have bewitched me body and soul’,” he quoted. He hit play and leaned back beside her. “It was so faithful to the source material it didn’t do a lot adaptation-wise, but …”

Cass half listened to him listing why fans and academics alike would have revolted with anything less than a perfect retelling or a full Bridget Jones’s Diary-ing of the story, but she felt herself getting lost in his voice.

Being bewitched sounded about right.

A swashbuckling man with an unbuttoned shirt and a prim woman wearing heels in the jungle flickered across her screen.

Ridiculous, and unrealistic, but she loved it.

His arm was draped over her shoulders, fingers tracing leisurely circles over the soft material of her pyjamas. Even early as it was, she fought her eyelids from closing, settling into the easy rhythm of his breath and the beats of the movie she’d seen a hundred times before.

“How’d you meet Nick?”

It was the last question she had been expecting. Cass tipped her head back to look at the ceiling, thinking. “It was a few years ago. My sister needed me to pick up my niece after hockey practice, and he was coaching her team.”

Nick had been circling the end of the rink, his back turned as he gave instructions to the kids swarming him. When he’d turned his head and met her eyes, that brilliant smile had sent her hormones storming into a tidy formation. By the time she had realized he smiled at everyone like that, he’d burrowed deep under her skin.

“What do you even see in this guy?”

Libby had asked her the exact same thing, and she was no closer to an answer. “I don’t know.”

“Come on.”

“He was cute?—”

“Was cute?” Josh jumped on her comment with feigned glee. “Has he been hideously maimed in a fire?”

Cass tsked. “Is cute. He could be really funny in a sarcastic way. Smart.” She grinned at him. “He has a nice truck.”

Josh gave her a look of pure disgust.

“I’m an Alberta girl,” she said with a shrug, and he swatted her thigh. His eyes lingered on the way her leg moved under the light contact, and she saw his throat work.

---