Page 196 of Blue Moon Mistress

“What? You did.” Johnny scoops it up off the rug and heads into the kitchen.

“It was weird,” Joshua says quietly against my hair. “Not having you at home when I got off work.”

“It was weird not being there.”

“What do you need from us to make tonight work?” Thomas asks, emptying a grocery bag and handing the contents over to Johnny at the fridge.

“Having you here is more than enough.”

“Okay, but what’s going to happen? We don’t want to mess it up.” Thomas wads up the bag and watches me carefully.

“We’ll light it right before sunset and have to keep it going until dawn.”

“That is a long night.” Johnny says.

I murmur an agreement as I nod. “But it will feel shorter with you here.”

He doesn’t look convinced. “Do you usually do it alone?”

“No. Since leaving the coven, I’ve gone up to my parents’ or they’ve come down here… Elaria came down last year.”

“I imagine the two of you got up to all sorts of trouble.” Chase laughs, and I have to too.

“Only the good kind.”

“We can all get behind the good kind.”

Chase and Joshua helped me move the last of the furniture around and get the copious amounts of blankets and pillows back out of the guest room they’d been stored in since last time.

Johnny put Thomas to work in the kitchen, and by the time the three of us were done in the living room, they had created something even more spectacular than what I had asked Johnny for.

“When I said we’d need to be nourished through the whole night, I hadn’t expected you to set up a practical feast.”

He’s covered the entirety of the coffee table with what some might call a charcuterie board, but it’s a complete masterpieceand he’s kindly separated all of the meat with walls of crackers… like little fences.

“Everything,” Johnny says as he places a small plate over a bowl filled with ice and moves a small stack of mushrooms to the side, “will last until morning… assuming we don’t plow through it first.”

He cuffs Chase on the shoulder and dodges when Chase swings to hit him back.

“Hey!” I hold up a finger. “None of that.”

“Yeah,” Thomas says, snapping a tiny carrot and tossing each piece to hit them both in the face. “Where’s your Yuletide spirit?”

I’m not the only one who rolls my eyes at him.

But the light out the window catches my eye and I say, “Food will have to wait just a little while guys.”

We have to get the fire going before the sun sets.

I drag away the screen and Joshua very kindly takes it from me before I snatch the small silver box from the mantle and drop down to sit in front of the cold hearth.

“Are you going to light this one with a snap of your fingers? Or are there matches in there?”

I smile and pretend to ignore them as they move to stand behind me.

When I flip open the silver box, I hear one of them move closer.

“What’s that?” Johnny asks.

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