Page 87 of The Hockey Grump Saves Christmas

“So you just faked enjoying it every time? For their sake?”

“Yup. I’d unwrap the gifts painfully slowly, careful to at least try to save the paper for next year. But then they thought I wasn’t excited because I wasn’t frantically ripping everything open. So then I worried they thought I wasn’t grateful that they’d gone without all year to get me those gifts.”

My heart breaks for little Gabe who couldn’t figure out the right way to handle it. “You felt like it was lose-lose whatever you did.”

“Exactly.”

“And even though you have all the money in the world now, that feeling still stays with you. You can’t shake it off.”

“Yes.”

“So that’s why you sent your parents away on that cruise. And that’s why you want to spend the holidays here all by yourself, with no reminders of Christmas anywhere, because then you’ll finally be able to relax over the holidays for the firsttime in your life.”

“You get it.” He looks at me like I’m the Holy Grail he never thought he’d find. “You totally get it.”

“I do,” I reply, almost in a whisper.

“There is one thing I like about Christmas now, though,” he says.

“The pink tree?” I point at Sophie Sullivan’s unlit tinsel tree on the other side of the fireplace.

“No. That’s an eyesore,” he says. “The thing I like about Christmas is how muchyoulike it.”

Wow. A flock of butterflies flutter from my chest to my belly.

“I like how much you like making people happy,” he says. “The kids, the folks at the retirement home. And I’m sure the Sullivans would have been delighted with your efforts if this had still been their house.”

“Maybe my people pleasing tendences aren’t such a bad thing, huh?”

I search his face, looking for the miserable jerk who threw me into the snow a week ago and who lies to his mom and dad.

But what I find is a good guy, someone who cares about his parents’ feelings, someone who’d paint a bird’s nest for Abigail, give his gloves to Grayson, ice my ankle, lay out his coat so I didn’t sit my bare ass on a grimy old theater seat, and fly ice cream over from Italy for me.

He rises to his knees and pulls me against his solid chest, a wall of muscle that could protect me from anything, and rests his chin on the crown of my head. “But you still don’t like me, right?”

“Can’t bear you.” I press my cheek against his left pec, right over his thumping heart. “And not only are you annoying, you’re also incredibly unattractive.”

“Criticism about my personality I can take. But ifyou’re criticizing my God-given good looks, well, now you’ve crossed a line, my little mugger bunny.”

He rolls back onto the floor, pulling me on top of himself, making me cry out with surprise and delight.

With my hands trapped inside the blanket and against his chest, I can’t push my hair out of my face. So he does it for me.

“And there’s a price to pay for that,” he adds.

I look down into those hazel green eyes that flash with the light from the fire. But behind them is an inner spark all their own. The spark of a man who’s turned himself into an island and pushed people away to protect himself. And is trying to have just one Christmas where he doesn’t have to endure painful flashbacks to his childhood.

“And what’s that price?” I ask.

“Lying here without moving a single muscle while I lick you all over.”

CHAPTER 28

GABE

Natalie lets out a low, sexy giggle as I roll us so she’s on her back on the soft cream rug.

“Allover?” she asks.

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