Page 78 of A Merry Mountain Christmas

“Okay,” she says slowly. “I ship it.”

“What?” I ask, but I’m laughing. Tina has that effect on me. From the moment I met her, I knew my brother had found the right person for him, the person who would be his partner and other half. One thing’s for sure, she will absolutely tell him whenever he’s being an idiot. Which is why I’m relieved she’s not calling me one now, I guess.

“You heard me,” she says.

I did.

“By the way, how freaking amazing are Harry and Oliver together?” she asks.

A smile stretches across my face. “Very. Harry seems really happy. He hasn’t even mentioned his hives today.” They’re barely hives at all at this point, just slight bumps that Nana Mayberry, of course, commented on several times, calling them everything from pimples to welts to warts.

“They’re coming by the tea shop tomorrow,” she says. “I can’t wait to tell them both they’re going to fall madly in love.”

My smile widens. What sets Tea of Fortune apart is that its servers are taught to interpret their guests’ tea leaves. “You’re not supposed to pretend, you know.”

She waves this off. “I won’t have to. Most of the tea leaves people leave behind look like hearts anyway.” With that, she takes my hand and tugs me up off the gnome toilet. “Now, let’s get back in there before your brother finds out Jonah’s not really a virgin.”

Laughter bursts from me again, but I go with her. We link arms on our way back to the ballroom. Being with Tina and Zach is so different from the gaping loneliness I’ve felt since Rowan left that I’m almost giddy from it. Or at least I would be if I didn’t know they’re going to be leaving soon, and I’ll still be here.

Before we go back in the room, I turn to her and ask in an undertone, “What in the world am I going to do, Tina?”

She smiles at me, and for all her lightheartedness, there’s an edge of sadness to it. “You’re going to put on a show.” She tilts her chin to the side. “And you’re going to make that man grovel. I think this situation calls for some good old-fashioned groveling.”

“I don’t even know if he—”

“Oh, he wants you,” she says knowingly. “If he didn’t, it would have occurred to him that the very best way to interrupt the show would be to steal the star out from under it. But he never tried to make what was happening between you public, did he?”

I consider it. Nana Mayberry knew things she shouldn’t have known about our night down at the pool, but Rowan had seemed pissed as hell about that. In fact, he’d stormed over to check my room for bugs.

“No, he didn’t.” I tell her, thoughtful. It feels like I’m missing something important, a revelation that’s hiding just beneath thewater like a fish that won’t surface. It’s chased away by a rumble that comes through the thick doors. Is someone shouting?

“Well, there you go,” she says—and swings the door open onto chaos.

Zach is laughing his ass off, tears in his eyes, while Jonah and Marcus try to scale the trellises nailed to the walls of the ballroom. The cameramen are capturing it all on tape—they’ve split up, each focusing on one of the guys, who are at about the same place in their climb. Nana Mayberry, it looks like, is directing them. Harry and the other guys are watching with no small amount of interest, half of them clustered near Jonah while the other half are around Marcus.

We walk over to Zach. “What the hell’s happening?” asks Tina, who has a way of getting to the heart of things.

“I told them I’d give my approval to whoever can climb a trellis the fastest,” he says through laughter. “I said my sister needs the best in everything, including romance, and they’re not romantic enough if they can’t climb a good trellis like inRomeo and Juliet.”

“Gee, I’m glad you’re taking this so seriously,” I tell him, kind of aggravated. He was acting overly protective earlier, and now he’s pretending he’d hand me over to the highest bidder.

“You told me to have fun,” he says through more laughter. “This is me, having fun.”

“What if they hurt themselves?” I ask, but I’m the only one who seems particularly concerned. Everyone else is getting in on the action. Colton is even collecting bets from the other guys about which of them will reach the top first.

It’s Jonah. Of course it’s Jonah.

When he gets back to the bottom, victorious, I reach out to shake his hand, and he pulls me in for a kiss. It’s chaste, it’s dry, and we have about as much chemistry as two alkaline substances. He pulls away from me and pumps a fist into the air.My brother no longer looks all that amused, and Harry’s making a face that suggests the kiss looked about as inspiring as it felt.

“Do you like winners, Kennedy?” Jonah says to me in an undertone. Maybe he means it to be sexy, but it’s off-putting. Gross.

I glance at Marcus, who’s sulking. His foot went through part of his trellis, so I suspect the production team will be getting a bill from the Labelles. Luckily, he made it down safely. I spoke to him briefly before Jonah swept me into that unwanted kiss, and he begged me not to eliminate him tonight. He said Jonah brings something out in him, which is clearly true, and that he’d love the opportunity to bring me on an individual date. I’ll be doing a lot of that next week—going on individual or two-on-one dates with the four remaining guys.

Colton is chatting with Marcus now. Between their easy camaraderie and the cocoa beans conversation between Quinn and Ray, it seems like most of the guys have managed to make nice with one another.

What other choice have they had, Kennedy?a voice inside me chastises.You’ve ignored them to moon over a man who is actively trying to sabotage you.

Except Tina’s right. If Rowan had wanted to use me, I’d given him the perfect opportunity to blow the show to smithereens. He hadn’t used it.

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