Page 41 of Take Me Home for Christmas

Oh, how my heart jumped at that. “Are you actually going to say something this time?”

“I promise.” He lifted the comforter, beckoning me to come sit next to him.

He didn’t have to ask me twice.

I clicked off my phone light and sat down. The comforter was warm from his body heat. Our shoulders and legs grazed lightly as he pulled it back down over us. And he smelled nice. Well, okay, he smelled a little like chlorine, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

My heart was softening. Make that melting. I’d tried so hard to prevent that, but it was just like left-out butter.Inevitable.

“I have something to say,” he began.

“Okay,” I said cautiously. I wanted him to share his heart with me. Tell me what he was thinking, like during the hundreds of conversations we had at work, when we had downtime, and when we weren’t pretending to be dating. Except even with all that talking, he’d rarely mentioned his past.

He rubbed his neck, taking a long time to choose his words.

“You had a long relationship with that guy,” he said.

“Charlie,” I confirmed. “Yes.”

He cleared his throat. “My longest relationship lasted eight weeks.” I could feel his eyes on me more than I could actually see them in the dark. But I could sense that he was struggling, and I could hear the emotion in his voice.

I knew all about his lack of steady dating, how popular he was with all women everywhere. But I wanted to know who the real Brax was.

He grabbed my hand. A pleasant shock that I didn’t see coming in the pitch blackness. His long fingers closed around mine, warm and secure. Like someone I could count on. Yet everything he was saying was the opposite. “I want to explain,” he said. “I understand why you don’t trust me. I just want you to know that I always thought you were different from anybody else I’d ever met. But I felt it was a mistake for us to keep going.”

“Because of the working-together thing?” I asked.

“That was an excuse.”

Aha! I knew it. “An excuse for what?”

He gripped my hand more tightly. “I was protecting you. From me.”

I grabbed a pillow from the couch and swatted him with it. He protected himself with his arms before he grabbed it from me and tossed it aside. “Hey! Why’d you do that?”

“Because that’s the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard.” I realized I was sort of shouting, so I dropped my voice. But notmy indignation. “What are you, from the ’60s? I don’t need protection.”

“Trust me, you don’t know my upbringing. Listen to me,” he said in a whisper-yell. The moon must have peeked out from behind a cloud, suddenly throwing silvery light everywhere, illuminating the crumpled comforter, the sewing machine, and the man in front of me.

He got up and paced, raking a hand through his hair. “I should have stopped this before we slept together.”

“So why didn’t you?”

He halted in front of the window. From the moonlight flooding the room, I could see his eyes spark. “You blew me away. You were the whole package—smart and fun and kind and pretty. I couldn’t stop.”

“Ichoseto sleep with you,” I said. “I knew what I was doing.” That sounded mature, but it was only half-true. I really had no idea what I was doing with Brax. I was crazy about him. And did he say that he thought I was kind? Yet I tilted up my chin to brace for a blow that I felt sure was coming.

“Mia, you need to hear what I’m saying.”

“I’m listening.” My stomach was flipping. We might finally be getting somewhere—or he was going to tell me something terrible. I couldn’t tell what was coming.

“My mom was addicted to meth, and my sister and I were put into foster care. I was twelve; she was eight. She got adopted. I didn’t.”

“Oh, Brax.” That horror seeped into my bones and made my heart ache. My impulse was to hold him, to hug him, to try to take away the unfathomable hurt. But I wasn’t sure he would want that.

He was standing in front of me, still spotlighted in moonlight, speaking so emphatically, it was breaking my heart. “This isn’t something I talk about—to anyone. But I need you toknow that I’m not a good bet for a boyfriend. For your own good. I’m not the kind of guy anyone takes home for Christmas.”

I shook my head, seeing this in an entirely different way. “Youarethat guy because you’re here now. You came when no one else would.” Well, except for Drake, but he didn’t count.

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