Page 80 of A Very Merry Enemy
“I was joking!” I tell him.
“Right,” he says. “You can’t handle this, HoHo.”
I scoff, but as my eyes slide over him, I think he might be right.
“Anyway. Guess we should get started?”
He smirks, like he can read my mind. “Let’s.”
He pushes off the counter and moves to the sink to wash his hands.
After he dries them, he stands beside me. Having himso close is making me hella nervous. I take a step away from him. “This is my personal bubble.”
“Wait a damn minute.” Lucas gives me a smirk, and I glance away from him. “Am I getting to you?”
“Absolutely not.” I set our ingredients out as “The Christmas Song” plays.
He returns to my space. “You’re lying. Wow, Holiday. After all this time, I’m still front and center in your fantasies.”
“You wish,” I whisper.
A playful laugh releases from him. “If it’s not true, deny it.”
I turn to him, getting ready to rip him a new one.
But he’s smiling like he’s the Grinch who stole Christmas. Lucas leans in and whispers, his hot breath on my ear. “I’m not going to fuck you, HoHo. So get those thoughts out of your dirty mind.”
Heat creeps up my neck as he pulls away.
We work in comfortable silence, and he wears a cocky smirk the whole time. The afternoon light shifts lower, making the Christmas lights overhead seem brighter.
“You still do that,” Lucas says without looking up from adding eggs to the mixer.
“Do what?”
“Hum when you bake,” he says.
I stop mid-scoop, not realizing I was doing it. “You noticed?”
“I notice everything about you. All your little quirks and habits,” he says nonchalantly, like we’re talking about the weather.
The words shouldn’t make my heart race, but they do.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” I tell him.
“I won’t keep shit to myself to make you comfortable anymore. It got me nowhere before.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I focus on measuring vanilla extract just to have something to do with my hands.
We move around each other like a dance we both stillremember the steps to. Every time our hands brush, reaching for the same bowl, every time he leans in close to check my measurements, I feel it. That pull. That heat. The thing that never really went away, no matter how many years or miles were between us.
“So,” he says as we start on the chocolate chip dough. “You ready for tomorrow?”
“Dinner at Mawmaw’s while your entire family stares at us? Absolutely not.”
“It won’t be that bad.” He adds chocolate chips to the mixer. “The food will be good and Mawmaw will love the cookie bars.”
“I’ve been thinking about a name for them,” I admit.
