Page 63 of Mistletoe, Mayhem & Mr. Grump
"Want to really fail it?" he asks with a mischievous grin.
Before I can answer, he picks me up and carries me down the street.
"ZERO POINTS!" Delia shouts from her window. "THAT'S NOT WALKING!"
"It's synchronized not-walking!" Holden calls back.
I laugh so hard I nearly fall out of his arms. "She's going to fail us!"
"Worth it," he says, not even breathing hard. "Your face right now is worth every lost point."
Tomorrow there will be more training, more binders, more PowerPoints about our relationship metrics. Malcolm will show up with his yacht stories and his perfect teeth and probably a newer PowerPoint about my failures.
But right now, carried through snow while Delia shouts point deductions and Giuseppe sings, I realize something.
We're definitely going to fail the synchronized walking test.
And somehow, that feels exactly like winning.
Chapter 12
Holden
Wren's apartment smells like cinnamon and chaos, which is basically her signature scent at this point. She's lit approximately forty-eight candles despite it being three in the afternoon, and there's Christmas music playing from three different sources, none of them synchronized.
"Is this supposed to be romantic, or are you conducting a séance?" I ask, dodging a precariously placed candelabra.
"It's ambiance," she insists, rearranging throw pillows that definitely weren't here yesterday. "I read that ambience is important for intimate dinners."
"This is lunch," I point out.
"Intimate lunch then," she corrects, pulling something from the oven that might be lasagna or might be a science experiment gone wrong.
"Did you make this?" I ask genuinely concerned.
"Define 'make,'" she hedges.
"Did you combine ingredients and apply heat?" I clarify.
"Then yes, I made it," she says proudly. "It's my grandmother's recipe."
"Your grandmother cooked?" I ask, surprised.
"Grandma ordered takeout and put it in her own dishes," Wren admits. "But she did it with love, which is basically cooking."
The doorbell rings before I can respond, and Wren freezes like a deer caught in very festive headlights.
"Who knows you're having an intimate lunch?" I ask.
"Nobody! I told nobody!" she insists, then her face falls. "Except Mrs. Patterson. And she told June. And June told Delia. And Delia sent out a newsletter."
"There's a newsletter about our lunch?" I ask.
"Just like the committees, there's a newsletter about everything," she sighs, heading for the door.
But it's not the committee. It's worse. It's Sterling.
He stands in Wren's hallway wearing a coat that costs more than most cars and an expression that suggests he's offended by Vermont's existence.
