Page 24 of Snowbound in Her Boss's Bed

As fractured and disjointed as her experience of family felt at times, she still had it.

They might not always know where she fit into the family portrait anymore, now that she was grown and branching out on her own, but there remained people to stand beside.

Compassion and sympathy, however, were not what he wanted from her in this moment.

He had told her multiple times now, casually, thrown out as if it did not bother him, and she had not understood.

Now that she had unwittingly pressed him into stating the obvious, he stared at her as if ready to assess her merit based on how she responded to his sad story.

He had not sent her doughnuts on to family as she had assumed he would because there was no one to eat them.

He was out here alone on Hanukkah not because he chose to keep himself apart, but because there was no one for him to be near.

But he didn’t want her pity; she could see that in his eyes, and she even understood it. So she said, “Well, that explains no one else eating the doughnuts.”

A small smile cracked the intensity of his expression. “But that means there’s more for us,” he said, reaching for another. “It’s been years since I’ve had sufganiyot,” he remarked as he finished the jelly doughnut, eyeing his still faintly powdered fingertips thoughtfully, his expression seeming to hover somewhere between the present moment and memories of long ago.

Each word reverberated through her fire-and-wine-warmed body, while her eyes remained riveted on his expression.

Nostalgia and distant joy mingled in the curve of his wide mouth, and Miri found herself wishing that she had purchased an entire box of jelly doughnuts after all.

Eyes that normally froze her in her tracks looked like a crisp clear summertime sky over the ocean now.

The furrowed brow that so well communicated just how unimpressed it was possible to get lifted and softened now, revealing a character that was as vulnerable as it was masculine and beautiful.

“My mother loved them. She could easily polish off a box over a business meeting.” His smile stretched slightly as he spoke, his voice warm and soft and dangerously normal—easy to relax into—and...also beautiful.

“She had no self-control when it came to sufganiyot, and she knew it, so she refused to buy them. Why tempt myself? She’d ask herself, and us, over and over, more and more times each day as Hanukkah drew near,” he continued.

Miri couldn’t have stopped her own smile, nor the quiet laugh that accompanied it, if she had wanted to, and she didn’t want to.

It was a good story. A happy memory.

“And did you all suffer along with her?” she asked, but he only shook his head.

“Every year on the first night of Hanukkah, my father would pick me up from school and we’d get a box of them on the way home. It became a tradition, the first night of Hanukkah, every year.”

Miriam’s breath caught in her throat.

She had unwittingly brought him sufganiyot for the first night of Hanukkah.

If the unexpected deliciousness of the evening did not, then the kismet of that fact at least made up for her thwarted plans a little.

Her friends would miss her, but they would still have one another.

Mr. Silver would have been entirely alone if not for her and her ridiculous doughnuts.

Her presence mattered more where she was, she realized, than even where she should have been.

Seeming as stuck in the moment as she felt, his eyes caught hers once again.

“The box never made it past that first night at our house, which I would say is a testament to our self-control today,” he said, brushing the powdered sugar off his fingertips before reaching for a glazed cruller, his smile turning mischievous and indulgent, perhaps distancing from the vulnerability of his memories. “Then again, though, Hanukkah hasn’t even truly begun yet, and we’ve already broken the seal. We never did that growing up.” He bit into the cruller, making a noise of enjoyment that vibrated through Miri with a different kind of frequency than his childhood memories had.

Was his voice the real secret behind his success? she wondered, still feeling the sound of it along the skin of her arms. Did he simply hypnotize people into believing he was a brilliant software designer when really they just liked listening to him talk?

Judging by the wealth on display all around her, she imagined he probably knew what he was doing when it came to software as well, but with that voice of his, it was easy to believe that it was something more supernatural.

Reaching for another doughnut, she was surprised when she leaned back to find him refilling her glass.

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