Page 80 of Wrapped with a Beau

“Sure, sorry.” He doesn’t look like it.

Ves tenses his jaw, aching to call the asshole out, but knows it’s the last thing Elisha wants to happen while Dave is running the workshop. Instead, he calmly selects a piping bag and creates a hot-pink outline around the cookie to corral all the icing. He floods it with lime green that reminds him of Shrek and then picks out matching sprinkles to create a border on the bottom.

“Look, I think I just need to say this. I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, but clearly it is.” Elisha takes a deep, bracing breath. “It’s not Piney Peaks that’s beneath you. It’s you who is unworthy of our town and everyone in it.”

Pride fireworks in Ves’s chest at her firm, no-nonsense delivery.

Bentley gives them all hard stares. “Victoria, we’re leaving.” When she doesn’t move, his expression turns ugly. “Victoria?”

A bottle of sprinkles slams down hard. “It’s Tori!”

Bentley storms out without another word, nearly crashing into another cookie station on the way.

Tori releases an uneven, choked exhale.

“Are you okay?” asks Elisha.

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Here,” says Grandpa Dave in a gentle voice, heading over to join Tori, who looks at him with visible gratitude. “Why don’t you try these?” He holds out a packet of popping candy. “Let’s do some stripes on your Ugly Christmas Sweater cookie. Grab some of that icing, sweetheart. Do you like yellow and purple?”

Ves isn’t sure how much he’s overheard, but is once again struck by the older man’s ability to get right to the heart of every hard situation. With Tori under Dave’s wing, he gives all his attention back to Elisha. “I’m proud of you,” he says, kissing her forehead. “I know it would have been much easier to ignore him.”

“I’m glad I gave him a piece of my mind,” she admits, relaxing into him. “I probably shouldn’t have forced the issue right now, but I can’t quite bring myself to regret it. I hope the scales have fallen from Tori’s eyes way faster than they fell from mine. And that she realizes she deserves better.”

With one last look at Tori, who’s in good hands with Dave, Elisha aims a high-wattage smile at Ves. “Now, are you going to wow me with some truly horrible sweater designs or am I going to win this on my own?”

“Hey, I’ve been carrying us so far. It’s your turn,” Ves says, snaking one arm around her waist while the other taps his chin. “Now, how ugly can we make this?”

He’s one hundred percent positive he doesn’t want to put this much food coloring into his body, but if she keeps looking at him like he’s Christmas come early, he just might be convinced. As Elisha pros and cons the technical difficulties of using licorice bits to make reindeer antlers and a cinnamon Red Hot as its nose versus using icing, a feeling of contentment steals over Ves.

He didn’t want to come, could certainly think of far more pleasurable activities to spend their time doing. But as he watches her brush her hair out of her face, getting a smear of icing on her cheekbone that he wishes he could lick off, he realizes there’s nowhere else that he would rather be.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Elisha

In her dream, someone’s calling her love. Someone with a laugh like silver bells, like waiting for winter all summer long, to finally wake up to the first frost spiderwebbing across the window and knowing that at last it was here, welcoming you home.

“Elisha, it’s time to wake up. We’re almost here, love.”

Love. There it is again. It feels nice, as nice as the warm arm securely around her. One eye blearily opens as she recalibrates, taking stock of where they are. It isn’t the glamorous view of midtown Manhattan’s skyline she loves or the exciting whizz of every geographically impossible tourist attraction jam-packed into the travel montage of a movie. Instead, she’s greeted with the gray-and-brown concrete walls of a bus terminal and a sore neck.

She stretches the stiffness out of her legs and cracks her neck before grabbing her suitcase, a tan carry-on size that was perfect for taking the bus on the two-hour journey from Piney Peaks to Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. Ves handles the subway with ease, like he knows it like the back of his hand. Which, she supposes, he probably does. After disembarking from the train, they walk three blocks until arriving at Ves’s East 2nd Street apartment. By the time they get there, she’s thankful her mom insisted she wear the heavy peacoat.

She lets him remove it after they make the three-flight walk up. “I know we just got here,” she says around a yawn. “And what I’m about to say makes me a terrible tourist, but please let me just crawl into your bed and stay there until Arun’s party?”

As much as she’s looking forward to tonight, they have a packed schedule full of sightseeing and a catch-up lunch with her old boss, Veronica.

Ves huffs a laugh, buries his face in her neck. “Now why would I have any problem with that? I hear that terrible tourists make excellent girlfriends.”

Is he sniffing her? He does that a lot. Nuzzles his nose against her skin and inhales like he can’t get enough. No man has ever craved her the way that Ves does. She arches her back, teases him with her ass right up against his growing hardness. “Hmm, nope. I don’t think I’ve heard that.”

“Well, you do come from a really tiny town...”

“Fuck you,” she says with a sigh, wriggling to give him better access.

“Where do you think I’m going with this?” he mumbles into that shivery spot where her neck meets her shoulder. The sensation springs her from eighty percent awake to a full one hundred percent, especially when his breath and body heat starts to warm her up.

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