His hand came up to brush snow from my hair, his fingers lingering against my temple. “Maddox,” he whispered, and my name on his lips sounded like a question I desperately wanted to answer.
Adrian’s heartbeat raced beneath my palm, which had somehow found its way to his chest. The rational part of my brain was screaming warnings, reminding me of all the reasons this was a terrible idea, but it was being drowned out by the roaring in my ears and the heat spreading through my body despite the snow seeping into my clothes.
His head tilted up slightly, eliminating another inch of the space between us. I could feel his breath on my lips now, warm and inviting. My eyes began to close of their own accord.
A violent shiver ran through Adrian’s body, breaking the spell. His teeth actually chattered as another shudder shook him.
“You’re freezing,” I said, clarity rushing back as I noticed the snow melting into his sweater, the pallor beneath his flushed cheeks.
“I’ve had men call me hot before, but never cold,” he replied with a weak attempt at his usual charm, but his continued shivering betrayed him.
I rolled off him and stood quickly, offering my hand to pull him up. “Come on. We need to get you warmed up.”
He took my hand, rising unsteadily to his feet. His designer clothes were soaked through from our tumble in the snow, his expensive sweater now clinging to him in a way that would have been distracting if I wasn’t worried about hypothermia.
I shrugged out of my jacket and wrapped it around his shoulders. It was lined with shearling wool and would provide more warmth than the designer coat he’d left in a snowdrift.
“I can’t take your coat,” he protested weakly.
“I’m not offering options here. Besides, I’m used to the cold.” I settled it over him despite his objections. “And you’re soaking wet.”
He pulled the coat tighter around himself, looking surprisingly vulnerable in my well-worn outerwear. “Thanks,” he said quietly.
I returned to the camera equipment, quickly dismantling the tripod and packing everything away. The sky had darkened considerably, the snow falling faster now. We needed to get back to the truck before the weather worsened any further.
“So,” Adrian said as I finished packing up. “All we need to do isdrag a hundred-pound tree back to your truck through increasingly deep snow while a blizzard descends upon us?”
“That about sums it up,” I agreed, shouldering the equipment bag. “Unless you want to leave your perfect tree behind?”
“Never,” he declared with such conviction I had to smile. “But… I don’t suppose you have a tree stand at your store?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Of course we do. It’s a hardware store, for god’s sake. We actually sell Emerson trees there, too.”
“Good.” He hesitated, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “Because I just realized I have no way to set this up in my cabin, and I… kind of really want to. Will you help me?”
The request hung in the air between us, carrying more weight than its simple words suggested. Going to his cabin. Extending our time together. Continuing whatever had almost happened in the snow.
Every instinct told me to refuse. To maintain boundaries. To remember that in less than three weeks, Adrian Hayes would be gone, back to his perfectly curated life in LA, while I remained in Legacy with my responsibilities and reality.
But as I looked at him standing there in my coat, snow and sweat turning the edges of his hair dark, I found myself nodding. “Okay.”
What the fuck was I thinking? There was a storm coming, and if I went to Adrian’s cabin, I’d end up spending the night there. That was not acceptable. Everyone had seen that movie, for god’s sake, and knew how it ended: with only one bed.
I quickly added, “But, uh… not today. We’ll unload it at the cabin, and then I’ve got to head back into town and check on Maya. I’ll bring a stand out tomorrow and help you get it inside before your next da—ah,shoot.”
The smile that broke across his face was like sunrise after a long night—warm, bright, and devastatingly beautiful.
“Perfect,” he said, raising a teasing eyebrow. “Just like this tree.”
I groaned and forced myself to turn away and focus on figuring out how to drag the massive spruce through the deepening snow. “Let’s get moving before we become the only people on Earth who’ve died from hypothermia at a Christmas tree farm.”
As we began the laborious process of hauling the tree, I tried to convince myself that I was just being a good business owner—securing a customer’s satisfaction, ensuring the shoot could be completed properly.
But the memory of Adrian beneath me in the snow, his eyes darkening as he looked at my lips, made it impossible to believe my own lies.
I was in dicey territory, and the storm brewing around us was nothing compared to the one taking shape inside me.
By the timeI arrived home that evening, every muscle in my body ached. Hauling Adrian’s ridiculously large tree through the snow, securing it to my truck, and then leaning it up against the porch of his rental cabin had been a workout even by my standards. But that wasn’t what had me pacing the floor of our apartment above the hardware store, a forgotten mug of coffee cooling on the kitchen counter.
