“All right, all right, give me a break, Pipsqueak, I haven’t seen it since I was a kid. The point is that you’re so cranky now, but you used to not be. Look how happy you are in this picture. You need to be ghost-of-Christmas-past-ed.”
“Do I?” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the sink, eyes narrowed under heavy, angry brows. “Maybe my dead mom can play that role.”
“Oh, damn it.” Kol cleared his throat and scoured the last five photos. “No, you’re smiling in these too, and they happened…after—hey, where were you in this one?” He moved a chair to get close to the photo in question, counting the MacLeans and identifying each one, her mother included, but Piper was nowhere to be found.
Piper’s whole demeanor changed, her anger gone as she fidgeted near the sink. “That was an off year. Only one I ever missed.”
The next photo did have Piper in it, but not her mother. Her mother wasn’t in any of the other photos, in fact.Shit, this conversation is not going to smooth things over. “You know what? We should go outside too and fight with balls.”
“Don’t have time.” Piper bent over the dishwasher again to do more reorganizing.
“Bullshit.” Kol hurried to the counter and snatched her planner, flipping to the current day. “Wrap presents, do laundry, shovel the driveway, make a grocery list—other people can do all this.”
She scoffed. “I’d like to see them try. And I have to adddo the dishesnow.”
Kol grunted, abandoning her planner and rounding to the other side of the dishwasher. He grabbed her arms, and she fell still. Eyes popped up to find his, wide and alarmed. He wanted to tell her to stop, march herself outside, and have at least a little mandatory fun, but he could feel the anxiety from the undone chores coursing through her as plainly as he knew he would feel it in the spruce.
“I’ll make you another deal, Pipsqueak. You get ten minutes to show me exactly how you want the dishwasher loaded, and I’ll commit it to memory, but in trade, you come outside with me.”
Piper glanced to the window, apprehension carved into every one of her features, suddenly so much softer than they’d been all morning. One of her older cousins fled by carrying his daughter on his shoulders, and the corner of Piper’s mouth twitched before falling back into a frown. She started to shake her head, and he could see the excuses building themselves behind her eyes.
“And you can throw as many balls at my face as you want.”
When Piper finally gave in, it was like someone had plugged in the string lights wrapped around Kol’s innards, and everything lit up. She sank, and she snorted out a giggle, and she said, “Fiiiiiine,” and it didn’t matter that she’d been angry with him or that he’d made her think about her dead motheragain, all that mattered was that he’d gotten her to smile, and the world was a tiny bit brighter.
Piper packed and rounded snow even more skillfully than she loaded a dishwasher. Cartoonishly perfect spheres were stacked at her knees in a lethal pyramid of weaponized snow, and she crouched behind a log at the edge of the wood, waiting. It turned out that she had no interest in belting Kol with her ammunition, instead directing him to follow along behind her and covertly modify her hiding places. He wasn’t particularly good with the snow anyway, it was water after all, and he wasn’t a lorelei—he was an elf, and only half of one at that. His magically-assisted aim was true when she offered him one of her well-formed missiles, but he pretended to be much worse, preferring to assist her instead, and not needing the bad blood that nailing Presley in the back of the head would harbor.
But it didn’t really matter how terrible Kol was at making snowballs or how embarrassing it was to get pelted by her cousins, becausePiper was laughing. He watched her face go pink from the cold and then red from breathlessness as she ran and shouted and managed to sneak attack just about every MacLean in the yard.
And the MacLeans took the whole thing rather seriously. Presley remarked how she “apparently hadn’t forgotten” after sitting out of the games for so many years right after he got bashed three times in a row. Kol had trouble keeping up as she darted from tree to tree, replenished her pile, and went right back to lobbing snow in a flash. When she unloaded the last of her ammunition on her uncle, she fled with Kol on her heels, around the copses and deeper into the forest where it was quiet and they were alone.
“All right, lieutenant, pay attention, because I have a plan.” Piper fell to her knees again and packed snowballs at a dizzying rate. “We haven’t nailed Noah, Luke, or Holden yet, so you’re going to boost me up into this tree, and I’ll be lying in wait while you lead them out here. You’re probably going to end up hit a bunch of times, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
If Kol had a sword, he would have gladly fallen on it at her command. Instead, he immediately clasped his gloved hands and offered them up for her boot. With little effort, he shot her up into the tree, then watched as she scrabbled one-handed along a limb, frozen bombs tucked into her other arm. The view was especially nice from his spot at the tree’s base where he could watch her ass as she shimmied along a branch.
“What are you waiting for?” she called down to him. “Take your wonky balls and go get yourself attacked.”
He bit his cheek and saluted her before doing exactly as she demanded. If only she would let him return the favor—she would certainly like it if she did.
Piper’s plan went off without a hitch with no small thanks to Kol’s genuine helplessness as he fled from an ambush of her young cousins. The three siblings were doused from on high, snow raining over their heads and down the backs of their jackets, their shock at being outdone well worth Kol face-planting in a bank of snow when he ran. Their attempt to pelt Piper back was ill-aimed, and she was too high for it to matter, so by the time she was out of ammunition, the kids were just flinging snow upward for it to rain back down on them.
Piper sat up on her branch like a kingfisher and shrieked with laughter, taunting them with her tongue out, and Kol could not have been prouder. By the time her brother and older cousin came around, they too had turned on the kids and chased them off back into the woods.
Triumphant, Piper wiggled herself out of the tree, and Kol ran to catch her, but she landed with the grace she usually reserved for the kitchen. “God, that was so good!” She threw herself at him, nearly knocking him back into the snow.
Not sure what to do, Kol stood awkwardly under her embrace. It then hit him harder than a ball of ice to the crotch just how much he’d been craving her touch since the enchanted shelter. She was squeezing him and squealing in his ear and hopping in place, and it was just sohuman. Kol sighed and grinned and finally squeezed her back, and the forest whispered softly to him once more,Home.
The last time someone wrapped themselves around him, though, that elf was naked, and his thoughts turned to his cock. Thankfully, Piper darted off again, disappearing amongst the trees.
“Did that happen?” he asked the dog as it trotted up.
Doc confirmed by turning the snow yellow at Kol’s feet.
Kol followed the sound of Piper’s laughter, a bright spark in the dreary whites and browns of the wood. He admired how the sun’s dappled light fell in patches over her face as it too tried to keep up. Her lips burned red in the cold, lips that he longed to warm with his mouth, and snow glittered in the strands that fell loose from her hair. He tracked that sparkle as she slipped between the trees until she was nailed with a snowball as hard as she’d been hitting everyone else and fell backward right onto her ass, allowing Kol to finally catch up.
The MacLeans were troopers at taking balls to the face, but Piper did not hop back up onto her feet as usual. “Finally tuckered out, Pipsqueak?” Kol tromped over to pull her up, but she didn’t take his offered hand, her own gloves folded over her face as she slowly sat up out of her imprint.
A drop of red fell onto the snow, brilliant against its whiteness, and Kol dropped to his knees before her, heart jolting up into his throat. Crimson spread out over the ice between them. Piper didn’t blink, a glassy sheen to her eyes, the rest of her face obscured until he tugged her hands away. A thin trail of blood leaked from her nostril, and a splotch of ruddy skin was painted over her already wind-burnt pink nose.
