“Look out, sweetheart.”
This doesn’t feel like a warning. No, it feels like a promise.
Before anything reckless happens, I grab her bags and guide her through the resort’s over-the-top security system—hand scanner, iris scanner, coded keypad.The works.
My boots carry me into the great room on autopilot as I mentally kick myself a few dozen times.
Do notthink about kissing. Or touching. Or beds. Or long showers.
Jesus, don’t think about anything.
“Welcome to Christmas Lockdown,” I joke, except my voice sounds strangled.
Liberty breezes past me, eyes going wide at the decorations. “Wow. Wow. Wow. This is amazing.”
Yep. She is. One thousand percent.
Enchanted by the holiday spectacle, she shrugs out of her coat and drops it across the sofa like she lives here.
My gaze snags on her.The pink sweater.The one I’ve been imagining way too damn often.
“They didn’t decorate the tree,” she says, circling the base of the massive Douglas fir.
“The team was supposed to do it together. You know, some kind of reindeer games, and all that.”
She laughs, and I wish I could capture the sound for some lonely night. The kind of lay-awake night where the house is cold, dark, and too fucking quiet.
“Everything’s here,” she murmurs, looking over all the boxes of ornaments sitting beside a carved-stone fireplace.
Stockings are waiting to be hung. Twisted strands of lights probably meant to be untangled as a group activity that just evaporated into thin air.
Leaving me alone with the one woman I’ve been trying to avoid.
I’m so screwed.
“I’ll be back.”
I make a quick escape down the hall, into the bathroom, where I scrub both hands over my face.
Get. Your. Shit. Together.
You’re a SEAL, not a teenage idiot.
I splash water, count to two hundred, and even give myself the world’s least inspirational pep talk in the mirror.
Then I step back into the great room—and instantly regret it.
She turns toward me, framed by the Christmas lights on the mantle and that ridiculously sexy sweater, and the force of it nearly knocks me backward.
I want everything—her expression, her secret smile, every piece of her she doesn’t know she gives away.
“Spence…”
The way she says my name is soft. Personal. Not a teammate calling me a nickname. Something much more important.
“Yeah?”
“I found your ornament.”
