“That’s unfair,” Mira said.
“It is,” Wade agreed, picking his chopsticks back up so he could pick at the remainder of his lunch. “But I figured thatsaying anything about it would have meant talking to him even longer than we already had.”
Mira had to bite down on the inside of her cheek to keep from letting out a very undignified bark of laughter. “Sad but true.”
She couldn’t imagine going back to her poor excuse for cashew chicken, so she picked up her fortune cookie instead.
“Want to see our future?”
“I do,” Wade said, and some light in his eyes made warmth spread through Mira’s whole body. He took his own cookie and slid it out of its crinkly plastic wrapper. “Ready to see what the future holds?”
“Ready. On the count of three ... one, two,three.”
They broke their cookies in unison, and there was the whisper of sliding paper as they pulled the fortunes out.
Mira looked at hers. She couldn’t stop her face from heating up. “‘Pay attention to new people in your life.’”
Believe me, cookie, I’m already paying plenty of attention to today’s new person.
A tiny bit of pink appeared in Wade’s cheeks, too. He said lightly, “Maybe you should go back up there and ask for another cookie. You were robbed. That’s not really a fortune, it’s more like ... advice.”
“But it’s good advice,” Mira said, just to see if he would blush more.
He did. Paying attention to him was already incredibly rewarding. She hoped the sparks between them would last through the holidays, so she would actually have time to go out with him andrelax. It would be fantastic to be out with Wade without anything hanging over her head—not Marsh, not her troubles with her parents ....
“What about you?” she said.
Wade looked back down at the little slip of paper. “‘The next few days will be very interesting.’”
Chapter Five
That was hands down the most accurate fortune cookie Wade had ever seen. Even if he didn’t count the two jaw-dropping things that had happened before he’d ever cracked the cookie open—stepping in as substitute Santa and meeting his fated mate—he was still having one hell of a week. One hell of aMonday, even.
He had buckled down for the post-lunch stretch of the workday and done his best to act jolly for that afternoon’s legion of kids. By the time five o’clock rolled around, he was exhausted. Even the most challenging woodworking was a breeze compared to beingonfor a non-stop crowd, especially when he knew that slipping up could ruin a kid’s Christmas. He knew every child stopped believing in Santa eventually, but he didn’t want it to be because of him.
But he wasn’t an actor. He wasn’t even usually that extroverted. It took a lot out of him to keep up that kind of performance for hours at a time.
And Petey hadn’t lied about how often kids liked to tug on the beard. Wade’s face hurt. Thank God Mira had encouraged him to really slather on the spirit glue.
Mira.
Even thinking of her made the whole world slow down. His whole frazzled spirit seemed to lift.
His polar bear had wanted to swipe a lazy paw at Marsh and bat him all the way across the food court for interrupting their lunch. But at least he was pretty sure it had been going well.
She was smart and funny, and she lovedChristmas in Connecticut, and when she got excited, she lit up like a human sparkler, so bright and dazzling that he couldn’t believe everyone around her didn’t turn to stare.
Wade had wanted to ask her out at the end of their shift, but he’d still had a Santa beard gummed onto his face and he’d felt like his brain was on the verge of short-circuiting. He needed a little quiet and a good night’s sleep so he could give her the best, freshest version of himself. If he had tried to ask her on a date not ten minutes after a toddler had swiped a wet cherry sucker across his face, he would have fumbled it badly enough to become a Honey Brook legend.
Besides, Mira looked a little worn out too. Marsh had run her ragged all afternoon, keeping her on the hop by sending her from station to station.
“All I want right now is to go home and collapse on the couch,” she’d said, so he was taking her at her word.
Even if he couldn’t help thinking about how incredible it would be to collapse on the couchwithher. He was so tired that he wasn’t even thinking about sex, just how much he would love to curl up with her, put his arm around her, and justbe. She would still smell a little like gingerbread from her time at the bakery booth ....
Alas, he had to go home alone.
He spent an ungodly amount of time carefully peeling off his beard, making sure to stick it in a drawer afterwards. Fiona, his tuxedo cat, looked sweet and well-mannered, but she was magnetically drawn to anything Wade didn’t want her to mess with. He bought her countless toys, even ones infused with catnip, and she ignored them to spend her days batting around any personal treasures or necessities he hadn’t nailed down or locked up. He still hadn’t finished fishing all of his grandfather’s old baseball card collection out from under the bed, where she had knocked them on one particularly exuberant day. The bedframe was too low for him to reach under it by hand, so retrieving the cards had been a delicate and painstaking operation involving a fly-swatter. And even then, hewas still down a few players that had to be lurking down there somewhere.
