"You were really close to her."
"Yeah," I said. "She raised me. My parents were checked out. This is my first Christmas without her. It just feels empty and lonely. I don’t even know what I'm going to do on Christmas. Now I'm the stray with nowhere to go."
"You can stay with me," Jack said, sounding slightly hesitant. "Not that I’m doing anything. My brothers will be back from Harvard. Last year I ordered Chinese food, and we played video games."
"That is, like, the saddest Christmas ever," I said, blowing my nose.
"You are such a Christmas snob," he said, feeding me little bites of curry.
"I'm not a snob," I said around the food.
"You are," he said, kissing me. "The sexiest Christmas snob."
46
Jack
The next morning, after kissing Chloe goodbye, I headed to the Platinum Provisions tower. It had been a nice surprise to see her, even though she clearly wasn't impressed with my offer to spend Christmas with me and my brothers.
Before a meeting with the marketing team, I took the bag with the broken piper to the engineers.
"Can you guys help me figure out what happened?" I asked one man. "This exploded all over a baker, burning her with hot caramel."
The engineer hissed as I took out the device and laid it on his desk.
"To me, it looks like the pressure was too much, but I don't understand how that happened," he said. "We performed rigorous stress testing on this device."
"We have product out there on the shelves," I said. "If people believe that our baking tools maim people, then we will lose not only that business but our medical supply business."
"I'll look into it," the engineer said.
Later that day, after my meetings had concluded, Greg called me.
"I heard there was an accident," he said.
"We're investigating it," I assured him.
"This tower is too much of a distraction. You could lose everything with Platinum Provisions," he told me.
"I have it under control."
"I highly doubt that," Greg said.
Chloe was in my penthouse when I returned. I had given her the key pad code to go there and work on the muffins. I had to admit, it was comforting to have her there when I returned. The penthouse also smelled amazing, which was an added bonus.
"I'm making the soup muffins," she called out, "and fancy sugar cookies."
I snagged a muffin off the tray.
"You know, I shouldn't keep seeing you," she said. "Dana told me not to."
"Yet here you are."
"I couldn't leave you hanging. I promised to make muffins for bribing Mark Holbrook."
"Bribery is such a strong word," I said, kissing the back of her neck.
Then I tested the muffins.
