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Shaking my head, I said, “No, it’s okay. I just…” I breathed deeply, assessing my thoughts to make sense of them. “I guess I just missed him.” I shrugged and Vinny nodded. “So after the hospice people came and cleared his body, I stripped the bed and started to clean up… just going through the motions and removing any signs of him or his sickness from the room…” My voice cracked and I cleared my throat to shove the emotion back. “And then I realized what I was doing, the magnitude of it all, and—”
Vinny cupped my cheek. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I know.” I sniffed. “I fell asleep on the bare mattress that first night.”
He nodded, his thumb stroking back and forth over my cheek.
“When I woke up, I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving that room or changing it at all. It smelled like him.”
“Still does.”
My eyes widened as hope bloomed in my chest. “Really?”
Vinny nodded. “Really. It’s a mixture of the two of you, but he’s still there.”
Tears pressed against the backs of my eyes even though I should have been all cried out after yesterday.
“So…” he began, “it’s Christmas Eve. Last night, right before you started snoring like a freight train, you mentioned—”
I groaned and tried to pull away from him but he tightened his grip.
“What’s your Christmas Eve tradition?” He searched my gaze and his eyes narrowed. “Mass, like a good little Catholic?”
I snorted. “I’m not a good little anything.”
“I doubt that,” he murmured. When he licked his lips, my gaze fell to his mouth, and I was acutely aware of our closeness. Wrapped in his arms like this, his mouth just inches away from mine, bodies pressed tightly together…
I inhaled a shaky breath. All I had to do was push up onto my tiptoes and lean in—
“Focus, Jacqueline,” Vinny practically growled. “Christmas Eve.”
Focus. Right. Giving him a curt nod, I thought back to spending all those Christmases with my dad and brothers, but with the memories came a wave of sadness. “It doesn’t matter. My brothers both have other lives now.”
“It matters to me.”
Good grief, was he determined to make it impossible for me to keep my distance?
“Vinny, I—”
“Jacqueline.”
My breath caught in my throat at the way he said my name, so full of power and leaving me little room to talk back. This was the side of him I knew, the side I was familiar with. I understood and expected the side of him that didn’t hesitate to throw me down onto the mat or kick my ass until I was bruised and bloody.
“I’d like to spend Christmas Eve with you.”
And that was the side of him that threw me, not onto the mat to spar, but completely out of my comfort zone and so far off balance I wasn’t sure which way was up.
His eyes flicked back and forth between mine, then his thumb stilled at the corner of my mouth and redness began to seep into that space around his irises.
My pulse sped.
He licked his lips and my gaze fell to his mouth again.
No no no
We can’t.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he whispered.
