Chapter One
22 Days Until Christmas
“OH MYGod!” I stared, horrified at the cup’s worth of hot apple cider I’d spilled all over the man I’d just purchased it from.
He looked down at his jacket and absently wiped the front.
“I’m sorry!” I said, my voice an octave higher than I’d have preferred. “There was—I mean, someone bumped me from behind….” I spun to point behind myself and instead splashed the last dribbles from the cup onto a lady standing there. “I’m so sorry, ma’am.”
She gave me a dirty look and shoved her way through the crowd.
“It’s all right,” the man said from behind me. His voice sounded likeamber. It was glittery and gold and slightly melodic, dancing before my eyes.
I turned back once more to the stranger. “No, no. I got apple cider all over your coat!”
“It’s just a coat,” he insisted with a gentle tone.
“But a very nice coat,” I finished. Damn. He was a tall drink of water if ever I’d found a guy to use that term on. He had this rugged-meets-GQ look, which I totally dug, with a jawline to kill for, and beautiful sandy brown hair and eyes. “Don’t—ah—don’t put it in the dryer. Wool shrinks.”
His mouth quirked as if he were trying to bite back a small smile.
“You probably knew that.”
Him and everyone else who can read a clothing tag!
“I’m Bowen,” I said. I thrust the cup forward, scrambled to move it to my left, then offered the stranger a hand.
He took it. “Felix Hansen.”
“Hansen or Handsome?” I asked, before I was quite certain I resembled something akin to a deer in the headlights. “I said that out loud.”
Felix sort of ducked his head to one side and smiled awkwardly. “Have a last name?”
“Hmm? Oh yes.I mean—Merlin.”
“Bowen Merlin?”
“That’s right.”
Felix nodded. “Quite the name.”
“Hard one to forget.”
Felix glanced at our still shaking hands.
I abruptly stopped.
The holiday food fair in my new home of Lancaster, New Hampshire, had been a lot of fun until I reached the Snowy Ridge Apple Orchard booth and thoroughly embarrassed myself. I mean, dousing a guy with hot liquid—by accident—was one thing, but then trying to flirt after the fact? My God, what was wrong with me? Sometimes I think I was dropped on my head as a baby.
Felix turned and stepped into the tent.
I closed my eyes and clasped my hands together, crushing the paper cup between them. I needed to walk away. Walk away before I made this whole fiasco any—
“Here you are.”
I opened my eyes. Felix was holding out a new cup, steam rising from the hot cider.
“Huh?”
