Page 59 of Santa Baby

I held her gaze. She held mine. I swore time stopped for a moment.

“Did you mean that?”

I knew exactly what she was talking about. She heard it all. How could she not have? “I think we should talk about what’s going on between us now.”

Her answering smile ignited something in my heart I’d never felt before and didn’t know how to name. “Are you hungry? I know a place.”

25

FIA

Mason walked toward our corner booth in the little diner a few blocks away from his office. It was the kind of place that was open at odd hours, serving a full menu all day. A true greasy spoon with linoleum tiles, chipped vinyl tables, and a soft, quiet atmosphere that reminded me of taking road trips to the Jersey Shore every summer to play on the beach. Tacky Christmas decorations covered every surface while soft jazz played over the speakers—Christmas jazz, of course.

A fabric Christmas tree on the bar started dancing and singing, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in a prerecorded voice. Mason jumped, swore, and might have considered taking a swing at it before calming himself down enough to roll his eyes and slide past it.

He slid into the booth across from me, his hand now wrapped in gauze and roughly bandaged together with whatever came in the little first-aid kit I’d picked up at CVS on our way here. I sipped my coffee from a thick porcelain mug with the animated version of the Grinch printed across it. “Do you need me to fight that tree for you?”

“Maybe.” He looked over his shoulder and grimaced. “Haunted, for sure.”

“It’s probably from the nineties, so you might be on to something. We used to have one. Colin and I used to hide it around the house to scare our parents. We had it for one Christmas before it mysteriously disappeared, like Colin’s Furbies.”

“Colin would have Furbies,” he said with a laugh.

“He had three, actually. He used to make them talk to each other.”

“That’s demented.”

“I know.” I laughed and took a sip of coffee. “I was like, five, when my mom brought them down from the attic when she was cleaning out the house, taking things for donation. They’d been up there for years and started talking again the second she took them out of the box.”

Mason shivered, shaking his head. I smiled so widely my cheeks burned. It was, admittedly, easy to avoid what had just happened at his office. I’d only been standing there for two, maybe three minutes but I was sure I’d caught the most heated part of their conversation—their fight.

They’d been fighting about me.

The memory of Mason’s words—that he loved me—rippled through my mind with every breath I took. It was growing harder and harder to tell myself this was still all for show.

“Fia, I shouldn’t have left you in the cold like that. I should have explained what was happening and why I wasn’t around from the beginning, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not.” His eyes met mine, a solid, beautiful blue in the unflattering fluorescent lighting. Mason looked good regardless. He was ruffled and exhausted, which was obvious based on the dark circles under his eyes and the hollowness of his cheeks. He had his sleeves rolled up his forearms, his muscles tense as he turned his mug in a circle. “You didn’t deserve that.”

“You were busy saving your company’s reputation,” I argued, feeling awful for my past thoughts and assumptions.

He shook his head, looking down at his coffee. “I didn’t stop thinking about you the entire time. I couldn’t stop.”

Silence swelled between us, broken by the music drifting through the air overhead. I opened my mouth to reply something, anything, but a waitress floated over to take our order.

“What’re you having, kid?” she asked me without meeting my eyes, all business in her sparkly clean uniform that smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke. The tells of a good diner, in my humble opinion.

“The Belgian waffles with extra syrup and whipped cream please. And he’ll have the house breakfast, double meat with bacon and sausage links, four eggs over medium. Hashbrowns instead of home fries and a side of country gravy.”

She raised her brows, her gaze sliding from mine to Mason’s. “Toast with that?”

Before Mason could even open his mouth, I said, “Pancakes, make it a double order. Butter, syrup, the works.”

She scribbled the massive order down and walked away before Mason could object. I could feel his gaze on my face and I blushed, hard.

“I’m supposed to be the one ordering for you, I think.” He grinned wryly and shook his head. “I don’t like hashbrowns, just so you know.”