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Four men stared at Josh with open mouths.
“What?” Josh shrugged. “I have a brain.”
“Said the scarecrow,” Flynn muttered before turning to Mitch. “The guy who makes a living singing love songs has a point.”
“Could it be that simple?” Mitch felt his heart lurch at the thought. “I just make her spend more time with me? I invoke the friends’ clause?”
“Right now, what you’ve got,” Josh said, “is a booty call arrangement. It isn’t friends with benefits. You need to up the friends part. And what happens when a woman becomes friends with a guy?” There was silence. Josh looked at them like they were idiots. “Emotional attachment. They become attached. The physical stuff becomes confused with the friend stuff and the next thing they know, they’re falling in love. They can’t help themselves. It’s in their DNA.”
“I hate to say it,” Matt said, “but he makes sense. You need to invoke the friends’ clause.”
“Did Josh just come up with a plan?” Flynn said.
The rest of the men stared at Josh, who was grinning widely. “I am the man.” He puffed out his chest—just as Caroline stalked into the bar.
“Josh McInnes, what did we agree about fried food?” She aimed straight for her husband.
And Josh’s eyes flew to Mitch. “Asshole. You sold me out.”
Mitch didn’t even bother to deny it. He just grinned and settled in to watch the fireworks while he plotted how to rope Jodie into a friendship with a man who wanted so much more.
The Reverend Morrison’s Last Christmas in Invertary
This story takes place after Callum and Isobel get married, which happens between Rage and Ransom.
During his forty-seven-year tenure at Invertary’s Presbyterian church in the Scottish Highlands, Reverend Morrison had seen it all. And most of it he wished he hadn’t. Which was why, on his eightieth birthday, he’d decided to retire to Spain and spend his last few years in a country that wasn’t wet and freezing for eleven months of the year.
He’d planned his escape right down to the last detail and made it clear to all and sundry that he didn’t want any farewell parties, he just wanted to leave. It had been his intention to give his last sermon at the Christmas morning service—mainly because that was an easy one to prepare—then slip away quietly at the end. As usual, the folk of Invertary completely ignored him. Which is how he found himself taken hostage by his congregation and forced to sit through the longest goodbye since the von Trapp family escaped Austria.
“Reverend Morrison,” Caroline McInnes said when she took over his service. “We know you wanted to sneak away, but we couldn’t let your many years of service to this church and community go unmarked. Please, take a seat. We have a few things we’d like to say to you, and then we’ve put on a wonderful buffet lunch for everyone afterward as a thank you.”
“Do you know what would have been a proper thank you?” Morrison said as the singing fool Caroline had married dragged a huge, throne-like chair into the middle of his platform. “If you’d listened to what I told you and let me leave in peace.”
“We all know you didn’t mean that.” Caroline smiled at him.
“Aye,” his nemesis piped up from the front row, “I told her how you’d secretly confided in me that you were hoping the church would make a fuss.”
Betty McLeod gave him a toothless grin. He’d told her no such thing. This was just another attempt at payback for all the years he’d rebuffed her advances. Bloody demon of a woman. If Saint Peter had been around at the same time as Betty, he’d have performed an exorcism on her.
“I did not say that,” he told Caroline as she took his arm and led him to the chair.
“I know.” She patted his shoulder and then proceeded to ignore him. “Now, since you’re heading off to Spain, the children have prepared an appropriate Christmas song for you.”
The kids were still dressed in the costumes for the nativity play they’d put on during the service. One of the wise men was picking his nose and wiping it on his crown, while it looked like an angel had spilled orange juice down the front of her white robes—at least, he hoped it was juice, and not vomit stains.
“You.” He pointed at a teenager in the front row. “Go to the office and get my angina medicine. I’m going to need it.” When the teen did
n’t move, he barked, “Now!” That got him running.
Morrison was jealous. There was a day, long ago, when he would have sprinted out of the church after the teen. As it was, he was too old and stiff to make a run for it, so all he could do was endure the kids’ tuneless rendition of ‘Feliz Navidad.’ Some fool had given them castanets to play during it. They clicked them randomly and used them to snap at each other. And then, halfway through the song, Mary Johnson—who believed every service should have some dancing in the aisle, and had the biblical evidence to prove it—appeared beside the children. Dressed in Spanish national costume, she performed the Flamenco to the last verse of the song.
It was hell.
It didn’t help that Josh McInnes and his breakfast club buddies were sitting right in his line of sight, laughing so hard they had to hold each other up. That’s when Morrison realized Josh was as much behind his torture as Betty. It was payback for those marriage lessons he’d made him sit through years earlier.
“Well, wasn’t that wonderful?” Caroline said as the singing ended. “Let’s give them a round of applause.”
That’s when the scream went up.
