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prologue
author’s note: you may have previously read the prologue, Inconveniently Bayou. I didn’t want anyone to miss it, so included it here, but if you’ve already read it, you can just skip to chapter one to read the rest of Beau and Becca’s full-length happily ever after!
Beau Hebert realized almost immediatelyupon stepping into the Bollier family’s kitchen that glitter was going to be his ultimate downfall.
Yes, glitter. The sparkly, seemingly innocent substance that people used to decorate things like arts and crafts projects, homemade Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards, and, apparently, New Year’s Eve decorations.
He’d spent the past two months believing it was pumpkin spice lattes that were going to be his undoing.
But no, it was definitely going to be glitter.
Glitter. And his next-door neighbor, Becca Bollier.
The girl who had moved into the house just to the east of his childhood home when they’d been ten. And who had been the first person to tell him he was an asshole. And the first—and only—girl to punch him.
Both of those things had happened when they’d been ten too. Well, the first time.
Ironically, if there really was such a thing as having a devil and an angel sitting on his shoulders, giving him bad and good advice, Becca would have been the angel. She’d smoothed out his rough spots and kept him from becoming, mostly, an even bigger asshole.
Thank God Becca hadn’t gotten gorgeous until she’d been eighteen and on her way out of town to college.
She’d gotten pretty at about age fifteen. She’d gotten beautiful around sixteen-and-a-half. Not that he’d been keeping track. Butgorgeoushadn’t happened until the summer they were eighteen.
And she hadn’t turned into a woman who he couldn’t be within ten feet of without wanting to run his hand through her hair and over the sweet curve of her ass until… well, about October twenty-seventh of this year.
Okay,exactlyOctober twenty-seventh of this year.
When she’d been—ironically—dressed in a satiny red devil’s costume that hugged her breasts and barely covered that sweet ass and had matching thigh-high red leather boots.
She’d walked into the kitchen in that thing, and he’d swallowed the bite of pumpkin muffin down the wrong pipe, shoved back from the table to try to keep from choking to death, and then spilled his pumpkin spice latte down the front of him and into his lap. And onto his sudden and extremely inconvenient erection.
He’d never drank a pumpkin spice latte before that day.
Or since.
But now, the smell of cinnamon, or pumpkin, or the sight of whipped cream, made him hard.
Which had also beenveryinconvenient considering that had happened five days before Halloween, and between October twenty-seventh and today, December twenty-seventh, there had beena lotof pumpkin, cinnamon, and whipped cream around.
But now, seven seconds after walking into Becca’s mother’s kitchen on December twenty-seventh, he realized it was glitter that was going to finally take him down. He didn’t know how, exactly. He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve this, either. But he had the sense he was in huge trouble. That was certain.
Everything was exactly as it had been two months ago. But bigger. And sparklier.
So much sparklier.
“Hi, Beau!”
“Beau! You came!”
“Happy holidays, Beau!”
Becca’s three friends from college—Savannah, Toby, and Daniel—were sitting at the huge, oak kitchen table. The table that Beau had made with his own two hands. Exactly where they’d been sitting when he’d walked in to fix the garbage disposal they’d broken by putting pumpkin rinds into it back in October.
The table had been covered in pumpkins, pumpkin guts, and pumpkin gutting tools. The pumpkins were partway to becoming jack-o-lanterns and there were pumpkin muffins, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin cheesecake, toasted pumpkin seeds, and the fucking pumpkin spice latteseverywhere.
The whole place had smelled like he’d walked into a pumpkin pie.
And he’d been okay with that. He’d actually been happy. Hungry. He’dgrinned.
