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Her smile sent a familiar ray of sunshine straight into my heart. “Oh, Mr. Rhodes, it might’ve just been.”
* * *
Obnoxious,incessant bouncing on my shoulder woke me from a dead sleep, and I blinked into the soft gray gloom of our room. Chloe contentedly stretched out along my side, happily oblivious to her psychotic owner, who was grinning down at me expectantly.
“Come on!” she stage-whispered with no regard to the fact that our cat and I would prefer to rest uninterrupted.
“What?” I mumbled.
“Come.On!” She pushed my shoulder again for emphasis with each word, as though that explained everything. “Get. Up.”
“Middle of the night—” I grumbled, her lips silencing my protest before she sprung from the bed with more enthusiasm than her feline friend ever showed. “Baby what’s—”
“Stop grumbling andcome on!”
A groan rumbled in my chest, but I rolled my numb-as-shit frame over, glaring at the red four-o'clock on the nightstand. “Our flight’s not for six hours.”
“Psh,” she scoffed, latching onto my bare arm and dragging my ass off the bed. “This isn’t aboutthe flight,” she muttered, still yanking me through the room as Chloe gave a lazy flick of her tail, one eye open a beat before she exposed her tubby little belly and returned to her glorious slumber. Great. I was jealous of a damn cat.
“Baby,” I complained as she got us to the front door and hurled my winter jacket at me, not bothering to explain as she dove into her cute little snow boots. “Freaking chaos pixie, I swear to God.”
She giggled as my eyes dropped to her shoes.Heelsonsnow boots—what kind of cosmic joke was that? It didn’t matter that they were sexy as hell, or made her legs look two miles long, they weren’t fucking practical. Hurrying to keep pace, I followed my Skittles out into the subtle crunch of our first snow of the season, the world aglow with the soft white of a blustering winter night.
Noel led me right into the middle of the damn street before bouncing on her toes, blinking expectantly as she beamed at me through the biting wind.
I stared back at her, entirely perplexed and no less sure as she hurled her arms around me, the fur of her hood stuck in my mouth as she squealed happily into my shoulder.
“Um…” When she lifted her face to the sky to collect fat crystalline flakes on her bare lashes and freckled nose, it finally hit me. “This is your first snow.”
She turned her face—the perfect picture of winter with her rosy cheeks and now-decorated lashes—back in my direction and beamed. My heart swelled. And despite how desperately I wanted to go climb back under our warm covers, I couldn’t miss this.
Not her first taste of frozen sky water.
Not her first snow angel.
I was certainly going to be her first snowball fight, even if the hourwasungodly.
Because Noel McShane was my world. And I would damn well do whatever it took to see her happy.
* * *
