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It didn’t take a genius to understand that Lena had as good as given him a green light to pursue Carissa and Heath had more than co-signed the idea. That squeeze was a reminder not to mess things up, but his takeaway as Heath sat down next to Lena was the same: the brakes he’d thought were holding him back were gone. Not that he knew what he was going to do about his feelings. Whatever he did, it could only be for the short term. Enough to get her out of his system and move on.
By the time Carissa got back, their base was finished.
“That looks good.” Instead of sitting across from him like she’d done before, she dropped into the chair next to him, shooting him a little smile, and damn. He liked making her smile. “I’ve got a plan, but first we need to build our little houses.” She plunked a tube of icing in front of him. “You’re basically going to use this like caulk.” The corners of her mouth twitched as she realised how the last word sounded. “Like glue. I mean like glue.” She looked so cute when she was embarrassed.
He couldn’t resist. He grabbed for the tube and without looking at her, he took two sides of the smallest gingerbread house and held them at right angles to each other. Then he squeezed a line of frosting into the gap where the pieces met. “Like this?”
“Yeah, just like that.”
“So, I’ll stick the tip in all the cracks and fill them up, and then the house will be nice and tight. Is that right?” Carissa’s cheeks flushed the prettiest pink, and on the other side of her, Lena made a strangled sound.
“That’s perfect.”
He held the tube of frosting out to her. “Do you need this caulk?” She snorted and he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing.
“You’re terrible, Big Nick.” Her gaze was pinned on him, as she swept her golden waves back over her shoulder. She’d said the exact same thing before—when he’d promised to keep her safe if she’d just get on his plane.
“Yeah, but nah. With your big plans and my caulk work, you and me are going to be the best, Ladybug.” Carissa covered her mouth with her hand, stifling a giggle and going a deeper shade of pink. “We’re going to win this whole thing so hard.”
“We better.” Then, without looking away she added, “Because I do, in fact, like winning. Especially when I’ve worked hard for it.”
“Now, are you going to tell me this plan of yours to bring home the big win, or are you going to keep telling me how to use my caulk?” He kept his attention on gluing together the next side of the gingerbread house, but he could tell from the breathless squeaking coming from the other side of the table that Carissa was struggling not to lose it.
“Stop it!” She laughed. “We’re wasting time! We need to focus.”
“Fine. I’ll be serious.” He’d frosted the four walls of his gingerbread cottage together, so he moved to attaching the roof. “Tell me your plan.”
She showed him how she wanted to arrange the three little cottages on the cardboard. “Like we’re making a little town square, only… I don’t know what to put in the middle. I grabbed some cotton candy—” she pointed at the selection of candy she’d brought over.
“Fairy floss.”
“What?”
“That’s called fairy floss, not cotton candy.”
“Okay, stop being a stickler! My point is, I thought we could use the cotton—fairy floss to make snow drifts, but… I don’t know. We can’t just make the whole middle snow. It seems too boring.”
“We’ll come up with something.” He set the first assembled gingerbread cottage on the cardboard base. “You can start decorating this one, and I’ll assemble the next one.”
“But how I decorate it might depend on what we put in the middle—”
She was worrying because they didn’t have a complete plan. He could fix that. “What goes in a town square during the holidays in the States?”
Carissa frowned. “I don’t know… a big huge Christmas tree? But I don’t think there’s anything that will work to make one.”
He surveyed the supplies she’d brought. “Do you have anything blue in there?”
“Blue? Why?” She pawed through the candy in her bowl and pulled out a package of long, flat, blue candy strips. “How about Sour Strips, like these?”
“Here’s what we’re going to do.” He lowered his voice. “We can use a few of those to make an iceskating rink or a frozen pond, there in the middle of the houses.”
Carissa’s whole demeanor went from tense to enthusiastic in a blink. “Oh my god, that’s perfect! And I can use the mini-candy canes to be little street lamps to light up the skating rink! Oh, and we can make a fence around it with graham cracker quarters. You’re a genius!”
He didn’t point out that he hadn’t come up with any of those ideas, he’d only suggested the one that had sparked her creativity. “Teamwork.” He put his hand up for a high five, just for a chance to touch her, and then he told himself that the tingles he felt after her palm smacked his was just because she’d put too much power behind her high five.
They werethe last ones to finish, but they squeaked in under the deadline, Carissa frantically tossing fairy floss around their ginger-cottages, covering up the last of the cardboard base, while he added sprinkles to the frosted roof tops. Their finished village looked pretty good, if he did say so himself, and no one else had thought to make anything like their ice-skating rink.
He leaned over to whisper into Carissa’s ear. “I think we’ve got this in the bag, Ladybug.”
