Another loud knock—this time at my window.
I checked the time. 7:30 am. Technically, I went to bed at 10 pm, but in girl-with-a-Kindle time, it was actually closer to 2 am, which made this wake-up call much worse than he probably imagined. The previous night of a frozen pond and accidentally laughing and telling Miles too many things had left me exhausted. I flung the covers off my body, immediately regretting it as the damp chill of the winter morning touched my skin. I had left the fire on in the main room the night before, but it had since died out. I dressed quickly to the sounds of Miles singing his own special version of “Jingle Bells” outside my window. When I finally opened the door, I was wearing long, thermal underwear underneath jeans and a thick, cream-colored sweater. All that was accompanied by major bedhead and probably streaked mascara underneath my eyes because I had been too tired to wash my face the night before.
“7:30 on a Sunday, really?”
Miles gave me a quick appraisal with a lift of his eyebrows. He looked like he was about to say something when his brow quickly furrowed.
“I can see your breath,” he said with some alarm.
He stepped past me, entering the cabin. “Why is it so cold?”
I closed the door and shrugged. “The fire went out sometime in the night.”
He muttered under his breath and strode to the fireplace, stoking the white embers before opening a box full of chopped wood next to the fireplace. Wood that hadn’t been there yesterday, to my knowledge.
“Did you chop that?”
He didn’t answer and, instead, set about making me a fire. Within moments, a warm orange glow began heating up the cabin.
I dropped onto my knees in front of the fire and let the cozy warmth soak into my skin.
“Thanks,” I said.
Miles sat on the couch somewhere behind me. “Alright. I was looking at the bingo card, and if we’re going to hit all the squares for a blackout, we need to be prepared, so I made us a schedule.”
I leaned back and took the papers he offered me, the top full of lines and times and dates, and my heart couldn’t help but give a little sigh of happiness. “A schedule? Maybe I underestimated you.”
“I feel like you’re the type of person who gets motivated best with a list.”
I looked at the paper, flipping to the next page, which held the actual bingo card.
“Since it’s Sunday, the lodge will be doing some of the simpler, low-key activities. Cheese making. Roasting a chestnut. Cookie decorating. Crap like that. If we can survive the boredom, we’ll be able to cross a bunch of stuff off the list.”
As I perused the paper, it became very clear to me that the “crap like that” bingo squares were the activities I was actually looking forward to doing. They were all the things that could be accomplished in the warm lodge without exposing myself to any elements of the outside world.
“I thought I was supposed to be the Scrooge in this relationship. These all look like a blast.”
“A blast, huh?” He smiled. “That definitely tracks.”
My body had sufficiently thawed from the fire, so I made my way over to the couch, sitting on the other side of him. “Just because you’re not risking death or frostbite doesn’t mean these activities are crap.”
He plucked the papers from my hand. “Roasting a chestnut? Making cheese? You categorize these under the blast category?”
Okay, blast was probably pushing it, but I was in this now, and I was going to prove my point.
“You probably grew up doing all this stuff. I have no clue how cheese is made, so it sounds fascinating. I’ve also never roasted a chestnut. And decorating Christmas cookies is always fun. Anyone who feels otherwise has no business being my fake boyfriend.”
“Alright,” he said. “You’ll have to convince me.”
I didn’t appreciate the look in his eyes when he said that, so I looked at the paper again. “And Monday, we’ll do the gingerbread competition.”
He groaned like a man being tortured.
I swatted him on the shoulder with the paper. “This was all your idea. I’d be very happy to forego the entire blackout thing.”
“Eh, once we get to tomorrow night, I’ll be fine.”
“What’s tomorrow night?”
“The barn dance and mistletoe kiss. We can knock out both at the same time.”
My stomach immediately clenched at the thought of kissing Miles. Again. Although the puckered grandma kiss we had shared wasn’t one for the books, I had a feeling that if I ever really allowed Miles to kiss me, the effects could be devastating. “A sweet little kiss on the cheek sounds perfect. The kind you’d give your mom on Christmas morning.”
He put his hands behind his head, a smile beginning to form on his face. “If you think I would kiss my girlfriend on her cheek under mistletoe, you’ve got another thing coming.”
I raised my chin, not allowing his words to distract me from my purpose, which was to keep us in line—or more specifically, him in line. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why?” He looked genuinely curious.
“Things will…get into our heads.”
“What are you worried about getting into your head?” Miles asked. He had crossed his leg over his knee and was now looking at me innocently.
I scowled at him. “Nothing.”
“Good. All I know is that we have a fake-dating agreement. We have to do everything on the list.” He peered closer at the bingo card and held it out to me, pointing to a square. “And it says mistletoe kiss right here.”
“Fine,” I said. “But if your heart gets broken, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Miles gave no sign that he heard me, except for a slight pause before he continued reading off the schedule. “Tuesday, we’ll milk cows, drink fresh chocolate milk…”
He droned on, but my mind was stuck on the “fresh” part of the chocolate milk. I didn’t have any sort of dairy allergy–thank goodness, because I was a big fan of pizza and ice cream. But straight milk was a different matter altogether, especially if I had to squeeze it right from the udder with my own two hands. I couldn’t quite stomach the thought.
He cleared his throat, snapping me out of my worried thoughts. “One more thing for tonight.”
“What?”
“My parents want to have us over for ice cream sundaes tonight after the lodge closes.”
I froze, wide-eyed. “What? Why?”
“Because they want to meet my girlfriend.” He grinned cheekily.
“I’ve already met them both, and I’m not really your girlfriend.”
“That’s not the line we’re feeding everybody here, though, is it?”
“What did you tell them about us?”
I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like his face might have reddened a tiny bit. “Just that I knew you were coming and wanted to surprise you. And them.”
“I don’t want to.”
“We’re going.”
“No.”
“It’s part of our cover.”
“No.”
We were still having the same argument hours later, after a day of learning to make cheese, roasting a chestnut, and, of course, decorating cookies. Miles had been a decent sport through it all, though I did have to remove all the candy from sitting in front of him and force him to decorate more than one cookie. By the end, it was almost as exhausting as decorating with two-year-olds. Although, two-year-olds probably wouldn’t sit that close to me, or rub my back, or play with my hair to annoy me when all of my concentration was on piping a border around my cookies. Suffice it to say, I was officially wiped out from the day of holiday fun, and the idea of keeping up the ruse in front of his parents was almost too much for me to handle.