“I told you.”
The men began to laugh. “You did tell us,” Jack said, giving his face one more wipe. “We should have listened.”
Miles was grinning when he leaned forward, brushing a drop of milk from my cheek with his finger. “But at least we get to count it.”
“You sure about that?” Jack teased, leaning forward to finish milking the cow. “I don’t think she swallowed any of it.”
“It counts,” I insisted strongly, and for once, both men gave me no grief.
“You don’t have a Christmas tree,” Miles said as I opened the door to him and his incessant knocking exactly two minutes after he had just dropped me off from the cow-milking debacle.
According to the list, today we were supposed to cross off the milking of a cow, drinking chocolate milk, and watching a Christmas movie.
“What?” I asked, moving back to let him inside again.
“I just realized. The lodge never prepped this cabin to have a tree. Nobody was supposed to be in here. We need to get you a tree.”
Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about it. In my mind, this Christmas was a wash. Maybe next year I’d be more open to a real Christmas, but this year…I had a cold, dead Scrooge heart, and a Christmas tree wasn’t going to help that.
“I’m okay. I promise. Besides, it’s not part of the bingo thing.”
He looked at me, his hand sweeping across his chest in mock offense. “My mom would murder me if I knowingly let a guest spend the week here without a tree. I’m adding it to the list. Today. After lunch.”
It was pointless to argue, so I didn’t.
“Fine. Should we just run to the grocery store and grab one off their lot?”
He looked mortally wounded. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
After lunch, he picked me up, wearing more dang flannel that was beginning to mess with my head. I’d always thought of flannel as something old men wore, but this was…different. It was flannel I had touched during a kiss. Not just touched either. My greedy fingers roamed all over it. It was a soft and sturdy fabric. The kind a girl could depend on to keep her warm. He looked like the cover of a book Chloe would love. Curse her and her endless lumberjack comments.
He handed me a pair of black gloves and pulled a white beanie onto my head, slinging it low across my ears. I pulled on the gloves, marveling at their warmth, and followed him like a stray puppy down the cabin steps and directly west into the woods.
“Did you buy these gloves?” I asked hesitantly, noticing the tag still on them. I hoped they were a pair his parents had been gifted or something. A pair they just had laying around the house.
“Can’t take my freezing-cold girlfriend Christmas-tree hunting without gloves.”
“I have gloves,” I said, trying to keep up with his long stride.
“I know. But you need gloves that don’t look like you ripped them off a three-year-old.”
He tossed me a smile over his shoulder and seemed to realize he was moving too fast, so he slowed down and grabbed my now warm, grown-up-glove-covered hand into his.
“Just in case anybody sees us heading to the woods,” he stated, holding up our clasped hands. My eyes narrowed, but I allowed the touching breach to continue—for our cover.
“What’s in your pack?” I asked, referring to the bag slung across his shoulder.
“A bow saw.”
“Is this the part where you kill me in the woods?” I asked, slowing my footsteps dramatically.
He stopped and turned to face me. “There’s a lot of things I could do with you in the woods. Should I start naming some off?”
My breath caught. “Well, I don’t see any mistletoe out here, so…”
He leaned closer, his flirting game on level one thousand, and whispered, “I’m not a big traditionalist.”
Having sufficiently rattled me, he smiled and began moving again.
I told Miles I liked about fifteen different trees on our walk before he finally deemed one perfect. I held the tree while he sawed the base, and soon we were making the trek back toward my cabin with Miles dragging our capture behind him.
He was on another level today, teasing me mercilessly like he just couldn’t help himself. For ten minutes straight, he rehashed every line of the infamous email, one jab after another. My mind couldn’t keep up as he used his wit and way with words to render me utterly outraged one moment and blushing and speechless the next. He brought up the letter, the nicknames, the hams, the missed kiss, and every other interaction between us that he could possibly twist into some form of a flirtation. One after the other, until I was left with unanswered retorts fluttering around in my head but unable to think fast enough to gather one and let it fly. As we walked side by side, my fingers clenched into a tight ball as I tried to school my emotions. He was Miles unleashed, and I couldn’t decide if I should laugh, or push him, or punch him or—
Reader, I spanked him.
Instantly, I knew I had done wrong. The entire forest seemed to hush, fading away into quiet spectators watching this unfold. My hand shot back, and I stared at it as though I had never seen one before. The other hand covered my mouth. My eyes went bug-eyed. Miles dropped the tree and whirled around with a stunned expression on his face. Actually, to be more accurate, he was looking at me like I had just handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill.
“I didn’t realize we were at this point in our fake relationship, Oliviana.”
I couldn’t move. My mouth gaped open, desperately wishing to bring a few seconds back on the clock. Rewind. Redo. Of all the people to get handsy with, it had to be Miles. My palm burned. I could only imagine what his…derrière…felt like. Well, I knew what it felt like…taut and firm…the perfect amount of bounce—FOCUS, Olive.
His eyes were dancing. Okay, he was just fine. Him and his…butt.
He bit his bottom lip in an ultra-attractive way as he took a step toward me, which I immediately countered by stepping backward.
“You just spanked me.” He couldn’t even get the sentence out without laughing.
“It…” I swallowed hard, my hands in my hair. What? Olive. WHAT? “You deserved it.”
“If that was being bad, I never want to be good.”
An embarrassed smile broke across my face before I leaned forward to push his annoying, laughing body away from mine. He held fast to my arm. I was out of protests, dismayed at how my traitorous body let me revel in the feel of his hands tugging me closer.
“I need to talk to you.” His gravelly voice and our sudden proximity read like a warning sign to me.
“What?”
“I’ve learned a couple of things about myself the past few days.”
“Should I be scared to ask?” Don’t look directly into his brown eyes, Olive. Don’t!
“Maybe.”
Against my better judgment, I looked at him square on, nervous, until he broke out into a wide grin, the scope and attractiveness of his smile literally taking my breath away.
I took in some air for my lungs and shook my head. “What have you learned?”
He held up a finger. “Number one, I’m not really a fake-dating kind of guy. As in, I hate it.”