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Then she thought about Cal Meridian looking at her. That special way he looked at her — like she was something that made him forget how to speak, like she was the sunrise he'd stopped believing in, like he couldn't understand how something like her existed in the same world as something like him. That man. That enormous, impossible, gentle, devastating man — and the way his whole face changed when she walked into a room.
He's not an idiot, she decided. He has excellent taste.
She looked at her reflection. “Still got it," she said out loud, to no one.
Then she slapped her own ass watching it jiggle, nodded once with great satisfaction, and turned toward the shower smiling.
If Cal saw that, he’d run away…and I’d chase him.
The shower was still absurd. It was always going to be absurd.
She turned the main lever, stepped back from the initial eruption of steam, and stepped in with the confidence of someone who had now used this shower enough times to have opinions about lever sequencing.
She knew which one to avoid if she didn't want to be ambushed. She knew which angle hit her shoulders best. She knew, specifically and with great scientific precision, exactly what the fourth lever did.
Girl seriously come on…you just did it!
She then paused considering.
I mean it is healthy, right?
Then feeling deliciously decadent she turned it on anyway and stood in the center of it and thought about Bear's hands and the sound of his voice saying dirty princess things in the dark. The jet hit her engorged clit just right and she moaned things that would make her man blush and try to escape.
Mmmm daddy…
Eventually, she got out. She stood in front of the mirror again afterward, towel wrapped around her hair, and surveyed the outfit options she'd mentally catalogued in the shower.
Sexy? Comfy? She turned the question over.
Both, she decided. Obviously both. The man is making me breakfast.
She came out in the tightest yoga pants she owned — the ones that had been part of the wardrobe she got at Hallie’s. Dark green, doing what yoga pants were designed by God and physics to do — and a massive cream-colored sweater that hung off one shoulder and made her look soft and cozy.
She looked in the mirror one more time.
He's going to lose his mind, she thought cheerfully, and went downstairs.
She stopped at the top of the landing.
Stared.
What the fuck!?
The living room was gone.
The walls, the fireplace, the massive windows looking out at the snow-covered estate were all still there. But every other inch of available floor space had been consumed. There were presents everywhere.
Stacked in loose towers, clustered in groups, wrapped in paper that was either deep green or burgundy or brown kraft paper with pine branches pressed into the ribbon. They covered the floor from the base of the Christmas tree to the edges of the room. They were stacked against the sofa legs. There was a pile near the fireplace that came up to her hip. They went up the stairs.
Up the fucking stairs!
As she wandered down carefully and looked closer she saw that so many had her name on them.
To Sage. From Santa.
She stood there and looked down at all of it.
She pressed her hand over her mouth. Her eyes went hot immediately, the way it happened since meeting him: no warning, no ramp-up, just the full weight of it arriving all at once.
