Cruel Winter with You (Under the Mistletoe collection)

In an ideal world, Marc Compton would be acting like a total dick.

I’m not asking for much. Some gloating, maybe. Obnoxiously raised eyebrows. A sneered, “Well, well, well. Look who showed up unannounced on Christmas Eve.” I’m not picky: any of the above would make me feel exponentially better about the situation.

But no. Marc opens the front door in a blaze of towering midwestern good looks, and when I look up at his handsome face, all I can detect is genuine surprise to find me standing on his parents’ snow-covered porch.

Surprise that quickly morphs into worry.

It’s like he doesn’t wish me ill. Like he doesn’t even hold a grudge over the terrible things I said to him a few months ago or over my fumbled, insufficient apology.

Then again, holding a grudge would require him to spend time thinking about me, which might be something that no longer occurs.

“Jamie?” he says, voice incongruously warm in the freezing dark. It’s barely six, but the sun sets so early, it might as well be the middle of the night. “What the hell are you doing out in this weather?”

A good question. To which I—a levelheaded professional who keeps her cool under pressure, regularly saves people’s lives, and sometimes even manages to make it through an entire Pilates class without bursting into tears—eloquently reply, “Um, yeah.”

Marc cocks his head.

Frowns at me with something that looks uncomfortably similar to pity.

Repeats, skeptical: “‘Yeah’?”

“Um, yeah.” I’m such an accomplished conversationalist. Maybe they’ll give me an award for that. “As in . . . Yeah. Yes. It is me. Jamie.”

“Glad to know you’re not being deceitfully impersonated by an evil doppelgänger.” He takes a step back and roughly orders, “Come in.”

“No!” I say—way too vehemently, judging from the line that appears on his forehead. I walk that back by adding, “Thank you, but no. I really can’t stay. I should go home before the storm gets bad.”

“It’s late December in Northern Illinois. The storm is already bad.” I don’t have to turn around to know what he sees over my shoulders: long stretches of no visibility interrupted by large, furious snowflakes flurrying like turbines under the streetlights. The soundtrack—occasional creaking of branches, constant hissing of the wind—doesn’t make the scene any better. “You have to come in, Jamie.”

“Actually, my dad sent me here to borrow a copper roasting pan. As soon as you give it to me, I’ll just head back.” I smile, hoping it’ll get Marc to feel some sympathy and speed things up. I am, after all, just a girl. Cast out to the brutal elements by her only parent, all in the name of a treacherous but essential quest: plundering her childhood best friend’s home to procure a magic pan.

I am deserving of compassion.

Especially because the childhood best friend in question didn’t even have the decency to be here. Tabitha is with her parents and husband on a balmy, all-inclusive cruise somewhere in the Caribbean, slurping pure joy out of a coconut. This holiday season, the only Compton in town is Marc. Tabitha’s little brother, who . . .

Well, for one, he’s not little at all. Hasn’t been in a while, really. And he flew in from California a couple of days ago to take care of Sondheim, the Comptons’ geriatric high-maintenance-and-even-higher-misanthropy cat.

I asked Tabitha why they didn’t simply hire a sitter, and her only reply was, “Why would we, when Marc was available?” Apparently, spending Christmas alone with a family pet who daydreams of eating eyeballs right out of their sockets is a totally normal activity for a tech mogul.

And thus, here we are. Out of eight billion people on this floating rock of a planet, Marc is the only one capable of short-circuiting my brain. And he happens to be all that stands between me and my quarry.

“Please tell me you didn’t walk two miles in a blizzard for a copper pot.”

“I did not. Dad’s home is closer than that”—by .3 miles, I estimate—“and what I need is a copper pan.”

“Jesus.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and leans against the door.

“It’s probably in the kitchen. And Dad says it’s necessary to bake the ham. So, if you could go get it . . .”

“Who the hell owns a copper pan?”

“Your mom.” I feel a spark of irritation. “Because they’re great. She wanted it, so Tabitha and I went in together to buy one for her last Christmas.” On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t have told him. Tabitha and I could barely afford the one we bought, but Marc is probably just making a mental note to tell his butler to have a baker’s dozen custom made. Seven for his parents and six for my dad, all gold foiled and emerald encrusted. With their initials embossed on it.

It’s so weird. Marc—Marc the jock, who charmed his way in and out of trouble; Marc of the coasting grades; Marc the college dropout—got filthy rich at twenty-three and paid off his parents’ mortgage after his company’s first liquidity event. He now has a net worth of millions. Billions. Bajillions. I don’t even know; as decent at math as I am, numbers that large always get slithery in my head.

Meanwhile, Tabitha and I—the dutiful, well-behaved, overachieving daughters—can barely afford appliances of the non-bedazzled variety.

I clear my throat. “Anyway, the sooner you bring the pan to me, the—”

“Hey, there! Aren’t you the Malek girl?”

I turn to the neighboring house, where a vaguely familiar elderly head leans out from one of the upstairs windows. It takes me a moment to place it, but when I do, I swallow a sigh. “Um, hi, Mrs. Nos—”

Hang on a minute. Is Mrs. Nosy her real name, or did we just call her that because she’d constantly bribe us with Werther’s Original to find out gossip about our parents?

“Norton,” Marc mutters, reading my mind.

“Hi, Mrs. Norton. Yup, I’m Jamie Malek.”

“You don’t look one day older than when you left for college. It’s been, what, ten years?”

I try to smile, but my zygomaticus major might be frozen. “Sure has. You look great, too, ma’am.” In truth, I can barely see her. The storm is picking up quickly, whiting out anything that’s more than a dozen feet away.

“You’re a lawyer, right? Like your daddy?”

“Jamie’s a physician,” Marc corrects her, a touch impatient. “Finishing up her pediatrics residency.”

“Ah, yes. You’d know, wouldn’t you?” She looks between us, suddenly hawkish and a little prurient. “I forgot that you two both moved out to San Francisco. Bet you see each other all the time, don’t you?”

My stomach tightens. Because now would be a good time for Marc and I to exchange a loaded stare and burst out laughing. Maybe even say, Oh, Mrs. Nosy, if only you knew what happened last time we were together. We should tell you. It’d make your holiday season. You’d dump a whole truckload of hard candy on us.

I stay silent, though. Paralyzed. Which means that Marc is on his own when he says, “Yeah, of course. We practically live together. If you’ll excuse us, I can see a snot icicle forming under Jamie’s nose. Merry Christmas to you and your husband.”

A minute later, I’m in the Comptons’ kitchen, having absolutely no clue how I got there. Marc, whose tolerance for bullshit never managed to grow taller than your average bolete mushroom, must have pulled me inside. He’s currently standing in front of me, unzipping my parka like he would for a toddler who has yet to master the concept of zippers.

“I need to—”

“Go back, yes.” He plucks the beanie off my head, and halts when the mass of blond waves slips out from underneath it.

My residency has been kicking my butt, and I barely have time to eat, let alone go to a salon. My hair is the longest it’s ever been, for the first time in my life—a little past my shoulders—not a bob. Marc must notice, because he picks up the end of a strand and rubs it between his fingers, staring at it in an intense, lingering way that makes me remember something he told me when we were both very young.

You have the prettiest hair in the world. It’s dumb that you don’t grow it longer.

All this attention from him has me feeling overheated. A true feat, in the current weather.

“You’re frozen solid,” he mutters, dropping the lock. “I made a fire in the living room. Go stand in there—”

“But what about the—”

“—while I look for the pan,” he adds, like I’m more predictable than a quarterly tax deadline. “I can’t believe your dad sent you here in a damn snowstorm.”

“I don’t mind,” I say. Minding a little.

A lot.

“You don’t have to say yes to every idiot thing he asks of you. Especially if it’s not safe.” Marc’s full mouth tightens into a thin line—and then curls ever so slightly, a bare hint of humor that is so exquisitely him, my heart loses a handful of beats. “You don’t even fucking like ham, Jamie.”

I huff out a laugh. Of course he’d know. “Dad’s trying a new recipe.”

“Uh-huh.” He unspools the scarf from around my neck. “Unless the new recipe bakes through the ten inches of snow we’re getting tonight, he still shouldn’t have sent you here.”

“Honestly, ten inches is not that much.”

A dark eyebrow lifts.

I realize why after a beat and instantly turn scarlet. “Oh my God.”

“Harsh, Jamie.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“I see.”

“No, really, I meant—of snow, ten inches of—”

My phone rings. I pick up immediately, so grateful for the interruption that I could start a cult based around worshipping broadband cellular networks.

“Hi, Dad . . . Yup, I made it to the Comptons’. Heading back in a minute . . . I will, yes. Of course.” I glance at Marc, whose expression can only be described as displeased. Nope, still not a fan of Dad. “Marc, my father wants me to remind you that you should come over tomorrow for Christmas dinner, and . . . Yes, Dad. I promise I’ll do my best to bring him back. No, I won’t be kidnapping him if he refuses, I . . . Okay, sure. I guarantee that if I can’t convince him, I’ll bodily drag him to our place.” I hang up with an eye roll and set my phone on top of the clothes Marc has piled on the counter. It’ll be a pain to put them back on, but I must admit that it’s nice when my body doesn’t feel like it’s being stabbed with a million little ice picks. “Um, would you like to come over for Christmas dinner?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“Got it.”

He eyes me expectantly.

“What?”

“I’m waiting for the violent abduction I was promised?”

“Oh. Right.” I glance at his height. The way his compression shirt skims his large biceps. The muscular thighs under his jeans. “Let’s say that I tried—but you bravely overpowered me.”

“Was it a close call?”

“Oh, yeah. I had you in a choke hold for a few seconds there.”

“But then you slipped on a banana peel?”

I laugh. Marc’s face seems to light up at the sound, that bright grin that thickens the air around us, and . . .

He doesn’t look away. Continues staring and staring, like he’s ready to swallow me whole with his eyes. He’s always been like this when it comes to things he wants—ravenous. Larger than life. Acquisitive. And that’s why it’s not good for me to be here, with him. Marc makes my heart leap and my body glow and my brain rest, and that’s not something I could bear to have and then let go of. Whenever I’m with him, I become greedy and reckless, and . . .

It’s too late, anyway. I had my chance and I blew it.

“I need to go,” I say, staring at the tiled floor. “Could you—”

I’m startled by a sudden cracking sound, followed by a metallic thud. I turn in its direction and gasp when I spot what happened through the kitchen window: in the Comptons’ backyard, one of the heavy oak branches snapped and fell on the patio.

It currently lies on top of their furniture, which looks a bit . . . flattened. And maybe broken. In several pieces.

Shit. I need to hurry home before the weather becomes unmanageable. Where the hell is that pan? I glance at Marc, wide eyed, only to realize that he’s reading my mind. Because he seems to know exactly what I’m about to say, and beats me to it.

“Jamie, let me make something clear.” His voice is calm and very, very final. “If you think I won’t tie you up and lock you in my bedroom before I let you step outside in this weather, then you don’t know me at all.”