Except, underneath, she’d know she’d have trapped him here, she’d have manipulated him. And when had she ever been one for cozy domesticity, anyway? What happened when she got tired of it? Of him?
Although, as she watched him move around her kitchen pouring coffee and scrambling eggs, she couldn’t picture getting tired of this. But it would happen one day, surely. And then she’d be forced to break this man’s heart. This good man. All because she couldn’t stand to be alone for a little while. All because she’d taken and taken and taken from him. Like she always did.
She tried to smile when he slid the plate of eggs and toast in front of her, but her face felt cold and immovable.
‘You okay?’ he asked and she met his eye across the table. His face was still a little red from shoveling and the cold, the hair along his forehead was damp with sweat. His gray eyes were warm this morning, more like her favorite soft wool blanket than a stormy sky. The way he looked at her made her physically hurt, a deep ache already forming in the hole he would leave when he went home.
Kira swallowed hard.
No more of this. Bennett is a holiday fling and nothing more. Something you’ve done plenty of times in your life. Now let it go.
She smiled her beauty-pageant smile, her mother’s society-party smile. She faked it until her cheeks hurt.
‘Yep. Just fine.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘How is it possible that it’s even colder up here?’ Kira blew on her hands and rubbed them together for warmth.
‘Well, it’s closed off from the rest of the house and there’s no heat source up here so…’
She glared at him.
Right. She wasn’t actually looking for an answer. Something had happened in between hauling that Christmas tree into the house and now, and he wasn’t sure what it was, except that Kira’s prickly spines were back out in full force. But maybe he did understand. After last night he was feeling torn open in ways he hadn’t felt in years. If Kira was feeling half that vulnerable, she was obviously just protecting herself. Something he should probably consider doing himself. Instead, he just wanted to chop down trees for her and make her breakfast and coax that smile back onto her face. Because he was a sucker to his very core. A human doormat.
‘There’s a lot of boxes up here,’ he said, changing the topic from heating issues to the task at hand. ‘So we might find something useful.’
Kira ran her fingers over the top of a dusty box. ‘He left so much behind.’
‘According to Jeanie, there was a lot more but they had it cleared out before selling it.’
He scanned the attic. Stacks of cardboard boxes leaned precariously, slumped and crumpled with age, a few old lamps collecting dust in one corner, an ancient TV inhabiting the other. He could only stand up straight in the middle of the space, the slope of the roof on either side making it impossible not to hit his head along the edges of the room.
Kira peered at the handwriting scribbled on the sides of the boxes.
‘Books, cassette tapes, clothes,’ Kira read. ‘Oh, this one says “holiday”. That might be promising.’ She opened the box and looked in. ‘Hmm…’ She pulled out a rather creepy, elfish-looking Santa doll.
‘Yikes,’ he said.
‘The box is full of them.’
Bennett crossed the attic to look for himself. ‘Wow.’
‘An entire collection of terrifying Santas,’ Kira said, rifling through the box. She pulled out another and held it up.
‘I feel like it can see into my soul,’ he said, as the doll stared at him.
Kira stifled a laugh.
‘Why are old dolls so terrifying?’ she asked as she put scary Santa back and closed the box.
‘Because it’s way too easy to picture their heads turning independently to look at you.’
‘True.’ Was that a trace of amusement he heard? He would run with that.
Bennett moved the Santa box so they could get to the one beneath it, also marked ‘holiday’. ‘I’m almost scared to look. Might be filled with deranged elves or something.’
‘Baby,’ Kira said, but the teasing tone was back in her voice as she nudged him out of the way. ‘Jackpot.’
The box was filled with carefully wrapped ornaments.
Kira undid the yellowed newspaper around one and revealed a white ball with a delicate design in silver glitter snaking around it. She breathed a little sigh of awe and Bennett’s heart stumbled in his chest.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she said.
She took out another and another, passing them to him as she unwrapped them until his arms were filled with shimmering white and silver and gold ornaments and the smile was back on Kira’s face.
And he didn’t care that they were in a freezing cold attic or that the dust was tickling his nose or that he was pretty sure he’d heard the rumble of snow plows on the road. He would have stood there forever cradling the fragile decorations, wishing Kira would trust him to hold more than that.
Even though he didn’t really deserve to.
Even though he was leaving.
She smiled at the bounty in his arms, unaware of the direction of his thoughts. ‘Well, I was half hoping we’d find a box marked “treasure” but this is pretty good too.’
‘And I’m glad we didn’t find any skeletons.’
‘We didn’t open all the boxes,’ she said, taking the ornaments back one by one and placing them carefully in the box to bring downstairs.
