Scoring a Holiday Match (Mr. Match), Delancey Stewart [classic novels TXT] 📗

Laughing on the deck of a boat with her hair flying wild around her and her skin shining. She looked happy and free, and so pretty it nearly broke my heart.

“Better, right?” Tallulah poked me in the arm, and then shamelessly wrapped her hand around my bicep. “My lord,” she murmured.

“Yeah, better.” I wrenched my arm from her grasp the way I’d done with my grandmother when I was small. Tallulah shrugged and then bounced away.

The evening seemed to be deteriorating, and without Rose here, there was no reason for me to stay. I said goodbye to Max and wandered through the cold night to my car, parked in a lot a few blocks away. When I got there, I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time, just looking at Rose’s photo.

Did I have the guts to call her? And what would I be starting if I did? Could I see it through?

I’d met the woman once, and as Tallulah pointed out, hadn’t even bothered to get her full name. But I knew she was strong and determined, I had a sense that family was important to her—she had seemed so shocked at the state of mine. And I knew she cared about people and would sacrifice her own needs if someone else needed her more—she’d done all that for PJ.

I knew she was beautiful. God was she beautiful.

I also knew that something had shifted inside me when I met her.

Maybe that was enough.

Chapter 7

Lost and Found

Rose

I was not in the habit of answering the phone if it rang after ten p.m., unless it was work. And then only if I knew there was something going on that needed my attention. In my opinion, most things and people were not as urgent as they were made out to be. Most things, and most people, could easily wait.

And whoever was blowing up my phone at eleven on a Friday night as I sat out on my patio and mourned the loss of an opportunity that had turned my heart inside out in one short evening, with one brief kiss . . . Well, that person could probably wait.

Except something told me to answer the phone. That same thread of magic that had wound its way around Ash and me as we’d first met, and pulled us together all evening, was shimmering in the night sky on the patio now. It was a faint glow, like a whisper that made me do things I would not normally do.

I sighed and leaned back in my chair, picking up my phone. I should have just left the damned thing inside. No good came from phone calls late at night.

“Rose Gonzalez.” It was my business tone. Assertive and a tiny bit angry.

“Ah, yes. Hi. Hello. Ms. Gonzalez. I’m calling about an item you left behind this evening at the party.”

I knew I had not left anything behind at the party. Furthermore, I didn’t believe that any of the caterers or event staff were in possession of this particular voice. Deep, sexy, warm. Confident and cultured.

“Did I?” I decided to play along. “I seem to have all my possessions. What did I leave?”

“It’s a large item,” the voice said.

“Would you say it’s bigger than a breadbox?” That was something my mother had always asked when we played twenty questions on road trips when I’d been a kid.

“I don’t think most people know what a breadbox is anymore.”

“Really?”

“Do you have a breadbox?”

“Well, no.”

“Have you ever seen a breadbox, Ms. Gonzalez?”

“Actually, no.”

“Then how do we know how large one might be?”

“Want me to Google it?” I asked, laughing now, easing back onto the lounge chair where I sat. It was Ash. I didn’t know how he’d gotten my number, but I felt like I could talk to him about breadboxes all night and be happier than I’d felt in a long time.

“I think that would be cheating. Ask me something else.”

“Did you have a good time tonight, Ash?” I felt brave, sitting here in my own home, the night and its holiday magic wrapping around me as the stars burned bright overhead.

“I did,” he said, his voice lowering like a secret just for us. “Until it ended too early. And I let a woman I’d hoped to know better disappear like Cinderella, without getting her number.”

“But you must be very resourceful. You got it somehow.”

“Tallulah gave it to me. I didn’t know if you’d pick up this late.”

“Normally, I wouldn’t.”

“I wish we’d had a little more time together.”

“I do too,” I said. Where would things have gone if we had? And really, in the long run, where could they go? “Maybe it was for the best,” I tried, not believing my own words and hating them as soon as they were out of my mouth.

“Rose,” Ash said, his voice still low and sexy, but with a sharper edge to it as he spoke. “It was not for the best.”

I had no words for that. At work I had the tough conversations, managed the difficult customers, fired employees. But in my personal life, maybe I was not used to being quite so bold. “Maybe not,” I said.

“There was something there tonight. Something between us. The second we met,” he asserted.

“It was just a first date,” I suggested, willing to let him spell out what I already knew, if he was brave enough to do it.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and though the silence was tense, the tension was laced with something else, something almost pleasant. It was like foreplay in a way, these long moments full of anticipation and pulled taut with possibility. “No, Rose. This was not a first date. Not for me.”

“Not for me either,” I admitted, not quite sure what I was actually saying. Only that this had been more. Much more.

“First dates for me are difficult,” he went on. “The women I meet generally know something about me, or infer things based on where we meet. In Alaska,