He still wasn’t in his room.
Well, so much for her one-hour deadline.
And her dignity, for that matter, seeing as how this was actually the second one-hour deadline she’d given herself following the last one.
Maybe I could break into his room and wait for him inside…
For any other normal college girl, that would be a ludicrous flight of fancy easily dismissed as impossible rather than merely improbable. Not so for Skylar.
Working for the Spencer brothers at their security firm over in Cactus Creek all through high school had armed her with some…unique work experience she’d had to get creative in describing when she’d updated her resume to look for a part-time job in Washington after starting her undergrad program at UW Tacoma this past fall.
Lock-picking = problem solving
Safe-cracking = quality control
Since the guys spent a lot of their time not just developing and installing their state-of-the-art security systems, but testing them and their competitors’ systems as well, learning the fine art of breaking and entering without triggering alarms sort of came with the territory.
Good times.
Sure, she probably should have spent her after-school hours and summers doing work closer to her social welfare major, but she’d taken to it like a fish addicted to water, reasoning that there just might be an organization one day looking for a social worker with a bit of ninja spy skills on the side.
Thankfully for her, throughout her entire time working there, despite the three brothers’ brilliance in all areas of recon and surveillance, they’d somehow remained utterly clueless about her long-held crush on their foster brother Drew.
The same could not be said for the lone female of the Spencer siblings, however. Lia, their adopted sister, was without a doubt even more fiercely protective of Drew than the guys were, largely because he was the younger brother of her first husband Leo, who had tragically gone missing in action in the war not long after they’d gotten married.
Skylar didn’t know all the details about how Drew had become the Spencer family’s youngest foster child over a decade ago, but she could only imagine the worst, based on the tortured emotions she used to see cloud Lia’s eyes whenever Drew would withdraw a bit at the first sign of excessive familial affection back when he was still living with them in Arizona, or the unmitigated rage Lia did a lousy job hiding whenever anyone made the mistake of mentioning his incarcerated mother.
Truth be told, with Lia being the ferocious mama lioness she was where Drew was concerned, it was actually quite the compliment that she seemed to approve of Skylar’s crush on Drew.
Seriously, it had taken Lia all of five seconds to figure it all out a few years back, during a family conference call they’d been having with him one day in the office, after which, she’d helped convince the guys that Skylar’s flushed cheeks were due to a mysterious allergic reaction to the printer toner.
Thus began the guys’ overprotective rule that Skylar not be allowed to come within ten feet of any printers—even the inkjet ones that had no toner, just to be safe. That was also around the time that Lia had started casually bringing up weekly updates on how Drew was doing in his cyber security undergrad program over in Texas, whenever Skylar was in earshot.
The woman was a paragon.
In fact, after Skylar had called to notify everyone that her flight had become grounded in Vegas tonight, it came as absolutely no surprise when she received a text from Lia just minutes later with Drew’s room number at the hotel.
…Followed by an all-caps, not-so-subtle follow-up text informing Skylar that the sofa in said hotel room had a pull-out bed, which Lia expected to hear all about from Drew bright and early tomorrow morning, at which time, any signs of extremely sated lack of sleep on his part would be regarded with supreme suspicion, and result in an unapologetic call to the ‘proper authorities.’
Meaning, of course, the Spencer brothers, who would assuredly launch a full-blown investigation on Skylar and Drew to make sure that ‘what happens in Vegas’ damn well wouldn’t stay in Vegas.
Yeah…if the thrilling highlight of her grand plan to come here tonight wasn’t simply to spend the night just talking with Drew, that scary-ass threat from Lia would’ve certainly done the trick.
“So, crazy question,” tossed out Landon as he rode the elevators back down to the lobby with her for the second time. “Don’t you have this guy’s phone number?”
Skylar sighed, imagining how nutty she must seem to him. “I do.”
“Ever call it?”
“Not even once.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Has he ever called you?”
This time, her answer was far more depressing. “Not even once.”
Not that she’d been holding her breath. Drew had made his thoughts on the matter crystal clear. She was too young for him. Period.
At least for now.
The reminder of that all-important caveat managed to make her breathing hitch just like it always did whenever she thought of Drew’s parting words for her the last time she saw him, nearly three years ago when he’d been back in town to visit during his first year of college.
“Five years, Skylar. Exactly how many years it’ll take for you to no longer be off-limits…you better believe I’ll be coming back. And to be clear, I’m not asking you to wait for me. I’m just letting you know to expect me.”
How was a girl supposed to do anything but moon over a guy like that?
“So instead of just picking up a phone and calling the guy tonight, you decided to show up at his hotel room unannounced.”
It was an incredulous question-statement wrapped up in what sounded like a compliment.
“Can I ask why?” Landon queried after her silent nod, studying her more seriously than he had all night. “Why tonight?”
“Because…because I’m no longer jail bait for him,” she replied softly. “Not quite the green-light age for him yet, but at least not stop-sign-red anymore. And…because it’s Christmas.”
The season of red playing nice with green. The holiday of magic and possibilities.
Her favorite time of year.
Just the mere mention of Christmas immediately filled her heart with all the misplaced hope she’d lost throughout the year like it always did, and all the unique, irreplaceable nuggets of joy she’d collected and stored away over the years, like colored glass pebbles from the beach.
…And all the happy memories of her mother Skylar fought tooth and nail to keep holding on to.
At Christmas time, it was all there.
With the exception of the winter her mother had passed away after a heartbreaking, decade-long battle with Huntington’s Disease, Skylar never failed to go less than all-out with the Christmas festivities every year. It helped that both her dad and uncle had each fallen in love and gotten married a couple of years back, filling both their homes with a few more Sullivan kids. First her cousin and then her twin siblings.
None of which would have been possible without the two amazing women responsible for the transformation in the Sullivan men, of course.
The aunt she’d actually known and loved her whole life and the stepmom who understood her in ways very few could both shared her wholehearted love of the holiday. But only her little brother and sister shared her deep-rooted feelings about its true magic.
And not for the reasons most preschoolers did.
Last year, the entire family had joined her in volunteering on Christmas morning at the care center her mother had lived out her last few years in. At the twin’s insistence. Skylar had been volunteering at the care center for years, but last winter had been the first time the twins had started asking her a lot of questions about why she went there so much. She’d kept her answers simple obviously because they were so young, but she remembered distinctly that they’d looked at each other and did that silent twin talk they did before asking if they could tag along on Christmas.
That morning, as they all spent time with the patients—a good portion of them children—the twins announced that they had surprises in the minivan they needed some help to go get.
The ‘surprises’ were dozens and dozens of their toys hidden in various nooks and crannies in the minivan, which, given the fact that this was news to their parents, the two sneaky kids must have been doing it covertly every time they’d gone out for a ride over a few weeks at least, judging by the sheer volume of toys they were unearthing like clowns out of a circus car.
All in all, they had a gently-used, and well-loved toy for every lonely child at the center whose parents were working through the holidays to make ends meet.
It was Christmas magic in its most basic form.
This year, she’d been one proud big sis when she’d heard that the twins had already asked—not even a few days into autumn—to celebrate Christmas the same way as last year, only this time, with a surprise present for every child in the center, a goal which had apparently resulted in quite a few door-to-door baked goods fundraising attempts around town over the months.
Unfortunately, Skylar’s tight travel schedule home after final exams meant she had to sit this one out.
Even if her flight hadn’t been grounded and she’d been able to land early enough on Christmas morning, it was just too medically irresponsible for her to go to the care center so soon after a flight—aka germapalooza—without knowing for certain that she hadn’t caught some sort of bug while she’d been breathing in all that recycled airline air. Skylar had been volunteering at the center for long enough to know how vital it was for them all to stay on guard against the risk of infections and viruses given the patients’ weakened immune systems.
On the bright side, however, at least this way, she had some time to rustle up a few more holiday surprises for everyone at the house before they all returned home from the center in the afternoon.
“So…do you do this drifting off into your own world thing often around guys, or am I really just that dull?”
Skylar laughed. “You’re far from dull and you know it enough for the both of us.”
Landon beamed proudly, looking ready to put that on a bumper sticker.
“I’m sorry I keep zoning out,” she apologized as she re-buttoned her jacket and marched them back outside the hotel lobby to see more of the faint sprinkles of snow she’d watched fall on her shuttle ride over here from the airport, so similar to the midair-evaporating flakes that came down in Cactus Creek only a few special days of the year. “The holidays always tend to bring memories that like to hijack my brain from concentrating on anything else.”
Just outside of the main entrance to the lobby, she hopped up on the low rock wall behind the brightly-lit hotel sign to try and catch a snowflake on her tongue before it melted.
Meanwhile, Landon stretched out to drape himself on the wall like a content cat, one arm lazily tucked under his head as he watched her. “Well, between all the spacing out, and the action-packed trips up and down the elevator, not to mention the alarmingly impressive—borderline frightening—amounts of sugar you’ve consumed in the past few hours, believe it or not, we have officially made it to Christmas Day.” He raised his phone up to show her the glowing 12:01 am on the screen. “Merry Christmas, pretty girl.”
Smiling wide, Skylar threw her head back and closed her eyes to savor it for a moment—the first minute of Christmas morning with fluffy snowflakes falling on her face—before returning happily, “Merry Christmas back.”
She hopped back down off the wall with every intention of launching into a friendly holiday hug.
…When a strong arm swooped around her waist and yanked her back against a solid wall of muscle.
“What the hell are you doing here, Skylar?”
Drew.