He, too, was wearing thick woolen socks but his were a marled gray and black, whereas mine were a light mint green.
He was also wearing faded jeans, a white thermal under a padded, navy blue flannel shirt, the navy blue somehow making his tawny eyes turn an appealing amber.
He had thick stubble.
It was hot.
And last, his hair was a mess like he hadn’t even run his hand through it to tame it after rolling out of bed.
That was hotter.
He was holding a heavy, toffee-colored earthenware mug of my coffee in his meaty fist.
I felt the pull of his magnificence, instantly denied that pull, and smiled at him.
He just looked at me then he looked to the chair beside me, a chair no one had sat in except Dick Grant, and Grant hadn’t sat in it often. Then he made his way there.
I looked away as he sat down but I couldn’t miss his feet going up on the top railing, two feet from mine.
My legs were bent. His long legs were straight and he crossed them at the ankles.
Sitting beside him in silence, something settled in me. Something just as good and right as I knew it was bad and wrong.
I tried to ignore it.
It was hard to ignore.
I managed it, brought the cup of coffee to my lips, and said softly into it, “Merry Christmas, Priest.”
He surprised me by replying in a gentle rumble, “Merry Christmas, Cassidy.”
He said my name.
He knew it and he said it.
I smiled into my coffee before I took a sip.
*
I hit the off button on the remote and turned to Priest.
“Well?” I asked.
“It sucked,” he answered.
I felt my eyes grow round. “Sucked? Sucked? Love Actually doesn’t suck!” I got up to a forearm in the couch and my gaze on him turned to a glare. “It’s perfect Christmas viewing. It has Christmas and it has romance and it has Alan Rickman. Anything with Alan Rickman does…not…suck.”
Priest’s expression remained the same. “That does.”
I rolled my eyes on my, “You’re impossible.”
He gave a slight shrug indicating he didn’t give a flying anything what I thought he was.
I wasn’t offended. That was Priest.
“Right. This time, you pick,” I stated, tossing the remote on my coffee table. Then I looked back to him. “Or do you want me to start making dinner?”
His brows drew together a centimeter before he reminded me, “We had that green chile bean dip during the last movie.”
“So?” I asked.
“So, you stopped stuffing that shit in your face an hour ago.”
This was very true. In fact, I had to stop myself from licking the bowl clean and only did that because the bowl was heated and I might burn my tongue.
“It’s Christmas, Priest. It’s a moral imperative to eat constantly and copiously, maintaining a food stupor in order to lapse into the ultimate stupor, that being a food coma after dinner. This lasts exactly one point five hours whereupon you wake up and eat Christmas dessert.”
“How about you eat another fifteen cookies while I take some time to make a hole in my gut to fit dinner while we watch another movie?” he suggested.
My eyes dropped to the opened tins of cookies littering the coffee table, cookies I noted he had not touched (not one), while I muttered, “Works for me.”
“Jesus,” he muttered back.
I looked again to him. “Go. Movie. Pick.”
He heaved himself out of my armchair and walked to my shelves that held my library of DVDs.
“It doesn’t have to be romantic,” I offered.
“Thank fuck,” he murmured and I grinned.
He stood, hands planted on narrow hips, and studied the shelves. This took a while. Long enough for me to get impatient.
“How about Thor?”
He looked over his shoulder at me and communicated nonverbally that Thor was most definitely out.
Apparently, badasses didn’t watch superhero movies.
So noted.
He looked back to the shelves.
“How about Red?” I suggested. “It has Bruce Willis in it. You have to like Bruce Willis. Everyone likes Bruce Willis, especially badasses. And it’s awesome. And funny. And it has Morgan Freeman and Morgan Freeman makes everything better. And Karl Urban, who isn’t hard to watch. Not that you’d think that. But it’d work for me.”
He reached out a hand and pulled out a DVD case. I saw it was Red. Thus I grinned again.
He went to the player and as he ejected the last movie, he asked, “Things good with your family?”
I figured he asked this because we’d been doing the breakfast dishes when my family called.
He had then absented himself. The call lasted an hour and a half. A call that, during, John Priest had taken it upon himself to go to the big shed that held a bunch of crap, including my little tractor, and cleared the snow from my lane and the parking area.
Part of the time he did it, I watched from the side porch, listening to my family, happy and together and celebrating and trying to pull me into that feeling long distance, and I did it with that something I was denying I was feeling bubbling up inside me.