“I feel strangely...happy,” she admitted. “As long as I don’t think of Derrick.”
As far as he could tell, she hadn’t checked her phone since they’d left, which made him believe she hadn’t yet answered Derrick’s earlier text. “Yeah. Watching me chop down a tree is pretty exciting.”
She chuckled. “I do have you to thank. You keep distracting me from my misery.”
He gave her a wry smile. “You like playing matchmaker, like talking about those women you found.”
She cocked her head. “Whom you don’t seem in any hurry to contact.”
“I’ll get around to it. In the meantime, my profile is up.”
“Meaning what?”
“They can write me if they want to.”
“So you are arrogant.”
“And if I said the opposite, I’d be sexist,” he teased.
When she took out her phone, he thought maybe she was finally checking to see if she’d heard from Derrick again. “Can you get a signal out here?” he asked.
“I don’t need a signal. I’m taking a picture.” She raised her cell phone. “Smile!”
“Another photo for my profile?” he asked. “Now we’re going to portray me as a guy who’s full of Christmas cheer?”
“This is actually for me. I think it’s funny watching you single-handedly wrestle that giant tree into your truck.”
He got a better hold on the trunk and lifted it cleanly. “Here you go. Now everyone on Single Central will see that I don’t need a gym,” he joked.
Her breath misted as she laughed. “Show-off!”
After another ten minutes spent tugging and dragging and maneuvering, he finally managed to get the darn tree into the bed of his truck and securely tied down. “I won’t be pleased when I can’t get this through the front door,” he warned as he examined his work. “Even if I will be fifty bucks richer.”
She stamped the snow from her boots, which were too big, since they were his. “Did we ever shake on that?”
“Did we have to?”
She glanced at him skeptically. “I don’t want to bet anymore. It looks a lot bigger now that it’s been cut down.”
He gave her the evil eye. “Don’t you dare say that. I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“I might’ve been wrong,” she said with a sheepish grin. “But...we can always cut off more. Make it work.”
Exhausted, he climbed into the cab of the truck while she did the same. “It’ll take a second for the heater to get going,” he said. He turned it on full blast, but he didn’t think she needed that much warm air. She was practically buried under his winter gear. “Look at you,” he said, reaching over to pull the hat farther out of her eyes, since her own hands were encumbered by the oversize gloves.
“You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she teased.
He shifted into Reverse. “I did the chopping. You get to do the decorating.”
“Fine,” she said. “Do you have any ornaments?”
“Come to think of it, I don’t,” he replied. “But I’m sure my mother has some she’ll let us use.”
“Your mother? Or Brandon’s?”
“Brandon’s. My stepmom.”
“What happened to your own mom?”
“She died of an amniotic fluid embolism when I was five.”
“I’ve never heard of that...”
Kyle couldn’t decide whether or not to explain it. He didn’t want to frighten her away from the idea of having children at some point. “It doesn’t happen very often.” He hoped she’d leave it at that, but she didn’t.
“So what is it?”
“Like I said, it’s rare. It’s a complication of childbirth.”
“She was having a baby? Did the baby make it?”
“’Fraid not. For whatever reason, she went into labor early. They were struggling to save what would’ve been my younger sister and then, without warning, my mother went into cardiac arrest. We lost them both.”
“That’s terrible! I’m so sorry.”