I’m anticipating this. “Maybe you should.”
She blinks in surprise, then glances down at the ball still in her hands, gives it a shake.
I don’t bother looking down. I know what it says.
“Yes,” she reads. Then she laughs. “Is there a ‘no’ option?”
“Definitely not.”
“How’d you rig a Magic 8 ball?”
“Kelly . . .” I’m damn close to begging now.
She leans forward and kisses my mouth. “Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you.”
My eyes close in relief. After a damn decade of waiting, I finally got what I want for Christmas. What I’ve wanted for every Christmas for the last ten years.
“I was thinking we’d buy you a ring together. In New York. After apartment hunting,” I say, in between kisses.
“I love that plan. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” She pulls back. “I saw the lady. The fortune-teller from the train station.”
“Oh yeah?”
Kelly nods. “Turns out I heard her wrong. She didn’t say The One was a past love, just that he’d been there all along. She was talking about you.”
I pull her close and kiss her forehead, smiling as I do so. “I know.”
For Sarah and Shelby, and everyone else who knows that Hallmark Christmas
movies are the best thing in the world. This one’s for you.
Acknowledgments
A super-huge thank-you to my agent and to the Loveswept team for letting me write my “dream book.” Writing a Christmas story’s been on my bucket list ever since before I even finished my first book. Finally, twentysomething books later, I got my chance, and it was every bit the experience I hoped for.
I hope all you fabulous readers feel the same.
May all of your holidays be as happy as Kelly and Mark’s.
Xoxo,
Lauren Layne
Read on for an excerpt from
Runaway Groom
I Do, I Don’t
by Lauren Layne
Coming soon from Headline Eternal!
January 2018
I hang up on Marjorie. She’ll understand when I explain later.
“So,” I say, forcing a smile at the unsmiling man leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “Awkward, right?”
Gage says nothing.
The light coming from the cracked door is enough to let me know it’s him, but not enough to read his expression.
I start to slip my phone into my back pocket, but he wordlessly holds out a hand.
“Um, no.”
“No phones,” he says. He pushes away from the wall and plucks the phone out of my hand. He glances down at it, his thumbs moving across the screen, as he unabashedly snoops through it. “Who were you talking to?”
“Give it back.” I try to grab for it, but he holds it higher, still snooping. “I’ll turn it in, I swear.”
He gives me a skeptical look but finally hands the phone over, and I shove it into my back pocket and glare up at him.
I’m a little surprised by how tall he is.
I’ve always heard that actors are shorter in person than they seem onscreen, but Gage has to be at least six-two, and he towers easily over my five feet four inches.
He’s wearing shorts and a button-down linen shirt, but the casual attire does nothing to diminish his masculinity. A fact I’m pretty sure he knows, because he steps closer, then grins when I back up and stumble over a bucket.
Gage reaches out a hand to steady me, a hand big and warm on my waist. For a second I think he’s lingering, but then I realize his fingers are simply testing the fabric of my T-shirt.
“So this is the business,” he murmurs. “Looks like a men’s undershirt to me.”
I bat his hand away. “The cut of a man’s undershirt doesn’t adequately account for a woman’s—”
I break off, and he lifts his eyebrows. “Yes?”
“Never mind,” I say, not about to say the word “breasts” or “boobs” when I’m in very close proximity to a man who’s making me too aware of my boobs.
He drags his eyes from my shirt up to my eyes, blinking a little in surprise as he does so, as the eye contact jars him.
“The person you were talking to. Was this the same friend that made you come here?”
My eyes narrow. “Why are you saying it like that? Like you don’t believe me.”
“You just don’t seem like the type of woman who can be made to do anything.”
“True. I’m the sort of woman who will do what it takes to make her business a success,” I say, trying to move around him. “I just . . . went too far with this one.”
He puts up an arm, blocks my way. “Hot and hollow, huh?”
His eyes are oddly intense, as though my answer somehow matters, and I wince, hating that he heard my careless assessment of him.
Still, I’m not out to make this guy like me, and I’d sort of meant it. Any guy who thinks he’s going to find his true love on TV in the span of a month? Hollow.
Or at least really dim.
I step back and look at him steadily. “Look. We both know that I never should have made it to this round. No doubt you were hoping that people would vote me off, but . . .”
I spread my arms to the sides, intending it to be a self-deprecating gesture to put him at ease. Instead, he rakes his gaze over me and the mood in the tiny closet is anything but easy.
“Interesting,” he says finally, breaking the silence.
“What is?” I look longingly toward the door. Toward escape.
“That you label me hollow, and yet you’re the one openly admitting to using the show—to using me—to sell T-shirts.”
“Oh, come on. Surely you’re not so naive that you don’t know what this show is—what we’re all doing here. The goal is ratings, not happily ever after.”
“That’s the network’s goal. Not mine.”
“Right. You’re here for . . . what was it again? To find your one true love?”
I don’t bother to keep the skepticism out of my voice, and he surprises me by grinning. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I say, waving my hand breezily as I start to ease by him.
He reaches out to stop me, his fingers resting lightly against my stomach, his fingers seeming to burn through the thin fabric of my shirt, and I’m embarrassed at the way my breath hitches.
Gage Barrett is touching me.
Marjorie and my mother would die.
Gage grins wider at my reaction, and the cocky response is exactly what I need to get myself together. I push his hand away. “Surely there’s a more willing contestant to go molest in a closet somewhere.”
“No doubt,” he says with a laugh. “Do you have a boyfriend, Ellie?”
“Contestants aren’t allowed to be involved in romantic relationships. It’s in breach of the contest rules.”
“That’s a stupid answer.”
“It was a stupid question,” I toss back. “And not your business.”
“Not my business,” he says under his breath, shaking his head.
“I’m leaving now,” I say, a little impatient, as I realize the other girls will likely be wondering where I am.