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Stay by my side for Christmases to come…

So soon?

Aye, I did. And I meant every syllable.

But Brier’s timing had been deplorable.

With Luce’s all-encompassing disbelief about his tag-rag family, she had taken his heartfelt avowal as naught but another jest, bustling from the counter, both their empty plates in hand, to step out the back and rinse them under the newly falling rain.

Putting an abrupt end to the moments of mirth.

But not to his determination.

A CHRISTMAS-WORTHY CUDDLE

“Aha! A whisker.”Lucinda smiled over her discovery, kneeling to pluck it from the floor, drawing Brier’s gaze for what seemed the hundredth time the last hour. “How long has Barnabas been with you?”

She asked this from the ladies’ display, where she had been rearranging sundries late that afternoon, during those few moments betwixt daylight and dark, when enough light near a window permitted work to carry on. Brier took more satisfaction than he had a right to, watching her flit about, touching his things.

No matter that thethingsin question were not personal to him. No matter that her guileless fingering of merchandise was not intended to seduce his senses and bungle his brain, it did so nevertheless.

Her efforts with the ribbons and small bit of garland he’d left for her, combined with her cut-out snowflakes, proved sublime, such that the Christmas spirit flowed from the store on into the back storage areas and up the staircase to his lodgings—where her labors had, understandably, halted. Not that he had locked her from his rooms nor forbade her entry. But what manner of self-respecting man encouraged a female into his domain?

Tension hunched his shoulders over the accounting journal he’d been studying since their midday repast. The distracted scrutiny had yet to resolve the remaining math errors plaguing the entries, thanks to that last, disastrous assistant. But his tension wasn’t the fault of the books. More the fault of his ballocks. His blame, misbegotten yearnings to lock the doors—with her inside.With him.

“Did he find you or you him? Were you seeking a cat?”

The quiet hours of Christmas Day, with the shop closed, cold winds still blowing, keeping sleet and ice frozen up against the eaves and in the shadows, had scurried by swifter than Brier could ever remember. How many more would he be fortunate to count with his current companion? Before commitments and life ripped her from his? Tore her soothing, unexpectedly charming presence from a life he had not realized had become so very barren?

“Woo-hoo. Bri-er…” The rare use of his name, so very welcome upon her lips, pulled his attention back where it preferred to dwell—upon her. “Have you had him long?”

“Barnabas? The vagrant stole in one night. Promised he’d earn his keep in the warehouse, down near the dock, but instead lazes around on his duff, staring at me anytime I pull out a bowl or plate, expecting me to wait on him as though he were royalty.”

Her lilting laugh dove straight to his middle, stirred up things better left settled. Especially if she remained intent on leaving once the weather cleared.

To stifle the urge to walk over to her, to take her in his arms and haul her upstairs, he cleared his throat. Clenched the innocent pencil in a death grip and offered, “Neither scolding nor shaming has convinced him to be a better mouser. He seems to think barely one small, shitten rodent a week is sufficient for bed and board.”

“No wonder the idler has such an appetite. He shared nuncheon with me, I admit.”

“You meanyoushared with him?”

“Aye,” she said with a winsome smile.

He’d seen how she’d carefully separated the meat from the bone—but hadn’t realized she’d been slipping the little gangrel part of her meal—for he’d been doing the same. “That little roamer. He knows how to gain indulgences from us both, I fear.”

Missing the demanding rub of the feline around his ankles and calves, something he’d come to take for granted as evening approached and he stilled from his industrious bustle of the day, Brier straightened and pushed away from the counter. “Where is the lazy louse? Have you seen him recently?”

She left off aligning the attar bottles to scan their environs. “I have not, not since losing a good portion of my chicken to him.”

“Mayhap I let him out and simply do not remember.” It wasn’t as though the account journal had occupied a significant portion of his thoughts since their meal. Nay, for those were completely focused on the female a few feet away.

Frustrated with his lack of concentration more than the erroneous entries, plagued by his own insistent desires of whisking her up and away, tucking her snug in his bed—and keeping her there—his restless fingers dropped the pencil and tapped against the accounts that consumed his attention.

Sure they do.Thorne’s voice in his head this time

“You always brick the door,” she said, walking the shop, checking the nooks and corners where he’d seen her pet his feline previously. “And then you unbrick it when he comes in. You are scrupulous in your actions, I have observed.”

True. He kept it propped open, so the cat could skulk back in as soon as he was ready and locked it upon Barnabas’s return. After a theft two years ago, while one of his brothers minded the shop during Brier’s visit home, they’d attached a chain on the door, and when engaged, it wouldn’t yield to a human body, only a feline one.