Page 75 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas

“Yeah. It’ssupposedto be.”

It most certainly did not look like the idea I’d had in my mind of an abandoned cabin in the woods. There were no cobwebs, no broken windows or rotting porch steps. In fact, the windows were so clean, they gleamed.

String lights had been hung from the roof, giving it a Pinterest-board quality, and a soft glow emanated from said clean windows.

Something was definitely going on.

“Hold on,” Remy said. If he was a cat, his hackles would have been fully raised. He was making me nervous, but I didn’t blamehim. It had been a weird, emotionally charged day, so a little caution was probably wise.

“Holding!”

He stepped forward cautiously, his head tilted to the side as if he was listening to something, but all I could hear was the same sounds of nature that we had been hearing all day.

Now that I thought about it, he was much less like a cat and more like a lion. Wait, no, not a lion, those males were pretty useless. Maybe... maybe... A wolf, or even a bear! Yeah, definitely a bear. He was protective, but he was also nurturing. And he loved food.

My kind of guy, really.

You stop that now,I reminded myself sternly. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of the budding attraction—my talk with Ana had helped with that a lot—but because it really wasn’t the time, and I still needed to find out if he was even in a spot where he couldhaveromantic feelings for someone else.

Step by step, Remy drew closer to the cabin, before finally pushing open the worn door. It gave an ear-piercing squeak as it swung on its hinges, but didn’t fall off.

“Huh,” he said, which really told me nothing, so I crept a bit closer.

“What are you seeing?”

His posture wasn’t defensive, which made me think it wasn’t something dangerous, but I wasn’t exactly a fast runner at the best of times, so I didn’t want to get too close in case we suddenly had to split. Like if the somewhat fairytale romance I was experiencing suddenly jumped genres to a horror story.

“I think I’m seeing that we’ve been set up.”

“Set up?”

I closed the distance between us and peered inside. The place was rundown, but it had been spruced up as best it could be. Firewood had been stacked in the fireplace, and the tableswere laden with food set under plastic cloches, and two different bottles of wine were chilling in ice buckets.

Oh.

“I…” I was baffled. Well and truly baffled.

My mind started putting together the pieces, and those pieces indicated that our children and his sister-in-law had orchestrated the entire hike. The idea was so ludicrous that I couldn’t fill in any of the other blanks, like why or how or what the purpose would be. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Neither do I,” Remy said, shaking his head before giving a hearty laugh. “But I am hungry, and that food isn’t going to eat itself.”

My stomach rumbled in response. I’d thought the light snack I had with Max earlier would be enough to tide me over on the “easy” hike, and boy was I wrong.

“You know what? I like the way you think.”

We closed the door against the cold, and even though I was a bit bewildered, I was really happy that I was back on track with my fairytale romance. Because maybe I was totally in my head, but a cutely decorated cabin out in the woods seemed pretty damn romantic.

I just hoped the big bad wolf didn’t come knocking at our door.

Chapter 20

Remington

Defending Territory

I didn’t knowwhen my life had gotten so...different,but as I sat across from Jeannie in a cozy cabin, a romantic meal for two spread out between us, I couldn’t help but like the direction it had gone in.

I suppose I should have been madder at our children for duping us—some might go so far as to say they manipulated our feelings—but I was too impressed to be offended. I didn’t want to think too hard about why they had gone through all the trouble and enlisted my sister-in-law, because that would lead to thoughts likewhyexactly they had done that. If I didn’t know better, I would think that they were trying to set something up between Jeannie and I.