Page 20 of The Christmas Arrangement

“It’s not?” Holly asks, calculating lost orders in her head.

“No.”

“What is?”

“The sleeping arrangements.”

“What?” Noelle says, bewildered.

I look at my soon-to-be stepmother. “There’s only one bed.”

She laughs. “I’m aware.”

Suddenly I remember that she and my dad holed up here for a while the summer she was being stalked.

“What did you do?”

“At that point, your father and I were just friends, so he took the couch.”

“Just friends is doing a lot of work, but we’ll let that go for now,” Holly says.

I turn to her. “What did you and Jack do?”

Last year, she shared the cottage with her now-boyfriend before they started dating.

“We had ground rules,” Holly tells me.

“Shocker,” Merry says.

“We took turns. We alternated getting the bedroom and the couch. But,” Holly adds, “that was a different situation.”

“How is it different? You weren’t dating; we’re not really dating.”

“We weren’t dating because I was his court-appointed lawyer and he was my client, and being involved with him would have been a violation of …”

I fade out as she starts naming the rules that she didn’t want to violate and snap back to attention when she says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t have any ground rules.”

“What do you mean? This is a professional situation. We have a boundary.”

“What’s the boundary?”

“Save the displays of affection for the public. So I guess we should just alternate nights in the bed.”

“Or,” Merry proposes, “you could throw caution to the wind, acknowledge that you’re attracted to each other, and have a fling.”

“A fling with Dash Pine?”

“You say it like it’s crazy idea.”

“It is,” I retort.

“No. The crazy idea,” Noelle tells me, “would be to not have a fling with Dash Pine.”

“Shouldn’t you be a good influence on us?”

She laughs. “Your mother raised three amazing daughters. You don’t need me to be an influence, good or bad. I’m just saying: it’s Dash Pine.”

“And we saw that kiss, you know,” Holly adds.