Page 67 of Time After Time

It’s been three meals and one snowball fight, and I’m no closer to even having a real conversation with Ember. At this rate, New Year’s Eve will come and go, and I won’t have made an inch of progress toward winning her back.

She’s at the dining table for breakfast, and when I say good morning, she responds like I’m an acquaintance she vaguely knows, and not the man who once made her come four times in one night.

She is civil to me.

Painfully, icily, heartbreakingly civil.

“Em—”

“Can you pass me the butter?” Freja interrupts.

“Ember—”

“Oh, Ransom, can you check your phone? Your mother sent you some dates for the Parson wedding in January,” Margot cuts in.

I’m not going to the damn wedding in January, and both my mother and Margot know that, so this is just the classic Rousseau two-step to protect Ember…from me.

That stings. That they think she needs to be shielded from me, the man who’s in love with her, the man who found out too late what she means to me.

She doesn’t look at me. She sips her café crème, eats her croissant that she dips into the coffee like a proper Parisian, and listens to Freja, who’s talking a mile a minute.

“You look like someone kicked your puppy.” Jonathan sits next to me, giving me a measured look.

I glare at him.

He raises both his hands. “Man, I come in peace. When I fucked up with Freja, this lot showed up at my office in DC. Bob wasn’t allowed in ‘cause he had a baseball bat.”

I raise an eyebrow. Jonathan justmayhave the key to winning back the fair maiden, since he’s with Freja, who’s, let’s face it, not easy to please.

“What did you do?” I ask curiously.

He pours himself some coffee. “I may have gone on a date with Freja’s colleague when we were on a break.”

“Butyou were on a break?” I ask, confused.

He shrugs. “The family didn’t think so. Freja didn’t think so.Ididn’t think so, either.”

“Then why did you do it?”

He grins. “Sheer criminal stupidity? I thought it’d make her jealous. It did. And Jean almost cut my balls off.”

“How did you get back in their good graces? Hers?”

“Took a year of some major groveling.”

“Ayear?” I panic. I wasn’t going to last a year without Ember, now that I knew, felt it in every cell of my body that I loved her.

“Maybe you can shortcut it since you’re both stuck in this chalet for another five days,” he offers, and then looks at the defensive line, metaphorically, in front of Ember, and shakes his head. “They’re not going to make it easy.”

Ember smiles at Tanya. My heart stutters.

She looks beautiful. Soft sweater, hair half-up, her glasses perched on her nose, which makes her look younger than she is, and more dangerous than she realizes.

I can handle anger. Rage. Tears. Even her throwing things at me.

But this cool detachment—like she’s written me out of her story—is killing me.

I stand up. I know there’s no way around this. “Ember, may I speak with you?”