“If we have to be in a place where we have to share a room to sell it, you get the couch.”

“No way.” Danny scowled. “We’re sharing. We’ve done it before.”

“That was outside, in sleeping bags on the beach.”

“Same diff.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Unless you think you won’t be able to keep your hands off me.”

“You wish.”

“Most hotels have rooms with king beds,” he pointed out. “They’re huge. We’ll build a pillow wall and that’s it.”

Catie paused. This wasn’t about her snowbound-induced awareness of Danny. Fact was, she didn’t like just anyone seeing her stumps. Not that she hid them—for one, she gave regular talks to children where she showed them how her prosthetic legs worked so they could be more comfortable with other children who had to wear artificial limbs.

And Danny had seen her without her prostheses plenty of times.

But being in bed without her prostheses… that wasn’t the same as horseplay on the beach. It was a whole different level of vulnerability. Of intimacy. “No, Danny,” she said, readying herself for an argument. “I need the bed.”

7

HERE BE DRAGONS

Danny frowned, parted his lips, then looked into her eyes. “Okay, you get the bed.” A gentleness to his tone that made her cheeks flush, but he carried on before she could get uncomfortable. “I’ll see if I can find an air mattress small enough to smuggle in a suitcase. Most of the fancy hotel couches are insanely tiny.”

Fighting off her hot cheeks and the urge to be annoyed with him for getting it—getting her, she said, “Or you can be a diva and ask for a custom ‘rugby player suitable’ couch.”

“Will work on my soprano.”

Heart dangerously softer toward her childhood nemesis—a nemesis she was starting to see had grown into the best of men—she looked at her list. “We have to have an end date.” For both their sakes. “Six months?”

He shrugged. “Sounds okay. That’s like a real relationship that just happened not to work out. And after, we can still do our usual social stuff so people don’t think we’re enemies.”

“Except we are.”

“Exactly.”

Laughing, happy, content in this moment, she said, “What else?”

“You don’t look at me with dagger eyes everywhere we go.”

“No one will believe it.”

“In fact, I want goo-goo love eyes.”

Catie would’ve thrown a cushion at him, but she liked the one she was sitting against. “Shall we tell the family now, before we do anything else?”

“Yeah, might as well bite that bullet.”

They decided to do it on a visual conference call, complete with the Dragon. Who said, “A wise business decision for both your brands.”

Catie had never before seen her mother’s business brain as an emotional asset.