She’d been in the middle of scrolling through emails, looking for an update about Uncle Buckley’s latest ploy to get a judge to declare her marriage didn’t fit the requirements of her dad’s will, when she’d distractedly put her phone down because Nash came out in his cat pajamas. Really, how did he manage to look so hot wearing a clothing ode to festive kitties? It wasn’t fair.

Her phone vibrated again. She picked it up off of the stack of Shelly Laurenston books that had changed her thoughts about honey badgers forever and glanced down at the screen.

Pulse pounding, she read the text from her lawyer again. And again. And a fourth time just to really make sure it said what she thought it did.

“What’s wrong?” Nash asked, setting Groucho down and hurrying over to her side.

If she could have formed words without the truth tumbling out, she would have. Instead, she turned her phone so the screen faced Nash as she worked to keep her outward demeanor neutral. There was no reason to let on that she was—in a weird way—disappointed.

“Well, that’s good news, right?” His shoulders a twelve million on a ten-point tension scale, Nash rubbed his palm against the back of his neck and kept his attention focused on her phone. “The judge sided with you on the marriage. Nothing in the will stipulated how long you had to be married. That’s great. It’s perfect. It—”

Is fucking awful, a voice screamed in her head.

“Is exactly why we did this,” she said instead of letting that voice out. “Thank you for helping me save the foundation from my uncle.”

That was the important part. The fact that all she wanted to do now was curl up into a ball under the Christmas tree and listen to “All I Want for Christmas is You” on repeat while eating badly decorated sugar cookies didn’t matter. Keeping her gaze averted until she could get the whole blinking away her suddenly watery eyes thing out of the way, Chelle took a deep breath, trying to get herself under control. This was exactly what she’d wanted from the beginning. This was what they’d agreed to. The fact that she’d fallen in love with him didn’t change anything. This was the perfect reminder that all of this—right down to the obnoxious silver tinsel she’d still be finding the remnants of in the corners and crevices in her apartment this summer—was part of an arrangement. It wasn’t real, no matter how much it had become real to her.

“Well,” Nash said as he took his phone out of his pajama pocket, “I was saving this for Christmas, but if we’re celebrating, we might as well double it.”