Matters only worsened when he arrived inside to see a house overflowing with decorations and frippery. (Yeah, frippery. He was so enraged he’d had to dip into his grandfather’s vocabulary for a word to describe it.) Fresh, fragrant greenery and cardinal-red ribbons brightened the sallow walls. Fake icicles hanging from the doorways danced in the heated breeze and caught the abundant light. A train—an honest-to-goodness train set—ran circles around the fir standing sentry in the open living room, sending out real puffs of steam from its working engine. And, if he wasn’t going crazy—which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility—he could’ve sworn he smelled gingerbread baking somewhere.

The whole thing was enough to make him puke chestnuts.

“Take it down,” he growled.

He could only hope the backdrop of tinsel and baubles didn’t undercut the weight of his infuriated stare. This was his house. His family’s house. And she had absolutely no business being in here, much less taking the whole place over for her personal art project.

“I can’t.” She shrugged and began a descent down the stairs, her high-heeled boots making authoritative thuds with her every step. “Not by myself, anyway.”

Beyond the closed front door, a series of engines turned over and sputtered to life. Clark’s stomach sunk.

“Let me guess…”

“Everyone’s already leaving. They’ve got to go home for Christmas Eve. There’s no way I could take all of this down by myself. It’ll just have to stay up.”

She landed on the step above him, and their body language echoed their last encounter. Back then, she was below him, asking for something she had to know he couldn’t possibly give. Now, he was the one at a disadvantage.

Taking stock of himself, Clark tried to catalogue his feelings. In business, these sorts of exercises kept him from flying off the handle during negotiations. He treated his emotions like items on an inventory list. They first needed to be counted, weighed, measured, and then neatly put away to keep from overwhelming him. It would have been easy enough if her caramel-candy eyes weren’t so distracting. The color was extraordinary, but it wasn’t their beauty he kept tripping over. It was her unguarded warmth he couldn’t quite wrap his head around. What gave her the right to treat him like an old friend, welcome to open the doors of her heart and make himself at home inside? Hadn’t she ever been hurt before? Clark managed to put those thoughts away before he asked any of those questions out loud, opting to reach for the glass icicles over his head.

“Fine. I’ll take it down,” he said.