Love and joy come to you! And to you glad Christmas too!

Clark tapped his foot. Maybe that sound would drown out their warbling.

And God bless you and se-end you a Happy New Year!

It didn’t. He just managed to tap in time with them, giving them a beat. He covered his ears. Maybe that would drown them out.

And God se-end you a Happy Ne-ew Year!

It didn’t. There was no drowning them out. Them, of course, because, as it turned out, he and Kate hadn’t been as alone in the house as he assumed they were. Michael’s slight drawl joined Kate’s…competent singing. In a more generous mood, Clark might have described her singing as beautiful. Stirring, even. Not because it was technically perfect—it wasn’t—but because there was a freedom to it. She didn’t care about sounding good; she sang because it brought her joy.

Or something. Clark didn’t want to read too deeply into it.

“That’s enough.”

Decorations and other passive, ignorable expressions of her Christmas obsession, he could handle. But indoor caroling? He couldn’t allow it.

Leaving his work behind, he stormed downstairs. He flew past the miniature Dickens village set up on a long end table in the hallway, the popcorn garlands strung between overhead light fixtures and down the garland-strewn grand staircase. Thank goodness his allergies didn’t include pine or he’d be a dead man walking.

By the time he arrived in the living room, embarrassingly out of breath, they’d moved onto the slower, more somber “Silent Night,” which Kate elected to sing in German.

Great. She knew German. The enemy living in his house was clever, talented, beautiful, and bilingual.

Not that Clark cared about any of that, of course. She was, above all, a nuisance. An obstacle to be conquered on his way to full control over his family’s affairs. He had to think of her that way. He never thought about anyone else he did business with in warm or familiar terms. Why should he start now?

“What is this?”

“We’re singing.”

Apparently, the concept of a rhetorical question was lost on Michael, who answered with a big grin as Kate’s song continued. Her head hung low over the keys and her golden-brown hair curtained her face, but the melody her lips offered wrapped around Clark with the insistence of prayer. He tried his best to ignore the clenching of his heart. The scene in the living room was something out of The Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell couldn’t have painted it better himself. A man and a woman sat, cozily enough, on a piano bench in the middle of a Christmas-covered living room. The fireplace crackled and the music hummed.