Ivy rested her head on Ezra’s chest and shivered slightly, prompting him to cover her bare back with the velvet jacket of the Santa suit.

“Wonder what the Roses would say about all of this?” Ivy said.

Ezra yawned and lazily ran a fingertip down her bare spine. “I think they’d approve. You’ve brought this old place to life. You know, I loved this farmhouse the minute I saw it. The place was crying out to be lived in again. But when I listed it, my expectations for a sale were pretty low. I even told James he’d never get his asking price.”

“And he didn’t,” Ivy pointed out.

“You were a damned tough negotiator,” Ezra said, laughing.

“What you didn’t know was that buying this place totally maxed me out. My savings, my IRAs, my half of the equity in our house after the divorce, everything I had. It was a huge leap of faith.”

Ivy stopped herself. “Faith isn’t something I’ve had a lot of, over the years. I think I stopped believing good things would happen the year I asked a sketchy-looking mall Santa to bring my mother home for Christmas. I was about the same age as your mom when she stopped believing.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t come home?” Ezra asked gently.

“No. She had pancreatic cancer. It was … fast. And brutal,” Ivy said. She shrugged. “Anyway, when I made the offer on this house, I was afraid the seller wouldn’t accept my offer and terrified he would.”

“We actually had a way better offer on the table,” Ezra said.

“Huh?” Ivy sat upright, wrapping the jacket around herself.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you. That real estate developer I told you about, the one who bought the abandoned textile mill? He made us a pretty respectable offer for Four Roses Farm. Like, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars more.”

“And James didn’t accept? Why on earth not?”

“The guy wanted to tear down the farmhouse and build a town-home subdivision. James Heywood said his father-in-law would have turned over in his grave. He wanted the house to go to a special buyer.”

“What’s so special about me?”

Ezra kissed her shoulder. “If I tell you, will you promise not to report me to the real estate ethics police?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know. This sounds serious.”

“Okay, here goes. I kinda cyberstalked you.”

She feigned outrage. “You what?”

“I had my client’s fiduciary interest to protect. And yeah, I was more than curious to find out about this mysterious I. G. Perkins. So I looked you up on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. You’re not much of a poster, are you?”

Ivy stared into the flames. “When Kyle and I split up, I couldn’t bear to see all those happy photos of us snorkeling in Cancún, or hiking in the mountains—or the two of us at dinner with Bianca, my BFF-slash-client who it turns out he was sleeping with on the side. It all seemed like such a lie, so I deleted everything. Clean slate, right?”