She’d have rather he’d banged it down and splashed wine everywhere than this controlled kind of calm.

“You told them what?”

“I’m sorry, Grady,” she said, daring to meet his gaze now, hoping she’d be able to convince him it’d been a tiny white lie that had escalated out of control. His green eyes sliced into hers like razor blades. “I’d told my mom I wasn’t coming home for Christmas, and then she said fine, we’ll come to you.” She beseeched him with her eyes, trying to impress upon Grady how much that idea sucked. “So I panicked and told a little white lie about me coming to Credence to be with you because I can’t take another minimalist Christmas, Grady, I just can’t, and I thought telling them I was shacked up with a guy who goes the full Griswold wouldn’t just stop them from coming but send them screaming in the other direction…”

Drawing breath, Suzanne picked up her glass and swigged another gulp of wine. She was aware of every beat of her heart reverberating against her pulse points.

“But it didn’t,” Grady supplied, his face like stone—hard and unmoving except for the tick of a nerve at the angle of his jaw.

She nodded. “It didn’t. They’re still coming.”

“So…untell them.”

It was a low, measured, reasonable demand, but Suzanne had dug herself too big a hole now. She’d totally fucked it up, and unfucking it without making herself look like some deranged chick who was so desperate for a man that she was fabricating a relationship was impossible. Self-preservation was a sucky reason to be hiding behind her lie, but she didn’t want her parents to start wondering about the state of her relationships—or her mind, for that matter—when they had enough to be worrying about with their own relationship.

And who knew, maybe being around a newly in love couple would help her parents to find their own magic again? The focus had to be on her parents now, so it was just easier to go through with the farce than walk it back. If he agreed. If he didn’t, she’d have to fess up and wear the consequences, but seriously…how hard could it be?

She glanced at Grady’s forbidding face. Impossible by the looks of it.

“Or…” she said, her voice wobbling, betraying just how much was riding on his agreeing to the fake relationship. “And, just hear me out here…we could pretend that it’s true.”

His jaw did that clenching and unclenching thing again. “And why in the hell would I do that?”

“Because it’s Christmas, and neighbors help each other out, especially at Christmas.”

Grady bugged his eyes disbelievingly. “You want your drive shoveled? I’m your guy. You want a cup of sugar? Sure thing. You want me to play fake kissy-kissy under the mistletoe in front of your folks?” He shook his head. “Hell no.”

But then his gaze dropped to her mouth and lingered hungrily, and the same breath-stealing tension she’d felt in the mudroom tightened her lungs. A wave of heat rolled between them, and the air sizzled as Suzanne’s insides did a slow loop the loop.