Christ. That kiss had been completely unexpected. He had no clue what had come over him, other than his dumb male ego being goaded by her lousy at faking it quip and rising to the challenge. Grady wasn’t lousy at anything he set his mind to, but a quick I hear faking things is more your wheelhouse would have been far preferable.

She faked for a living, for fuck’s sake.

But he hadn’t really engaged his brain at all—he’d just moved to a beat that had been several belt notches below higher thinking—and it hadn’t been until he was sliding his hands onto her that his brain had caught up with his body. And by then it had been way too late: Kissing her had become some primitive kind of imperative.

Which made him feel like a knuckle-dragging caveman. Fuck. These two weeks could not go fast enough.

Staring out the doorway and girding his loins to face the clusterfuck of his cabin and Suzanne, Grady’s gaze snagged on the god-awful sprig of fake mistletoe hanging from a hook in the mudroom doorway. When in the hell had she put that up? It hadn’t been there last night.

No. Hell no. Over his dead body, no.

Snatching it off the hook, he tossed it in the trash can near the sink, barely suppressing the urge to rip it into tiny little pieces. She might have hung the stuff from every beam in his ceiling, but she couldn’t have the mudroom. The mudroom was for manly shit. For filthy boots and machinery grease, for clothes streaked in sweat and all kinds of muck and crap—sometimes literally—from the ranch.

She didn’t get the mudroom.

The wreath on his back door stopped Grady in his tracks—it hadn’t been there last night, either. It was made of garishly gold tinsel with red pom-poms placed randomly amid the fuzz. Were they supposed to represent baubles or Rudolph’s nose? In the center of the wreath, where a person could reasonably expect to find nothing, Santa’s jolly, rosy-cheeked face stared back at him.

Grady shuddered. Where in the hell had she found all this shit? www.tackyChristmascrapforblindpeople.com?

Wishing he could unsee the wreath, he entered. Warmth enveloped him instantly, as did the aroma of something hot and garlicky. The cabin had smelled like this when he’d been seventeen and come in after a long day working the ranch with his uncle. But the woman in the kitchen wearing some kind of snug green V-necked sweater that looked as fluffy as a newborn chick was not his aunt.

She was his fake girlfriend. As of tomorrow.

“Hey.” She smiled at him.

“We’re not officially on the clock yet,” he said, turning his back to her to hang his hat and coat on the hook and catch his goddamn breath.

“And hello to you, too,” she said, ignoring his testy response, and even though his back was to her and there was twenty feet between them, fingers curled around his spine. “I cooked some chili. Also picked up some of Annie’s peach cobbler because…well…you live here, so I’m sure I don’t have to explain, right? That woman is a national freaking treasure.”