Winter's Kiss (24 page)

“I bought you a Valentine’s Day present,” he said in my ear, sending shivers through me despite all my layers. He rocked to one side in the chair and pulled something from his back pocket.

I took it in my gloved hands and peered at it in the dusky light from the stage and the stars. It was a sew-on patch with a black diamond in the center, the symbol for a dangerous ski slope. “Nick, that’s so cool! I love it!”

“That’s not all.” He rocked to his other side and pulled out another patch. This one had a four-leaf clover. “To replace the luck you’re missing.”

“Nick.” I stared at the patches in my mittens, trying not to tear up. “This is sweet of you.”

“I really like you in those ‘boy toy’ jeans,” he said, “but this needs to go on top of ‘boy.’” He took the black diamond from me and shook it. “And the clover goes on top of ‘toy.’”

“Deal.” I slipped the patches into my coat pocket. Then I sipped my hot chocolate and sighed, enjoying his warmth behind me. “We’ve been dating for four years, huh? I don’t think Fiona will like that answer.”

“You’ve always had my heart.” He kissed my earlobe—the one without a bandage. The one that was still lucky. “You know, you’re going to be in
People
anyway when you make the Olympic snowboarding team. ESPN will ask you, ‘Hayden O’Malley, you came from nowhere at age seventeen. Where have you been?’ And you’ll answer, ‘Oh, I had a few acrophobic issues to work through.’”

Laughing, I poked him for his embarrassingly accurate imitation of my Southern drawl.

He continued in my voice, “‘Then one night my boyfriend was being an ass and I challenged him to a comp. I had to do a front 1080 off a jump just to show him up, and the rest is history.’”

“I hope so.”

“I know so.” He kissed my cheek.

I reached back to run my fingers through his long hair. “Right now I want to lie low, have a normal life, and hang out with my boyfriend. I’ll meet you in
People
in a few years.”

He chuckled, making my insides sparkle with anticipation. “It’s a date.”

About the Author

Jennifer Echols is the author of the romantic comedies
The Boys Next Door
and
Major Crush
and the teen drama
Going Too Far
. She lives in Alabama with her family, no snow, and a vivid imagination. Please visit her on the Web at
www.jennifer-echols.com
!

The Twelve Dates of Christmas

prologue

It had seemed like the perfect plan—get my boyfriend to fall for another girl, and I’d be free. No muss, no fuss, no guilt or bad feelings.

I’d approached it logically, like the scientific person I am. I’d identified the problem. I’d come up with a hypothesis. I’d set up an experiment.

And now the results were sitting across the warm, garlic-scented, holiday-bedecked room from me. Or, rather, getting up and walking out of said room, namely Manfredi’s, my hometown’s fanciest restaurant.

Cam glanced over toward me as he was helping his new girlfriend, Jaylene, with her coat. He smiled and waved. I returned the smile weakly and wriggled my fingers in return.

“What are you looking at, Lexi?” My date, Andrew Cole, stopped talking about himself just long enough to notice I wasn’t hanging on his every word. He looked over at the door just in time to see the happy couple depart. “Oh.” He shrugged, then shoveled in a mouthful of lasagna before returning to his favorite topic. “So anyway, like I was saying, the admissions guy from Northwestern told me that if I applied, he was positive I’d get in, and …”

I picked up my fork and poked at my pasta. But my stomach recoiled at the thought of actually eating it. I’d lost my appetite the second I’d walked into the restaurant and spotted Cam and Jaylene together.

Andrew had, in his efficient, overachiever way, procured us a great table by the front window. It was tinted with fake frost and draped with garlands of holly and ivy, but that wasn’t enough to block my view of Cam and Jaylene as they emerged onto the sidewalk outside. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, not wanting to see any more but unable to resist. Call it scientific curiosity.

It was early December and the temperature out there was normal for late evening in our part of Wisconsin—in other words, frigid. A few snowflakes drifted lazily down, lending the perfect touch to the scene. Seeing that we were in Claus Lake, that scene could be summed up in one word: Christmassy. The whole town was crazy for Christmas. Red and green lights twinkled up and down the poles of the streetlights, across the facades of all the shops on Elf Street, and even on the parking meters and stop signs. Holly and mistletoe were everywhere.

Jaylene huddled in her baby blue, fake-fur-trimmed, not-really-warm-enough-for-Wisconsin jacket, laughing at something Cam had just said. Then she let out an elaborate shiver and cocked her little blond hatless head up to say something to Cam, who was almost a foot taller than her. I couldn’t hear them through the window, but I imagined her saying something like,
We-all don’ have this heah wh-aht stuff fallin’ outta the skah awl the tah-yam back home in Jaw-ja.

Okay, so maybe her Southern accent isn’t quite
that
bad. But it’s close.

Anyway, whatever she said made Cam laugh. Now, a lot of people can laugh wickedly or sarcastically or wearily or even just politely. But not Cam. His whole face always lit up with pure joy whenever he smiled or laughed, like a little boy’s on—well, okay, Christmas.

So he laughed, and then he put his arm around her. She snuggled up against him with another shiver, wrapping both her white-mittened hands around his waist.

She smiled up at him. He smiled down at her. A second later she was standing on tiptoes, and he was bending down toward her.

Their kiss sent an electric shock through me. A spontaneous kiss on a snowy evening, not knowing or caring who might see—since when had Cam become such a romantic?

And more important, since when did I
care
? After all, this was all totally my idea, my plan, my fault.

But maybe I need to backtrack a little. Begin at the beginning. See, it all really started a few months ago at the big last-day-of-freedom party at the lake the night before my first day of senior year….

one

“Hold still.”

I froze on command. A second later my best friend, Allie Lin, smacked me soundly on the forehead. “Ow!” I yelped.

“Mosquito,” she explained succinctly.

I rubbed the spot. “Oh. Thanks.”

She slapped herself on the arm, then shifted positions on the big old scratchy pine log where we were sitting. Her gaze drifted to a group of beefy-looking guys in Bermuda shorts over near the bonfire. They were pounding beers and talking football. Their loud, excited voices blended with the hip-hop music pouring out of the speakers of the battered old Chevy sedan parked on the rocky lakeside beach. The dark, still water of Lake Claus lapped gently against the car’s front tires.

“I can’t believe school starts tomorrow and I still don’t have a boyfriend.” Allie glanced from the football guys over to a couple making out furiously on the next log. “If I don’t have a guy of my own before the Ball, I swear I’m going to give it up and become a nun.”

In Claus Lake, there was only one thing people meant when they said “the Ball.” That was the town’s big Christmas Eve Costume Ball, held every year at the fireman’s hall. It was a fund-raiser for some local charities, but more important, it was the social event of the season. The Christmas season, that is. And in Claus Lake, the Christmas season was the only season that counted. It lasted for a good four months, and people talked about it all year long.

“You can’t become a nun,” I reminded Allie. “You’re not Catholic.”

“Thanks, Logic Girl.” She made a face at me. “My point is, I really, really,
really
don’t want to go to the Ball stag this year.”

I didn’t see the big deal. The Ball wasn’t a big date-night thing like homecoming or the prom. Lots of people went as couples, but plenty more went on their own or with their whole families or a bunch of friends or whatever. It wasn’t important who you went with; it was just important that you
went
.

But I knew Allie didn’t want to hear it. For the past three years, she’d gone to the Ball with me; my boyfriend, Cameron Kehoe; and my cousin Nicholas. However, last year Nick’s girlfriend, Rachel, had been part of the gang too, suddenly making it feel much less like a group thing and more like a double date plus one. I guess Allie hadn’t liked the feeling, because she seemed determined not to let it happen again this year.

“Senior year,” she mused. “It hardly seems possible, does it? It seems like two seconds ago that we were all scared, stupid freshmen.”

“What hardly seems possible is that I’ll ever get everything done this fall.” I stretched out my long legs, accidentally kicking over an abandoned beer bottle with one flip-flopped foot. “I need to finish up my college applications, sign up for the SATs, interview for the Simpson Scholarship—”

“It’s not like you have to worry about that last part,” Allie interrupted, slapping another mosquito on her neck. “You have the Simpson Scholarship in the bag.”

“Don’t be so sure. Andrew Cole could weasel in there and get it instead of me, especially if I screw up the interview.”

I frowned slightly at the thought. Every year, the Simpson Scholarship went to Claus Lake High School’s most accomplished senior. Just having the highest GPA—which I did—was no guarantee. The committee was headed by Mrs. Alice Simpson, the town’s wealthiest citizen, as well as one of its oldest at ninety-three and counting. Grades and academic achievements were very important, but so were extracurriculars, charity work, and who knew what else. Then there was the personal interview. That could make or break you with the committee—especially Mrs. Simpson.

Andrew had had the second-highest GPA in our class for the past three years running. He was also kind of charming in a geeky-nerdy, Clark Kent-y, sucking-up-to-adults kind of way. If he ended up winning that scholarship, I would probably have to reconsider my choice of colleges. And that would definitely be a total disaster.

See, I had my whole life pretty much planned out. My one-year plan was to win the Simpson Scholarship and get into a top East Coast university. Five-year plan: Earn a degree in biology and acceptance to the med school of my choice. Ten-plus-year plan: Begin fabulous career in medical research, complete with exciting big-city lifestyle.

I could hardly wait. But for now here I was, sitting with my best friend, listening to a good song, on a nice—albeit rather buggy and muggy—early September night. Not such a bad place to be, really. At least for the moment.

Reaching back over my head, I grabbed two fistfuls of my thick, springy auburn hair, lifting it up off the nape of my neck to take advantage of the slight breeze coming in off the lake. Even though the sun had set, it was hot and sticky. Sitting so close to the fire wasn’t helping matters. If I hadn’t known it was biologically impossible, I might have suspected I could melt into a puddle at any moment.

If the heat was affecting Allie the same way, she wasn’t showing it. Her glossy dark chin-length hair was pulled back into a tiny ponytail at the back of her head, and her heart-shaped face was sweat free. As a new song came on the car radio she started bouncing and wriggling on the log, tapping her toes and shaking her slim shoulders in time to the music.

“Sit still, will you?” I complained. “You’re making me sweat just watching you.”

“Can’t,” she said, a little breathless from all the seat dancing. “The Crazy Legs Theory, remember?”

That’s another thing about Allie. She was always coming up with all these psychological theories, mostly about love and romance. She planned to write self-help books someday—you know, the kind with titles like
Visualize Your Way to a Hot, Happening Love Life
or
It’s Not You, It’s Him.
It was pretty much her life goal to get on
Oprah
with one of her bestselling tomes.

And now that she mentioned it, I did remember this particular theory. It was one of her favorites, one she’d trotted out on numerous occasions. It posited that if a girl wriggled and toe-tapped as if she were dancing right there in her seat, a guy would be more likely to come over and ask her to dance.

“Oh, right,” I joked. “The Crazy Legs Theory. How could I forget? Isn’t that the one we disproved at the prom? And then at Mary Zimmer’s party? And then again at your aunt’s wedding last month?”

“It only has to work once.” Allie smiled serenely as she boogied down on the log.

I grinned. I was always amused by Allie’s endless parade of new theories. That didn’t mean I actually
believed
most of them—I was too much of a hard-science girl for that sort of thing—but luckily Allie was a good sport and didn’t seem to mind that I often couldn’t resist applying the scientific method to her so-called data.

The bonfire was dying down by now, and the crowd was starting to thin out. The football guys wandered down to the water’s edge to throw rocks or something. Meanwhile couples had been slipping off into the darkness together for a while. Last chance for some carefree romance before the daily grind started up again.

That reminded me: I hadn’t seen Cam in quite some time. However, it only took a quick glance around to locate him. He was over on the far side of the fire, picking up empty cans and bottles and tossing them into the public recycling bin near the fire pit.

Yeah. Way romantic. Then again, that was kind of the way things had been going with us lately.

I guess Allie heard my sigh and followed my gaze toward Cam. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “You’re not still worried that you and Cam are losing your spark, are you?”

“Maybe a little,” I admitted.

It was true. The closer we got to senior year, the more I thought about what came next—after high school. And the more I looked forward to my carefully planned out, totally fabu future, the more I realized there was one thing I hadn’t taken into account while making those plans. Namely, my almost-four-year relationship with Cam.