All Chapters of MISTLETOE,MOONLIGHT AND MY SECRET: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The door had barely stopped rattling in its frame and I still hadn't managed to say another word. Maya. It was actually her. Seven months of telling myself the masquerade had been some kind of fever dream, some perfect, impossible night I'd built up in my head because reality had never given me anything to compare it to, and here she was, standing behind a bakery counter with flour on her hands and my child under her ribs. I'd spent the drive up the mountain on a call with legal, cutting off a junior associate mid-sentence because he hadn't read the terms closely enough, and I hadn't thought twice about it. That was simply how I ran things. I did not, as a rule, arrive anywhere soft. "Maya. Is that.....?" I couldn't finish it. I didn't need to. Her face told me everything the rest of the sentence would have. "You need to leave," she said instead, voice tight, already moving toward the door like she could physically push the last thirty seconds back outside with the storm. "The ro

The Aspen Peak Grand occupied the top third of the mountain like it had been carved there on purpose, all glass and cedar beams and a lobby fire that had apparently been burning continuously since the resort opened in 1987, according to the small brass plaque nobody had ever asked for. The resort had sent a truck down for me before dawn, chains on the tires, taking the one lane through town that existed purely because the Vance family paid enough into the county's snow removal budget to make it happen ahead of anyone else's turn. The rest of the valley could wait for Thursday. I'd never once had to. I stood at the window of my suite at seven in the morning, still in yesterday's clothes, watching the plows clear the private drive below while the rest of the valley remained buried under three feet of snow the county wouldn't touch until Thursday at the earliest. The world outside was the kind of quiet that only exists after a storm, no wind, no traffic, just snow settling on snow, t

My mother's car hadn't even cleared the end of Main Street before I felt the whole shop exhale around me, string lights flickering back to life like the building itself had been holding its breath. A wreath on the door, half-crooked from where my mother had brushed past it on her way out, still swung faintly on its hook, and somewhere above us a paper snowflake Maya had clearly cut herself, slightly lopsided, one point longer than the rest, twisted slowly on its string. Maya had already gone still at the counter a full second before I heard the car's engine catch on the ice at the corner, her shoulders dropping in relief before there was anything for either of us to actually hear yet. I filed it away without remarking on it, the same way I'd started filing away every small thing about her that didn't quite line up, and let it go. "That," Maya said, "was the single worst four minutes of my life, and I once had a raccoon get into the shop during the Christmas rush." "How does tha

The dining room my mother had chosen for the welcome dinner sat forty people comfortably, which meant she'd invited exactly forty people, because being comfortable had never once been the point. I found Maya by the fireplace, dressed in something borrowed from Chloe that fit her better than anything my mother's stylist would have chosen, and felt something in my chest ease slightly at the sight of her, right up until I saw who was walking toward us with a champagne flute in each hand. "Julian Vance." The woman pressed one glass into my hand without asking whether I wanted it. "You've gotten better looking since the last time I saw you, which frankly feels unfair given how insufferable you were at nineteen." "Bianca." "Don't say my name like that. You'll make your fiancée think we have history." Bianca Castellane turned to Maya with a smile that belonged on a magazine cover, warm and white and entirely too practiced. "I don't, for the record. History implies Julian noticed me,

I found her building a nest.Two mismatched blankets over a sofa, upholstered in a white expensive enough to be its own quiet warning, and a string of fairy lights looped along a mantel holding nothing but a stack of decorative logs someone was paid to arrange and never light. A wooden ornament, carved crooked on purpose or not, turned slow on its string in the draft from the heating vent."You've redecorated," I said, from the doorway.She startled, one hand flying to the ornament like she could hide it after the fact. "It came with me. Chloe insisted.""I didn't say it was wrong.""You said it in a tone.""I don't have tones.""You have exactly one, and you're using it right now." She let the ornament go, some of the defensiveness draining out of her shoulders as it kept turning. "It's ugly. I know it's ugly. It's mine, though."I crossed the room, careful of the space between us the way I'd been careful of it since the hallway two nights ago, since the perfume, since some versi