Their Christmas To Remember. Amalie Berlin
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Their Christmas To Remember - Amalie Berlin страница 9
Название: Their Christmas To Remember
Автор: Amalie Berlin
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
isbn: 9781474075510
isbn:
They’d arrived just in time. The MC began to speak, and she missed every single word the man said. All she could do was stare up at the tree, focus on keeping it steady and try really hard to ignore the feel of him behind her. The crowds of New York were something she could never hope to get used to; they literally pressed so tightly together that the crowd seemed to move like one organism—which meant everyone directly beside her was touching her. So why was it that she only really felt him at her back? His heat. His solidity. The fan of his breath on her neck...
Someone flipped a switch and the tree blazed to life, thousands of lights instantly glowing.
It towered over the plaza and glittered as if covered by the wealth of the Rockefeller family. As if someone had opened some vault of jewels and strung the sparkling strands from bough to bough, spiraling upward to a crystal star that wiped out pretty much every thought she’d had before coming down.
So far gone from the strands of threadbare tinsel of her childhood trees. No hulking fire hazards of multicolored lights. No icicles dripping from everywhere because icicles were cheap and covered a multitude of tree imperfections. Icicles, it was well known, could kill your pets while making your Christmas tree seem full and high class. Not true, at least on one count. She hoped not many people lost pets to icicles.
No icicles here, not as she’d known them—though there did seem to be some crystal, icicle-like ornaments among the perfect, colored glass balls.
Did her family still celebrate the holidays? Maybe they’d only ever tried for her. It had been the one time of year she could count on receiving a gift, and only learned as a teenager that most of those gifts had been stolen. For her. For them. She didn’t know anymore.
“Ready?” he asked, breaking through the cold fog that rolled over her any time she thought about her estranged family.
“For what?” She looked over her shoulder, but he was already sliding between her and the next nearest body, so he stood more to the front and she could get part of him in frame with the tree.
“This is a stately Northern Porcupine Cone Tree. It was brought to this country approximately three hundred years ago by immigrants from the land of...”
Porcupine Cone? Was that a tree? No way. Three hundred years?
She felt her brows coming down even before he smiled extra bright at her.
He did not have the information.
“I don’t remember where they came from, but it was very far away.” He gestured up and down, denoting the height, and she finally caught on that he’d changed his accent. He now sounded like a remarkably proper BBC documentary narrator. “This magnificent beast of a Christmas tree is approximately seven hundred feet tall. The Rockefeller family employs twelve brigades of elves—one for each of the days of Christmas—both to make the lights and ornaments and put them onto the tree in the dead of night when the rest of the world is sleeping.”
She should stop this, shouldn’t she? Her smile said she wanted to hear more of this silliness, but he was lying to the kids and they would believe him. Well, might believe him.
But it was kind of amusing? To her, at least.
“Unfortunately, this year there was a terrible scandal in the Elf Union as Old Man Winter outsourced the production of the ornaments to South Pole elves, paying them significantly lower wages than the North Pole Union allows. And thus began the much misunderstood War on Christmas.”
THE REMAINDER OF the ceremony continued in much the same manner—Wolfe narrating in the most outlandish and ridiculous fashion, which made the comments on the stream go berserk, and more and more people tune in to what was supposed to be a temporary, barely viewed feed on Angel’s account.
Now she couldn’t erase it. Now, although she barely used the thing, each view pressed on her like the weight of a stare. Increased traffic could only lead to increased scrutiny. Increased exposure and danger.
“You might’ve become an internet celebrity, in my small circle of friends and followers,” she murmured as she eyed the three-digit number of people following their—well, his—antics.
“Ah, fame. Such a burden. Next thing you know, women will be throwing themselves at me.” The ceremony had ended a few minutes ago, but he was obviously still on.
She flipped the phone case shut and walked with him back out of the plaza, because walking was the only way in which she could keep up with the man. It was both satisfying and horrifying to know how quick-witted he was. Satisfying because he was a surgeon, he took care of children in extremely critical situations, so him being bright was a good thing, but horrifying because she was a doctor too, she should be able to be as effortlessly witty as he was. Instead, she couldn’t work the phone, and she couldn’t come up with anything outlandish to say about the tree or the holiday.
“Dr. McKeag...”
“Angel, please, call me Wolfe. We’re friends now, right? Or at least we’re peers who aren’t mortal enemies. Call me Wolfe. I’d hate to think that you didn’t enjoy the evening half as much as I did, and I truly didn’t expect to enjoy it so much.”
Call him Wolfe, as if that made any of this easier. It was a step out onto a rickety bridge over rushing flood waters.
He paused at 49th, where they’d exited the cab earlier, and looked at her, the cookies in one hand and the caddy of hot drinks in the other. “You turned the phone off, right?”
She showed him the closed case, then dropped it into her coat pocket. “Listen, Mr. Alberts was on the feed, so it did go further than I’d hoped.”
“Was he?” He handed her the cookies to free his hand to hail a cab, leaving her begrudgingly grateful for his remembering, and saving her asking.
“He was.” She tucked the small bag of snickerdoodles into her other pocket and cleared her throat. “And about one hundred and thirty-several people I barely know.”
He deserved to know the number, even if it was unlikely to trip him up the way it did her.
“You sound worried.”
How much should she admit to? It was unlikely this would snowball into Spencer coming out of the woodwork again to warn Alberts this time. She wasn’t even social media friends with him, or anyone else from her epic three-day job, but putting herself out there at all felt like running into a bear’s den.
“No, lass,” he said, probably because she took so long to answer, slipping into an even more familiar way to address her, a way he usually reserved for patients. Until a rascally light sparked in his eyes, and he followed up with, “I don’t feel slightly guilty for this evening. If you feel guilty, I’m going to have to assume you’ve been having untoward thoughts about me and all the things you’d like to do to me in the back of this cab.”
As he spoke—the velvety rumble of his voice, the way he leaned ever so slightly closer—her cheeks flamed brighter and brighter, and there went her ability to think again.
A taxi pulled up to СКАЧАТЬ