Page 81 of Mistletoe Mistake
I had to fight to keep the smile off my face, not wanting to let her know just how much I enjoyed her teasing. “I thought it was quite magnanimous.”
“But do you like kids?” she followed up, looking at me with genuine curiosity.
Though she couldn’t have known it, the question brought a lump to my throat. I hadn't told Gemma that part of the story with Samantha. I hadn't mentioned how I proposed to Samantha in part because she told me she was pregnant, and I hadn’t told her how excited I'd been at the prospect of being a father and having a baby with the woman I loved.
I had to assume now that it had just been another lie, another thing Samantha told me just to hook me in deeper. Surely, if she had actually been pregnant with my child, she would have tried to get more money out of me somehow. Since she hadn't, it must have meant she'd never been pregnant at all.
In any case, I didn't want to bring all of that up right at that moment. I didn't want to think about Samantha at all, so I decided to give Gemma a pithy answer that I hoped would change the subject. “Children are fine as long as they're someone else's.”
A flash of something that almost looked like disappointment crossed her face, but before I could find out what it meant, a man with a clipboard came over to us. “Ms Sudlow, all the members of your team are here now.”
I stood back as Gemma gathered the kids around her. There were eight of them ranging in age from about eight to fourteen, and she showed them some pictures of the house they were going to make and gave them a pep talk that had them all laughing and ready to go. Soon, the time came for us all to head into the ballroom and find our table.
Gemma and I were the last to go, and she reached into her bag and pulled out two Santa hats. “What do you say, Cole?” she asked, slipping one of them onto her head and offering me the other. “It's for the kids.”
My eyes moved from the Santa hat to Gemma's inviting smile. I had nearly forgotten about our bet, but after everything that had happened between us, the idea of being able to ask a favour of her, with no restrictions at all, appealed to me even more than it had when we made the bet. As tempted as I might have been to give in to her, I wanted to win even more.
"You haven't convinced me quite yet, I'm afraid."
A look of such genuine disappointment crossed her face that I almost changed my mind right then and there out of guilt. But a moment later, she put the hat away and gave me a challenging grin. “Alright. I'll just have to come up with something even better tomorrow, then. For now, let's go out there and win this thing.”
~Gemma~
By the end of the night, Cole's expensive suit had been covered in bits of icing and candy. The children designated him the official 'gingerbread holder', meaning he had to hold the pieces of the house together until they dried while the kids decorated the house around him.
He took it all in stride, gamely letting them climb over and under him to get to where they needed to go, and only slightly wincing every time a stray bit of decoration landed on his custom shirt or jacket.
Despite what he'd said, I could see he was actually really good with kids, especially the younger ones. Although his response when I asked him if he liked kids disappointed me, I tried not to read too much into it. After all, most men didn't sit around dreaming about having babies. He probably wouldn't know for sure how he felt until he had one of his own, and I still couldn't help feeling that he would make a great dad based on the way he stood up for me and protected me even in the short time we'd been together.
In the end, I reminded myself that I probably wasn't pregnant anyway, so getting worked up about his glib response wouldn’t do anyone any good. I had enough real things to worry about without inventing new problems for myself.
Like how to talk to Cole about our relationship and what I wanted it to be, for example. Or what I was going to do about my father's party the following evening.
I hadn't told Cole yet that my father's valet messaged me earlier in the day to remind me that my father expected me at the party, and that I was not to bring a guest. Holly could still come, as she'd been issued a separate invite, and apparently she could still bring a guest, but I couldn’t. It seemed that my father wanted me to show up looking single and repentant, though repentant for what, exactly, I couldn’t be sure. For having the bad form to be left by my fiancé? Or for actually admitting that I was a woman who liked sex?
Whatever the case may be, I still thought it would probably be in my best interest to go, to make an appearance to satisfy my father, and hopefully, I wouldn't see him again for another six months or more afterwards.
When the buzzer sounded to signal the end of the competition, we all stepped back from our masterpiece. The house I designed was a fanciful version of Wilby Park, with the same basic structure as the actual house but with decoration drawn purely from the imaginations of the children on my team. They'd done a brilliant job.
After a tense round of judging, we were awarded second place out of the twenty teams there. I was a little disappointed, as I really thought we had a chance of winning, but the kids' school still got some great prizes and the kids themselves were happy enough.
Cole was much more upset on my behalf. “The other team cheated,” he complained as we got into the taxi to head back to the Lytton. “They propped up the rear wall because it couldn't support the weight of the roof on its own. Yours was free-standing and perfectly proportioned.”
“It's okay,” I assured him, amused by how invested he’d become. “We'll always know in our hearts that ours was the best.”
He recognized the teasing in my voice, and his eyes darkened. “Just because I know you're the best doesn't mean the world shouldn't recognize it too.”
A shiver ran through me, as it often did when he adopted that tone of voice. Why did it feel like we weren’t only talking about the house anymore?
By the time we arrived back at Cole’s suite, it had already passed ten o'clock. As much as I wanted to spend some time being naked with him, I also wanted to talk to him that night and I wasn't sure we had time to do both. As I tried to figure out how to tell him that I only wanted to talk, he shocked me by saying the exact same thing.
“Gemma, I've been thinking about having you in that bed ever since I left, but if it's okay with you, I'd like to talk to you about something first.”
“Sure. What is it?”
He invited me to take a seat on the couch in the living room and sat down beside me, sitting at an angle so he could look at me directly, our bodies not quite touching.
“I'm really not good at this kind of thing,” he started, his hand gripping the back of his neck in an almost nervous gesture, and a surge of affection rushed through me, seeing him so unsure of himself. “Negotiating and making deals, that's where I'm comfortable. But being away from you for the past few days made me realize that this thing between us, it's more to me than just a deal. I hoped... well, I hoped maybe it was for you too.”
