Depends on Who's Asking - Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,18

text out to Brad and asked him if he could see what strings he could pull.

Then, the rest of our day was filled with a Die Hard marathon, some eating of bad food that I would have to eventually work off in the gym in the alcove off the main room and conversation with a woman that was very intelligent and knew exactly what to say to get a rise out of me.

CHAPTER 6

Drinking tip: hold two drinks so you don’t text the person you know you shouldn’t.

-Beer mug

SAINT

Quarantine Day Two

The morning started the same way the morning before it had started.

My eyes opened first to the sound of her snoring.

Damn, but she really snored loud.

And not even a cute snore, either. But a great big, massive snore that you would expect to come out of a three-hundred-pound man. Not some little slip of a woman.

The second thing I noticed other than her snoring was the way she was practically wrapped around my arm.

She had it in such a tight grip that the entire thing was numb.

Her forehead was pressed to the outside of my bicep, and her lips were slightly parted.

I slowly tried to disentangle myself when there was a knock on the door.

I frowned and glanced at the clock that was on the bedside table.

Six-forty in the morning.

Nice.

I walked to the door and asked, “Yes?”

“Got a few deliveries for you,” Jace said.

I backed up as I said, “Okay. I’m back.”

The door opened and the butt of a tree was forced into the room. It kept coming and coming and coming until it was where I was nearly standing.

Bags were put beside the tree, followed by a few boxes.

And then two more large boxes followed by something so large that they could barely fit it into the room.

By the time they were done, they could barely close the door due to all of the crap.

But manage they did, and then they said, “We’ll be back with your breakfast.”

Then the door was closed, and I was left standing there with my eyes on the sheer amount of shit that was in front of me.

“Is that a tree?”

Her gasped words had me looking at her over my shoulder just as the shades were pulled open on the room.

My eyes automatically went to her ass that was covered by my t-shirt, and then moved up to her face.

She was staring at me with her mouth slightly parted.

“I asked for it,” I admitted.

She walked to where it was and stared at it.

“It’s a real tree,” she said, eyes wide. “They brought us a real tree?”

“A Fraser fir,” I confirmed.

“I… how?” she asked as she walked up to it. “It smells so good!”

“My dad’s got connections,” I answered, not bothering to hide the truth. “We’ve always had Fraser firs. Did you know they don’t grow down here?”

She shook her head. “We always got the fake ones because my brother, Connor, is allergic to almost everything.”

I hummed and walked to the door to grab the tree stand that was placed on the last box before they took off.

Walking back to the area where there was no furniture and the ceilings were tallest, I placed the stand down, widened the screws in the base, then walked back for the tree.

Five minutes and a little leveling later, it was up.

“The ceilings are too short,” she grumbled as she looked up at the tree.

The top six inches were bent over due to it being too tall.

“I’d normally just trim the tree up there, but I don’t have anything to do that with,” I admitted.

She walked back over to the boxes and bags and started to bring everything over.

She pulled out lights, not-cheap glass ornaments—what the hell did my mother do? Go to fuckin’ Dillard’s and buy this shit?—and all kinds of things that I didn’t have a name for.

Carolina, though, obviously knew what they were.

And she spent the next hour directing me on what to do with the lights, the ‘tree picks’ that were stuck in the tree for decoration, and the garland.

About halfway through her tree decorating, she’d paused to go get her phone and had turned on her favorite Christmas station on Spotify.

It was around the time when we started hanging up ornaments that she brushed her backside against my front, and I realized that there was no way in hell she didn’t know how fucking hard she made me.

But she didn’t say a word, and in the end, we finished the tree without anything too