Missing Christmas - Kate Clayborn Page 0,2

“yes” I’ve been working to get for months. Six weeks from now Dr. Nhung will be starting a five-year stint with Möller Metals, a job I’m certain will make him happy, and an agreement that will bring Jasper and me one of the biggest recruiting commissions we’ve gotten since we started up fourteen months ago. A good salary bump for Carol in the next quarter, enough money to make some improvements to the office we’ve been waiting on. I could’ve heard that yes and gone back to my office, e-mailed my contact at Möller, opened this document, and let myself feel proud of what I’d done.

Instead I’d asked Jasper to kiss me. I’d practically dared him to.

And oh. Kiss me he did. One hand in my hair, one arm wrapped around my waist, a rough sound in his throat—

The sharp ring of my phone stops me from reliving it—again—and even before I look down at the screen I know it’s my older sister, and I know the lecture I’m about to get.

“Kris, you absolute hag,” Kelly says, her voice strained, her breathing shallow. I can hear the thud of her feet on her treadmill. She’s probably on mile four at least, her Bluetooth in her ear and her tablet in front of her face. Likely she’s been answering e-mails since mile one. “I have been waiting for hours. Did you get him?”

I have a flash of my thumb on the curve of Jasper’s lip. I cross my legs under my desk.

“I did.”

“What the hell,” she says, and I can hear her slap the stop button. “You said you’d call! I figured it went bad and you were off somewhere with Jasper drowning your sorrows.”

“It didn’t go bad,” I lie.

Because it did. It did go bad, once the kiss had stopped. One pause to catch my breath—who knows how long we’d stood there like that, arms around each other, lips and tongues tangling—and in that pause while I’d stared at him, taken him in and what we’d done, it’d been like a light had switched on in Jasper’s head, the glazed, hungry look in his eyes before the kiss suddenly gone. He’d stepped away from me and said, “I shouldn’t have.”

He’d looked at me like he didn’t know me at all.

I stand from the desk and walk to my door, peeking out before I close it to the small, dimly lit lobby outside. Carol won’t be in for another hour, and Jasper—who is always here before me—still isn’t in his office across the way.

I take a deep breath. “Kel, I messed up.”

I try giving her an abbreviated version: a long day, a jolt of adrenaline, a huge achievement, a kiss I shouldn’t have initiated, an awkward parting.

But I should’ve known that wouldn’t work on my sister.

“Oh my Gooooooooooooood,” she shouts, and I wince on her behalf. It’s barely six a.m. in LA right now, and no way are Malik and their two kids out of bed yet. I shush her on instinct, but this doesn’t work either.

“Freaking finally! What was it like?”

I can’t say Christmas morning, obviously, unless I want Kelly to know how far gone I am, how far gone I’ve been. “What do you mean, finally?”

“Please. ‘Jasper this, Jasper that.’ He’s all you ever talk about.”

“We work together. We’re business partners. Of course I talk about him.”

She ignores me. “Plus he looks like a cologne ad come to life. God. Does he still have that scar at the corner of his mouth?”

“Uh, yes? Why would he not have it anymore?” I stifle the urge to tell her what that scar—a small, upward curving line that makes the right side of his mouth look slightly upturned, a tease for the smile he so rarely gives out—felt like against my tongue. I love that scar.

“Who knows. People here get stuff like that lasered off, or whatever. Anyway. What. Was. It. Like.”

I slump into my chair again, turning it out to face the window. Early morning light bathes the glass-and-steel buildings of downtown Houston. Even from up here I can hear a swish of traffic on the surface streets below. It’s supposed to be sixty-two degrees today. It doesn’t feel like Christmas morning anymore at all.

“It can’t happen again.”

“Oh. You’re going to play it this way, are you?”

“Kel. This is our business. We’ve worked so hard to get here. Being with Jasper—it goes against everything I know about professional life.”

Kelly sighs, and I know part of her—the part of her that finished