He ran his hand down his shivering, wet face, but before he could reach for his snowball maker to retaliate, Bridget, not Carly, appeared. She jumped out from behind a tree and pinned him back onto the ground.
“What the hell are you doing? I’m already down! You got me with four hundred snowballs! Are you crazy?”
That storm he’d seen in her eyes now raged. “Am I crazy? No, Scooter, I’m furious.”
“With me?”
“Of course, with you!”
“What did I do now?”
She’d been stewing since the Angels came by the shop, and that exercise and fresh air he’d hoped would have helped her move on, clearly hadn’t. Unfortunately for him, she looked more pissed off.
She held a snowball in her hand, poised to nail him in the chest like a baker phenomenon turned snowball ninja. “How can you do it? How can you go out of your way to hurt so many people? I let a lot go, Scooter. I didn’t even yell at my boyfriend when I caught him in bed with a woman who was wearing my lingerie. I let Gaston take advantage of me. He paid me nothing to do the job of three bakers and a store manager. But you, you take the cake. Literally. You don’t want to help Cupid Bakery or for Tom and Lori to get married. You are a matrimonial meddler and the killer of cake all wrapped into one!”
Matrimonial meddler? Killer of cake?
He’d been called a lot of things in his day, and perhaps she had him on the meddling, but killer of cake wasn’t something he’d ever imagined anyone would call him in a million years.
He needed to get her talking like a normal human.
He glanced at the perfectly formed snowball clutched in her gloved hand. “I’m not saying this to piss you off, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about with the whole lingerie and Gaston rant?”
She shook her head and released a frustrated sigh. “I should apologize for that part. That stuff doesn’t have anything to do with you. There’s just a lot making me mad right about now—and I’m not the kind of person who gets mad. Somehow, you’ve turned me into a lunatic!”
“I’ve turned you into a lunatic?” he threw back, exasperation woven into each syllable.
“Absolutely,” she replied, eyes blazing. “What you’re doing to the Angels and Cupid Bakery is pure scroogery. You get the chance to save the day with your work, to help people who dedicated their lives to creating a bakery that brought joy to its customers and community, and you do nothing. You’re no Rudolph.”
“It’s who I am,” he answered, a little, no, a lot more truthfully than he’d expected.
“It doesn’t have to be, Soren,” she whispered as her words hung in the chilly air.
Chests heaving and the breath hot between them, they stared at each other.
“You mentioned lingerie,” he said, needing more than anything to change the trajectory of a conversation that was hitting too damn close to home.
She glanced away and released a wry bark of a laugh. “It wasn’t officially my lingerie. I saw it in a bag at my ex-boyfriend’s house. I assumed it was a gift for me. But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.”
“You’re the one who said it,” he replied with a cocky twist to his lips.
“Soren!” she chided.
He dropped the arrogant facade. “I’m sorry you caught your boyfriend cheating on you.”
She set the snowball on the ground. “I should have known it wasn’t a relationship that was going anywhere. He’d never kissed me like…”
“Like what?” He stared into her truthful eyes, allowing him to see her very soul.
“Like, how you kiss me. Like, I’m all you’re thinking about.”
Christ! How true that was.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she replied with a slight shudder.
He pulled off his glove and cupped her cheek in his hand, his heart hammering in his chest. “You’re cold.”
She gave him an adorable cringe of a grin as she brushed a bit of snow from his hair. “You’ve got to be colder. I got you pretty good.”
That was the understatement of the century.
He sat up but didn’t release her from his lap. “I’m not cold when I’m with you, Bridget.”
He didn’t mean temperature-wise. He wasn’t the cold-hearted man he despised when he was with her. She was light and warmth and gooey-delicious goodness, and he wanted to bask in her beauty and indulge in her honey-sweet radiance. He wanted her spirit to overtake his lonely soul and replace it