Tic-Tac-Mistletoe - N.R. Walker Page 0,51

in a little closer. “Would you like to do it again?”

“Very much,” I murmured, running my thumb across his beard, scratching it just a little. I lifted his chin, so slightly, and just as I was about to bring his lips to mine, Chutney jumped onto the bed beside us.

“Oh, no you don’t, little miss,” I said, picking her up.

“Why do we keep getting interrupted?” Hamish asked.

I tucked Chutney under my arm and leaned down, just about to kiss him for real this time, when my phone beeped in my pocket. I groaned and stepped back, taking my phone out. “My service provider would like to wish me a Merry Christmas.”

“Well, their timing sucks.”

I scoffed out a laugh. “It sure does.”

Hamish turned back to the box on the bed and pulled out the next thing. It was wrapped in bubble wrap and he carefully unwrapped it, and he frowned.

“Is it broken?” I asked.

“No.” He pulled away the last of the protective wrap to reveal one of those wooden tic-tac-toe boards with wooden Xs and Os. “It’s not broken. It . . . it was my mum’s. She kept it on the coffee table and we’d play it all the time. She loved it. We didn’t keep all their stuff. I mean, we kept a lot of it, and most of it was furniture and jewellery, and some of it was worth a lot . . .” He looked at the game in his hands. “But it’s funny how it’s the little things, the stuff that most people wouldn’t look twice at, that means the most.”

I put my hand on his arm. “I get it.”

He nodded slowly. “Like the service counter in your store and the chair scuff mark on the office wall.”

God, it made my chest ache.

“Yeah.” I had to clear my throat. I nodded to the tic-tac-toe board. “Did you want to play a game?”

“Of this?” Hamish looked at the game, then to me. “You’d want to?”

I’d do anything to make him smile like that . . .

“Sure I would.”

He handed me the game and he collected the wrapped gifts from the bed. I put Chutney on the floor and followed Hamish back to the living room. He placed the presents under the Christmas tree, then took his seat on the couch next to me, the game of tic-tac-toe between us.

“When I was little, we’d play naughts and crosses all the time, just on a piece of paper,” he said quietly. “Then when I was about ten, Mum brought this home one day.”

“Noughts and crosses,” I repeated. “I like that name.”

“What do you call it?”

“Tic-tac-toe.”

Hamish smiled. “I like that name.” He collected the circles and handed them to me. “I’m the crosses. But I will let you go first.”

I chuckled and put a circle in the middle square.

“Ah, I see how you play,” he said, then slid an X into a corner square.

Liv came out of the kitchen. “What are you— Oh.” She gave Hamish a sad smile. “You packed that?”

He nodded. “Of course I did.”

She got a little teary, but she gave me a smile. “Is he the crosses? He always had to be the crosses.”

I held up one of the circles. “He sure is.” Then I thought better of it. “Did you want to play?”

“No, you two can play,” she replied, smiling. “Maybe later.”

I slid a wooden circle into a corner square opposite Hamish’s piece, and he placed an X to block my win.

I don’t know how many games we played. A lot, probably. We didn’t keep score, we just kept playing, game after game, laughing, and I’d pretend to get mad when he won. It might sound weird to anyone else, that two grown men would play tic-tac-toe on Christmas Eve while some Santa Claus movie played on the TV. But it was Hamish’s mom’s game that he used to play with her, and if playing it with him allowed him to remember her and to feel closer to her and to not miss her so much—on Christmas Eve of all days—then I’d sit with him and play it all day long.

And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t want fancy formal family dinner parties, all for show and fake charades. I wanted stupid games and non-stop laughs and a nervous brush of fingers, listening to Liv and Josh bicker over making eggnog while some B-grade Christmas movies played for background noise. That’s what I wanted.

This is exactly what I want.

“It’s