Chapter Thirteen

December 22

The morning went by in a whirlwind. Wade had needed to run back to his own place to change clothes—and pet Fiona, who was haughtily miffed about how his absence had robbed her of the chance to jump on his head at three in the morning—and so he was late to the Christmas Village staff meeting. Much, he was sure, to Marsh’s delight.

But since he had woken up with Mira, and they had gotten to eat breakfast in bed together—leftover cinnamon rolls from the bakery stall, made warm and gooey again by a short spin in the microwave—and he had gotten to kiss a dollop of sweet icing off the bow of her mouth before he’d left ... Wade couldn’t bring himself to care about what kind of hustle and bustle the day would bring. Mira wasn’t stuck leading nonstop carol-oke, and that was good enough for him. She was back on regular elf duties, mostly alternating between crowd control and gift-wrapping. It was easy for him to steal glances at her from Santa’s chair, and she always looked gorgeous.

She always looked happy, too. The daily grind of her job and worries was still there, but it didn’t seem to wearing her down anymore.

If Wade had given her a break from that pressure, he was unbelievably glad of it.

He knew for sure that she had lifted him up. If he had spent too long in a rut, feeling like his life was a block of wood with no secret shape worth hewing out of it, then Mira had changed that completely. He could see how the two of them fit together now, and he knew how he would carve their interlocking pieces.

When he wrapped up his last meet-and-greet—this one with a little girl who dutifully reported her older, non-Santa-believing sister’s requests as well as her own—Mira was there waiting for him with a paper cup of peppermint hot chocolate.

“You’re an angel,” Wade said.

“I’ve heard that a couple times today. It’s the dress.”

She did look a little like a treetop angel, and with a garland in her hair and silver or gold wings on her shoulders, she’d look like it even more. But that wasn’t what Wade had meant.

“Those people are just guessing,” Wade said. “I know.”

She smiled, her cheeks rounding and dimpling in a way that made his heart skip a beat.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you that I come bearing bad news, not just hot chocolate. Marsh offered everyone the chance to drop off tons of presents for overnight gift-wrapping, and we still have a couple dozen left. He wants me to stay late and finish.”

That did make the hot chocolate turn more bitter than sweet.

But only for a moment. Sure, he had wanted another real date with Mira, but any time with her was time well-spent.

“Need a hand?”

“You can’t possibly want to stay here for hours and wrap presents with me,” Mira said, biting her lip. “Marsh probably wouldn’t even pay you.”

Wade was sure he wouldn’t, but that was fine. He wasn’t doing it for Marsh, or even for the Christmas Village and its guests. He was doing it for Mira.

She was so reluctant to let him inconvenience himself that it took a little time to persuade her, but eventually—and with some obvious relief—she accepted his offer, and they took their hot chocolates over to the gift-wrapping stall.

This was the first time Wade had been in the Christmas Village after it had shut down and all the other employees had filtered out, and there was something magical about it in a low-key way. The Elf Mafia had turned off most of the lights on their way out, so only the gift-wrapping stand and the Christmas tree were still bright and shining in the early winter dark. It was cozy, and the twinkling tree looked especially breathtaking without any hubbub to distract from it. The air was scented with peppermint and Mira’s gingerbread hand lotion.

No matter how many presents they had to wrap, Wade was pretty sure his bone-deep contentment was here to stay.

“Any rules for this?”

“Not many,” Mira said. “Keep a family’s presents together in their labeled section on the shelves. We’ll lock the cabinet when we leave. Each set of gifts comes with an inventory sheet, and we put down what wrapping paper and bow combo we use on what, so they’ll know what to write on the tags. Look and see if they’ve checked off any of the extra boxes, like if they’d like Hannukah-themed paper or don’t want us to use any of the goofy, cartoony stuff, even on the kids’ presents. But it’s pretty simple. And again, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, or you don’t have to stay if you get bored.”

“As long as I’m with you, I’m not going to get bored.”

Was this when he should tell her about their mate bond?

He still wished he could have done it last night, before they’d made love for the first time, but he had the feeling that a human hearing about fated mates for the first time might have a couple of questions. Last night, Mira hadn’t been up for any more talking.

But her voice was back in fine form now. He would have to see if the moment felt right.

“You’re ridiculously good at this,” Mira said, watching Wade zip a pair of scissors through some red-and-green plaid wrapping paper. “I can never make the line that straight without a ruler.”

Wade grinned. “Practice. I do a lot with my hands, remember.”

Mira arched her eyebrows. “Oh, trust me, I remember.”

That hadn’t been what he’d meant, but he wasn’t going to pretend that her reaction didn’t delight him.

“So I was wondering,” Mira went on, so studiously casual all of a sudden that he knew this was a big deal, “if you wanted to have Christmas dinner with me and my parents. Well, December 23 dinner, actually—it’s a weird family tradition. My mom likes to have it early so the actual holidays are more for relaxing and leftovers. Anyway, I figured since Petey’s out of town and you said your parents are out of the country ....”

“I’d love to. It’d be great to still have a get-together to look forward to.”

Even more than that, it would be great to meet Mira’s family. She obviously adored her mom and stepdad, so Wade already liked them by proxy. And he wanted to get to know his mate’s family.

Mira beamed. “I was hoping you’d say yes. I want to show you off.”

Wade didn’t know how much there was to show off, technically. He was just an average guy. Well, an average guy who happened to also be a polar bear, but still.

“Don’t get their hopes up too high,” he said, stealing a brief kiss. “Make sure they expect a woodworker, not a movie star.”

He felt her laugh against his lips before he pulled away.

“What?” Wade said.

The laugh turned to genuine puzzlement.

“Wait,” Mira said. “Do you not know what a catch you are? Even the Elf Mafia agrees that you are, and I quote, ‘farmer’s market hot.’”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s my favorite kind of hot! Sure, technically I just learned about it when they called you that, but it’s become my favorite kind of hot. It like you’re both hot and ... comfortable. Touchable. It’s easy to imagine having a life with you.”

That was how he felt about her too. Of course, unsurprisingly, he’d been thinking about it as more “mate-bond hot,” to the extent that he could put it into words at all, but he guessed this worked.

Mira said, “The really worrying thing is that Becky thought it was an expression I’d know, which means she thought it was ancient slang for old people, and I still hadn’t heard of it. But it’s comforting that you hadn’t either. We can be old together.” Her cheeks pinked. “Not that I’m—I mean, I know this is all pretty new—”

He needed to find the right way to tell her that there was no way she could scare him away. There was no way anything between them could happen too fast or too soon, not as far as he was concerned.

But did he want to do that in a gift-wrapping booth, even an after-hours one? He wasn’t sure. Maybe it was wrong to hold out for the perfect moment, but then, this was the kind of conversation you could only ever have once.

“I think according to these kids, we already are old together,” he said softly. “I don’t mind it either.”

The self-assured sparkle came back into her eyes, and he thought the blush was now more pleasure than embarrassment.

“Well, good,” she said. “Anyway, all I was saying was that you’re ... incredible. I feel like you don’t know that.”

“I think I’m okay,” Wade protested. “Just not necessarily that interesting.”

Mira framed his face with her hands. “Listen to me. You’re unbelievably interesting.”

“You just mean because I’m the only—”

“I do not,” she said fiercely. “I don’t mean just because you’re the only ... person like you I’ve ever met.” She had already absorbed the importance of being cautious about talking openly about shifters. “I don’t mean that at all. I think that somewhere along the line, you convinced yourself that just because you’re ‘the responsible one,’ you’re less interesting than Petey, and that’s just not true. Yes, you’re responsible—and I like responsible.”

That was probably true. Mira’s steady, consistent podcast release schedule went back years at this point, and she couldn’t juggle all that work if she wasn’t on top of things herself.

“—but being responsible doesn’t mean you’re not fun. You can’t have fun without some kind of responsibility, not forever. You need a beat or a rhythm if you want to dance, right? You’re the beat.”

He was the beat. He liked that.

“And you’re the dance, too. Most importantly, you’re Wade, not just somebody’s older brother. You’re funny and sweet and artistic, and you dance with sugar-high little kids, troll Marsh, befriend cats, and blow my mind in bed. My family is going to love you. The last thing I would ever need to do is lower their expectations before they meet you. You’ll be lucky if they don’t try to adopt you on the spot. Okay?”

It would probably be best not to argue with our mate , his polar bear suggested. Especially not when she’s speaking in our favor.

You know what? Wade thought back. I agree. Besides, if Mira’s our mate, we can’t be all that boring. She’s right. Besides, she’s responsible too, and she’s the furthest thing from stodgy.

Maybe together, they had a rhythm they could dance to for the rest of their lives.

“Okay,” he said, feeling a slow smile spread across his face.

“Okay,” Mira repeated. She let go of him. “Sorry for all the intensity. I get kind of heated when I’m on a subject I really care about. I’ve gotten bad reviews for it before.”

“Not from me.”

His polar bear seconded that with a growl. We would never give our mate bad reviews! She is a five-star mate!

Wade was about to lean in for a kiss, and only his keen shifter senses stopped him. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard distant footsteps during their conversation, but before now, they had always been ambling past.

These steps were slower but far more purposeful, and they were getting closer by the second.

“Something’s up,” Wade murmured.

He breathed in through his nose and caught a whiff of something that didn’t seem to belong with all the fake snow, Christmas trees, peppermint, and gingerbread. It was ... animal. That wouldn’t have been all that weird at an outdoor mall like Honey Brook, where people often brought their dogs along on their shopping trips, but this didn’t smell like a dog. It was wilder than that. Besides, most of the stores had closed by now.

Mira was listening now too. Her brow furrowed. “What’s that noise?”

Footsteps , Wade started to say, but then his mouth snapped closed.

Because that wasn’t entirely accurate, was it? If he listened more closely, he could tell that the footsteps were accompanied by a much stranger noise, one that was as out-of-place here as that gamy wild animal smell.

Suddenly, he understood more than he’d like to.

“Hoofbeats,” he said.