Revealing Kia (10 page)

“I think I broke my leg,” I whined
and watched with suppressed amusement as her eyes went round in horror. Her hands flew to my left knee.

“This one? Can you move it?” She began to rub it, prodding it with her fingertips.

“Higher,” I moaned and had to bite the inside of my cheek when she slid her hand higher up my leg.

“Nothing feels broken!”
she cried.

“Just keep going higher,” I instructed.

Her brows furrowed. “Why would…” The grin on my face must have alerted her to my teasing because her jaw slackened in horror. Then she was smacking my chest. “You jerk!”

Like a lunatic on crack, I howled
, doubling over in self-defense as she rained her wrath down on me with slaps to my shoulders and chest. My sides ached and tears streaked down my face as I laughed.

“That wasn’t funny!” she protested, but her lip twitched and I caught it before she was on her feet and storming away.

Breathing hard, I wiped my eyes with my hand and shoved up to my feet. I ran after her.

“Come on, Kia. It was a joke!” I said, taking her elbow and pulling her to a stop next to a lamp.

She shook her head. “I thought you were hurt.”

“I was!” I argued. “I had every intention of letting you nurse me back to health.”

She rolled her eyes, the corner of her mouth lifted in a grin. It was how I knew she wasn’t really angry.

“Okay, let me make it up to you. Let me buy you supper,” I said when she
folded her arms and waited.

“And you think buying me food will make up for
freaking me out?” she countered with a challenging quirk of her eyebrow I was beginning to find embarrassingly sexy.

“I can pretend my leg is really broken
if you—”

She smacked my chest. “No more talk of breaking your leg. I don’t like the idea of you getting hurt.”

Something in my chest wrenched at her heartfelt confession. I reached for her, curling my fingers into the sleeves of her jacket. I drew her to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I won’t do it again.”

She shook her head, her lips bowed into a broad smile. “What am I going to do with you?”

I grinned. “I can think of a few things, most of them involve you wearing a nurse’s uniform and holding a sponge.”

“That’s
pretty complex.”

I shrugged. “Like I said, I have a very vivid imagination.” I lowered my head and dropped my voice. “
You wouldn’t believe the one I have of you in nothing but my tie.”

I hadn’t meant to reveal that, as true as it may have been. That
had been my secret fantasy since the masquerade party. I had no idea why I was telling her, and fully expected her to smack me or call me a pervert. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting her to bite her lip and blush. That threw me for a whole new set of loops. My sick, twisted mind began wondering if she was considering it, or if she’d thought about it, too, or…

“You’ll have to tell me
more about that later,” she murmured so quietly I almost didn’t hear her over the sound of my mind blowing up. For a moment I nearly convinced myself I’d fantasized her speaking, that it had been in my head because my sweet, shy Kia would never … then she was doing the lip thing again and peering at me through her lashes like she wanted me to…

Shit
I needed a cold shower.

“I’m hungry,” she whispered.

“God me too.”

B
y some Christmas miracle, I managed to make it through the rest of our shopping adventure without a) embarrassing myself, and b) pulling her into a dark corner and tearing off her clothes. My restraint on the latter deserved a medal. Even a eunuch saint couldn’t have done a better job. Unfortunately, the side effects left me feeling a little less than sociable by the time we met up with the others and drove back to the cabin.

But despite the beautiful night I’d had with Kia, the car ride back was thick with tension.
Van was in a miserable mood. She hadn’t said one word to Kia since we left the Village. She sat stiff in her seat, staring stubbornly out the window while blatantly ignoring Kia’s concern. I met Kia’s sad, brown eyes as we exited the SUV. I lightly touched her hand as we passed each other walking up to the door.

It was clear even without a rocket science degree that something was bothering Van. It was made even clearer when she kicked off her boots and stomped upstairs without asking a single person what they’d gotten her for Christmas. For someone who had grown up with that question and expected it, I was thrown for a loop as I watched my sister’s retreating back.

Dad sighed beside me as he bent down and righted her boots. He set them on the rack before straightening and reaching for his scarf. “That girl will never learn.”

“Did something happen?” I asked.

Dad looked at me. “You mean aside from that lovely display at the beginning of the evening?” He shook his head, unwinding the scarf from his neck. “I don’t know what to do with her.”

Mom touched his arm lightly, cutting him off. “It’s Christmas. Let’s just get through it and we’ll deal with it when we get home, okay?”

“Hey, if it makes you feel any better, my parents do nothing but pray all Christmas like the Baby Jesus will magically come down and talk to them if they do it enough times,” Kenny said. “I think this is better. Is there anything to eat?”

We stared at him, which he didn’t seem to notice as he padded into the kitchen.

“I should go talk to her,” Kia murmured, already halfway to the stairs.

“No.” Mom stopped her. “Just let her sort out whatever issue she has alone. She needs to learn that people won’t always come running when she’s having a tantrum.
She’ll be fine.”

“
There are more lights over here.” Mom nudged the box with the toe of her sock clad feet.

Sitting in the middle of the living room, surrounded by a small tower of boxes marked with words like lights, streamers, ornaments, I felt a bit
agitated by the task assigned to me.

While the others stood around the tree,
organizing tinsel and bulbs, I’d been shunned to the opposite side of the room and forced to detangle all the crap collecting dust in storage since the previous year. I honestly had no idea why we had thirteen strings of lights. It wasn’t as though we were decorating the tree at
Rockefeller Center
. And how did so many strings of lights get so tangled when I knew for a fact I’d wound them up neatly the year before? It really shouldn’t have surprised me since I was the one who was elected every year to do the worst job, and yet, every year I was surprised.

With a frustrated growl, I shook the coils of wires and bulbs, listening with some sick pleasure as they clinked together.

“Find the ends.”

Surprised by the unexpected intrusion into my own personal hell, I glanced up into Kia’s grinning face. She said nothing as she slipped onto the sofa next to me and curled her legs under her. She took the bundle from me and placed it
in her lap.

“I always get stuck doing this, too,” she said, head bent over the task. “I learned long ago that if you find the ends, you can weave your way back.”

I watched as she slipped and prodded the plug end in and around the knots. My hand moved without any knowledge from me and creeped up the side of her bent knee to rest along the side of her thigh. It was risky and stupid, but my hand was out of sight, tucked between her and the sofa. No one could see unless they were right beside us.

Kia raised her head. Our eyes met. I expected her to pull away or tell me to stop.
But she turned her attention back to the lights, her motions not as careful as they had been moments ago.

She’d been doing that a lot since
our shopping trip through Whistler Village the night before. She didn’t look away when she caught me watching her. She didn’t move away when we touched. It was both exciting and frustrating. On one hand, it was a sign she trusted me to do the right thing and talk to Nessie, but on the other, she was making it impossible to remember I shouldn’t touch, not until I’d done so. And every time her fingers touched mine, it made me all the more anxious to leap up, drag Nessie aside and beg, bribe and threaten her into sharing Kia. I couldn’t stand being so unbearably close, yet forced to restrain myself when I was slowly dying inside from the ache.

“Meet me tonight,” I murmured.
“I want to give you your present.”

She raised those warm, golden eyes of hers and peered at me. “Christmas is tomorrow. Don’t you want to wait?”

I shook my head. “Not for this one.”

Her lips parted. She exhaled slowly
and then nodded. “Okay.”

“Who wants chocolate?”

Abandoning her rummaging, Mom leapt over the scattered remains of crumpled newspapers and skipped into the kitchen. I removed my hand in case she could see at that angle, but my gaze remained locked with Kia’s.

“
Yo, bro!” Kenny pitched a green, plastic bulb at me. It struck my chest and landed in my lap. “We need the lights.”

“
Kenny, don’t throw the ornaments,” Mom scolded, stirring packets of chocolate into hot water. “Some of those are antiques.”

“Sorry, Mrs. C.
” He picked up a magazine off the coffee table and pitched it at me instead. It hit Kia instead.

“Hey!” she shouted, laughing. “We’re working on it!” She hurled the thing back at him.
It missed him completely and hit Van in the back of the head.

“What the hell!” She twisted around and snatched the magazine up. “I haven’t read this yet. Keep your hands off my stuff!” She slapped the magazine down on the coffee table.

“Sorry,” Kia murmured.

Van turned back to the box of ornaments in her lap without a word.

Beside me, Kia sighed.

I glanced at her.
“What’s wrong?”

She just shook her head, eyes focused on the lights.
But there was a shadow drawing her face and her shoulders were drooped. I wanted to touch her, coax her to tell me, but I held off, making a mental note to get answers later.

Kia was already there, standing beneath the lit tree when I made my way downstairs later that night. Her head was tipped back as she stared at the prehistoric angel
perched at the top. Light glinted through the soft strands of hair slipping free from the tiny ponytail at the back of her head and shone in the dozen or so pins she’d used to keep the stray locks contained, but they’d managed to slip free, falling around her face and the back of her neck. She wore a long t-shirt with yoga pants and her glasses, and I was a little glad about the latter.