Christmas Ever After (Puffin Island 3)

“Liv!”

“I’m sorry, but

it’s true. She hurt him,” Liv said flatly. “It’s fine for me to hurt him, that’s my role as sister, but no one outside the family can.”

“You can’t meddle in someone’s marriage. Add some fresh orange juice to those cranberries. And then have a look outside. I heard a car. Your sister and the twins must be here. For goodness sake put those knives out of reach.”

“I’m allowed to meddle when she screws my brother up.” Liv reached across and grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl in the center of the table. “And she tried to kill Nelson by feeding him a chicken bone.”

“I’m sure that was an accident. She didn’t understand dogs.”

“Didn’t understand Alec, either.” Liv shot to the door to greet her sister and Suzanne sighed.

“I’d have to agree with that.”

Sky made the finishing touches to her table decoration, her fingers not quite steady.

She’d often wondered what she’d done to make Alec behave with such hostility toward her.

And now she knew.

She’d done nothing except bear a striking resemblance to his ex-wife.

THE KISS HAD meant nothing, so why the hell hadn’t he been able to stop thinking about it all day?

He felt as if he’d been wired to a generator, with power pumping through him.

“I had so much fun today.” Sky strolled into the bedroom ahead of him. “Tom is going to be a real heartbreaker. Only four years old, but those eyelashes—” She stopped as she noticed Alec standing just inside the door. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong.” Nothing except that he didn’t trust himself to be in a room alone with her.

“Alec, you’re so tense I could snap you in two.”

And she was the reason for that. “Family gatherings are stressful.”

“Some family gatherings.” She gave him a long look. “Not yours. Yours are fun, warm, supportive, occasionally a little intrusive but overall friendly and loving. No stress. If anyone is stressed it’s them, by tiptoeing round you and trying not to mention she-who-must-not-be-named.”

He inhaled sharply. “Enough.” But the tone he adopted that worked like a stop sign with everyone else didn’t work with her.

“Yeah, you know what? It is enough. You’re divorced. It happened and it’s done. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but you do have to live your life. Are you really going to do that looking backward?”

He wondered what she’d say if he confessed that right now he wasn’t thinking about his divorce. “How I live my life is no business of yours.”

“I’m making it my business. I’m doing you a favor, Alec. You helped me, so now I’m helping you.”

She was the sort of woman who would double any trouble a man was already in.

“I don’t want your help. What I want,” he said slowly, “is for you to leave this alone.”

“Are you sure?” She strolled over to him, thumbs tucked into the pockets of her jeans, eyes sparkling. “Because I was thinking of taking a different approach. More ‘hands-on.’” The thought of how it would feel to have her hands on him sent a hot, torturous ache through his body.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Then maybe you need to change your thinking. Take a little help from a friend.”

He noticed that her eyes were a deeper blue in firelight than sunlight and that her hair kinked slightly when she came in from outdoors.

“You’re offering me friendship?”