Damsel Under Stress (Enchanted, Inc. 3)

“You’re going to be stuck by yourself for Christmas?”

“Yeah, but it won’t be so bad. It’ll be nice to have some peaceful alone time.”

“You could come with me.” He said it casually as he uncapped his marker and moved toward the board to write something on it.

“With you? You and your foster parents are just starting to work things out. You don’t need an outsider there.”

“I’d love an outsider there,” he said, still facing the board, his back to me. “Think of it as a buffer zone.”

“But would they want me there?”

“You’ve already been invited.”

“What?” This was awfully fast to be meeting the folks. We’d only just kissed for the first time when magic wasn’t involved a few days ago. Now I was already invited home for the holidays?

“Not like that,” he said, finally turning around to face me. His cheeks had turned the shade of pink that meant he was very uncomfortable. He didn’t quite look me in the eye as he spoke. “I’d already told them about you—not as someone I’m dating but as a friend from work who’s relatively new to the city. When they invited me to come for Christmas, they suggested that I could invite you if you didn’t have other plans. Until now, I suspected you had other plans. But if you don’t, you’re welcome to come.”

For Owen, that was a long, heartfelt speech. It also demonstrated that although he was a genius when it came to stuff like magic, research, and translation, he could be a little clueless when it came to women. If he’d talked enough about me for his foster mother to notice and feel as though she should invite me, then she was dying of curiosity about me and wanted to make sure I was worthy of him. And that made this a potentially tricky situation.

“You’re sure it won’t be really awkward?” I asked.

“Oh, it’ll be awkward. But it will be whether or not you’re there. It may be less awkward for me with you there.”

“But what about me? I have a feeling it’ll be more awkward for me there than it would be if I stayed here.”

He took a step closer to me and gave me the shy smile that had totally floored me when I first met him. “I’d really appreciate it if you came along with me.”

He was impossible to resist when he was like that. I also couldn’t deny that I was curious about his foster parents, and I didn’t particularly want to spend Christmas alone in this city. “Okay, I’ll go,” I said. “What’s the itinerary, and what should I bring?”

He grinned, and for a second I thought he’d kiss me or at least hug me, but we were at work, and Owen was nothing if not proper. “I was planning to take the train up the morning of Christmas Eve and come back the morning after Christmas. It’s about an hour-long trip. Does that work for you?”

“Owen, we work at the same place, so we’re on the same schedule,” I reminded him.

He flushed slightly, “I didn’t know if you might have any other plans. As for what you need to bring, well, they tend to be rather formal, so you can expect to dress for dinner, and a church service Christmas Eve night is mandatory. You won’t need to bring anything for the dinner. That will have been planned in detail well in advance.”

“I should probably bring gifts. Any suggestions?”

“You were the one who helped me buy my gifts for them,” he reminded me. I refrained from telling him that his gifts had been far, far out of my price range. Great, now I not only had to find an appropriate gift for him, but it had to be appropriate enough to give him in front of the closest thing he had to a family. And, I had to find something for them that wouldn’t make them hate me on sight. The way he described them, I pictured his foster parents as being very stern and forbidding. Still, they couldn’t be all bad for him to have turned out so nice. It wasn’t like there was a niceness gene. That usually had something to do with one’s upbringing.

“Then we’re set,” he said, smiling so brightly that I was glad I’d agreed to go. If it made him that happy, I was certainly game. “I’ll check the train schedule and let you know what time we’ll need to leave from Grand Central. In the meantime, what do you say to spending the day before that together?”

I blinked, trying to catch up. “Huh?” I said, showing how smooth I was at this male-female communication process. He wasn’t the only one who had a thing or two to learn.

“Well, we have noticed that the one thing that seems to bring Ari out of the woodwork is us together. What could be more tempting than the two of us, spending the day enjoying all the romance of Christmas in New York City?”

“So you mean we’d be doing this as work?”

He gave me that shy smile again. “We could have fun, too. That’s certainly allowed. In fact, it would work even better if we were having fun.”

“I guess if we have to do it to get our jobs done, then I’m willing,” I said with a wink. “I should warn you, though, I think I’ve seen every movie that involves any kind of Christmas scene in New York, so my expectations are pretty high.”

“I can’t guarantee a pretty snowfall—well, I probably could, but altering weather patterns is usually frowned upon—but I’ll see what else I can come up with.”

I didn’t think he was likely to kiss me at work, but he was awfully close to me. Our heads were practically touching, and neither of us would have had to move much if we wanted to kiss. Then the sound of a throat clearing made us jump apart. Of course, that made us look guilty, like there had been something going on. I turned to see Owen’s assistant, Jake, who seemed to be trying to look anywhere but at us. “Uh, boss, just bringing your mail,” he said. From the way he acted, you’d think he’d caught us undressed and rolling around on the lab floor.

Owen didn’t help matters when he turned several different shades of red and took the long way around the lab table to take the mail from Jake instead of walking past me. Looking guilty was a sure way of giving the impression that something was going on. “Thank you, Jake,” Owen said firmly, the implied dismissal clear in his tone.

Jake didn’t move. “What’s this I hear about Ari getting away?” he asked.