I checked the time. 7:30 am. Technically, I went to bed at 10 pm, but in girl-with-a-Kindle time, it was actually closer to 2 am, which made this wake-up call much worse than he probably imagined. The previous night of a frozen pond and accidentally laughing and telling Miles too many things had left me exhausted. I flung the covers off my body, immediately regretting it as the damp chill of the winter morning touched my skin. I had left the fire on in the main room the night before, but it had since died out. I dressed quickly to the sounds of Miles singing his own special version of “Jingle Bells” outside my window. When I finally opened the door, I was wearing long, thermal underwear underneath jeans and a thick, cream-colored sweater. All that was accompanied by major bedhead and probably streaked mascara underneath my eyes because I had been too tired to wash my face the night before.
“7:30 on a Sunday, really?”
Miles gave me a quick appraisal with a lift of his eyebrows. He looked like he was about to say something when his brow quickly furrowed.
“I can see your breath,” he said with some alarm.
He stepped past me, entering the cabin. “Why is it so cold?”
I closed the door and shrugged. “The fire went out sometime in the night.”
He muttered under his breath and strode to the fireplace, stoking the white embers before opening a box full of chopped wood next to the fireplace. Wood that hadn’t been there yesterday, to my knowledge.
“Did you chop that?”
He didn’t answer and, instead, set about making me a fire. Within moments, a warm orange glow began heating up the cabin.
I dropped onto my knees in front of the fire and let the cozy warmth soak into my skin.
“Thanks,” I said.
Miles sat on the couch somewhere behind me. “Alright. I was looking at the bingo card, and if we’re going to hit all the squares for a blackout, we need to be prepared, so I made us a schedule.”
I leaned back and took the papers he offered me, the top full of lines and times and dates, and my heart couldn’t help but give a little sigh of happiness. “A schedule? Maybe I underestimated you.”
“I feel like you’re the type of person who gets motivated best with a list.”
I looked at the paper, flipping to the next page, which held the actual bingo card.
“Since it’s Sunday, the lodge will be doing some of the simpler, low-key activities. Cheese making. Roasting a chestnut. Cookie decorating. Crap like that. If we can survive the boredom, we’ll be able to cross a bunch of stuff off the list.”
As I perused the paper, it became very clear to me that the “crap like that” bingo squares were the activities I was actually looking forward to doing. They were all the things that could be accomplished in the warm lodge without exposing myself to any elements of the outside world.
“I thought I was supposed to be the Scrooge in this relationship. These all look like a blast.”
“A blast, huh?” He smiled. “That definitely tracks.”
My body had sufficiently thawed from the fire, so I made my way over to the couch, sitting on the other side of him. “Just because you’re not risking death or frostbite doesn’t mean these activities are crap.”
He plucked the papers from my hand. “Roasting a chestnut? Making cheese? You categorize these under theblastcategory?”
Okay,blastwas probably pushing it, but I was in this now, and I was going to prove my point.
“You probably grew up doing all this stuff. I have no clue how cheese is made, so it sounds fascinating. I’ve also never roasted a chestnut. And decorating Christmas cookies is always fun. Anyone who feels otherwise has no business being my fake boyfriend.”
“Alright,” he said. “You’ll have to convince me.”
I didn’t appreciate the look in his eyes when he said that, so I looked at the paper again. “And Monday, we’ll do the gingerbread competition.”
He groaned like a man being tortured.
I swatted him on the shoulder with the paper. “This was all your idea. I’d be very happy to forego the entire blackout thing.”
“Eh, once we get to tomorrow night, I’ll be fine.”
“What’s tomorrow night?”
“The barn dance and mistletoe kiss. We can knock out both at the same time.”