Isabella did not, in fact, make buko pandan as good as her mother.
I’d never tasted the Valencia matriarch’s famed recipe, but one bite of the cold dessert told me all I needed to know.
“I don’t understand.” Isabella stared at the delicacy with dismay. “I could’ve sworn I got the ratio of ingredients right this time! How does my mom do it?”
She flopped onto the kitchen stool in a fluff of reindeer-print wool and despair. She looked so adorable I couldn’t repress a smile, despite the delicacy of the situation.
“I’m afraid there are certain superpowers only mothers have.” I added an extra heap of marshmallows to a steaming mug of hot chocolate and pushed it toward her. “Cooking traditional recipes being one of them.”
Isabella took a morose sip of the sugar-laden drink. “Is it that bad?”
Yes. I was fairly certain that the usually sweet dish wasn’t supposed to be so…salty. But while I operated on a general principle of honesty, wild horses couldn’t drag this particular truth out of me.
“It’s perfectly edible.” I stirred milk into my tea and prayed she didn’t ask me to elaborate or, God forbid, take another bite. “However, it’s Christmas. We should be enjoying the day instead of, ah, cooking. Why don’t I order food instead?”
She acquiesced with a sigh. “That’s probably a good idea.”
I hid my relief and placed the order on my phone.
We were supposed to tackle her mom’s Christmas recipes last night, but we got…distracted after she’d showed up at my front door wearing a red dress. Granted, the dress had been modest by Isabella’s standards, but it didn’t matter. She could wear a potato sack and the sight would still hit me in the gut.
It was quite concerning. I had half a mind to fund research on her baffling impact on me during my next round of scientific donations.
We migrated from the kitchen to the dining room, which my housekeeper had decorated with a massive flocked Christmas tree after Thanksgiving. White marble reindeer sculptures, sleek gold wreaths, and a row of snowy velvet stockings added to the festive atmosphere.
“This is so beautiful.” Isabella ran her hands over the stockings. “If I were you, I’d never take these down.”
Warmth sparked in my stomach.
I asked for the same decor every year. Changing it annually was a waste of time and efficiency, and I’d never thought much about it. But seeing them through her eyes made me appreciate the details just a little more.
“I could keep them up,” I said. “But then there’d be no fall decor, Halloween decor, Lunar New Year decor…”
“Good point.” She dropped her hand with another sigh. “I hate how you keep making those.”
Our food arrived with surprising speed, and after some debate over Netflix versus board games, we settled into increasingly competitive rounds of Scrabble over cinnamon roll pancakes, champagne donuts, eggs Benedict, and sweet potato hash.
“Vizcacha? Are you kidding?” Isabella slapped her palm against the board when I won the third round in a row. “How do you come up with these words?”
“You came up with quetzals in the last round,” I pointed out.
“One, I visited Guatemala in college, and two, I still lost.” She narrowed her eyes. “Are you cheating?”
“I don’t need to cheat,” I said, offended. “Cheating is for the intellectually lazy and dishonest.”
Isabella came close to beating me a few times, but we finished with a final score of five to zero. I almost let her win at the end, but she wouldn’t take kindly to a pity loss from me. Plus, the thought of willingly giving up a victory curdled like bile in my stomach.
Other than her vizcacha outburst, she took the outcome in stride.
“I have something for you,” she said after we finished our food and put away the Scrabble board. “I know we didn’t say anything about presents, but I saw this and couldn’t resist.”
She reached into her bag and handed me a brown paper-wrapped package. It read To Kai. Merry Christmas!! in her signature loopy cursive. Red hearts dotted the i’s and matched the red bow.
A pang pierced my gut at the sight of the hand-drawn hearts.
I unwrapped the present methodically, taking great care not to rip the paper or the bow. The wrapping fell away, revealing a book unlike any I’d encountered before.
I stared at the cover, too flummoxed to form a coherent response. “Is this…”
“A signed copy of A Raptor Ripped My Bodice, the latest dino erotica by Wilma Pebbles,” Isabella confirmed. “It’s a hot commodity since Wilma only sells a small number of autographed books every year. I literally had three screens up at the same time so I could snag one before they sold out. Congratulations.” Her dimples deepened. “Your literary collection is now complete. Also, you have something new to translate when the board pisses you off. I bet it’ll be more relaxing than translating Hemingway.”
If the hearts had cracked the outer wall of my defenses, the present—and her explanation—demolished it beyond repair.
I’d received countless gifts in my life. A customized Audi for my sixteenth birthday; a limited-edition Vacheron Constantin watch when I was accepted into Oxford; a penthouse atop the Peak in Hong Kong when I graduated from Cambridge with my master’s. None of them touched me as much as a flimsy paperback of velociraptor erotica.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to make sense of the odd tightness in my chest. I sincerely hoped I wasn’t in the early throes of a heart attack. That would ruin Christmas forevermore for all parties involved.
“Wait, that’s not all.” Isabella pulled a manila envelope from her bag.
“Does the raptor have a brother who also enjoys a good bodice rip?” I teased.
“Ha ha. As a matter of fact, he does, but you’re not ready for the kinks in that book. No. This is, um, my manuscript so far.” Isabella handed the envelope to me with a noticeably nervous expression. “I’m not sure whether it counts as a gift since I can’t guarantee it’s good, but you wanted to read it, so here it is. Just promise you won’t read it until after I’m gone.”
Forget what I said about the book. Isabella trusting me with her work in progress was…
Fuck. I swallowed past the creeping pressure in my throat.
“I promise.” I tucked the envelope beneath Wilma Pebbles and retrieved a box from beneath the tree. Most of the gifts were for show; only two were exceptions. “On that note, I also have a surprise for you. It seems we were on the same page about presents.”
Isabella’s face lit up. “I love surprises.” She took the box and shook it gently. A rattling sound ensued. “What is it? Makeup? Shoes? A new laptop?”
I laughed. “Open it and find out.”
Isabella didn’t have my hang-up about preserving the wrapping paper. She tore through the metallic foil without hesitation, revealing a simple black box.
An unfamiliar rush of anxiety shot through me when she removed the lid and went utterly still.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Kai…”
Sitting in the box, nestled in a bed of tissue paper, was a vintage 1960s typewriter. The manufacturer went out of business decades ago, and there were less than a dozen of its products still circulating in auction rooms and antique shops. I’d paid a king’s ransom to refurbish and restore it to functionality before Christmas, but it was worth it.
“You said you keep deleting what you write, so I thought this would help.” I tapped the side of the box. “No delete option on a typewriter.”
“It’s gorgeous.” Isabella ran her fingers over the keys, her eyes suspiciously bright. “But I can’t accept it. It’s too much. I bought you dinosaur erotica, for God’s sake. This is in no way an equal trade.”
“It’s not a trade. It’s a gift.”
“But…”
“It’s rude to decline a host’s gift in his own house,” I said. “I can show you the exact reference page in my etiquette manual if you don’t believe me.”
“Do you really have…you know what? I don’t want to know.” She shook her head. “I believe you.” She leaned over and kissed me, her face soft with emotion. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I cupped her face with one hand and deepened the kiss, trying to ignore the inappropriate thoughts creeping through my brain. Like how natural waking up next to her was or how this was the most at peace I’d felt in months. Or like how I could spend every Christmas with her, just the two of us, and be happy.
They were thoughts I had no business entertaining. Not when I couldn’t promise anything more than what we had in the moment.
My stomach twisted. I pushed aside the bubble of unease and leaned back. “Before I forget, there’s something else.” I nodded at the box. “Check the sides.”
After some rustling, Isabella retrieved a smaller, slimmer box. It was roughly the size of a Kindle but twice as thick due to the attached keyboard.
“It’s a digital typewriter,” I explained. “Much easier to travel with.”
“Why am I not surprised you thought of everything?” she teased. She squeezed my hand, her face softening. “Thank you again. These are the best gifts I’ve ever received, except for maybe the Monty painting.”
“Understandable. It’s hard to beat an oil portrait of a nineteenth-century serpentine aristocrat.”
“Exactly.”
Our gazes caught and lingered. A thousand unspoken words crammed into the small space between us before we looked away at the same time.
We’d had sex multiple times over the past twenty-four hours, yet it was the small moments that felt the most achingly intimate.
A hand-drawn heart.
A simple thank you.
An intangible, pervasive sense that this was where we were meant to be.
“Let’s watch a movie,” Isabella said, breaking the tension. “It’s not really Christmas without a holiday movie marathon.”
“You choose.” I dropped a soft kiss on her forehead and stood, trying to ease the returning pressure in my lungs. “I’ll make popcorn. But no movies with royalty.” After the relentless news coverage of Queen Bridget and Prince Rhys of Eldorra’s fairytale love story the past few years, I was all royaled out.
“But that’s almost all of them!” Isabella protested. “Don’t give me that look…ugh, fine. I hope you don’t have anything against bakers, or we’re really out of luck.”
A smile tugged on my lips as I entered the kitchen and started the popcorn maker. It was easier to breathe when I wasn’t around her. It should’ve been a relief, but the rush of oxygen was almost disconcerting.
I’d just poured the popcorn into a bowl when my phone rang.
Unknown number.
I would’ve brushed it off as a telemarketer, but I’d paid an exorbitant sum to effectively block cold calls, and no one had my personal cell number except for a select few friends, family, and business associates.
“Hello?”
“Merry Christmas, Young.”
My spine stiffened with surprise at Christian Harper’s smooth, distinctive drawl. I didn’t bother asking how he got ahold of my number. He had a knack for ferreting out private information, which was why Dante used his services so much.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, coolly polite. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Just wanted to see if you had a chance to open my gift yet. I believe a messenger hand delivered it yesterday.”
My mind flashed to the skinny, dark-haired messenger and the small box he’d handed me. I meant to open it yesterday, but Isabella had arrived right after.
I hadn’t thought much about it since similar gifts poured in every year, but now, a trickle of unease slithered down my spine.
“What is it?”
“Open it and find out,” he said in an eerie mirror of what I’d told Isabella earlier.
I remained silent. The day I opened an unsolicited package from Christian Harper was the day I walked through Times Square naked of my own free will.
Christian sighed, managing to infuse the sound with equal parts boredom and amusement. “It’s a present from a mutual friend. A little chip with everything you need to secure your position as one of the youngest CEOs in the Fortune 500 come late January. You’re welcome.”
The implication hit like a crate of bricks.
“Blackmail,” I said flatly.
I was going to murder Dante. He was the only mutual friend who would do something like this. He had good intentions, but his methods were questionable at best.
“Insurance,” Christian corrected. “Dante said you would be too morally pure to use it, but it never hurts to have leverage in your back pocket. I don’t care either way, but don’t say I never gave you anything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my girlfriend. Enjoy the holidays.”
He hung up before I could answer.
“Everything okay?” Isabella asked when I returned to the living room with our snacks. “That took a long time.”
“Yes.” I settled next to her and banished Christian’s call to the back of my mind. It didn’t matter that he’d sent the equivalent of an information nuclear bomb; I was never going to use it. “Everything’s fine.”
