Abby's Christmas Spirit Read Free Page B

clearly in the dark, but he seemed to have been stunned speechless. Good. She understood the feeling, given her reaction to hearing his name twenty minutes earlier.
    “That does put a wrinkle in my plan to have you here, not to mention it cramps my privacy, but I’ll manage.” She’d had to severely rearrange her expectations for this evening but maybe this would actually work to her advantage.
    “I didn’t force your sister to sell this house,” he said, a beat behind the current conversation. “I gave her a more than fair price. Way more than she ever could have gotten selling it on her own.”
    “She didn’t want to sell it at all. But when you unearthed that tax bill, she had no choice. If it wasn’t for you, she would be living here raising her family right now. Instead it’s been sitting empty collecting dust and losing shingles. I want to know why.” It had never stopped pissing her off and now that she had the man responsible in front of her, Abby heard her voice getting higher and more agitated. She tried to rein it in. She was still floored that this was Darius. She had been planning to have sex with this man. He was supposed to be her future husband. Now all she wanted to do was shake him really hard.
    Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. She was still more than physically attracted to him, which furthered her irritation.
    He didn’t sound too pleased either. “It’s none of your business. I think you need to leave.”
    “Sell me the house.” Might as well lay it on the table for him. “I’ll give you one-fifty.”
    “What? Are you crazy? That’s half what I paid.”
    “You said you overpaid and you were right. Why should I do the same? You clearly don’t want the house. I’ll take it off your hands.”
    “No. I could get more on the open market.”
    It’s what she expected him to say. Hell, it’s what she would say under similar circumstances. So she would have to get bold. “Then I’m not leaving.”
    “ What ? You can’t just decide to stay here.”
    “I just did.” Abby felt a little gleeful at how flummoxed he’d sounded. It was clear he wasn’t used to people arguing with him. She adjusted her backpack on her shoulders and tried not to grin.
    “I’ll call the police.”
    “Go for it. My brother-in-law is the police chief.” Not that Charlotte’s husband Will would bend the law for her, but Darius didn’t know that.
    He made a sound of frustration. “My attorney lives here. I’ll call him.”
    “I’m very aware of that. He’s my other brother-in-law.”
    Darius cursed. “I forgot about that.”
    “Did you know they just had a baby? His name is Alistair and he’s super cute. He looks like Winston Churchill.” Abby thought Bree and Ian’s son was the epitome of butterball baby. She couldn’t wait to see him and tickle his belly.
    “No, I didn’t know that.”
    “Why does that not surprise me?” she asked wryly.
    He moved closer to her, so rapidly that it set Abby’s heart to racing and she stood straight up in alarm. She wasn’t expecting him to close in on her like that. That was all. Her reaction had nothing to do with sexual attraction.
    “Don’t act like you know me,” he said. “You don’t. We’ve only met once and that was a decade ago.”
    That knocked her completely off kilter. “What? What are you talking about? We’ve never met.” Just in her dreams. And in his dreams.
    “Yes, we did. I came here on a ghost tour thirteen years ago to this very house. You were here with your sisters. You told me I couldn’t buy this house, even though I didn’t say anything to you except for hello.”
    Abby frowned. She didn’t remember doing any such thing. “I was eleven years old. Why would I say something like that?”
    “You tell me.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember that.” She didn’t remember him at all. She tried to picture what he would have looked like at twenty, standing in her grandmother’s parlor,