My Merry Mistake

Sometimes the perfect gift is standing right in front of you. . . You're just too stubborn to see it.

I don't like to make mistakes. Ever.

Especially when those mistakes are witnessed by the same person-flirty Finn Holbrook-who can't seem to leave me alone. Can I really trust him not to tell anyone that the night we met, I tried to kiss him? Or that I fell apart after I got fired from a job I loved? Or that I'm not as strong as I want everyone to think I am?

The simple fact that he's boomeranged back into my orbit after all these years feels like a great, big cosmic joke.

Only now he's a professional hockey player, and while he doesn't look like the goofy college bartender I met all those years ago, he still acts like one-immature, flirty, and unable to take anything seriously.

Which is why I never, ever fall for his game.

I know better than to get swept up in romance. I don't have time. I'm busy making myself irreplaceable in my new job with the Chicago Comets. Work isn't just something I do, it's who I am.

And while my sisters are constantly on me to slow down and take breaks, those things aren't on my schedule, so . . . I push on. Do more. Load up my schedule. Overcommit. Until eventually, my stress lands me in the emergency room.

The prescription? A month off. No emails. No work. No distractions.

Unless you count Finn Holbrook, who keeps showing up at my door, determined to leverage his positive, golden retriever energy to show me there's a great, big world outside that I haven't bothered to explore, most of it covered with white twinkle lights and Christmas decorations.

I begrudgingly go along with his grand plans, and little by little, I start to see there really is more to life than work-and more to Finn than flirting.

Which makes me wonder . . . how can someone so obviously wrong for me start to feel completely right? And more importantly . . . how do I make those feelings go away?