Every single person pointed to Mateo.
She swiveled her head and looked at him.
He grimaced. “Look, you were tiptoeing in the back way. I thought you were my cousin Rafe. He sneaked in last time and took me down.”
She arched a brow. Or at least she thought she arched a brow, but since they were frozen, she couldn’t be sure.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly, stepping closer, cupping her face to tilt it up to his. “Did I hurt you?”
“Hmm,” she said noncommittally and bent under the guise of rubbing her ankle. “I think I sprained something. Do you have a first aid kit?”
“Of course.” He turned toward the house.
“Mateo?”
He turned back just as she rose upright again, patting the snow she’d just scooped up into a snowball as she did. Which she threw at him.
And nailed him.
Also in the face.
His family erupted in wild cheers.
She grinned and took a bow.
This got her an ovation.
Mateo, who hadn’t fallen to his ass, straightened—snow in his hair, dripping off his nose and sticking to the stubble on his jaw—and just looked at her.
“Mateo, can we keep her for our team?” someone called out.
“No fair,” someone else yelled. “She’s got a wicked right arm. We need her on our side!”
“Charlotte,” Mateo said and swept an arm across his yard, “meet my wild and crazy cousins. Primos, meet Dr. Charlotte Dixon. And she’s far too civilized to play with this lot.”
“I’m not that civilized,” Charlotte said. “And I want to play against you.”
Cheers broke out on one side of the yard, groans on the other side.
Mateo met her gaze, his own lit with humor but also challenge. “You sure?”
“Oh yeah.” She shrugged off her purse and computer bag. Mateo put them on his patio table and turned back to her. “You should know, there’s no rules. First one to call ‘tío’ gets a cease-fire and a loss.”
He looked a little worried for her. Cute. She turned to her team. “Let’s do this.”
It was mayhem. It was chaos. It was rough-and-tumble. Snowballs flew so hard and fast that it was a constant, unrelenting battle, and Charlotte loved every second of it.
A snowball took her beanie right off her head. When she looked up, Mateo stood there with a wicked mischievous unrepentant grin.
She mirrored his expression and quickly formed a snowball. Ducking his next hit, she came up and threw, and nailed him right between the eyes.
He wavered, but didn’t go down, so she launched herself at him, and then they were in free fall. Mateo landed flat on his back, cushioning her as she followed him down.
“Say it,” she said, laughingly holding him down, knowing that if he wanted to, he could easily have flung her off him. “Say it,” she said again, their noses nearly touching.
His hands went to her hips, his mouth curved, but definitely not saying a word.
“Say it, say it, say it,” her team of Morenos began to chant.
Charlotte wiggled a bit, realizing she was getting cold as the snow had slowly seeped into her clothing. Mateo’s hands tightened on her hips to hold her still, and suddenly his eyes had gone from amused to hot.
She stared down at him, time suddenly stopping as she gulped.
“Tío,” he said huskily.
She cocked a hand around her ear, smiling as she said, “Excuse me? I didn’t catch that.”
His eyes narrowed playfully. “Why, Dr. Dixon, I forgot how viciously competitive you were.”
“Never have tried to hide it.” She smiled and hoisted another handful of snow threateningly. “Say it, Moreno.” Amongst the cheers, he rolled her to her back, came over on top of her, and dropped a kiss to the tip of her icy nose. “Our next round is a one-on-one,” he said for her ears only, and then rose, hauling her to her feet as well.
After that comment, she felt her knees wobbling, so he held on to her for an extra second. “Yeah?” he asked.
She drew a deep breath. “Yeah.”
LEVI WAS AT his dad’s desk, ostensibly working while also playing that kiss with Jane on repeat. Good thing he could multitask. He was putting together a PowerPoint presentation to explain all the shocking accounting discrepancies to his family in an orderly fashion. And to hopefully mitigate their panic while he was at it. He’d also come up with a few possible solutions for the now-struggling store, not to mention a list of the evidence needed to put Cal away. The thought gave him a pang for Peyton, who deserved better from her dad, but they’d deal with how to tell her when the time came.
The problem was the mitigation of panic. Cal had managed to get his hands on a lot of the Cutler money, enough to put them under if the store didn’t bring in a lot of money quickly.
And the high revenue season—the holidays—was behind them. Knowing that, Levi planned to present the info in a way that they could stomach.
Or so he hoped.
Making it worse, Cal had gone off the grid. With some time and the right resources, Levi felt confident they’d be able to find him and haul his ass back to Tahoe to face his crimes. But one thing at a time.
Jasper padded into the room and gave a soft woo woo. Translation: he was hungry.
“You’re always hungry,” Levi said.
Jasper nudged his arm.
“You had dinner. In fact you had your dinner and half of mine, because when I got up to get a drink, you got up on your hind legs like Scooby-Doo and helped yourself to my plate.”
Jasper lay his head on Levi’s thigh and gave him the “I’m starving to death as you speak” eyes.
“You know the vet told Mom you’ve got to lose some weight.”
At this, the dog huffed out a huge sigh and plopped to the floor, propping his face on Levi’s shoe so he would know if Levi moved so much as a single inch.
Tess appeared in the doorway wearing oversize plaid pj’s and crazy hair. She helped herself to Levi’s bed—aka the couch—and sighed more dramatically than Jasper.
Levi knew this trap. He’d grown up with this trap. So he just kept working on his laptop.
Jasper abandoned him to jump up on the couch, all ninety pounds of him crawling into Tess’s lap.
Another very loud sigh came from Tess as she scratched Jasper’s head.
Levi gave up and looked at her.
“I just spent the last ten minutes helping Peyton look for the cupcake she got from school.”
“And?”
“And . . . I ate it two hours ago.”
Levi laughed. “Isn’t it past her bedtime?”
“She got up to go potty. Then she wanted another story. And then she needed water. We were in the kitchen getting a cup of water when she noticed the cupcake was missing.”
Of course she would notice. Not much got by his niece. “I assume you lied your ass off.”
“Yeah.” She sighed again and hugged Jasper. “I’m a terrible person.”
“You’re not a terrible person. You’re a single mom on the edge.”
Tess burst into tears. “Oh my God, I’m a single mom! I don’t want to be a single mom! How did this happen to me?”
With a grimace, he got up from the desk and sat next to Tess.