Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Christmas Morning

I didn't answer Brady.

I didn't delete him either.

I took a screenshot of both texts and sent them to my own email, and then I turned the phone face down and put the frozen peas back on my cheek.

Quinton came out of the shower with a towel around his hips and his hair dripping.

He saw my face.

"What did he send?"

I handed him the phone.

He read it twice.

A muscle in his jaw moved, and that was all.

"He wants you at the lake house," he said.

"He wants both of us. Me and her." I took the phone back. "He's keeping his options open. He always did."

"What do you want to do?"

"Nothing yet." I looked at the screen. "I want to keep it."

"For what?"

"For when it costs him the most."

Quinton sat down on the bed beside me and took the peas from my hand and held them to my cheek himself.

"Remind me," he said, "never to text you anything stupid."

"You don't text. You don't have a phone that isn't a secret."

"I'm getting one tomorrow. Just for you. I'll only text you pictures of pie."

I laughed, and it hurt my face, and I leaned into him anyway.

On Christmas morning, my grandmother and I went to war over cinnamon rolls.

She used her mother's recipe with lard.

I used mine, with brown butter and cardamom, the one that made the lawyers on Wacker Drive cry.

We made both batches at the same counter, elbowing each other, with Quinton at the table as judge.

"This is a trap," he said.

"It's a judgment," said Nana. "Pick wrong and you're back in the garage."

He ate one of each, slowly, chewing.

"Well?" I said.

"Opal's," he said.

Nana crowed and smacked the counter.

I threw a dish towel at his head.

"Traitor."

"She has a cane," he said. "You don't."

We opened presents by the little cottage tree, which was a real cedar Nana had made Quinton cut down from the back fence line the day before.

Nana gave him a pair of thick wool socks she'd knitted for my father and never given him, because he died first.

Quinton held them in both hands.

He didn't say anything for a second.

"Put them on," Nana said gruffly. "Your feet look cold."

He gave her a new deck of cards and a handwritten IOU for one dollar.

"For the poker game," he said. "Tonight. I'll let you deal."

"You'll regret that, son."

I gave him my father's pocketknife.

It was a bone-handled Case knife with a worn blade, and Nana had given it to me the week of the funeral.

I'd carried it in my purse for four years.

"Katie," he said. "I can't take this."

"He'd have liked you. He hated golf, too."

Quinton turned the knife over in his fingers.

Then he reached under the tree for a flat package in brown paper.

"Last one," he said.

Inside was a cheap black frame from the drugstore.

In the frame was a crumpled receipt from the urgent care on Lake Street.

Three hundred forty dollars.

Across the bottom, in his blocky handwriting, he'd written: "PAID IN FULL. G."

"I kept it," he said. "I promised myself I'd frame it the day I could pay you back."

"You never paid me back."

"I married you," he said. "I'm working on it."

My throat closed.

Nana made a noise into her coffee mug.

"Lord," she said. "I'm going to early service. Y'all have one hour."

She took her cane and her purse and her good church hat, and the neighbor's car honked in the alley.

The cottage door shut behind her.

The house was very quiet.

I put the frame on the side table, carefully, face up.

Then I looked at my husband sitting on the floor in my father's wool socks.

"One hour," I said.

He was already getting up.

He pushed to his feet and came at me without a word.

I backed up until my shoulders hit the bookshelf beside the tree.

The colored lights threw red and green across his face.

He stopped close enough that I could smell the cinnamon on his breath.

"One hour," he said.

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