Mark proved to be a wonderful cook; the chicken was well-seasoned and juicy, the vegetables plump and perfectly salted. Maple pie, Roxanne discovered, was one of the most delicious things she’d even eaten in her entire life: creamy, decadent, and sweetly flavored with maple syrup, served—as instructed by her host—with a dollop of vanilla whipped cream. Once they’d finished dinner and dessert they moved from merlot at the farm table in the kitchen to bourbon-spiked hot cocoa at the coffee table in the den, bringing the half-eaten pie plate with them. They’d strung a set of frosted white lights on Mark’s undecorated Christmas tree for ambiance, and much to her own surprise, Roxanne had selected an instrumental holiday album from his large vinyl collection and set it at a low volume, enjoying how the popping sounds of the record player added another layer of music to the crackling of the fire. With bellies full from a delicious, home-cooked meal—the first Roxanne had enjoyed in a very long time—and hearts warmed warned by bourbon and the fire, they set about the task of wrapping the toy drive presents. It took them hours, not that they minded the time, and they worked late into the night, sometimes talking, sometimes lapsing into comfortable silence as they fixating on attaching ribbons and bows to the children’s’ gifts. She didn’t say so, but wrapping all the children’s gifts made Roxanne question the authenticity of the gifts in her trunk, awaiting nieces and nephews whose birthdays she couldn’t even remember. She’d put next to zero thought into selecting their gifts, just purchasing whatever the clerk at the toy store counter had said was popular that year.

All the while, snow continued to fall from the sky, blanketing in the earth in an ever-deepening coat of white. Once or twice they’d open the door to peak out of it, and every time Roxanne felt herself feeling just a little bit more positive toward the snow, which showed no sign of stopping. And every time they opened the door, Mark would stand a little closer to her, warming her side with his body heat, and when he did Roxanne could swear she heard the distinct sound of sleigh bells ringing in the distance. For the first time in as long as she could remember—and perhaps it was just a consequence of the bourbon and the cocoa—she could feel herself being caught up in the holiday spirit.

“Do you hear that?” she asked, when the bells sounded again on their third trip out to the porch to watch the snow. She listened hard, but their sound had faded as quickly as she’d heard it.

“Here what?” Mark replied, sliding closer to her and blocking the wind. The later it got, the gustier the wind had become, until it had grown so strong and loud that it almost had a voice of its own to add to the conversation. Roxanne didn’t mind though; it made Mark lean in closer and whisper in her ear as a result, and she was enjoying the closeness of him.

“I keep hearing something,” explained Roxanne. “It sounds like, I don’t know, like bells. Sleigh bells, maybe.”

“Sleigh bells? Santa doesn’t come until tomorrow night, you know,” Mark teased. “Are you that eager for Christmas?”

She laughed, and elbowed him in the ribs playfully. “No,” she protested, ignoring the way he looked at her suspiciously out of the corner of his eye. “I’m not really a…Christmas person. Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought.”

“’Not a Christmas person’,” he echoed. “What does that mean exactly?” He touched a finger to his side of nose and furrowed his brow as if in deep thought. “Is it the presents you don’t enjoy? Or perhaps the warm feeling of the company of family and friends? The lights? Snowmen?”

“No—” she tried to protest, but Mark continued, waving her away as he continued to name all the wonderful things about the season that Roxanne had been working very hard disliking.

“Must be the cookies, or the cocoa,” he continued, ignoring her when she elbowed him a second time, laughing. “I’ve got it. It’s Santa isn’t—the big guy himself? You don’t buy into the whole magic of Christmas thing? Don’t think Roxanne Hudson made her way onto the nice list?”

He was impossible, and Roxanne felt a little bit bad about the bad rap she’d been giving the holiday. Nevertheless, she couldn’t give up her position now. “Not even a little bit,” she fibbed. There was something about this Christmas that was…different. Nevertheless, she thought she might be going a little crazy. She’d been hearing those bells since she’d driven her car into the snow only to find herself rescued by the ranger that was quickly becoming the man of her dreams, even though everything he was—from his hiking gear to his homestead in the woods—was the polar opposite of what Roxanne had been expecting to find.

With a little help from the bourbon, they talked, laughed, and enjoyed several heart-palpating moments when their hands would brush each other’s when reaching for another throughout the remainder of the night, but all the while Mark proved to be a perfect gentleman—which was having the interesting side effect of making Roxanne fall for him even harder.

When neither of them could hold their eyes open any longer, they finally agreed it was time for bed. There was no clock in the room, and with her phone charging still in the bedroom and the brightness of the moon on the snow giving the illusion of twilight, it was nearly impossible to know for sure what time it was, and Roxanne didn’t bother to check. Mark excused himself to the bathroom while Roxanne sat nervously on the couch, fidgeting with the edge of a knit blanket and fretting over the night’s sleeping arrangements. A few moments later, he returned the living room holding a bright blue toothbrush clenched between his teeth, and a pillow in the one hand. Roxanne barely noticed either of them. She was too busy trying to pick her jaw up off the floor and will the color in her cheeks to die down.

While he’d been gone, Mark had traded his jeans in for plaid flannel pajama bottoms, and lost his shirt. He was currently trying to wrangle a plain white tee over his head with one-hand. Roxanne did a pitiful job of trying not to stare, watching mesmerized as the taunt, ropey muscles of his stomach rippled beneath the swell of pecs that looked like they’d be way more of a comfortable resting place than the pillow she’d seen in his hand. He had at least eight fully defined abs, and his stomach dipped and sliced downward as it disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants, which was set dangerously low…far beneath his waist. His shoulders were broad, and there wasn’t an inch of fat on his chiseled body. His skin was, as was the rest of him, tanned and flawless.

Finally Mark was able to slip the shirt over his head and loop his two arms through as one had tugged it over his chest, eclipsing Roxanne’s view. She was no stranger to gorgeous bodies; she saw beautiful people every day roaming the hallways of Vogue headquarters, and of course she was still dating a model who seemed incapable of covering up his impressive physique, but something about Mark made Roxanne’s breath catch in her throat.

“Everything alright?” Mark asked, kindly not remarking on the fact that she her mouth had gone slack and her eyes had very likely misted over. Finished brushing, he waved his toothbrush at her to get her attention.

“Just peachy,” she said, and immediately felt ridiculous. It was a rare moment that she put her foot in her mouth, but when she did her Loubs could have poked her throat on the way down. Not that she was wearing her favorite shoes, Roxanne remembered, staring at her feet as she wiggled her toes in the thick, woolen socks. If someone had told her just this morning that she’d be going to bed on a stranger’s couch wearing his lounge pants and the kind of thermal shirt that came in a three-pack plastic package, she would have laughed in their face. Now that she was in them, she kind of liked them…though she still wished she had her toiletry kit.

Mark smiled and dropped his pillow on the couch between them and sat at the opposite end, reclining easily with his feet propped up on the coffee table. He rolled his head to the side and smiled at Roxanne, and she pulled her knees up against her chest as their eyes mutually wandered to the Christmas tree. What had started off as a bare pine with boxes of decorations and presents underneath had erupted into packages of brightly colored wrapping paper, shiny, glittery bows, and twinkling lights. Mark had even hung a mismatched pair of stockings—one with his name embroidered on the cuff, the other with his sister’s—on the mantel alongside Bogie’s.

“You know,” he ventured, rolling his eyes to Roxanne and winking when hers met his. “For someone who’s not the biggest fan of Christmas, you sure do wrap a mean present.”

She laughed. “Reason 7,941 I dislike Christmas: six straight seasons of working the gift wrap station at Macy’s.”

“Ah. A veteran wrapper, then.”

Roxanne nodded. “Good tips. Helped me pay my way through college.”

“Not still whiling away your days at Macy’s then, I take it?”

“Oh, no,” she said, realizing that in all their conversation over the course of the evening, she had managed to almost completely avoid talking about herself. “I’m a senior fashion editor at Vogue. I started at the copy desk, and now I have my own column.” She felt a surge of pride. “I was in Milan this year. I wore Valentino.”

Mark blinked his eyes, but there was no hint of recognition in them. He smiled anyway. “It sounds like you love your job.”

Roxanne shook her head enthusiastically—maybe a little too enthusiastically. “I do. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I’m really happy with how far I’ve come. Everyone says I’m on track to climb up, but what I’m really hoping to do is to get into design myself. ” She realized she was talking too much and stopped. For the first time, her job wasn’t what she really wanted to talk about it. “What about you? Did you always know you wanted to be a park ranger?”

Mark shrugged. “More or less. When you spend enough time hopping around, city after city, you come to enjoy the peace and quiet.”

“Did you move a lot before?”

“After our parents died, Mags and I were in and out of foster care for a while,” he explained, and although Roxanne had at least a dozen questions queuing up in her thoughts she didn’t dare ask any of them. “New York, Boston, Chicago…kind of bounced around, going anywhere as long as we could stay together. When it finally came time for me to decide where I wanted to go, I wanted to get as far away from everything is possible—Mags, too, but she was the type to keep moving. She’s done everything from Peace Corps to Semester at Sea. I took a job as a seasonal ranger out of college, then spent some time in Denali and Yellowstone before falling in love with the Green Mountains. Haven’t left Vermont since. Summers here are beautiful, so is fall. Winter is my favorite though. Everything is white, and so still you can almost feel nature holding its breath for spring.”

Roxanne wasn’t sure what to say, so she added more of herself to the conversation. “I grew up in a small suburb in Connecticut,” she volunteered. “Went to Pratt, then moved to Manhattan and bounced around a little until I got hired at Vogue. You haven’t seen summer until you’ve spent it in New York—the concerts and summer festivals in Central Park are amazing. I have one sister, Rachel. She’s still Connecticut, married with a small flock of children.”

He chuckled. “Sound like polar opposites, like me and Mags.”

“Who, you and me? Or me and Rachel?”

“Well, both I guess…although I don’t think you and I are that different, really.”

It was Roxanne’s turn to chuckle. “You don’t? Vermont versus New York City, winter versus summer. Come on!”

Mark’s mouth stretched into a fake wince and he tsk-ed his tongue against his teeth. “I don’t know, Roxy. I think you might like it here in the woods a little more than you’re letting on.”

“Oh, is that right?”

He rose from the couch, reaching out both of his hands to her. She accepted them, and he lifted her to her feet, then with a squeeze, released her fingers and tapped one of his to his head. “I’ve got a sense about these things,” he informed her. “I’m off to bed. I’ll take the couch, you take my bed. We’ll head out first thing to your car, and while you get ready I’ll load up my sleigh for the toy delivery, and drop you off at your family’s cabin on my way out.”

“Thank you,” Roxanne said, grateful for everything Mark had done for her and that he’d be willing to give up his own bed for the night. “But I don’t want to kick you out of your bed. I’m fine with the couch.”

“Not a chance. I would completely lose my gentleman card if I left a lady to sleep on this lumpy old thing,” he said, laying his hands atop her shoulders to steer her toward the bedroom. “Goodnight, Roxanne.”

She smiled, thinking of the lush pillow and thick quilt that awaited her. She was exhausted. “Goodnight, Mark.”

Just as she turned the threshold into the bedroom, Mark called her back. “Hey, Roxy?”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t totally dismiss the idea of Christmas magic, not just yet,” he said as he settled himself onto the couch, adjusting cushions and pillows and dragging a blanket over his chest. “You never know—Santa might just have something planned for you yet.”