Who would have ever thought that she, Vivian Forest, would wake up on December 29 in a fancy hotel room in London, in bed with a very attractive man? She certainly wouldn’t have thought so. But here she was, and goodness, was she happy about it.

Thank God Maddie had made her stay in London. What if she’d been scared and stubborn and had flown home with Maddie the day before and had missed out on last night? She shuddered to think about it.

She got up and went to the bathroom, then slid back under the covers next to Malcolm. He opened his eyes and pulled her close to him.

“Good morning.” He kissed her shoulder, her cheek, her forehead.

“Good morning.” She smiled up at him. “I believe we have one more condom. What do you say to—”

Before she could finish her sentence, he growled and pulled her underneath him, as she giggled again. How was this man able to both make her laugh this much and turn her on this much?

After a very successful use of the last condom, they curled back up in bed together. Malcolm kissed her on the cheek.

“So. We have three more full days together, and I think we would both agree that most of yesterday didn’t go so well.” He sat up, turned to her, and took a deep breath. “And that’s all my fault.”

She sat up, too.

“No, Malcolm, it wasn’t—”

He stopped her.

“Please don’t argue with me; we both know it’s true. But let me explain why.” He sighed. “I lied to you yesterday.”

She just waited. Whatever this was, it was a big deal to him.

“About Miles. That’s not what his big news was. It was that he’d gotten into an art school for next year and is giving up his place at Oxford.” Her mouth dropped open, and he nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly how I felt. We had a massive fight about it. And now he’s even more determined to do this, Sarah is furious at me for encouraging him with his art in the first place, and for not finding a way to talk him out of this, and I’m furious at both Miles and myself.”

It was obviously very hard for him to tell her this. She was grateful he trusted her enough to open up to her. She reached for his hand, and he squeezed it.

“This all sounds so hard. Do you want to tell me how it happened?”

He turned on his elbow toward her and nodded.

“Rather strangely, I do.” And then the whole story spilled out of him—about how excited his nephew had been, how perplexed and then angry Malcolm had been, what Miles had said about passion and his father, what Malcolm had said about securing his future, how they’d both yelled, how Miles had stormed out.

“I’m sorry, Malcolm.” She took his hand.

He kissed hers, then smiled at her.

“Thanks. I’m sorry for taking all of this out on you yesterday. I’ve been in a foul mood since Christmas Day, trying to figure out what to do and how to fix it and if Miles is ruining his life, and if I’ve ruined our relationship forever. I thought spending time with you would help push it all out of my head, but instead your questions about Miles and your happy stories about your daughter just made me think about everything I did wrong. And plus . . .”

He opened his mouth to say something more, but instead just shook his head.

“Plus what? Really, you can tell me,” she said.

He let out a huge sigh.

“This is also why your thing about surprises caught me off guard yesterday, and I’m sorry I acted like such a boor about it. But the only thing I’ve done in the past few days, other than fret about the situation with Miles, was to plan a few small things for us, and I was looking forward to surprising you, so when you said that, I didn’t know what to do.” He laughed. “Which of course means everything you said about surprises is completely right—my desire to surprise you is all about me, and not you. Ouch. Right, here were my plans—”

This time, she stopped him.

“Wait. I said all of that off the cuff. I hadn’t realized you had actually planned surprises for me. Why don’t I tell you exactly what I hate about surprises, and we can see if we can figure out a way to make this work for both of us.”

He ran his fingers through her very tangled ponytail.

“You’re so good at problem-solving. I feel like Parliament could use you.” He shook his head. “No, they’d never listen to someone as logical as you. All right, tell me everything you hate.”

More people should ask her to do that.

“Okay, for starters, there’s so much managing someone else’s emotions along with your own. You have to monitor your facial expression so well, and make sure it’s reflecting what it’s supposed to reflect, and as you may have noticed about me, I have a pretty expressive face.” He laughed, and she grinned at him. “You’ve noticed, have you? Here’s an example of that: I was so relieved that my boss emailed me that he was going to retire and he wanted me to become director after him. I was so taken aback by the email, I almost dropped my tea. If he’d told me in person, and I didn’t manage to get ahold of myself quickly enough, he might have thought I was horrified by the idea of the job.”

Malcolm nodded.

“That makes sense. What else?”

“I hate that everything is out of my hands.” She ticked off her fingers. “Where I’m going, what I’m doing, even often who I’m with. There’s nothing I hate more than a surprise party, where you’re never in the clothes you would want to be wearing, someone always invited a person you hate, and you have to do the whole gasp, huge smile, ‘Oh my God!’ thing.”