My Secret Santa Clayton (Silver Ridge Christmas)

6. Grace

SIX

Grace

I sent a spray of water up from the slushy melting snow as I pulled out of the parking lot at the general store and started driving through Silver Ridge.

“Ridiculous,” I muttered, glaring at the obnoxiously large Christmas tree dominating the town square. It was decked out in a gaudy array of lights and tinsel that sparkled mockingly under the gray sky. The sound of laughter floated across the lake where families skated in circles, blissfully unaware of anything outside their picture-perfect moment.

I hated Christmas. I hated Silver Ridge.

I hated Clay Hawthorne.

My eyes lingered on the lake, and suddenly it wasn't just the forced festivity that got to me. Memories flooded in, unbidden—my dad, young and hopeful, taking us out on the ice, teaching me to skate with a patience I didn't appreciate until much later. Then, those memories darkened with the ones that followed—the hushed phone calls, the tension at home, the day we found out we had nothing left because of some smooth-talking con man my dad trusted.

And then there was Clay.

Clay with his easy smile and hands that once held mine like they were something precious. We were kids thinking we had forever, until forever came crashing down around us.

Until one summer day on that very lake changed everything.

I slammed my hand against the dashboard, unleashing a growl I’d barely been holding in. That’s when I started talking to myself like a crazy lady—good thing no one was here to listen. “Everywhere I turn, there he is,” I spat out the words like they left a bad taste in my mouth. Grace from high school would've teared up—ha! Not anymore. “You think you can just show up, Clay? After prom night? After those lies?”

The thought of him, lurking around every corner of Silver Ridge, was enough to set my blood boiling. But even worse was the way my body betrayed me whenever I caught a glimpse of that rugged, infuriating man. He’d been cute in high school, but now? He was a damn smoke-show.

It was like my skin remembered his touch, reacting of its own accord.

I felt like a violin string about to snap…raw tension, undeniable. I felt it, that familiar pull, a need that nestled deep in my belly and heated up my whole body.

It wasn't fair, and it sure as hell wasn't welcome.

“Get over yourself, Grace,” I told myself. “He's nothing but trouble.”

Trouble wrapped in a too-tight shirt and jeans that should be illegal for how well they fit.

No. Stop. Focus.

But as I kept driving the twenty minutes home from Main Street, I couldn’t stop. The image of his hands—those rough, capable hands—cupping my face sent an unexpected shiver through me. They were the same hands that once drove me wild, the hands that could tell stories of tenderness and raw passion.

If he just reached out, pulled me to him…

Nobody had ever messed with my head like Clay did. He was a walking contradiction—tender and rough all in one go, a storm that left me reeling every time we collided. But those were just memories, ancient history that should've been buried alongside my old yearbooks.

These days, the only thing that got my heart hammering like that was the rush right before a story broke wide open—the chase, the hunt for truth. That was where I belonged, where I thrived, not here in this sleepy town that time forgot.

Silver Ridge was my purgatory, halfway between heaven and hell.

As I drove, it started to rain—icy pellets mixed with the water streaming down the windshield. I sighed, a sound that was half frustration, half resignation. Thoughts of Clay—his rough hands, the way he used to look at me like I was the only one in the room—were fading, replaced by the mundane task of navigating the streets of Silver Ridge.

Practicality always did have a way of dousing flames.

“A lemon stuck in my mouth,” I muttered, rolling my eyes at the memory of his words. My grip on the wheel tightened, knuckles white against the black leather. As I approached the stop sign at the corner of Maple and First, my foot eased onto the brake, bringing the truck to a halt more gently than I felt. “What the hell did that even mean? He has a lemon up his?—”

I shut my mouth, a tingle crawling up my spine.

There was a black sedan with tinted windows in the rearview mirror.

That car…

It was probably a coincidence; people here drove cars like that, people in Boston did too. It was almost definitely a coincidence.

But I’d seen a hell of a lot of sketchy black sedans outside my apartment in Boston before I’d fled.

I put my foot on the gas, trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, and I turned in the opposite direction of Mariah’s house. I jerked the wheel left, then right. Something was off—not in the way that you forget to lock your door or leave the coffee pot on, but in that skin-crawling, someone's-got-their-eyes-on-you kind of way.

I flicked a glance at the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind me.

They were still back there.

My palms were slick against the steering wheel as I took myself and the sedan on a little mini-tour of my childhood neighborhood. They weren’t riding my ass or anything…just following.

Or driving home.

I needed to remember they could just be driving home, and maybe I was crazy, but?—

The sedan took a right at a cul-de-sac, and I slow rolled along the street to make sure they stayed there. I kept my eyes trained on the street, grabbing my phone, ready to call the cops if I needed to…

But they stayed there.

I turned around and scoped it out, and saw a couple getting out and laughing together as they walked into one of the small houses at the end of the street, carrying groceries. Yeah, I was being crazy. They hadn’t been following me, they were just living their lives.

I was safe here. I had to remember that.

No one was going to follow me all the way to Silver Ridge.