Chapter Text
It’s Christmas break, but Penelope doesn’t want to leave work.
For one thing, she adores the smell of books. She enjoys the quiet humming of pages turning, and even the soft clicks from the keyboards have become soothing with time. Her Library is her sanctuary and leaving it is seldom pleasant, but it’s made even worse by today’s circumstances.
She sighs heavily as she pulls on her patterned overcoat, grabbing her purse on the way out. It is neither the freezing air nor a personal dislike for the Holidays that make it so – she is no Grinch, thank you very much. It’s simply that Colin will be picking her up to take her to his family’s Christmas party.
Colin Bridgerton.
Her best friend’s elusive older brother.
The same one who’d charmed her at first sight – or should she say first laugh? It’s no matter, both happened on the same day, one after the other, his kindness shining through every bit of his expressive face. It might have been easier if she’d simply fallen for his remarkable blue eyes or his wavy brown hair, but no, she had to go and fall for his kindness, instead.
A couple of years later, it made the blow so much worse.
Her phone blips. Then blips again. And again.
She knows it’s Colin before looking; he is incapable of sending a single text. It annoys the hell out of her.
Hi Penelope, last chance to back out!
Once you get in the car there will be no escaping the Bridgerton chaos XD
(I’m parked outside)
She’s even more annoyed when her lips turn upward against her will. Why does he have to be so effortlessly charming?
She forgoes answering by text and rushes outside instead, wiping the traitorous smile off her face before joining him in the car. Her effort doubles when she enters, the warmth from the heater hitting her freezing cheeks and she’s made instantly aware that it smells like him. If he’s Don Quijote, this car is his Rocinante, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he fills the small space so fully.
Warm leather, bright bergamot, and rich cedarwood.
She wishes she didn’t recognise his scent so quickly. She wishes it didn’t affect her this way even after his obvious dismissal all those years ago. She’s such an idiot.
“I’m not sure whether you’re being brave or naïve for not taking the chance to back out,” he jokes, starting the car.
“I’m neither,” she responds after a beat, getting her act together. “You forget I’ve spent many a holiday with your family before, even when you weren’t around, and I’d take your family over mine any day.”
She sees his eyebrows furrow at the mention of his absence and immediately regrets bringing it up. It’s fleeting, his expression schooled back into a friendly smile before she can even turn to examine him fully, but Penelope Featherington is nothing if not impossibly attuned to Colin Bridgerton’s mannerisms. She bites her lips in reprimand.
“So things are still rough back home, huh?” he sympathises, and it’s a spear to the heart, how good he always is to her. She wishes he could be a dick, just once, so it might cure her of this twelve-year-old crush.
“Eh, same old, same old,” she says, grounding herself in the present conversation. “Believe me when I tell you you lucked out with the Bridgertons, Colin.”
He takes his eyes off the road for a brief moment, his eyes gleaming. “I know I have,” he whispers.
Of course he knows. He may hide his sensitivity behind this happy-go-lucky attitude lately, but she’s a keen observer and knows he loves deeply. She’s taken aback by the urge to run her fingers through his hair in comfort. It’s grown a lot since the last time she saw him. She tightens her hands into fists instead, clearing her throat.
“How long until we get to Aubrey Hall?” she redirects their attention to a safe topic.
Through the years she’s learned her infatuated self could turn almost anything he said or did into fuel for her romantic delusions. Needless to say, she no longer allows herself this freedom, not after that fateful day.
I would never date Penelope Featherington. Not in a thousand years, Ben.
And, well, since it’s only been seven years, there is no reason to believe he changed his mind, is there?
“Probably a couple of hours, maybe more depending on traffic,” he says, pulling her back to the present yet again. “Did you check the weather, by any chance?”
“Um, no, why?”
“Nothing, just hoping the skies stay clear until we get there.”
***
“This is all your fault!”
“How is this my fault?”
“Who brought up the weather just as the trip was starting?”
They were forced to take shelter after driving straight into a snowstorm, and Penelope feels like she’s been transported to a veritable Christmas Wonderland. This place is huge but cosy; every room carefully decorated with trees and lights and fancy ornaments that Penelope is sure she could never afford. Not that she can afford to stay here, either. All this and they haven’t even checked out the vast grounds the clerk had mentioned upon booking yet, for obvious reasons.
He guffaws, and she notices his broad shoulders shaking underneath his heavy backpack.
She can’t hold back the smile this time, “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”
Colin surprises her by stepping closer and resting his hands on her shoulders. He is even taller up close like this, his eyes darker in the dim light of the fireplace.
Between the fancy hotel’s ambience and Colin’s warmth, she cannot be expected to breathe.
“I’m not so powerful as to provoke a snowstorm,” Colin laughs, ironically unaware of the storm he’s provoking inside her when he squeezes her shoulders before letting her go. “Should we go up to our room? I’m dying to get out of these wet clothes.”
Penelope takes a deep breath before shaking her head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing to her; he never does.
She reminds herself once more: Colin’s flirting has never been intentional.
“So am I,” she responds without thinking and immediately wants to crawl into a hole and die because she knows her red cheeks betray her train of thought. Thankfully there’s no time to dwell as she follows him to their room.
Their room.
Because it’s a quarter past seven on the 23rd of December, and the hotel Colin took them to looks so much like the fucking Christmas Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas, they might as well have been pulled into a tiny little door shaped like a tree. And it’s fitting, really, because Penelope is living inside her personal little Christmas nightmare. They couldn’t just stay at the perfectly reasonable and, most importantly – affordable – inn. No, he had to choose this day to take advantage of his trust fund baby status and, in his own words, treat her to a nice place to make up for the extra time it would take them to get to Aubrey Hall. She couldn’t in good conscience allow him to spend twice as much on a solo room for her, of course, so now here they are: sharing a suite.
Penelope Featherington is sharing a suite in a fancy hotel with Colin Bridgerton.
An admittedly large suite with two small doubles separated by a single bedside table and a lamp, but still.
The place is elegantly decorated in white and pretty blues, real flowers resting on the table in the corner, but Penelope can’t shake the nerves enough to take it all in. Colin will be sleeping in the bed right next to her. As big as the room is, there is in no way enough room between those two beds. Tonight is going to be torture.
“Do you have a preference?” his voice floats in.
“Hmm?”
“Which bed would you prefer, Pen?”
“Oh, of course!” she’s forever pulling herself back together when he’s near. She notices him eyeing the one closest to the door. “I’ll take the one by the window.”
He rewards her with a charming smile before dropping his bag on his bed and rummaging for dry clothes before heading to the adjoining bathroom.
“Oh sweet, we have a huge bathtub,” his muffled voice attempts to break whatever’s left of her inner peace.
No matter what happens next, she must refrain from putting this last comment together with the image of him getting out of his wet clothes. She fails, miserably.
“Are you alright?” Colin asks, stepping out of the bathroom in her favourite shade of green, and that’s when Penelope notices she’s been blinking rapidly in an attempt to erase the mental image that last thought had conjured.
“Yeah, fine,” she says, turning her back to him and moving toward her bed. “I’m just gonna–” She motions vaguely towards her small bag.
“Oh, yeah, we don’t want you to catch a cold,” he says, sounding so genuinely worried it makes her heart skip a beat.
She takes her bag to the bed closest to the window, moving on autopilot. The hours of forced proximity catch up to her and she finds herself pretending she cares to test out her mattress, just for a moment’s respite.
“This feels really soft,” she says, finding that she’s being honest and letting her hand caress the likely five-hundred thread count sheets.
Colin smirks.
“Oh, don’t be so full of yourself,” she says, rolling her eyes, and the bastard takes this as an invitation to sit beside her on the bed. He wouldn’t know personal space if it slapped him in the face.
“So I did good?” he asks, his face a picture of innocence while he sits even nearer, their thighs almost touching. She can feel his warmth through the layers of both their clothes.
Utter torture.
“Yes, Colin,” she exhales, hoping it passes for a different kind of frustration than she feels. “You did good.”
“Yes!” Colin exclaims, springing rather unnecessarily to his feet.
This is new. Or not exactly new, but a change she’s observed in him over the last decade or so. He never used to be this… boisterous. The Colin of her youth used to wear his sensitivity on his sleeve, always eager to listen and take care of his loved ones to the point of putting himself last. At 33, though he’s still caring and sensitive, he hides it well beneath this charming, exuberant armour. Penelope can’t help but love every version of him, but she hates thinking about why he needs this armour. It annoys the hell out of her.
She rolls her eyes. “Grow up, Colin.”
He pretends to be hurt, taking a hand to his heart. “Ouch.”
She sighs, quickly taking her turn to change in the bathroom and leaving him to pout by himself. When the pout is still there a few minutes later, she changes tactics.
“Are you not hungry?” she asks because food is a surefire way of cheering him up. And honestly, because she’s ready to be out of this room for this mix of annoyance, horniness and heartbreak is a dangerous combo.
He lights up, offering her his arm, “Sometimes I forget how well you know me, Pen.”
And as they make their way back down, Penelope finds herself wishing not for the first time that she could forget it as well.