Chapter 2
TWO
JESS
Town council meetings were my personal vision of hell.
They always started too early, went too long, and inevitably included someone over seventy yelling about potholes or bird feeders.
My coping consisted of mainlining my own cold brew and silently judging everyone’s organizational systems. But this evening was worse than the usual municipal torture. This evening, he was here.
Powell Ferguson sat two rows up, still in his station uniform, all broad shoulders and clean jawline and irritating competence. I slid into a seat beside Pepper and almost groaned when I spotted him. She followed my gaze, took one glance at my face, and smirked. “Oh good. Your favorite.”
“Please shut up,” I muttered, pulling out my notebook. “He’s not my favorite. He’s a menace.”
“A menace.” Her lips twitched with amusement. “You mean the guy who rescued a kitten from a storm drain last week?”
“That kitten was stuck because he startled it,” I snapped.
“He sneezed too loud and the poor thing ran in there to hide.” Of course, I knew no such thing, but it was the kind of thing high school Powell would have done.
High school Powell whom I still despised even more than store brand instant coffee.
Pepper snorted into her scarf. “You’re ridiculous.”
“No.” I stabbed my pen at my blank page as if it were the problem. “He’s ridiculous. With his stupid firefighter muscles and his stupid smile and his stupid—” I cut myself off, because Pepper was staring at me like I’d just delivered a monologue on forbidden love. She didn’t need that kind of fuel.
“Jess,” she whispered. “Normal people don’t catalog someone’s… attributes with that level of emotional intensity.”
“It’s not emotional intensity,” I hissed. “It’s annoyance.”
It was an injustice of the greatest magnitude that he’d left high school and gotten all big and broad and sexy looking. Too damned bad the inside didn’t match the outside. I knew that from first-hand experience, and I’d never forgive him for it.
“Mmhmm,” Pepper hummed.
I ignored her and pretended to write something down, though what I scribbled in the margin was: Powell = absolute jackass. Avoid at all costs.
Of course, he sat across the aisle where there was no escape without being obvious about it. When he looked back, surveying the meeting attendance, and realized I was there, he gave me a polite smile. I scowled and looked away fast enough I might’ve sprained something.
The meeting dragged on through traffic updates, parade permits, and Mrs. Wiggins’s annual crusade against battery-powered Santas.
I sank lower and lower in my chair until Mayor Allen tapped his microphone with the kind of self-important flourish that always signaled an agenda item worth caring about.
“Next up,” he announced, “is planning for this year’s Twelve Stops of Christmas holiday crawl.”
I straightened. The holiday crawl was huge for Pour Decisions.
My seasonal drinks were basically the reason half the town survived December.
I’d volunteered to chair the committee this year to further my business connections in Huckleberry Creek.
I had so many ideas for how to level up the event from years past.
Pepper nudged me. “This is it. You’ve got this. Creative queen.”
I tried not to beam. “Obviously.”
The mayor smiled at the room like he already saw a front-page newspaper photo. “Given the scale of the event this year, we’ve decided the planning committee will be co-chaired.”
Co-chaired? What the hell? I had everything under control. No one had consulted me about this.
“Co-chair number one: Jessica Donnegan of Pour Decisions.”
Pepper elbowed me. “YES.”
I lifted my chin, ready to accept with grace. I could play well with others as long as others weren’t—
“And co-chair number two will be Powell Ferguson of the Huckleberry Creek Fire Department.”
My stomach dropped so fast I considered checking under my seat for a trapdoor.
I turned toward Pepper. She had one hand over her mouth and eyes the size of ornaments.
Behind us, someone gasped. Across the aisle, Powell glanced back at me and raised his brows in a helpless Well…
I guess we’re doing this way that made me want to throw my notebook at his head.
“This is sabotage,” I whispered.
“It’s not sabotage,” Pepper whispered back. “It’s dramatic irony.”
“I reject dramatic irony.”
The mayor beamed like a politician at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, oblivious to the emotional carnage unfolding in real time across the folding chairs.
“We think combining Ms. Donnegan’s exceptional creativity with the fire department’s extensive community resources will generate excellent synergy for this year’s expanded event! ”
Synergy, my ass. I felt my blood pressure spiking as I raised my hand with a forced politeness sharp enough to cut glass.
“Mayor Allen, with all due respect—and I mean all due respect—are you absolutely, positively, one hundred percent sure you want me paired with him? No room for reconsideration at all? Because I feel like there might be other firefighters who—”
A few people in the back rows laughed, clearly thinking this was some kind of adorable small-town banter. The mayor, however, did not appear amused. His smile tightened around the edges. “Yes, Ms. Donnegan. You and Mr. Ferguson are who we want leading this initiative. The decision is final.”
Fantastic. Just freaking fantastic. I closed my eyes and counted to five, trying to summon every meditation app I’d ever downloaded and deleted five minutes later. It didn’t help. Not even a little.
When I opened my eyes again, Powell was still watching me with that infuriatingly earnest expression—all apologetic concern and helpful energy, like he was trying to radiate calming vibes in my direction. Like he thought his stupid perfect face might somehow make this situation less catastrophic.
I narrowed my eyes at him with the intensity of a laser beam, and he had the absolute audacity to lift one broad shoulder in a small, almost hopeful shrug. The kind of shrug that said Maybe this won’t be so bad?
I mouthed “No” at him with exaggerated precision. His lips twitched like he was fighting a smile, which made me want to launch my entire tote bag at his head.
Ten excruciating minutes later—ten minutes that felt like geological eras—the meeting adjourned. While council members drifted toward the lobby in clusters to chat and dissect every word that had been spoken, I tried to execute a tactical retreat through the side door.
Pepper’s hand shot out and snagged my wrist before I made it three steps. “Oh, no you don’t. You have to talk to him.”
“I really don’t.”
“You’re co-chairs.”
“I can be silent.”
“You can’t run a twelve-stop event with interpretive glaring.”
I sighed with all the drama of a high school Thespians meeting and shoved my notebook into my tote. “Watch me.”
Of course, fate—or more accurately, Pepper’s less-than-subtle shove between my shoulder blades—intervened, and I ended up face-to-face with Powell anyway.
The impact of her push sent me stumbling forward just as he turned from saying goodbye to one of the other volunteers, and now there was nowhere to look except right at him.
He straightened when he saw me, pulling his hands from the pockets of his cargo pants, shoulders going loose in that casual way that suggested he was working very hard to appear relaxed.
His eyes went soft—that particular shade of warm brown that reminded me of coffee beans and autumn leaves and other things I refused to acknowledge right now.
“Jess.” He spoke like I was a skittish woodland creature that might bolt if he moved too fast or spoke too loud.
“Powell,” I answered with the approximate level of warmth I’d show a tax auditor.
For a long, uncomfortable moment we just stood there in the slowly emptying community center, the weight of our unwanted assignment hanging between us like a storm cloud.
Volunteers squeezed past us with their coats and purses, folding chairs scraped against the linoleum as they were stacked against the walls, someone made off with the wrong thermos from the refreshment table, and still neither of us blinked or moved or did anything productive.
The silence stretched until it became almost painful, filled with all the things we weren’t saying and probably never would.
He cleared his throat, the sound rough in the quiet space between us. “So. The Twelve Stops of Christmas.”
“Apparently.” I shifted my tote bag higher on my shoulder, using the movement as an excuse to put another inch of space between us.
“We should meet soon. Start planning. Get organized. Unless you’d rather just over-caffeinate yourself into a holiday planning frenzy and improvise the whole thing?”
There was a hint of teasing in his voice, like he was testing the waters to see if I might smile or if I was committed to treating him like an unwelcome door-to-door salesman.
“I don’t improvise.” I lifted my chin in haughty defiance. “I strategize. I plan. I make lists and backup lists and contingency plans for when the backup lists fail.”
“I can work with that.” The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “I’m pretty good at following detailed instructions.”
He waited for me to say something else—something gracious or civil or downright miraculous that might indicate I was capable of basic human cooperation.
But my supply of graciousness had run out somewhere between Mrs. Wiggins’s impassioned rant about Santa’s workshop logistics and the mayor casually destroying my holiday sanity with a single announcement.
“I’ll text you,” I said finally, because professionalism required it and my business needed this event to go smoothly. Pour Decisions couldn’t afford for me to torpedo our biggest potential marketing opportunity of the year just because I had personal issues with my co-chair.
“You have my number?” I caught a note of genuine surprise in his voice.
“Unfortunately.” I’d kept it after everything fell apart, though I had no idea why. No doubt some masochistic impulse to torture myself.
He smiled then, a genuine smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look like the boy I’d once thought I might be falling for. I ignored the small, traitorous flutter low in my stomach, the way my pulse picked up despite my best efforts to remain unmoved.
“Okay.” His voice was so gentle it almost hurt. “Talk soon, then.”
I made a noise halfway between a grunt and a warning growl and turned away before I did something catastrophically stupid, like let my guard down or—God forbid—soften toward him.
My boots clicked against the polished linoleum as I stalked toward the exit, putting as much distance as possible between myself and those warm brown eyes that had always been my weakness.
Pepper caught up to me near the double doors, her shorter legs working overtime to match my determined pace. “Well?” she demanded, a little breathless but grinning like she’d just witnessed the most entertaining show in Huckleberry Creek.
“Well, nothing,” I bit out, not slowing down.
She ignored my tone. “Well, he’s hot. Like, seriously hot. Did he always look that good in uniform, or is this some kind of post-high-school glow-up situation?”
“I am begging you.” I stopped to face her and gritted my teeth. “Please stop talking forever and ever, amen.”
She only laughed, the sound bright and unrepentant. “Oh, honey, this is going to be amazing. You, him, forced proximity, Christmas magic in the air—”
“This is going to be a complete and utter disaster of epic proportions.”
“It can be both,” she said with a cheerful shrug, her gray-green eyes sparkling with mischief.
I groaned and pushed through the heavy glass door into the biting December air.
The cold hit my flushed cheeks like a slap, but it was nothing compared to the assault of Christmas cheer that blasted me from every conceivable angle.
Twinkling lights draped across storefronts, garland wound around every lamppost, and a massive wreath hung on the door of almost every business lining Main Street.
Even the fire hydrants had been decorated with festive red bows, for crying out loud.
I glared at all of it with the intensity of someone who’d just been sentenced to community service.
This ridiculously cheerful town was determined to ruin my entire week.