Chapter 3
Winter Wonderland: Celebrity Edition
Ivy
Three hours earlier
I’m wrestling with a large white snowball hydrangea when a high-pitched shriek sounds directly behind me. I jump and nearly drop the heavy planter on my foot. I bobble it and, at the last second, ease it into the red wagon I borrowed from my dad along with his red pickup truck.
The wagon’s nearly full of blooms, but I’ve barely made a dent in the mountain of flowers still in the truck bed. I really should’ve wrangled someone into helping me with this delivery. Preferably someone muscular.
I brush the thought away. I am woman, hear me roar.
Or grunt, at least. Thankfully, I don’t have to traverse the frozen, rocky ground all these flowers.
As requested, the wide doors to the MacIntoshes’ heated barn were propped open for me so I could back the pickup into the space, protecting the flowers from the elements.
I push my bangs out of my eyes and tuck them back under the hood of my park as I turn in the direction of the nails-on-a-chalkboard noise. As suspected, it’s coming from Quinn MacIntosh. Her curly blonde hair bounces, probably from the decibel level.
Correction: the bouncing curls are courtesy of the way her entire body is jittering and twitching as she crosses the threshold from the blustery outdoors into the barn.
“Where have you been?” Against all odds, her voice climbs even higher up the vocal register.
I flash her a slight frown as I resume the task of hauling oversized flower arrangements out of the truck bed and nestling them in the wagon.
Quinn and my sisters and I have been friends since she and I were both in diapers. Holly, Merry, and I call her dads Uncle Chris and Uncle Pedro. She calls our father Papa Nick. It’s that kind of friendship. In all this time, I’ve never known her to be high strung.
“I’ve been at the shop putting together your order.” I speak in a soothing tone like she’s a rabid raccoon. “And, I’m early. Why are you tweaking? Did Merry stop by with a plate of her chocolate-espresso balls?”
I told my sister to cut back on the espresso powder in her eleventh-hour energy bites, but she insisted people need the boost to get through the jam-packed month of December festivities that Mistletoe Mountain is famous for. She has a point, but poor Quinn looks like she’s about to blast off.
“What? No.” Her eyes grow huge. “She’s not coming out here, is she? She can’t!”
She’s as edgy as a reindeer on an ice-slicked roof. I make the universal gesture for ‘calm down’ with my mittened hands. “She didn’t say anything about a surprise visit. It was just a guess based on how amped up you are. What’s going on with you?”
She heaves a long, loud sigh of relief and ignores the question. “Oh, good. I don’t need another lecture about the NDA.”
I pause with a brilliant red amaryllis in my arms and raise an eyebrow. “NDA? As in a nondisclosure agreement?”
She nods.
“What kind of photo shoot is this, anyway?”
“I told you—it’s a really big deal.”
To be fair, she did. In fact, she said it at least three or four times. But I figured she just wanted me to squeeze her enormous, last-minute order into my already over-scheduled holiday season calendar.
I’ve known since before the jack-o-lantern smashing contest in early November that I’d bit off more than I could chew in my first year as Mistletoe Mountain’s only local florist. And, yikes, was I right.
Mind you, I’m not complaining. Opening Blooms by Ivy back in August was a leap of faith that stretched my budget until it was paper-thin.
Except for Sunday dinners at the inn with my dad and Noelle and the meals that my sisters have treated me to, it’s been four long months of rice and beans on repeat.
But, come New Year’s day, I’ll be in the black.
A large part of my pending financial stability is thanks to Quinn.
And not just because of this massive order, either.
She opened Quintessentially Quinn, her event planning business, less than a month before I signed the lease on the flower shop.
She finally took everyone’s advice and turned MacIntosh Farm’s gorgeous old barn into a full-time event venue.
And as soon I opened my doors, we partnered to offer package deals for her space and my flowers.
We were slammed with weddings and graduation parties, anniversary parties, and family reunions all summer, then she rolled right into engagement parties and family photo shoots all autumn and I started ramping up for the bajillion holiday parties, open houses, events, and traditions that dominate town from the day after Thanksgiving through December 31st.
So when she called me just two days ago with a last-minute floral emergency (her words), of course I agreed to help her out, despite the fact that I’m completely booked and the Christmas festivities kick-off tonight.
The so-called emergency? She needs one thousand blooming flowers along with greenery and berries to create “an elegant, magical, romantic winter wonderland with a touch of small-town whimsy.”
After I made her repeat herself, I did some quick calculations and told her I’d have to import at least half of the flowers, which would make the sky-high cost even more outrageous.
Her response? The client said you have a blank check.
So, thirty-seven hours (and one all-nighter) later, here we are.
I’ve loaded my dad’s borrowed pickup with red, cream, and champagne roses, ivy, holly, deep red peonies, and fragrant Christmas lilies, giant amaryllis, bright red dinner plate hibiscus, and several more varieties that I’m forgetting in the hazy of exhaustion and exhilaration.
I’ve been so busy making this order happen, I haven’t stopped to wonder who would want such an extravagant display, let alone why.
Now, I squint at Quinn. “Are Taylor and Travis getting married in your barn?”
She giggles. “I wish, but no. You aren’t that far off, though.”
My narrowed eyes widen. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. And I can tell you who it is as soon as you sign this.”
She digs into her parka pocket, removes a folded sheet of paper and a pen, and thrusts them at me.
I unfold the paper and smooth it out, then give it a quick scan and raise an eyebrow. “You want me to sign an NDA, too? Just to deliver the flowers?”
She shrugs. “The client’s insisting—or at least his manager is.”
I skim the rest of the single-spaced document and almost uncap the pen. Then I freeze. My oldest sister would throw a legendary lawyerly fit if I signed this thing without understanding it.
“I need to show this to Holly first.”
She shakes her head. “There’s no time. Besides, isn’t she in Florida?”
Holly spent Thanksgiving with her boyfriend and his brother’s family. But she and Jack are on their way back to Vermont right now because he wouldn’t miss the town Christmas tree lighting for love or money. He considers it their first date. She begs to differ.
She always begs to differ. Like I said, she’s a lawyer. She was born to argue.
Now I glance from the document in my hand to Quinn then back to the contract. “She’ll be back tonight.”
“Look. I promise it’s okay to sign it. I signed the same thing. My dad looked it over and said it was completely standard.”
Presuming she means her dad the judge and not her dad the artist, that’s comforting. But still. I don’t want to do something that gets my fledgling little business in trouble.
I gnaw at my lower lip, trying to decide.
Quinn, sensing weakness, moves in for the kill. “And so did your dad and Noelle. I’m sure Holly reviewed it for them.”
I jerk my head up. “They did?”
“Yep. This same client rented the cottage at your dad’s inn for the week.”
I squint at her, skeptical. “There’s no way. Jodi and Mark Bryant reserve it every year.”
“They didn’t last year,” she reminds me.
“That was a one-time thing,” I protest weakly.
She shrugs. “Guess it’s a two-time thing now. You can ask your dad when you return his truck. Just sign the thing already, please.”
The pleading tone in her voice melts my resistance and I scribble my name on the signature line. She plucks the document out of my hand and spins around like she’s going to leave in a hurry.
“Wait. You have to tell me who the client is. You said you couldn’t tell me until I signed. I signed, so spill it.”
She stops and turns around to face me. “Dash Pine.”
My jaw drops. “Dash Pine as in Dash Pine?”
“I don’t know how to answer that question. Dash Pine as in the guy who played Vlad Graves on The Vampire Quarterback for the entirety of our teenage .”
I stammer out some sounds that mean nothing. My ability to form words appears to be broken.
But Quinn correctly guesses I’m trying to ask what Dash Pine is doing in Mistletoe Mountain, and why it requires a metric buttload of fresh flowers.
“He’s dating Lia Campbell. It must be getting serious. They’ve decided to go public with their relationship right here in our holiday hamlet.” She flashes a wide grin.
“Dash Pine and Lia Campbell?” I manage to ask.
“Yep, Hollywood’s bad boy and America’s sweetheart are in love. They want to take advantage of the golden hour for the photo shoot. Please work your winter wonderland magic as fast as you can. Trust me, you do not want to get on their bad side. I gotta go. Sorry I can’t help you unload.”
I barely hear her over the teenage version of me freaking out inside my brain. Dash Pine. The Dash Pine. The broody vampire quarterback who stared down at me from the poster above my bed from 2012 through 2017, inclusive.
I hush my inner sixteen-year-old. Meeting Dash Pine may be teenaged Ivy’s wildest dream come true, but I’m an adult. A business owner. A woman who would like to eventually be able to buy groceries without counting her quarters first.
I can't afford to act like a starstruck fangirl. This contract’s too important. If the photos of Dash and Lia go viral, every bride between Maine and Rhode Island will be at my door.
Holy sugarplums.