The Holiday Hate-Off (A Hideaway Harbor #1)

Chapter 1

LUCY

“Ican’t believe you’re getting married,” I tell Charlie, smiling so hard my face hurts. Crap. Does she know it’s a fake smile? I make it larger, feeling a vein pop in my forehead. My mouth droops slightly, the muscles confused.

“I know!” my friend squeals, pulling me into a hug. Her reddish hair is partially contained by a knit cap, but it brushes against my face with the force of her embrace. “And it’s all because of you and Eileen.”

Eileen beams at us from the other side of the counter and adds a splash of peppermint schnapps to Charlie’s hot chocolate.

It’s after closing at Love at First Sip, the coffee shop where my best friend Charlie and I work, run by the delightful Eileen Burrows, a former Hideaway Harbor beauty queen turned coffee shop owner.

Her roots in Hideaway run so deep it feels like they span the whole town, down to the harbor.

Or possibly the entire state of Maine. Every time I leave the Sip with her, at least a dozen people greet her by name.

It’s like working for one of the celebrities who like to vacation here.

She looks like a celebrity too, with her barely wrinkled skin, which has never been touched by the slightest prick of Botox, her big blue eyes, and her long, perfectly curled white hair, which never seems to suffer the horrors of hat head.

She does occasionally wear oversized reading glasses, but somehow she manages to make even those look elegant.

I look longingly at the bottle of schnapps in Eileen’s hand, and she winks at me and adds an extra-large splash to my cup. She knows as well as I do that good news can be bittersweet. I’m thrilled for my friend, obviously, but I’m also sad my big adventure with her is ending.

Charlie has lived in Hideaway Harbor for a year and a half, ever since she answered an ad posted by an eccentric rich woman seeking a portrait artist for her cat.

Painting animals is Charlie’s specialty.

The woman offered to pay for her travel expenses from our hometown of Asheville to Hideaway Harbor, along with a rental car and an Airbnb in town.

It was exactly the sort of adventure I’d longed to go on myself—and would have if my mother’s terminal illness weren’t so far advanced at that point—so I’d urged Charlie to go.

She’d fallen in love with Hideaway Harbor, and after her host introduced her to Eileen, she’d decided to stay.

The part-time hours at the coffee shop fit perfectly with her commissioned work as an artist.

Then my mother died last fall. The house filled with an echoing emptiness that broke my heart again every morning.

I was desperate to escape it. So I visited Charlie in Hideaway Harbor this past spring, on an unseasonably hot weekend, when everyone was walking around in shorts and summer dresses.

We spent the day on the water, ate takeout with sand still in our toes, and then got cheap red mani-pedis while speculating about the wellness treatments offered at The Haven, Hideaway’s fancy spa we couldn’t afford.

It was the perfect visit, idyllic. So when she’d begged me to move here so we could live together again, just like we’d been able to do for that ever-too-brief semester my freshman year of college, it had felt like fate.

Especially since Eileen had offered to hire me part time too—and said it would be “no problem at all” to mold my schedule around some online continuing education classes I was taking.

Eileen herself is an inspiration. Despite having lost Murray, her husband of thirty-two years, two years ago, she’s in love with love and sees it everywhere.

She can always look up at the sky and point out the one cloud that looks like a heart.

Every drink at the café is named after a famous poet or romantic hero in literature.

We have the Heathcliff, the Romeo, the Byron, and the Fabio—because he’d been on the covers of half of her favorite books for the better part of a decade—among others.

Every latte and cup of tea comes with a heart-shaped macaron.

Even though I’ve never been in love with a man, I adore the idea of finding home in another person, and I fell in love with the café. I wanted to move to Hideaway and spend my days surrounded by the café’s pink mugs, high-pile rugs, and expansive view of the quaint downtown area.

It felt like a world of possibility was waiting for me in Hideaway Harbor.

At the end of my perfect vacation, Charlie squeezed my hand and said, “Please come. We’ll do all of it together, Lucy. All of the things left in your magic ball.”

The “magic ball” was a gift from my mother—a spherical, mosaic glass container with a wooden lid. Before the last stretch of her illness, she’d secretly filled it with…prompts, I guess you’d call them. Her attorney had given the colorful container to me after she passed away.

The prompts were simple but beautiful in their simplicity.

Bite into a ripe strawberry and think of that time we went strawberry picking and that man with the mullet tried to juggle with them.

Take a walk along the water and listen to the sound it makes.

Go to a psychic with a friend. I’ve always wanted to do that, but I wasn’t brave enough.

She’d left me a prompt for each day after she died, for a full year, to help get me through my grief. True to her word, Charlie had completed many of the prompts with me, even after moving in with her fiancé Lars last month, but I’d decided to do the last one alone. Just Mom and me.

I pulled the final paper last night:

Listen to your favorite song and dance like no one’s watching.

I did just as it said, blasting my favorite song on Spotify, and I wept, which is probably the first time anyone’s ever sobbed to Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” I figure it’s definitely the first time anyone did it while dancing around a Christmas tree.

Eileen pushes the hot chocolate across the counter to me, pulling me out of the memory. “Drink it up, dear. You’ve earned it.”

After I take it from her, she emerges from behind the counter and wraps her arms around Charlie, who sets her hot chocolate down and hugs her back. I know from experience that Eileen’s hugs are warm and smell like chocolate and cinnamon.

“If you hadn’t set me up with Lars, this never would have happened,” my friend says, beaming.

A sigh seeps out of me, escaping past the too-large smile.

We did set them up. In fact, it happened on that warm, sun-filled spring trip, when love had seemed as obtainable as the popsicles sold by the beach.

He’d come into the café, Charlie had taken notice of him, and we’d all but pushed her at him.

I’m happy for both of them—Lars is lovely and sweet and looks like a lost Skarsg?rd brother—but I have to admit I’m a little sad for myself. Because I’ve never experienced love for myself. Only through other people and in my books. I’m hungry for it. For life.

I’ve never had a pet, even though I long for one.

I’ve never gone to Europe, something else I long for.

And, up until last month, I’d never lived alone.

“Drink up,” Eileen says, pointing to my cup, and I realize she and Charlie have stopped their happy dance and my friend is watching me with concern.

I take a sip and try to fix my wavering smile, probably overcorrecting. “So, are you going to wait until after Christmas to do the engagement party? Can we have it here? Or maybe—”

“Your smile is scaring me,” Charlie says.

“It’s scaring me a bit too,” I say with a sigh, taking a bigger sip of the hot chocolate. “Have you told your mother?”

Charlie’s not close to her parents, both of whom are stern corporate types who aren’t pleased their only child is a bohemian artist whose environmentalist boyfriend makes a living following birds around.

“Yes, and she’s thrilled,” Charlie jokes with sparkling eyes.

“Come, sit.” Eileen gestures to the pink armchairs assembled in the corner of the room by the front window.

A visiting businessman once fell asleep in one of those armchairs.

Of course, Eileen being Eileen, she’d sent over a single local woman to wake him up, hoping it might be their meet-cute.

It might have worked if he hadn’t jolted and accidentally spilled the cold coffee he was still holding all over her blouse.

We lower into the chairs, and Charlie sets her hot chocolate on the coffee table and takes my hand.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “It’s just, I pulled the last prompt from the magic ball last night. It’s hard to believe it’s over.”

Her eyes widen and she swears. “It was last night? Oh shit. I’m such a selfish bi—”

“No,” I say, squeezing her hand. “You’re happy. You should be happy! You and Lars are getting married, and you’re going to have lots of enormous children together, and probably way too many pets for two people to take care of.”

Eileen chuckles.

“Very funny,” Charlie says, pulling off her cap. A few hairs dance above her head, static-charged. “And what an obvious deflection. I should have been there, Lucy. We should have done it together. What was this one?”

“Dancing to Britney Spears. It was cathartic until I realized the blinds were open and someone was watching me from the street.”

“Was it a man?” Eileen asks excitedly.

“Oh, here it comes,” I groan. “You’ve got one of your assistants engaged, and you’ve already moved on to the next.”

“As if you weren’t always on her matchmaking docket,” Charlie says. “She’s got half a dozen schemes running. You’ve seen her list.”

I have. Eileen keeps a Google doc of the town’s single people and is constantly trying to match them up.

I know several of the people on her list, of course, and most of them aren’t aware they’re on there.

I know for a fact that Audrey, the fantastically talented chef/owner of Making Whoopie, the bakery just next door to us, has no idea that Eileen has an ebbing and flowing list of candidates for her.