Chapter 1
“I can’t believe this,” Rocco said incredulously, partly to Rebecca, the employee he’d inherited from Holly and Joelle, who’d owned Jolly Java before he’d bought it from them, and partly to himself.
Rebecca shot him a frank look. “It’s been this empty in the afternoons for a week,” she said.
The one thing he could say about Rebecca was she could make a mean latte and she was unflinchingly honest. Okay, that was two things.
Two whole things! Rocco gave a weak cheer, and she sent him another one of those questioning looks as she cleaned the tables scattered through the little coffee shop. It was quaint. It was old-fashioned.
When Rocco had taken it over maybe it had been a little too quaint, maybe a little too old-fashioned. He’d spruced up the interior. Painted the walls a modern coffee-with-a-hint-of-cream brown, with darker espresso trim. New tables and chairs.
He’d modernized the equipment. The logo.
He’d changed out the beans the owners had been buying for years for a higher quality Italian brand.
Stopped buying baked goods from Joel at Ginger’s Breads Bakery, putting out a full gourmet spread of pastries that he baked in the back kitchen.
He’d put his stamp on it, the Rocco Moretti stamp.
And since Morettis were scattered across the whole US now, spreading their culinary magic, he’d thought that would be a welcome stamp.
His first realization that maybe he’d made a misstep was when four customers complained the day he debuted his special fall drink.
Not the pumpkin spice latte, like the original Jolly Java had been famous for, but a new creation he’d come up with, a marzipan latte that apparently nobody wanted.
Pumpkin spice! Like Rocco would ever be that freaking basic.
It was disappointing and frustrating, but Rocco had still been sure these were just growing pains.
Everyone said the tourist season, when Christmas Falls hosted its huge holiday themed festival, was crazy, and he’d be packed.
And he did have customers. A steady enough stream of tourists in the mornings, but most locals had abandoned him and Jolly Java. After ten AM, the place was deader than a doornail. He’d never even gotten a chance to implement his new lunch menu.
Instead of a cozy cafe full of regulars whom Rocco knew by name and by order, he had a lot of tourists he saw maybe once or twice, and a few Christmas Falls residents who didn’t visit with the regularity Holly and Joelle had described.
It was not the community-forward, familial atmosphere he’d hoped for when he’d taken every penny he’d earned from fourteen to twenty-eight and bought this place.
Rocco slumped down to the front counter.
He’d been so sure he’d win over the town with good Italian cappuccino and his delicious pastries.
But instead, the majority of them had started going to Ginger’s Breads, even being willing to trade his high-quality espresso for the free self-service coffee Joel served with his baked goods.
Rocco had been in the line in the grocery store just the other day and had gotten to listen to one woman complaining to the other about the changes—and how she’d started saving a bundle by not getting her oat milk latte every morning.
“I told you,” Rebecca said as she approached the counter, where Rocco was gently banging his head against the reclaimed wood. That he hadn’t needed to replace, because the coffee bar itself, stretching across one side of Jolly Java, was gorgeous.
“I took the turmeric and goat cheese scone off the menu! I added pumpkin spice back on,” Rocco argued. The scone had been a stretch, and he’d known it, but he’d also envisioned a future where the townspeople of Christmas Falls had been willing to have Rocco expand their palates.
“Yeah, you gotta win them back somehow,” Rebecca said, sympathetically.
Her empathy, while kind, felt like poison in his gut.
What if he failed . . .no, that was not even an option. Morettis didn’t fail. Especially not in any kind of food-related business.
His grandmother, whom everyone called Nonna, had started a famous chain of Italian restaurants in the Napa Valley, restaurants that his cousin Luca now ran with an expert hand, along with his six other siblings.
Luca also owned a gourmet bistro in the tiny town of Indigo Bay, South Carolina, with his husband, Oliver, and tourists came to town just to eat there.
Dante and Beatrice, his parents, ran their own little jewel of an Italian restaurant in the hills of San Francisco, and it regularly made lists of “Best Italian in the City” and “Best Neighborhood Spot.” Some of his parents’ clients had celebrated twenty anniversaries at the same goddamn table.
And here was Rocco.
Three months here and already a has-been.
“I’ve tried to spread the word that pumpkin spice is back and god help us, gingerbread, too,” Rocco said, motioning to the artistic chalkboard sign sitting just outside the door.
Rebecca leaned against the counter. Lifting Rocco’s head so he’d stop thwacking it against the counter.
“Stop that. You’re gonna give yourself a concussion, and then what are you going to do? Listen, these people are creatures of habit. Most of them were born here and grew up here and never left. Jolly Java is a part of that tradition. Give them that tradition back.”
It was hard to give something back to someone when he’d been so eager to change it it felt like he’d barely given the original a second glance.
Sure, he had Rebecca as a resource, but every time he suggested making a change back to what they’d had before, she’d given him one of those looks that said, but that isn’t going to fix it.
Well, he had to fix it.
“I’m trying,” Rocco said. “I gave them goddamn pumpkin spice back, didn’t I?” He shuddered.
“It’s not about flavors, though that certainly isn’t going to hurt you.” Rebecca’s mouth quirked into a little smile. “You know that.”
“I spent the last two weeks trying to get the festival committee to consider letting me supply the cookies for the tree lighting, thinking maybe I could convince the town to try me again.” When Rebecca shot him another one of those looks, he kept going.
“I was even going to serve goddamn normal things, I swear. Chocolate chip and sugar and snickerdoodle and peanut butter. I showed up more than once with baskets of cookies. Fresh baked! And you know what they said?”
Rebecca sighed. “I can only imagine.”
“Joel’s handling it. Joel knows what he’s doing. Like I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“You did take pumpkin spice off the menu.” She was smiling again, and yes, it sounded very stupid when she said it now.
His head had just been building castles in the sky.
“Holly and Joelle supplied cookies every year to the tree lighting before last year. Joel does it one year and he ‘knows what he’s doing’!” Rocco made a frustrated noise and re-started banging his head, before Rebecca stopped him again, grabbing him by a handful of dark curls.
“You’ll figure something out,” Rebecca promised. “You’re a smart guy. You’re good at this, when you get out of your own way.”
“Thanks,” Rocco said dryly. “But we Morettis aren’t just ‘good at this’! We’re spectacular! We’re fabulous! We’re fucking synonymous with flavor and experience.”
“No? Are y’all as dramatic as that, too?”
Rocco laughed, because otherwise he was going to cry. “Believe it or not, I’m from the undramatic branch of the family.”
Rebecca joined him, downright cackling with delight at this impossibility. “Would one of your cousins be on his knees by now, rending his garments and banging his fists on the floor?”
It was easier to keep laughing, and even easier still when Rocco considered this.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Gabe, yes. He’d be beside himself.
He’s so fucking emotional. And Lorenzo? Yeah.
He’d be right alongside there with him, unless it messed up his perfect hair.
Luca? He’d have issued an edict ordering everyone to return, or else. ”
“Or else?”
“There’d be a town coup if Luca was in charge. Governmental change number one would be a law requiring everyone to visit Jolly Java once a day.”
“Well, there’s always that,” Rebecca said lightly.
“There’s always that,” Rocco retorted morosely.
“Well, one positive about being slow today is that we can close early, for the tree lighting,” Rebecca said. “You gonna head over?”
“So I can eat perfect Joel’s perfect cookies? No fucking thank you,” Rocco said.
“Rocco,” Rebecca chided.
He sighed. “No,” he murmured. “I’m not in the mood. Maybe I’ll take up that whole tray of pastries and gorge myself on the couch, watching the worst TV I can find.”
“I think Real Housewives has a Duluth edition, these days,” Rebecca teased.
“Ugh, that might actually be better than thinking about how I’ve messed this up,” Rocco said.
Rebecca whacked him on the shoulder before turning and heading to the front door, flicking off the open sign, grabbing the chalkboard sign, and tucking it behind a row of barstools that stood on the new tall bar that ran alongside the big picture window.
Rocco had imagined people sitting there, working on their laptops and enjoying the beautifully decorated streets of downtown Christmas Falls.
That had not happened.
“Come on,” she said, “you’re gonna come with me to the tree lighting. It’s your first one here, you can’t miss it because you’re throwing yourself a big pity party.”
“I’m not exactly in a festive mood,” Rocco argued.
“Doesn’t matter.” Rebecca shot him another look, but this one was softer, affectionate. “In Christmas Falls, everyone’s welcome. Even grinches.”