Chapter 18
Becken
Saturday arrived with all the subtlety of a chumble mama rushing to protect her babies.
I found myself standing in the function hall before dawn, staring at what looked like the aftermath of a Christmas decoration explosion, while Carla paced through the debris with barely controlled panic written across her face.
Everything that could, had gone wrong, and the parade was only hours away.
The woman was driving me to distraction, and not because she was flustered about the costumes or the Santa suit. I still didn’t know how to tell her everything in my heart.
“What happened?” I asked, taking in the scattered garland, broken ornaments, and dejected-looking evergreen trees.
“It snowed. Again. And the temporary storage shelf collapsed during the night. I dragged it all in here to go through it.” Her voice held barely controlled frustration.
“Everything for Santa’s workshop is wrecked.
The backdrop, most of the decorations, even some of the gifts we’d set aside for those getting photos.
” She looked up at me with tears in her eyes.
“There isn’t time to fix it all, is there? ”
I surveyed the damage. Days of careful preparation, ruined in one night. “Can we salvage anything?”
“Some of it, maybe. But we’d need to rebuild most of the display.” She ran her hands through her hair. “But the parade starts in six hours. We also have to get ready for that.”
“Then we’d better get started.”
Her head snapped up. “You’re not upset?”
“Upset won’t fix anything.” I started sorting through the debris, separating items in decent shape from the rest. “Panic won’t either. We work with what we have.”
“I can’t believe you’re being so calm about this.”
“One of us should be.”
She stared at me for a moment, then burst into hysterical laughter. “You’re right. I’m freaking out, aren’t I?” She started gathering broken ornaments and tossing them into a trash barrel. “Okay, what do we need to do first?”
We worked to rebuild Santa’s workshop from whatever materials we could find.
Carla proved resourceful, fashioning new decorations from spare fabric and repurposing broken ornaments into something functional.
I handled the structural repairs, reinforcing the backdrop and the throne area that had also been in the shed.
We’d needed the function hall for a midnight wedding last night.
“Hand me that hammer,” she called from across the room, where she was attempting to reattach garland to a support beam.
I brought it over, and she immediately put me to work holding things in place while she secured them.
The close quarters meant constant contact—her hand brushing mine as she reached for supplies, her shoulder bumping my arm as we maneuvered around each other, the occasional full-body collision when we both moved in the same direction.
Each touch sent awareness shooting through me, heightened by the stress and adrenaline of our race against time.
“Becken, can you… Oh.” She’d turned to ask for something just as I moved behind her, and suddenly we were pressed together, her front against my chest, my hands on her waist to steady us both.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moved. Then she cleared her throat and stepped away. “Sorry. Can you hold this while I nail it down?”
“Of course.”
We returned to work, but the tension between us had ratcheted up another notch.
Finally, we stepped back and studied it.
Carla leaned into my side, swiping hair off her face. “It looks…wonderful.” She glanced up at me. “Thank you for your help. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
I wanted to put my arms around her, hold her, tell her everything was going to be alright, but I wasn’t sure where this was going between us. Instead, I stepped back and peered around. “What else needs to be done?”
With one last lingering look I couldn’t interpret, she walked over to point at spots on the town square map spread across a table she was using as a desk.
“The crowd barriers need to be positioned here and here to funnel people in a weaving line toward the function hall.” Her sleeve slid up enough to show the golden mating mark on her wrist, and my jaw clenched.
“That way, families with small children can see without being pushed by those around them.”
I forced my attention to the logistics. “Let’s go through the entire project and make a list of what we still need to do.”
“Alright.” She slid a pen and a pad of paper my way.
“What about security checkpoints at both ends of Main Street?”
“Dungar’s handling that. He’s got volunteers stationed every fifty feet.
” She traced the parade route with her finger.
“The parade will enter from the west, circle the square twice, then return to the starting point except for you. Santa, that is. You’ll stop the sorhoxes out front and come inside to sit with the children for photos. ”
She sighed. “I think the only problem we don’t have is with the sorhoxes. Peeka and Thrakul have been responding well to the crowd noise training.”
With the help of Max and a few of his school friends, we’d spent the past few days preparing the sorhoxes for the parade, exposing them to increasingly loud sounds and chaotic environments.
Carla had proven surprisingly good at reading their moods, suggesting adjustments to our approach that showed real understanding of their psychology.
“They trust you,” I’d told her yesterday after she’d successfully calmed Thrakul during a particularly difficult training session.
“They trust you,” she’d said. “I’m just following your lead.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. The sorhoxes had started responding to her voice, her touch, her presence. She’d earned their respect through patience and consistency, the same way she’d earned mine.
“I’ll call Ruugar and ask him to make sure the barriers are set up outside,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“What else?”
She consulted her list. “We need to dress the sorhoxes again and lead them around the outskirts of town to the parade starting point. I don’t want the kids seeing them until they’re hitched to the sleigh, but I want to make sure one more time that they’re comfortable with their antlers and bells.”
“We can do that an hour or so before the parade.”
“Sounds good. I need to go check on a few things with Dungar.” She gathered her tablet and headed for the door, pausing when she reached it. “Becken?”
“Yes?”
“I appreciate you letting me be part of all this. You’ve trusted me with something important to your community.”
The sincerity in her voice made my chest tighten. “I appreciate you caring about it as much as we do.”
We stared at each other, the air between us charged with unspoken words. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with the lingering scent of her shampoo.
The afternoon sorhox costume fitting went smoothly.
Peeka stood patiently while Carla adjusted her antler headpiece, and Thrakul barely flinched when she attached the collar of bells around his massive neck.
And when we walked them along the road toward the edge of town where we’d hitch them to the sleigh, they paced beside us placidly.
When we’d reached the sleigh and everyone who wouldwalk in the parade, she stepped back to examine her handiwork. “How do they look?”
“Funny,” I said honestly. “But festive.”
Her laugh made warmth unfurl in my chest. “High praise from our grinchy orc.”
“I thought I was supposed to be Santa.”
“You’re multi-talented.” She caught Peeka trying to scratch her fake antlers against a fence post and strode over to scold her. “No destroying your costume.”
Peeka looked chastened.
“She understands you.”
“It’s people I struggle with.”
The comment was casual, but I heard the hurt beneath it. “You don’t struggle with people here.”
“Here’s different.” She removed Thrakul’s collar and laid it over the rail. “Everyone’s been welcoming and accepting. I keep waiting for the moment when they realize I don’t truly fit in. When the novelty of the newbie wears off and they remember I’m just passing through.”
“You belong here.”
She looked up, vulnerability flickering in her brown eyes. “Do I?”
“Of course. You’ve become part of this place. Part of…” I paused, searching for the right words. “Part of everything that matters.”
“For now.”
“For as long as you want.” I’d been so focused on what I couldn’t ask of her that I’d forgotten the most important thing. She couldn’t choose me if she didn’t know I was an option. But how could I tell her that without making staying with me feel like an obligation?
We stared at each other across Peeka’s snout, and I thought for a moment she was going to say something that would either stun or crush me. Then her tablet buzzed with a message, breaking the spell.
“Holly needs help with the decorations on Main Street,” she said, checking the screen. “I need to go.”
A short time before the parade was due to start, Ostor arrived to help me hitch the sorhoxes to the sleigh, only to find Peeka’s antler headpiece in pieces.
“What happened to her costume?” Carla asked, striding over to join us.
“She must’ve caught it on something while she was waiting,” I said grimly. “Probably trying to scratch an itch.”
She looked like she might cry. “Can we fix it?”
I studied the damage. The headpiece was beyond repair, but maybe… “We can make something simpler. Basic antler shapes, with minimal decoration.”
“With what? We don’t have time to—”
“We’ll make it work.” I was already rushing to the barn and the things we’d tossed in the trash, with Carla hurrying behind me. “Hitch the sorhoxes, Ostor. Please.”
“Will do,” he called out.
Inside the function hall, we sorted through the trash, picking out this and that. Then we laid them on the table. We constructed a new set of antlers with a glue gun and shiny fabric and wire and a few plastic ornaments. Then we stood back to look it over.
“Not bad,” Carla said. “A little lopsided, but it’ll do.”
“Lopsided has character.”
“Everything has character according to you.”
“It’s true.”
She smiled at that. “I’m glad we could make something new.”
“That’s what partners are for.” I hadn’t meant to say that. “Professional partners, that is.”
“Right. Professional.”
We rushed back and attached Peeka’s new antlers, and honestly, they looked fine.
But with only minutes before the parade was about to start, everything else that could go wrong did.
Thrakul spooked when someone in the marching band accidentally dropped their huge drum. He reared up and nearly trampled a group of women dressed as elves. They were acrobats who were going to tumble and spin and do cartwheels to the cheers of the crowd.
It took both Carla and me to calm Thrakul down, and even then he remained skittish.
“He’ll be fine once we get moving,” I told her, though I wasn’t entirely certain. “Sorhoxes do better when they’re not standing around waiting.”
“And if he spooks again during the parade?”
“Then we deal with it.”
That’s when I realized I wasn’t wearing the Santa suit. I raced to the changing area inside the function hall, slipping out the back door and running across the open area to reach the sleigh once dressed.
Dungar joined us, peering around at everyone gathered, some stomping their feet to stay warm, the band tuning their instruments.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes, finally,” Carla said, pirouetting to show off the elf skirt and top she wore over her regular clothing.
I helped her into the sleigh. Climbing up beside her, I lifted the harness straps and called out to Peeka and Thrakul to settle them. The Santa costume felt odd, especially with the middle stuffed with pillows, but I suspected the children would love it.
“Ho ho ho,” I said under my breath.
“Did you just ho your ho-ho?” she asked with a sparkle in her eyes.
I ho-ho’d again, louder this time.
“That wasn’t half bad.”
“High praise.”
“I’m working up to it.”
Despite everything that had gone wrong, I grinned. We’d pulled together a Christmas parade that would bring joy to the people who’d chosen to spend their holiday with us in Lonesome Creek, and we’d done it together.
The parade went perfectly. The sorhoxes performed flawlessly, the crowd cheered, and even Thrakul enjoyed the attention. Children waved and called out to Santa, and I found myself genuinely enjoying the experience.
Afterward, we returned to the function hall to get ready for the children. Our rebuilt Santa’s workshop looked almost as good as the original, and no one seemed to notice the hasty repairs and improvised decorations.
“Somehow, it all worked out fine,” Carla said as the last family left. She shut the entrance door and strode back to join me where I still sat on Santa’s throne. “Despite the snow and the mess and my nerves.”
“We make a good team,” I said.
“The best.” She glowed with accomplishment and exhaustion. Her hair might be frazzled, and her cheeks flushed from excitement, but she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.
“Carla.”
“Yes?”
I left the throne, stepping closer to her. “Today was—”
“Completely insane?”
“Perfect.”
Her breath caught. “You’re sure?”
“Working with you. Solving problems together. Building something important.” I brushed a strand of hair from her face. “All of it.”
“Becken—”
“I know you’re leaving. I know this is temporary. But right now, I don’t care about any of that.”
Her eyes darkened. “What do you care about?”
“You. The way you feel in my arms.”
The space between us disappeared. I cupped her face in my hands, studying her expression for any sign of hesitation. Instead, I saw a hunger that matched my own.
“The door,” she whispered.
I strode past her and turned the lock, then returned to back her against the wall. She fisted the front of my Santa costume and pulled me closer, and I braced my arms on the wall on either side of her head.
“I want to kiss you,” I croaked.
“I want more than a kiss.” The desire in her eyes undid me.
I kissed her, pouring all my pent-up need into the contact.
She responded with equal intensity, her mouth hungry and demanding against mine.
When I lifted her against the wall, she wrapped her legs around me and tugged me closer, deeper into the heat that had been building between us since we left the cabin.
“I want you,” she gasped against my mouth.
“I’m already yours.”