Chapter 9
Nine
Holly
The Silver Bell Falls’ community hall is always hopping on Friday night, but on the second weekend in December, with the annual Gingerbread Jubilee about to get underway?
Well, it’s a bona fide madhouse in here.
The long room is packed with folding tables, each one a chaotic hub of activity as teams from various town businesses and families prepare for the starting buzzer.
Christmas music blasts from giant speakers in the corner, a peppy, pop-punk version of “Deck the Halls,” a little too aggressive to make it easy to communicate with your teammates.
But that’s all part of the psychological warfare.
The mayor’s husband, Mattie, is in charge of the music and very invested in keeping his wife, Hattie, in the winner’s circle for another year.
But if I have anything to say about it, Hattie’s reign ends tonight.
She’s had a strong five years, but this year is mine, dammit!
I take a deep breath, centering myself while fanning my face with my gingerbread house plans. They turned the heat off half an hour ago, but it’s still boiling in here, despite the cracked windows. Turns out, I shouldn’t have worn my blue sweater, after all, but it’s too late now.
I’ll just have to think chill thoughts and trust my deodorant to hold up under the strain. I’m sure my nerves will calm down once we actually get started.
I mean, I’ve assembled a powerhouse team.
I’m the project manager and creative director, armed with a detailed architectural sketch of our project: a charmingly rustic replica of the Silver Bell Falls town hall.
My crew consists of Marge, the head librarian, a woman known for her meticulous attention to detail, her ten-year-old grandson, Timmy, who has won several school art competitions and demonstrated impressive hand-eye coordination for a human of any age, and Paulie, a local baker who once made it to the semi-finals on Cupcake Battle Royale.
On paper, we’re unstoppable.
We’ll just have to see if we live up to the hype in real life.
“I brought extra frosting!” Marge announces cheerfully as she and Timmy arrive ten minutes before showtime. She plunks two massive tubs of store-bought vanilla onto our already crowded table. “You can never have too much icing, right?”
“Right. This will be great for the snow around city hall,” I say, beaming as I tuck the icing under the table, making more room for our premade cookie pieces and all the equipment needed to make Candy’s top secret Hard as Glue and Tasty Too icing.
My bestie kindly shared her recipe for her magical icing, the kind that stays soft just long enough to pull a gingerbread house together before drying as hard as concrete.
She’s used it to create masterpieces at the Reindeer Corner’s Inn over the past few years and assured me it’s the only icing capable of holding our ambitious design together.
Store-bought frosting does not have the chops for this job.
But hopefully, I do. I’ve practiced whipping egg whites so many times between last year’s competition and this one, I’m pretty sure I could crank out a perfect batch of Hard as Glue in my sleep.
And Paulie has the kind of deft, professional baker’s touch certain to slice our gingerbread into the perfect shapes with minimal breakage.
Each team only gets a set amount of gingerbread. With a design as large and ambitious as ours, we can’t afford mistakes.
“All right, Ginger Jubileers, on your marks,” Mattie calls out through his megaphone as the clock counts down to go time. “In five, four, three, two, and one!”
The starting bell rings, and a cheer fills the room.
Followed quickly by frantic attempts to communicate over the music Mattie has once again cranked up to an unreasonable decibel…
Shooting a glare his way, I raise my voice, reading our first step in the directions aloud as I get started on the icing.
For the first ten minutes, things progress perfectly!
I whip out icing and delegate while Paulie assembles the gingerbread walls according to my sketch.
Timmy sorts the candy decorations into piles, preparing to slap the flourishes into place the moment we’re ready to move on to step two.
Marge follows behind Paulie, adding extra icing glue to the weaker-looking junctions.
I am a fun, festive, highly capable leader in her holiday element!
I am executing on the plan!
I am not going to lose again to Hattie, who has more than her fair share of first-place medals already, and is honestly kind of crossing a line, what with the Mattie musical sabotage and installing her sister-in-law on the judging committee.
I am flying high on the wings of anticipated victory when the first crack appears.
Literally…
“Uh, Holly?” Paulie calls from the end of the table. “These cookies are way too dry. We’ve already got breakage.”
“What?” Pausing the blender, I hurry over, heart lurching into my throat at the sight of the fissure snaking up the center of one of our main walls. It’s right in the front of the structure, no less! “Crap,” I mutter. “Are all of them like that?”
He nods, motioning to several already-fractured pieces on the table. “They are.” He glances around before adding in a voice for my ears only, “All of our cookies are, anyway. Other tables seem to have perfectly baked gingerbread that’s taking to the construction process just fine.”
Jaw dropping, I gasp, “No! You don’t think—”
“That we’ve been the victims of sabotage?
” he cuts in, lips pressing into a tight line as he glares toward Hattie’s table in the corner.
“I mean, I don’t have any proof. But the fact that the woman whose team got three points away from taking Hattie’s title last year is the only one with cracky cookies smells fishy to me. ”
“What smells fishy?” Marge asks, bending her nose to the icing bowl in her arms. “It’s not the icing, is it? I think it smells good. Maybe not as good as store-bought, but…”
Ignoring the sacrilege that has just slipped from Marge’s lips, I do my best to throw off the conspiracy theory and focus on fixing the problem. If I let myself tumble down that rabbit hole, I might end up going after Hattie’s gingerbread library with a baseball bat.
I am a very nice person.
I am also very competitive.
It’s a problem, one I’m reflecting seriously on in my morning journal entries, but won’t be fixed today.
I clap my hands together, forcing cheer into my voice as I say, “Okay, new plan! We’ll cover the entire front of the town hall in a thin coating of icing to hold it all together.
Then, once it’s dry, we’ll have Timmy jam in there with a few extra flourishes to disguise any visible imperfections. Sound good?”
Timmy, who is a boy of few words, gives a thumbs-up.
Marge nods fast enough to make her ample bosom ripple.
Paulie also nods, but I’m pretty sure he’s also still plotting revenge.
Which is fine. He can plot all he wants as long as he erects gingerbread walls while he’s at it.
The next twenty minutes are a tension-filled masterclass in escalating chaos.
Timmy, apparently as stressed as the rest of us, despite his silence, starts biting his nails, prompting Marge to order him to the bathroom to wash his hands every two to three minutes.
Paulie continues to shine, but unfortunately, the cookies also continue to crack.
Marge, convinced more frosting is the answer to everything, tries to sneak the store-bought out from under the table to “help.”
I am no longer a competent leader.
I am a firefighter in a burning bakery, armed with nothing but gasoline and shattered dreams. My perfect town hall replica has been downgraded to “structurally unsound mansion haunted by the losses of Christmas past,” and it’s quickly becoming clear we will not be taking home gold this year.
Still, I try my best to keep a cheery smile on my face for the team.
Even when Marge finally succeeds in spackling store-bought garbage onto the east wall while my back is turned, resulting in a slow, dramatic implosion that summons a collective gasp from our table, I will myself to hold it together.
“Oh, no,” Marge whispers. “I guess it really was too heavy and thick. Like you said.”
“Told you,” Timmy whispers before promptly returning to chewing his nails to bits.
Paulie heaves a tragic sigh for the ages, and then we all just…stand there. Speechless in the wreckage. The entire front wall is gone, leaving a gaping hole and a pile of frosting-smeared rubble.
We have failed.
Utterly and completely.
I’m considering face-planting into the center of the mess to hide my shame, when a voice rumbles from behind me, “What in God’s name happened here?”
I turn to see Luke hovering at the edge of our disaster zone, looking like he just stepped out of an issue of Sexy Businessman Relaxing on the Weekend Monthly.
In a grey cashmere sweater that hugs his broad shoulders and dark designer jeans, he is the kind of yummy that would soothe a girl’s soul if she weren’t currently lost in the haunted gingerbread house of despair.
“You’re early,” I finally manage, my voice emerging as a squeak. “Clean-up isn’t for another hour.”
“I meant to be here earlier. To cheer you on or…whatever one does at an event like this,” he says, making my battle-weary heart perk up a little.
“But there was a sleigh ride traffic jam on Main Street. Half the Santas apparently never learned to drive.” He surveys the carnage of our workstation, his gaze moving from the collapsed wall to Marge’s frosting-smeared hands.
“What can I do to help? It looks like we need to address some structural issues?”
I blink, certain that he’s joking.
Surely, this is sarcasm at its very driest.
After all, this is a man who hates Christmas tomfoolery, and it doesn’t get much more foolery-filled than this.
But when his gaze shifts my way, all I see is a sincere desire to help pull me and my band of misfits back from the edge.
I nod, rolling my shoulders back. “I think we need some help regrouping. We got stuck with a crappy batch of cookies.” I motion to Paulie, on my right.
“Paulie’s a professional baker, so he’s doing a fantastic job with assembly.
But our raw materials aren’t up to snuff.
So, we’re shoring them up with a thin coat of my fast-drying homemade icing. ”
“Not the store-bought icing I used without permission,” Marge pipes up with a sheepish smile. “I learned from my mistake. I promise I did.”
“And I’m putting the decorations on,” Timmy whispers almost too softly to hear, pointing to the rear of the structure. “I already started.”
Luke shifts to observe the back, nodding seriously. “You’ve done a great job. Keep going with that, Timmy. The rest of us will get the front fixed and ready for you to continue your work as quickly as possible. How long do we have left?”
I glance at the clock, my pulse spiking. “Fifty-two minutes?”
“I’m so sorry!” Marge whimpers again.
“Right, then we’d better get to it.” Luke takes off his coat, folding it with precision and placing it on a clean chair. Then, he pushes up his sweater and starts rolling the button-down sleeves beneath, revealing forearms corded with muscle and dusted with fine, dark hair.
And that’s it.
One look at those highly capable, sexy as hell forearms is all the inspiration I need to get my groove back.
My shoulders, which have been somewhere up around my ears for the last hour, drop, and a steady quiet settles over me.
Luke’s here to back me up.
He’s here because he wants to be, not because our blackmail pact demands it.
The knowledge infuses me with a ridiculous, intoxicating surge of hope.
Maybe, just maybe, we still have a chance.