Chapter Three
Kaylee
Kaylee stood in front of the large espresso machine, steaming a silver pitcher of milk for the four drinks she had on deck.
Judging by the line out the door, she’d have a dozen more soon, so she needed to be quick.
If there was one thing she’d learned while working at Heart Stop Coffee Shop, it was how to multitask like The Flash.
She looked out the big window at the street, watching the clumps of people pass by.
Strings of white twinkling lights lined the perimeter of the window, but other than that, the view of Holiday was unobscured.
Several businesses across the street blocked her full view of the town square, which consisted of three historical landmarks, a lot of green grass when it wasn’t covered in fall leaves, and a park with a sculpture of a two-story potato standing at attention.
They were close enough to Lava Hot Springs to bring the tourist crowd in the summer, but during the fall and winter months, the quirky town’s festivities drew in people on their own.
From Fall Fest to their Spooky Straw Maze out at the Meyers’ farm, followed by the Thanksgiving parade and town potluck, there was plenty of small-town charm to attract tourists.
Kaylee flipped a bottle of caramel drizzle in her hand and squeezed a heart on top of the coffee she was making. Several patrons who were watching nearby applauded, and she grinned. If the movie Cocktail had been set in a café, she would have been Tom Cruise but with boobs.
The place was hopping thanks to an even greater influx of tourists after Holiday, Idaho, was featured in Small Town USA’s Christmas episode.
The town’s Potato Lights Spectacular caught the producer’s attention, and they’d come out just after Labor Day to film.
Everyone banded together to set up Main Street and the square exactly as they would on the day after Thanksgiving, minus the dusting of snow Eastern Idaho usually gets in late November.
The number of people made her nervous, and Kaylee wished she could hide out for the next two weeks to avoid the crowds, but unfortunately, her friends and neighbors would have something to say about that.
After everything that had happened, she needed the comfort of the familiar.
Craved it. After her first town meeting, they’d pulled her in for every holiday celebration, making her a part of something like she’d grown up there.
It put her in a constant war within herself on whether to scare them off or soak up the connections as long as she could.
It wasn’t just the crowds that were making her bah, humbug the holidays.
Kaylee had never celebrated Christmas with anyone but her parents and Elasia until she’d taken off.
That first Christmas she’d spent alone in a cheap hotel, crying into a carton of store bought eggnog that was mostly rum and having the overwhelming urge to call her family.
Even in her drunken misery, Kaylee kept telling herself that while she stayed away from them, they were safe, but it didn’t stop her from missing them.
She thought about how, on Christmas Eve, her mother insisted that her siblings and Kaylee gather in the living room to listen to Christmas stories she read aloud, no matter how old they got and she swallowed back a lump of emotion, dumping two tablespoons of white chocolate into an empty cup.
As for Elasia, their usual holiday celebration consisted of exchanging overpriced boxes of See’s Candies and gorging on them while they watched various holiday movies that ranged from slightly cheesy to nacho.
Kaylee laughed out loud at her own mental joke. Elasia would have laughed, too. Then she’d have called her cringey.
She shook her head, pushing the sadness away. Kaylee couldn’t dwell on the past. She had to concentrate on moving forward.
Starting with the row of drinks in front of her.
Tipping shot after shot of espresso into each cup, she smiled at the crowd of coffee lovers chatting. There were several men and women giving one another the look, as Jolene Newbury called it. As the town matchmaker, Jolene relished pointing out when she knew sparks would fly between two people.
Kaylee thought the whole matchmaking hoopla was a crock. Just a way to filch money from desperate people, but she’d never say that out loud. She loved Jolene and wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings. She just didn’t believe all the hype.
Setting four drinks on the bar, she hollered, “Kathleen, Bruce, Shelly, and Clint, your orders are up!”
They each approached the bar for their drinks, thanked her, and Kaylee smiled, barely meeting their eyes. She didn’t take chances. She pulled the brim of her black cap lower and went back to work.
A cheerful holiday beat erupted from the overhead speakers, and her boss, Dana, wiggled her hips and did the sprinkler, earning a laugh from Kaylee and a few nearby patrons.
“Come on, Kaylee, rock out with me!” she called gleefully, doing the mashed potato.
Dana loved dance moves from the fifties and sixties; she was no different with Christmas music.
She was only thirty-six, but she’d been raised by her grandparents and grown up on their favorite music and movies.
Even her style of dress was straight from a 1965 magazine cover: today she wore a pin-up-style polka-dot dress, her auburn hair styled in a stiff updo, and bright red lipstick.
She was someone the men in town always stared at but never approached.
Unless they were from out of town and didn’t know about the Great Wall of Dana, then she would just let them down easy.
As a single mom whose marriage had been a cyclone of emotional and physical abuse, she’d told Kaylee more than once that she’d never fall for a man again.
In Kaylee’s opinion, it was a smart move. It was hard to trust people these days.
“That’s the jingle bell rock!” Dana sang in between taking customer orders.
Kaylee laughed and did a little shimmy for Dana’s benefit, earning a cheer from the older woman. For someone who was trying to fly under the radar, Kaylee tended to surround herself with colorful characters.
“Hey, Kaylee!” Cal Larson, one of her regulars, called from the register counter. He was a nice man in his forties who worked a variety of jobs, including summer road construction projects and winter road plowing.
“What’s up, Cal?”
“Working for a dollar.” He scratched under his worn, dirty ball cap at the dark, shiny skin beneath as he grinned crookedly. “What’s good here?”
Cal asked the same thing every morning just to tease her, and she huffed in exasperation. “Like I’ve told you a million times, it’s all good! Now stop being a pain in the rear and order your apple fritters.”
He arched his dark brows. “Maybe I want something different today, Miss Smarty-Pants.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes. “You always say you want something different but end up with the fritters.”
“Touché. Can’t argue with that. I’ll take two.” Cal handed his money over to Dana, then added loudly, “Your employee is picking on me.”
Dana laid his change across his open palm with a huff. “Good! It’s in her job description to give the customers a bad time.”
Kaylee laughed. “Thanks, boss.”
Cal grabbed his bag of donuts off the counter and dropped a five in the tip jar. “Thanks for busting my balls, ladies.”
“Later, Cal! Be careful,” Kaylee said.
“Always, sweetheart.”
The bell on the door rang when he exited, and Dana groaned. “Remind me to throw that bell away after we close.”
“But how will we know when customers come in if it doesn’t jingle?”
Dana snorted. “With this crowd, I think we’ll notice.”
A few customers who overheard laughed. Kaylee set five more drinks up on the counter and hollered, “Paula, Jennifer, Ray, Tim, and Rick.”
As each customer stepped forward and picked up their order, they thanked her. She glanced up from another pot of foaming milk to see that there was still one unclaimed cup. She turned it to see the name and shouted, “Yo, Rick! I got your nonfat vanilla latte with extra foam. Get it while it’s hot.”
She scanned the sea of faces, but no one stepped forward.
“Come on, Rick! You’d better claim it before I start taking bids!”
More laughter from the crowd.
Suddenly, a man with mahogany hair stood up behind a couple in the corner.
He stepped around them, and she got a good look at him.
An oval face with high cheekbones and tan skin.
His eyes were obscured by dark sunglasses.
A black leather jacket stretched across broad shoulders.
Kaylee’s heart pounded like ocean waves crashing against the sand until it drowned out the buzz of conversation around her.
Between them was an espresso machine and a countertop, yet he was still too close.
He slid his shades up his forehead and into his hair, exposing eyes black as sin.
“Hello, Kaylee.”