Mistletoe Sky (Frosty Season #6)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Willa

The woman in the khaki trench coat took a sip from her mug, then tilted her head back to let her blond hair, like a golden waterfall, cascade down her back.

Content, she flashed a perfect white smile and said her catchphrase (for the fifty-seventh time today), “In our family, we’d just give up without a Franken cup. ”

Willa’s heart leaped into her chest. “Cut!” she cried, and the crystallized vision on the set before her exploded.

Makeup artists rushed forward to fix the actress’s face, the kid actor in front of the bowl of cereal got up to jig in place, and Willa’s favorite camera operator, Steve, turned to give her a thumbs-up.

They’d been filming all day. He was exhausted. They all were.

“I think we got it?” Willa muttered, mostly to herself. Her heart pumped. It was only her third commercial since her big promotion, and the stakes felt perpetually high.

All eyes were on her. And because she was a woman, almost everyone wanted her to fail and make way for younger men in the business, eager to prove themselves better than any woman behind the camera. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Steve gave her an almost imperceptible nod, and she confirmed it was over. “That’s a wrap on Franken coffee, everyone! Thanks for the brilliant day.”

Since she’d become a director of commercials at her advertising firm, she’d started using the word “brilliant” about a thousand times a day. She didn’t know how to stop and wondered if she annoyed everyone else as much as she irritated herself.

Willa spent the next three hours in post-commercial meetings with her editor before heading to her dressing room to change into a chic black dress. She then went out into the night, fluffing her red hair as she went.

At seven thirty, Chicago was already pitch-dark, and since it was the beginning of December, that meant it was thirty-two degrees. A shiver ran down her spine as she grabbed a cab to take her closer to the lake. Gavin Marsh was waiting, and she knew he didn’t like to wait for long.

Once in the back seat, Willa allowed herself a full five minutes of looking out the window.

The city was all dressed up for Christmas, as it always was, with glowing lights twisting around every telephone pole and every tree.

A man in a Santa hat collected donations in front of the Walgreens on the corner, and a few little girls raced down the sidewalk, wearing elf hats and ballerina outfits under their unzipped coats.

The girls giggled so loudly that the sounds filled the cab. It made Willa’s heart heavy.

Willa forced her eyes away and returned them to her phone, where she checked over her notes and found that, to her surprise, she still didn’t know which client Gavin was trying to connect her with.

All week she’d ached to get out of meeting Gavin, knowing she’d be exhausted after the coffee shoot and want a night to herself, all alone in the apartment she’d bought after the promotion had gone through.

(The fact that they’d accepted her request for a mega-raise had astounded her and made her think, Finally, it all feels worth it.) But being so fresh in her position forced her to say yes to most things.

Gavin Marsh was a fifty-something agent who connected Willa and her company with brands willing to invest heavily in advertising campaigns.

He’d connected them with some of the biggest names in the United States: coffee brands, fast food companies, and kitchen equipment.

Last year, a significant commercial for a diaper company generated more revenue than they’d ever seen before.

That had been before Willa’s promotion, but she’d watched it all from her lower-tier position, knowing that her company was on the up-and-up.

She’d been proud to see her name on their list of assistant directors, proud to list her company as her boss of the last fifteen years. They were making waves.

Gavin stood when she entered. Always dressed to impress, yet with an air of a “young cool guy,” he wore an expensive suit jacket paired with jeans, and a linen shirt that he had unbuttoned to reveal the hollow in his neck.

Sometimes Willa wondered if something was between them, something romantic, but she always shoved that thought to the side.

Dating was nothing she had time for, nothing she’d allowed herself to thoroughly think about since she was twenty-nine or thirty.

She was thirty-seven and devoted to her work.

No, she was thirty-seven and devoted to herself.

She didn’t want to give a scrap of her time or energy to someone who wouldn’t respect her as much as she deserved.

The fact that work took up most of her time didn’t bother her.

Or, fifteen years into her career, it didn’t bother her yet. Maybe it never would!

Gavin shook her hand. “You’re looking wonderful, Willa. Tell me, how did the shoot go?”

Willa sat and crossed her ankles, glancing at the cocktail menu, which didn’t have a single price on it. Typical of a swanky place that Gavin would pick.

“It was relatively fluid. We had a little bit of trouble with our child actor, but that happens. His shirt was itchy on him. I had a ton of empathy.”

Gavin laughed that pleasant laugh of his and told a story about another child actor on another shoot from last year or the one before it, who’d had a terrible head cold.

“But his mother refused to let him go home because she was dead set on him becoming a child star. We had to reason with her for over an hour. The kid was green.”

Willa groaned. “I hate how parents push their kids into things.” Her gut trembled, remembering what her own family had wanted for her—and how far away she was from that.

“This business brings out the worst in people!” Gavin said. “Not us, though.” He winked.

The server came to take their cocktail orders. Willa opted for a summery tequila thing, while Gavin went for something warm and Christmassy.

“Don’t you know what time of year it is?” Gavin teased.

Willa swallowed the lump in her throat. “It’s hard to ignore, I guess.”

“The most magical time of the year,” Gavin said. Willa was pretty sure he was making fun of Christmas people, rather than announcing himself as one.

Willa wouldn’t call herself a Christmas cynic. Instead, she’d say, I don’t deal with that anymore. That being “celebrating Christmas.” For her, it brought more sorrow than anything.

But she wasn’t going to tell someone like Gavin about her sorrow.

“I guess you’re wondering why I brought you out tonight,” Gavin said.

“No rush on work stuff.” Willa smiled.

Their drinks had arrived. Willa tasted the tang of summer in her glass. But in Gavin’s face, she could see the gleam of the Christmas tree in the back corner of the bar, and Christmas songs played through the speakers. It was unavoidable.

“I appreciate how work-focused you are.” Gavin chuckled. “I mean, this next job is a rush job. They want it as soon as you can get it done.”

“I like a challenge,” Willa declared.

“It has to do with Christmas.” Gavin stretched out that final word.

Willa didn’t skip a beat. “It’ll be perfect to use the Chicago Christmas backdrop.”

Gavin clucked his tongue. “This ad has nothing to do with the city, I’m afraid.”

Willa waved her hand. “We have plenty of sets to choose from. Wherever the ad needs to be, we can put it there.” She thought of the studio she’d just left, the multiple sets she’d worked on, the fake kitchens, fake bars, and fake bedrooms she’d filmed in, and the fake people who’d supposedly lived in them.

“This is an on-location shoot,” Gavin said. “In fact, my clients sought me out specifically because they want to work with you.”

Willa arched her eyebrow. This was unheard of. In the world of marketing, the world of selling capital, Willa Caraway wasn’t exactly an unknown entity—but she’d only directed three commercials so far. But she wasn’t one to question Gavin. “Okay. Where’s the shoot?”

Gavin spread both hands out in front of her. “Have you heard of a little place called Mackinac Island?”

It felt like stones landing in Willa’s belly. She fixed a smile on her face, but it felt all wrong. “I have,” she said, surprised that her voice wasn’t shaking.

Gavin was still talking about the island, as though he hadn’t heard her say she knew about it.

“It’s a quaint place. I looked it up online.

Super, super small and snowy and cold all winter long, obviously.

It gets so cold that sometimes the water between the island and the mainland actually freezes, and they put Christmas trees on it to mark the ice roads.

For their snowmobiles, I guess. That’s another thing—on the island, nobody has a car. ”

Willa’s throat was so tight that she struggled to swallow her cocktail. It was a surreal feeling, listening to Gavin describe Mackinac Island back to her.

“No cars, huh?” she said.

“I’d die without my BMW,” Gavin said with a little laugh at himself, as though he was embarrassed by his wealth. She knew he wasn’t.

She needed to know who’d hired him.

She filled her mouth with more tequila and felt the creeping of a headache up the back of her neck.

“Who is the client?” she asked.

“It’s so quaint, you’ll die,” he said. “An entire committee contacted me. The Christmas Festival Committee of Mackinac Island. No telling how many members there are. But they’re addicted to Christmas.

They’re in charge of putting the festival together, decorating the island, and putting everyone in the Christmas spirit, obviously.

I bet they even knit scarves for their horses at home.

That’s how they take the tourists around, by the way. Horse and buggy!

“But apparently, tourism on the island has fallen in recent years,” Gavin continued.

“As an island that makes all its money via tourism, it isn’t looking good.

They want someone to come in and film a few commercials about Christmas on the island, including the festival and the horses, to set them up for the next few years of advertisements. What do you think?”

What did Willa think? She thought it was a setup. She thought it was a trap. Her hands were sweaty, and she wiped them on her black dress without thinking first.

For some reason, she said, “I’m actually from Michigan.”

“Are you?” Gavin said it like he didn’t care. “In the city, everyone is from everywhere, I guess. But does that mean you’ve been to Mackinac?” This time, he pronounced it with a hard 'K' sound at the end, like Mackinack, which was incorrect.

“It’s pronounced like Mackin-AW,” Willa said, then cursed herself for the old habit.

Gavin shrugged. “Then why don’t they spell it like that?”

“It’s French,” Willa said.

“Yeah? Well, we’re not in France, are we?”

Gavin waved down the server, eager for another Christmas cocktail.

“They want you there by Monday. I figure you go there, see the sights, meet the people, and get a sense for the Christmas spirit. Create a few mood boards and around ten commercial scripts. The Christmas Festival Committee and I will have a gander, as they say, and figure out the next steps.”

Gavin went on to explain that the island was willing to keep their Christmas decorations up throughout January and February if Willa needed more time to film.

“But my guess is these people are obsessed with Christmas,” Gavin said with a laugh. “They probably don’t take their decorations down till it goes above thirty degrees. And when does that happen that far north? April? May?”

Willa’s heart pounded. She couldn’t do this. She had to make an excuse and tell Gavin to tell the Christmas Festival Committee to back off.

But she’d made it her mission to be easy to work with, to be the commercial director who Gavin and other agents sought first. If she shoved this one away and made up some excuse about hating Christmas or islands or horses or something, what then?

Would Gavin start working with another director?

Would the bosses at her company get word that she’d ignored an incredible opportunity—for reasons unknown?

Willa had never been in the habit of sharing her past with anyone, including where she came from or why she never went home for the holidays. She tried to imagine explaining herself to her bosses, and a wave of panic overtook her.

She had to get out of this. But she really didn’t know how.

“Can I think about it?” she asked Gavin.

Gavin’s face echoed surprise. “How long do you need?”