Chapter 6 Holly #2
When she was a kid, the village was set up on a folding table in the living room, since they needed the dining room table for everything from homework to science projects to its actual intended purpose of eating on.
Putting it together started in early December, and it was a big deal for all five of the Porter girls, who had ranged from eldest Carol to eleven-years-younger Merry.
Each year, the sisters fought over the placement of miniature houses and skating rinks, tried to find places to add some of Holly’s dolls or Ivy’s toy horses, and all of them looked forward to the big surprise that would always be unveiled on Christmas Eve from their parents: a new piece for the village.
The last new piece had arrived a year before Merry went off to college. By that time, Mom was seriously ill, and the next year wouldn’t be a jolly Christmas at all.
Looking at the half-set-up village gave Holly an uncomfortable jolt in her stomach; it was like seeing the debris after an explosion, which in some sense their lives had become.
She hurried on past it, through the living room to the mud room where their outdoor stuff was kept.
As she put on her coat and hat, and stamped into her boots, she wondered if whichever of her sisters made it home for Christmas this year would want to finish setting it up.
Ivy had said she had other plans. Carol, as always, was a “maybe” because, as a nurse, she might have to work.
(“Might” was going to turn into “definitely” closer to the holiday, just like it always did; Carol always signed up to cover everyone else’s last-minute absences and holiday shifts.) Noelle was coming, she even had tickets, but they hadn’t heard from Merry, who was probably slammed with final exams right now.
Well, if it didn’t get set up then it wouldn’t be the first year that had happened since losing Mom, and with that not very comforting thought, Holly went outside into the sharp chill of dawn.
The sun had not yet risen, and the farm lay in shades of gray and white, with the pine trees standing in neat dark slashes against the paler hills.
The lights of Christmas Village twinkled up the hill behind the farmhouse and outbuildings.
Yesterday’s midday warmth had melted the snow, but overnight it had frozen hard as iron.
Holly had to pick her way carefully across skating rink puddles and ridges of churned-up mud turned to concrete. Her breath smoked in the cold air.
She began to wonder on the walk if there was any chance Jace Wheeler was up yet, but a warm gold light shone from the front window of Mistletoe Manor.
(Which .... she had to admit it. He was right about the names. But Mom had named them, and there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in June that anyone in the Porter family was going to rename them now.)
Holly mounted the steps past the cheery little sign on a striped candy cane pole with the cabin’s name. She knocked on the door. “Hi, it’s Holly. Are you up?”
“Come on in,” Jace’s voice called back, muffled.
Holly hurried inside. It was wonderfully warm after the sharp chill. “Here, I brought you a—” She paused. There was no sign of Jace. “You’re in here, right?”
“Upstairs,” his voice came from above her.
Holly put the dish on the cottage’s small table.
Yesterday, the table had been perfectly clean except for a holiday centerpiece (holly branches around an adorable cat-shaped candle holder) but now there were some paper towels spread out with a half-dismantled .
.. thing? Something metal, crusted with black deposits. She stared at it for a minute.
“Hey, if you don’t have to leave right away, could I get a hand?” Jace called down.
Holly climbed the ladder to the loft. The bed was distractingly rumpled, and Jace was kneeling on it, both hands in the air, doing something to—the ceiling light fixture?
“What are you doing?” Holly asked as she crawled off the top of the ladder.
The ceiling wasn’t high enough to properly stand up in the loft, even for her.
None of the cottages except for one were disabled accessible.
She was more aware every year that getting around inside them required a certain degree of athleticism.
Jace glanced over with a sudden, quick smile that made her heart skip a beat. “The light wouldn’t stay on, so I was trying to figure out why. It’s a loose wire, but I really could use a third hand to hold it in place while I clamp it down and screw things back together. If you don’t mind?”
“Oh. I can do that.” She crawled on the bed next to him.
It was even warmer up here. Or maybe that was the fact that she’d moved right into Jace’s space to see what he was doing.
He smelled nice. Spicy. Male. “Did you have any problems, uh ...” This was very distracting, actually. “... settling in last night?”
“No. It was fine.” He had gone tense now that she was beside him. Maybe he was horrified at the thought that she might grab him and kiss him again.
“What do you want me to hold?”
“Oh, uh, here.” He almost fumbled the utility knife that he was using for a tool.
“Yeah. Like that.” His voice had gone a bit rough.
Wow, he didn’t like being close to her at all, did he?
Holly swallowed her urge to protest that she was a nice person, really, she didn’t normally go around kissing strange guys .
.. but she bit down on it, tried to ignore his extremely pleasant nearness, and held the light in place while he finished screwing things into place.
Being this close to him gave her very little to stare at that wasn’t him.
She tried looking at the wall, but instead she was drawn to his hands.
He was wearing gloves despite the warmth, and his fingers seemed a bit clumsy.
She tried to remember if he had been wearing gloves the other day at the community center.
She didn’t think so, but she had been too fixated on his eyes and hair and . .. everything else to be sure.
“There, done.” Jace scrambled off the bed, like he couldn’t wait to get away from her. Holly followed more slowly. “Want to test it?”
“Sure.” She flicked the switch, and the light came on, flooding the loft with bright light. “Oh, wow. That thing hasn’t worked right in ages. It was just a loose wire?”
“Yeah, easy to fix.” He looked a little more relaxed now that they had more distance between them.
“I also unclogged the air vent to the furnace, no big deal. It’s working fine now.
Oh, and the chimney of the fireplace really needs to be cleaned.
I pulled out the damper assembly to scrape off the creosote so it doesn’t cause a fire, but it would be easier with a wire brush or a chemical remover, so I figured I’d see if you guys have any. ”
Holly felt herself flushing. The cabins had been standing empty for a while, but she hadn’t intended their guest to have to immediately jump to work fixing them. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You shouldn’t have had to do any of that.”
“I want to. I was even thinking about making a fire this morning, but I couldn’t figure out where the wood was.”
“Oh. That’s another thing I didn’t show you.
” Now she felt unforgivably rude. She really had just dropped him off yesterday and fled.
“It’s there.” On her knees, she pointed out the low window of the attic.
“There’s a covered woodshed near the entrance to Christmas Village.
It’s beside the first cottage. There’s also a small wood bin on each porch, but they’re not filled up right now because we haven’t had any guests. I can take care of that later today.”
“You don’t have to,” Jace said. “I can get wood myself if I know where it is.”
Feeling humiliated on several levels, Holly shuffled on her knees to the top of the ladder. “Yeah. I just wanted you to know.” She began to descend, but her hostess nature got the better of her. “Is there anything else you need? Linens are fine? Place is clean enough?”
“It’s fine,” he said quietly, following her back down the rungs. “It’s very clean. It’s nice. Thanks.”
That took the wind out of the sails of the S.S. Righteous Indignation. Holly sighed as she hopped off the ladder and tried not to stare at his ass descending after her.
“Don’t forget to leave a tip for Housekeeping,” she said with an attempt at a smile. “That’s me, by the way.”
“I’m definitely not complaining to the management.” As he stepped off the last rung, she thought she caught a slight smile before he looked away.
“The management’s just us anyway.” She looked down at the disassembled metal pieces on the table.
The paper towels were keeping it off the tablecloth.
“You can feel free to look in the barn for anything else you need, or ask one of us. Oh, uh—Dad might like to put you to work on the tree farm, if you want to help out. He can show you the ropes.”
“Yeah, sure.” Jace looked like he wanted to shove his hands into pockets he didn’t have; he was just wearing a loose brown pullover. He ended up stuffing them halfway into his jeans pockets, not looking at her.
Holly bit her lip, and in the process, felt the sharp ping where the bite still hadn’t quite healed right. She was not about to ask her dad if there were any side effects to being bitten by a shifter. But she had the person she could ask right in front of her. “Did you bite me?” she blurted out.
Jace’s head whipped up. He stared at her. His eyes were showing a gold ring around the pupil. “What?”
“When we, uh. The thing at the community center. I thought I felt you—I—look,” she said, floundering. “I know you’re a shifter. I guess I just wanted to make sure I, I didn’t contract some kind of sexually transmitted lycanthropy or something.”
Jace stared. The gold had spread until it nearly filled his entire iris. The effect was mesmerizing. “It’s not spread like that,” he said, slightly strangled-sounding.
“Okay. Good. I just wanted to ...”
“I need to—go,” Jace said sharply. He turned on his heel, strode into the bathroom, and closed the door firmly behind him.
Holly stared at the closed bathroom door. It didn’t reopen.
“So ... your breakfast’s on the table?” she offered after a deeply awkward minute.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to, uh .... we can go back to not talking about it.
In fact, let’s do that. If you can come down to the tree farm later, Dad wants to meet you.
” Oh, that came out twenty kinds of wrong.
“I haven’t told him!” she added. “Anything. I mean. I’m leaving. ”
She grabbed her coat and all but ran out the door. Outside, she stood for a minute gulping cold air.
This was going to be a very long couple of weeks.