Chapter 8 Holly
HOLLY
“It’s a coat,” Holly said.
“Made from a ... sock?”
“Yes.” She poured herself a cup of hot cocoa that she didn’t really want to give herself something to do with her hands.
Down at the bottom of the side road to the tree farm, her dad was unfastening the chain. There was already a car waiting on the other side.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” Jace said stiffly.
“I’m not,” Holly announced briskly. “It’s fine. I’ve moved on completely.”
Her dreams had other ideas, of course. She couldn’t help remembering mental flashes from last night before she had been so rudely interrupted by Rob’s text.
Jace’s powerful body against hers, his stubble prickling her face.
It didn’t help that she had an all too vivid sense-memory of just exactly what his strong mouth and full lips would feel like on hers.
The car started towards them, and Holly turned to pour two more cups of cocoa. “Here,” she said, jamming them into Jace’s hands. “That looks like the same old blue Toyota that Mr. and Mrs. Borweski were driving a decade ago. I wonder if their kids are in college now.”
“Do you know everybody around here?” Jace asked. He stepped away, giving her space. She felt a highly confusing mix of ambivalent feelings about that.
“It’s hard not to when you grow up in a small town.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said quietly, and then the car arrived, and she didn’t have a chance to follow up on that.
As she had told Jace, working at the tree farm this close to Christmas was typically a series of rushes punctuated by long periods of boredom.
It had been five years since she had done more than fill in occasional shifts when she happened to be home at Christmastime, but she found that the regulars hadn’t changed a whole lot.
The Yangs, who had been coming here to get their tree here since they were newlyweds, had three kids now.
Old Mrs. Cooper, another of their longtime regulars, brought her long-haired dachshund Pickles, who turned out to be fast friends with Rocket; the two dogs ran around together while Jace cut and wrapped Mrs. Cooper’s Norway pine.
Unfortunately, working with Jace did not seem to be getting rid of her urge to plaster herself all over him like a cheap shirt. She had hoped her overactive libido would calm down with repeated exposure, like getting rid of an allergy by taking small doses of the substance you were allergic to.
Instead it seemed to be doing the opposite and sensitizing her. Not a prophylactic dose of an allergen, more like some almost-out-of-reach piece of clothing that was rubbing gently, now and then, not enough to cause pain, but like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
“Was that E4 or E6?” she asked, bending over the ledger and trying not to imagine Jace bending her over the table it was on. “The tree location.”
“E6,” Jace said promptly as he worked on lashing up the tree they’d just cut.
He was good at remembering things. Holly had worked with much less competent assistants—actually quite a lot of them, over the years, since the tree farm tended to use either college-age help or guests working off their free room and board.
She had trained a lot of people, and fixed a lot of people’s mistakes.
Jace was one of the best they’d ever had.
Why did he have to be so blasted good at everything?
In between customers, he quietly fixed things. So far he’d fixed a chainsaw that hadn’t been running for years, found a lost wrench that someone had dropped behind the hay bales in the shed, and fiddled with the spigot on the cider jug so that it stopped randomly dribbling.
He always left the gloves on. Every now and then he was clumsy seemingly at random, dropping something or struggling to write legibly. Holly wondered if he had some kind of disability, but she felt it would be impertinent to ask.
“Have you always liked working with your hands?” she asked, watching him oil the chain on one of their chainsaws. When he first went to cut a tree for a customer, he had mumbled that he’d never done it before today, but he acted like a complete natural with the machine.
“Yeah.” His head was down, focused on what he was doing rather than on her. “I like it. I was always better with machines than with people.”
“We, um—we have a few more broken things on the farm if you might want to take a look at them,” she offered hesitantly. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to. It’s not an obligation.”
Jace flicked a look at her. The gold rings were back around his pupils, which she had come to associate with his weird (shifter-y?) moods, but this time he flashed her one of those quick, delightful smiles. “I’d like that. It’s no trouble. I enjoy having something to do.”
In early afternoon she took a break, leaving the tree farm in Jace’s capable hands, and walked down to the house to pick them both up some lunch.
Her dad was back, or at least the truck was.
But the sound of power tools and a radio playing in the barn suggested that he was engaged in one of his typical “forgetting about Mom at the holidays” projects, usually something carpentry-related.
Normally she wouldn’t have done more than slap herself together a sandwich and leave two more on the table for her dad.
But today, as with the hot breakfast she had taken up to Jace, she found herself wanting to do more than just provide cold sandwiches.
There were a ton of leftovers from the last few days.
She heated up the leftovers of a cheesy tuna casserole that looked like perfect cold-weather food and divided it into two covered dishes.
The remains of a cold roast turned into a giant slab of a sandwich that she left for her dad.
In addition to that, there were three pieces of a pecan pie that one of their customers, also a neighbor, had brought a few days ago.
She left one for her dad and put the other two in the small hamper she was putting together.
Cupcake, in his sock coat, clung to her legs the whole time and then followed her back to the tree farm.
He was very much a people dog, and she had already noticed that he hated being left alone.
It was still too cold for him out here, though.
She suspected she’d probably end up carrying him back to the house tucked into her coat before they were done.
Jace was with a customer when she came back—another of their longtime regulars, Mrs. Kirby, a military widow who had brought her college-age kids with her.
Holly hung back, setting out the food on the table beside the ledger and watching quietly.
Jace was reserved, but he wasn’t sullen or rude, and the widow and her son and daughter even teased out a couple of quick smiles that lit up his whole face and made Holly’s heart flip over.
After the Kirbys left, no more customers were in sight, and Holly waved Jace over. “Come on, get some of this while it’s hot. I hope you’re not a vegetarian, although even if you aren’t, it’s only tuna casserole, so don’t get too excited.”
For whatever reason, he still seemed to be in a light mood, and gave a quiet little laugh that caught under her ribs somewhere. “I’ll make an exception to my strict vegetarianism for a gourmet tuna casserole.”
Holly snorted, feeling her cheeks heat. “In that case, you’re out of luck. But I do make a good basic tuna casserole.”
“Oh, you made this?” he asked, settling backwards on one of the plastic chairs at the folding table as she placed a fork by the steaming dish.
“Yes, so eat it quickly before it freezes. There’s pie for dessert.”
They both dug in. After working in the cold, Holly found that she was starving, and gave up on any attempt not to snorfle down her lunch like a prize-winning blue ribbon hog.
Besides, she was serious that it would lose heat quickly in the cold air.
There was nothing like hot, filling food on a cold day, and as much as tuna casserole was a Midwest mainstay to the point of being a joke, she really did think that she made a decent one.
She’d used the high-end tuna, and it was just the right amount of cheesy, rich and melting on her tongue.
She couldn’t tell if Jace was impressed or not, but he wolfed his down just as quickly. He kept his gloves on as he ate, but he handled the fork deftly. As they moved on to the pie, he said, “Thanks.”
“Sure. We try to feed our farm hands well.”
“I’ve never been called that before. I’m pretty much a city kid.”
“Where are you from? Originally, I mean.”
“Georgia,” he said after a long enough pause that she wasn’t even sure if he intended to tell her.
“I’ve never been there. What’s it like?”
Jace shrugged. “I left when I joined the Army.”
“This must be a lot of snow compared to what you’re used to. What do you think of it?”
This drew out a slight, lopsided smile. “It’s like being inside a calendar picture. Weird. But nice.”
“Oh. I like that.” Holly grinned and dropped her gaze to what was left of her pie.
A calendar picture.
It made her look at the tree farm with new eyes. It really was beautiful. Sometimes she got so used to its casual Christmas-card scenic beauty that she stopped noticing it. Now she was aware of the sun glinting off the melting frost on the branches, the pleasant smell of pine and hay.
As Jace chased the last of his pie around his plate, he asked, speaking more to the pie than to her, “So what do you do here, when you’re not working on the Christmas tree farm? It must not run year round.”
“Do you mean me specifically, or me and Dad?”
“Either,” Jace said. After a brief pause, during which she tried to decide how much detail about the daily workings of the farm he actually wanted, he said, “Is it just the two of you?”