Chapter 10 Holly #2
“Maybe a little,” Holly admitted. “You couldn’t stand him.”
“No, I couldn’t,” he said easily. “Because he was no good for you. I’m glad you finally figured that out.”
Holly pressed her lips together for a moment. “No good at all,” she said softly. “How did you know?”
Her dad looked like he was choosing his words carefully.
“There’s a difference between a man who won’t work because he wants other people to do the work for him, and one who needs a hand getting back on his feet,” he said finally.
“Can’t abide the first kind, man or woman.
Rob had every advantage in the world, with that banker dad of his, and all that talent in high school, and he threw it away because he can’t follow through on anything he’s ever tried.
” He cleared his throat. “But a lot of folks like Jace have the world stacked against them from the get-go. I don’t know too much about him, but I can see he’s a hard worker.
If the man wants to do a solid day’s work and I can help him with that, I’ll help. ”
Holly blew out her breath and reached for the potato dish. “And Rob’s the other kind.”
“Always was, kid.”
When the kitchen was clean, she excused herself and went upstairs to strip her bed completely, changing to clean sheets with no potential hint of Rob. She glanced at the doll, then shivered and went and put it in the sewing room, formerly Merry’s room, for now. She would clean and fix it later.
Maybe Jace is right. Maybe I should have called the police.
But for now, she was serious about wanting to handle it on her own.
She had blocked Rob’s number again after sending him her text, and so far he didn’t seem to have tried to circumvent the block.
And she would have her dad downstairs in the house at night. There was nothing to worry about.
As she stuffed the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine, she heard Jace come in with the dogs, the low tenor of his voice and her dad’s lower rumble as they talked. Then the door closed again, and Jace called softly, “Holly, are you here?”
“In the laundry room,” she called back.
She came out to find Jace looking at the decorations in the living room.
They were very sparse, compared to how it used to be when Mom was alive and the other girls were living at home, but Jace gazed at the lights and holly on the mantel of the unused fireplace with a look of wonder, as if it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Then he turned to her, and that look didn’t change. Holly was abruptly self-conscious.
Jace seemed to shake himself out of it. “Your dad’s out at the barn. I said I was going up to ...” He coughed a little. “... Mistletoe Manor in a few minutes. But I don’t like leaving you alone in the house. Not with that Rob shitstain out there.”
She was used to soldiers, but still, the profanity on her behalf startled her a little. “I’d be able to hear him drive into the yard,” she pointed out. “And Dad will be back from the barn soon. He’s an early-to-bed kind of guy.”
“Are you?” Jace asked softly, moving forward. She hadn’t realized that they had gravitated toward each other as they were talking, but suddenly he was up in her space, looking down at her with that faint gold ring back in his eyes.
“Am I—am I what?”
She could have moved away. She didn’t.
“An early to bed kind of girl.”
“Around here, you have to be.” Holly grinned. “Reveille is at oh six hundred sharp.”
She could have leaned forward, close enough to feel his broad chest against her, to brush his lips with her own—
Instead, she stepped away swiftly, resetting their boundaries. Jace jerked a little.
“You should go back to the cottage for the night,” she said, turning away. “I’m just going to read and do a little paperwork. It’ll be boring. And Dad will be back from the barn soon.”
Jace took a slight step back, and she felt the tension defuse, leaving a melancholy-tinged emptiness in the air between them. He was still looking at her with the same intensity, but his eyes were all brown again. Maybe it was just the light.
“All right, but—let me give you this.” He took out his phone, unlocked it with a swipe of his thumb, and opened a blank text, then handed it to her. “Put in your number. So you’ll have mine if you need it, okay?”
“Uh, okay.”
She sent herself a text from his phone that just said Jace.
Seeing it plunk in with her text history with Rob was a little uncomfortable, but at least it pushed Rob down.
She had thought about deleting Rob’s texts, then decided it would be best to keep them in case she had to show them to the authorities or something.
Jace took the phone back, his fingers rough and callused, but warm when they brushed against hers. It seemed to her that his hand lingered briefly. Then he cleared his throat, stepped away, and put the phone in his pocket.
“See you later, Holly,” he said with another of those intense looks. He went to the door, grabbed his town coat, and left.
Holly was left standing in the middle of the living room with her hand tingling where he’d touched it.
She found excuses to be downstairs for the next hour or so, tidying things that didn’t need to be tidied, putting the sheets in the dryer, hunting through her dad’s closet for a coat he didn’t wear that she could give to Jace in the morning.
Every time a window rattled in the wind, she jumped, and when boots finally clomped up on the porch, she tightened her grip on the brush she was currently using to try to get dog hair off the couch, holding it in front of her like a weapon.
But it was just her dad; he came in with both dogs bouncing around him, snow dusted on the shoulders of his coat. “Snowing again, a little. Don’t think we’ll get enough to need to plow.”
“It’s certainly going to be a white Christmas,” Holly said absently. “I’m going up to bed.”
They almost never locked the door, but she made sure both the front and back were locked before she went upstairs.
Maybe Jace was right after all, she thought as she changed into her PJs and brushed her hair. She didn’t want to go through the entire holiday season jumping out of her skin every time her dad came into the house or one of the dogs knocked something over.
Downstairs, things quieted down as her dad went through his nighttime routine. A toilet flushed. The house was so quiet at night that she even heard Rocket’s toenails clicking as the dog prowled the downstairs before settling down to sleep.
Cupcake poked his nose in the door. Holly let him in, and he prowled the room, sniffing everywhere.
“I wish you’d been in the house when Rob showed up,” Holly remarked. “I bet you’d have bit him, and he would deserve it. Though you probably don’t. You might catch some—”
A noise rattled at her bedroom window, and she jumped so violently she dropped her hairbrush and almost knocked a lamp over.
“Good grief,” she muttered, going over to secure the window just as it happened again, sounding like bits of driven ice clicking off the glass. They got that now and then in the winter when the wind was really blowing. It hadn’t seemed like such a windy night, though ...
Holly peered out, her heart in her throat, and relaxed when she saw Jace standing beneath the window in his inadequate coat, looking up, holding a handful of icy snow.
She pushed up the window and leaned out. The cold wind went straight through her pajama top. “What are you doing?” she whispered loudly.
“Getting your attention,” Jace whispered back.
“You have my phone number!”
Jace cupped his hands around his mouth and said softly, “You would have just told me to stay in the cottage.”
“Well, now I’m telling you to go back to it! My dad’s going to hear you.”
He shook his head.
Holly sighed. “Come around to the front,” she whispered. “I’ll let you in.”
She padded downstairs, barefoot. The house was completely dark, with just the light of the barn light coming in through the window, casting shadows.
Rocket stirred in her bed in front of the radiator.
“Go back to sleep,” she told the collie quietly, and unlocked the front door with as little noise as possible.
She cracked it open. Jace had come up on the porch so stealthily she hadn’t even heard him.
He ghosted inside on a gust of cold air and closed the door behind him.
“What are you doing here?” Holly whispered, hugging herself. She felt vulnerable, barefoot in her loose flowered PJs. She could sense the winter cold coming off Jace, trapped in the folds of his coat and the hair on his hatless head.
And at the same time, she felt better than she had all evening. More relaxed.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he whispered back. “I’ll spend the night here, and leave before your dad gets up. Just in case.”
“Oh, Jace, no ...” But there was that clenched fist of tension inside her that had relaxed as soon as he came through the door. All her jumpiness melted away like snow in the spring sun.
“If you shut me out, I’ll just sleep on the porch,” he told her quietly. “I’m not leaving you alone with that guy coming around. Your dad’s bedroom is at the back of the house, right? Would he hear if someone came in?”
“Maybe not,” she admitted. If her dad knew, he would sit up all night with a shotgun, probably. Or, no, he’d talk to the sheriff, and they’d both talk to Rob .... and then what? With Rob’s banker dad connected to everyone in town, she didn’t know what kind of hornet’s nest they might stir up.
“I just want to keep you safe,” Jace said, and the sincerity in his eyes, in his voice, undid her.
“Okay, fine. I’m not going to make you sleep on the porch. But I don’t think having you down here is a good idea. Like I said, Dad gets up early. He’ll be up by 5:30.”
“I get up early too.”
“Yes, fine, but if he comes in and finds you on the couch ...” She took him by his elbow. “Come on. You can sleep in one of my sisters’ rooms.”
Jace took off his boots and carried them. They both tiptoed upstairs.
“In here,” Holly whispered, pushing him into the sewing room without turning a light on. “There are boxes in the other one, but this bed is made up.”
“Your bedroom is closest to the stairs,” Jace whispered back stubbornly. “And your ex knows which one is yours. I don’t like that.”
Holly didn’t like that either, now that she thought about it. “Okay, fine, let’s trade. I’ll sleep in here, you sleep in mine. But if we do that, you have to be gone before Dad is up. Way before Dad is up.”
Jace was staring at her, his face illuminated on one side from the dim glow of the Christmas lights coming in through the loose, gauzy curtains. “You want me to sleep in your room?”
“You’re the one who insisted on being here. The sheets are clean, but you can sleep on top of the covers, or on the floor or whatever. We’ll both need to be up by five, so you can clear out and I can look like I’ve been there all along. Okay?”
“I—uh. Okay.” Jace had the slightly dazed look of a man who had been in charge while things were going to plan and was now caught off balance when suddenly they weren’t. “Keep the door of this room shut. There’s no reason for anyone to know you’re in here.”
“Keep your door shut too, or my dad will know you’re in there if he gets up in the night.”
“Do you. Um. Need anything from your room?”
“No. Wait. Let me get my phone. I usually use an old-fashioned alarm clock, it’s set for six right now, but you can turn it back to five or use your phone or whatever.” She realized she was babbling a little. He was going to be in her room. In her bed. “Let me just. Get my phone.”
Jace followed her into her room, still holding his boots. Cupcake jumped up to greet him, and Jace absently patted the little dog’s topknot with the hand not holding the boots. “Where do you want these?”
“Closet. No, wait. Just put them by the door. They’re not too snowy.” She retrieved her phone from the bedside table, picked up Cupcake, and stood looking at him for a minute. “Good night?” she said, and fled.
A few minutes later, she was nestling down in the slightly musty sheets.
The room’s general smell was familiar from childhood sleepovers.
She and her sisters had been in and out of each other’s rooms all the time, nestling up in a pile to giggle about television or boys after lights-out, or coming in to soothe a nightmare.
It was hard to even pin down the smell to anything specific; it was a mix of perfume and beauty products, craft supplies and books.
Cupcake snuggled up beside her stomach. Holly lay with her eyes open, the room’s dimness resolving into the shapes of the sewing machine—she hoped she remembered that was there if she had to get up in the night—and the glint of light on old toys and models that Merry had left behind on the shelves.
On the other side of the wall, there were a few small rustling noises as Jace settled in for the night, followed by total silence. She couldn’t even hear him breathing. She knew he was there, he had to be there, because she had heard the door close and she hadn’t heard him leave.
Was he actually in her bed? Under the covers?
The idea of Rob touching anything in her bedroom had disgusted her. But Jace was completely different. She felt a wave of pleasant tingling sweep over her body at the idea that he might be lying there on the other side of the wall, tucked under her old pink and white comforter.
... Well, more likely on top of it, since he didn’t seem to have brought sleeping clothes with him. She hoped he was comfortable.
But it was just so quiet. Maybe he had left. Maybe he was downstairs. She sat up in bed and tapped gently on the wall, like her younger sisters used to do sometimes after a bad dream or just to get her attention.
“Jace?” she whispered.
Immediate rustling. “Yeah?” he whispered back, muffled by the wall. “You okay?”
“Just—just checking you don’t need anything.”
“No,” he whispered. “I’m fine.”
So was she, now. Even if she didn’t know how she was going to face her dad in the morning, knowing Jace had slept all night with only a thin wall separating them.