Chapter 13 Holly
HOLLY
Holly felt herself beginning to relax as the next few days settled into a kind of peaceful routine.
Cupcake was getting the hang of farm life, sort of.
Holly found an old cat bed in the attic—it wasn’t like Cupcake would know the difference—and set it up in her room in the hopes of teaching him not to sleep under the covers with her.
So far it wasn’t working; he might start out there, but she invariably woke with his small body radiating heat against her back.
At least he hasn’t decided to start sleeping with Dad ...
So far, at least, her dad was remarkably even-keeled with both Cupcake and Jace.
As for Jace, it seemed to her that something had changed in him since he and her dad had their talk.
He seemed more settled in himself. There was a quiet calm to him that she hadn’t noticed before.
He was somehow more there, an intense presence that made him impossible to ignore.
Well, to be fair, she’d always found Jace impossible to ignore.
But now it was like she could feel him, the heft of his eyes on her, the pleasantly prickling nearness of him.
He continued to spend the night, although after the first night they had switched, with Holly going back to her own bedroom and Jace sleeping in the adjoining one.
Holly kept her door shut and she was aware that Jace had his cracked open, which would have been a problem if Jace overslept, or if her dad came up in the night .
.. but that wasn’t very likely, as long as they made sure they were both up on time.
Jace was gone every morning when she woke up, slipping out of the house like a ghost. After the dogs gave the alarm the first night, Holly suggested that he try going out the kitchen door.
It had the disadvantage of being closer to her dad’s bedroom, but it was farther from the living room, and Rocket was used to humans getting up in the night and going to the bathroom or the kitchen now and then.
It must have worked, because Holly slept through to her alarm. Sometimes she had the vague sense of awakening in the night, sometimes aware of Jace making some noise from the room beside her, or of the door closing quietly.
Some nights she lay awake for a while, acutely conscious of Jace just on the other side of the wall. Was he lying awake too, thinking about her?
Meanwhile, he kept himself busy fixing broken things around the farm. Farm equipment declared dead years ago got a new lease on life. The truck had never run so well.
Although Holly herself was not mechanically inclined, her dad and some of her sisters were competent at basic repairs and maintenance. But Jace was gifted. Even Holly could tell the difference. Under his capable, competent hands (encased in gloves most of the time as they were) machines sang.
The tree farm was open every day, and saw a steady stream of customers.
It really was only a one-person job unless it was really slammed.
But having Jace around to help out made it a different experience.
They chatted in between customers. She showed him how to pack and throw snowballs.
Together they built a little crowd of snowmen around the shed, some of which Rocket knocked over, while the rest began melting into lumps in the sun.
And they talked.
“So how did the farm work with your family having a military career? Didn’t you guys move around a lot?”
“When I was little, we lived all over,” Holly said.
“We were stationed on military bases all around the world. But around the time Merry was born, Mom started making noises about settling down. Dad had been promoted a few times by then, and he started looking for a stateside, stable post. And we found the farm.”
“You just had to have those Christmas trees,” Jace said, grinning.
“They weren’t even here then! It’s hard to believe now, but there was almost nothing here, just the farmhouse and barn, and a whole lot of overgrown pasture.
The tree farm and the cottages came later.
” Holly smiled nostalgically. “Most of it was Mom’s baby.
She had wanted this her whole life, you know—a farm, a big family, a home.
For those first few years after we got the farm, Dad was away most of the time at different job postings, coming home only on holidays and weekends.
Then he retired, and they went all in on the tree farm and the other stuff. ”
“I pictured you living here for your entire life. It’s hard to imagine you anywhere else.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine it now,” Holly admitted.
“Even my city job feels like it belongs to another world. Back when I was growing up here, I kept thinking my real life was out there somewhere, and then I got out there and I—I just missed this. Like a piece of me was missing. After being used to a house full of people, I was so, so lonely.” She picked up Cupcake, who was hanging out under her feet as he often did, and cuddled him. “Does that sound pathetic?”
“Not at all,” Jace said quietly. “I understand completely.”
He probably did. Maybe more than anyone she’d ever known.
Then a family arrived with four kids in an SUV, and there was a tree to harvest and no more time to chat for a while.
A few days before Christmas, it snowed again: soft fluffy flakes, at first just a few, drifting down to settle on the pines’ dark green boughs.
But then the snow drew a whirling veil across the ranch, all but hiding the distant hills.
Even the house could be only dimly glimpsed through the blizzard.
“I love when it does this!” Holly exclaimed. She climbed up on the back of the small wagon they used to transport the trees and tilted her head back, opening her mouth to try to catch snowflakes on her tongue.
“Are you eating them?” Nestled into her dad’s old brown coat, Jace seemed to be dealing with the winter weather a lot better than the first day she’d met him. But it still didn’t come as easily to him as it did to her.
“Haven’t you ever caught a snowflake on your tongue?” She tilted her head back. It never ceased to captivate her, the way the spinning, dancing snowflakes looked slightly darker against the pale gray clouds, little pieces of sky breaking free to whirl down toward her face.
“But it wouldn’t taste like anything,” Jace objected. “Anyway, if you really want to eat snow, there’s plenty of it on every fence post.”
“This is different. Like eating fresh picked berries instead of buying them from the store.” She tipped her head back to its normal orientation to look down from the back of the wagon at him.
Jace was looking up at her with a mildly baffled expression.
Snowflakes peppered his dark hair and the shoulders of the coat.
Jace wrinkled his nose in a frown and then shrugged. “Okay, I’ll eat a snowflake.”
To her surprise and delight, he jumped up in the back of the wagon with her. “Getting closer to the sky so they’re fresher,” he explained.
Holly snort-giggled.
Then Jace tipped his head back and opened his mouth, and she abruptly realized that she had made a mistake. Now she was captivated by the line of his exposed throat and jaw, with its hint of fresh stubble; the pink of his tongue, the unexpectedly vulnerable softness of his parted lips.
He licked a snowflake out of the air, and Holly made an embarrassing squeaking noise.
He was so close. She could barely move in the confined space of the wagon without bumping into him.
She hadn’t prepared herself for this.
She didn’t know if she could have prepared herself for this.
Jace lowered his head and looked down at her. She was caught off guard all over again by how much taller he was. She didn’t normally think of him as that tall—she was used to being around her dad; both of them were over six feet—but he also wasn’t normally this close to her.
His presence felt overwhelming. The intensity of his eyes nearly knocked her off her feet. If she took a couple of steps forward, she would bump against his broad chest.
Then abruptly he took a step back, nearly stumbling over the edge of the wagon.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “Sorry, I can’t—sorry.”
He was looking anywhere but her face. His eyes were pure gold, and he was flexing his hands as if they hurt him. She could see him tensing to jump down.
“Wait.” She reached out and caught him by the hand. He was, as usual, wearing gloves. She had never touched him like this before, and she felt an odd bulkiness through the glove. His hand was curled a little, like there was something wrong with the muscles or the bones.
But he didn’t pull away, instead looking at her searchingly. Some of the brown was back in his eyes.
She kept holding his hand. After a minute, slowly, he turned his hand around in hers so that he could grasp hers back. His fingers felt normal now; she wasn’t sure what she thought she had felt at first.
“Jace, can I—ask you something? Something personal?”
“I guess,” he said. “I mean, yeah.”
Holly sat down in the scattered straw and bits of pine branches in the back of the wagon, drawing him with her by the hand.
He could easily have pulled away, but instead he sat down with her.
It was strangely cozy, and it smelled nice.
Their knees were almost touching. Holly put her arms over her knees to stop herself from taking his hand again.
“What was it you wanted to ask?”
His eyes were mostly brown again, but still with that rim of gold around the pupils.