Chapter 21 Jace #2
He ended up being plied with cookies, and left the house with the scarf-wrapped doll and a plastic container full of sewing supplies selected by Noelle, with a few cookies stuck in on top.
She cheerfully snuck him out the back just as he heard the front door slam.
“It’s our secret,” Noelle whispered. “She’ll be really happy. What a sweet thing to do for her.”
Sewing was a lot harder than it looked.
He didn’t have internet access on his phone, and he hated to have to go down and see if Noelle could locate any books on it. It should be straightforward and simple.
It wasn’t.
Noelle, who as one of five sisters had presumably dealt with amateur sewing attempts before, had tucked some extra fabric into the box of sewing supplies.
He started out thinking that using it was a waste of time, tried sewing up one of the slashes in the doll’s dress, and ended up picking out his puckered, uneven efforts and doing some test stitches on the fabric instead.
He was also going to need to clean up the doll and do something about its broken china parts. He needed glue. He wondered if there was any in the barn.
A soft tapping came at the door. By now he knew Holly’s knock well. He scrambled to stuff the doll under a cushion, shoved the box of sewing supplies behind a chair, and jumped up to look like he was tinkering with the fireplace when the door opened and Holly came in with a covered plate.
“Dinner,” she said, setting it on the small table by the door. “I’m sorry to keep feeding you up here.”
“It’s okay. I get it.”
Holly sighed and tucked her hands under her arms. “With the tree farm staying open late, we’re going to need you down there tonight. I promised I’d help Noelle with some holiday cleaning this evening. That’s going to leave you and Dad to cover the tree farm. I’m sorry about that, too.”
“It’s fine.” He stood up and tried to casually shove the box of sewing supplies further behind the chair with his heel. “It isn’t your responsibility to be a buffer between me and your dad. We’re both adults. We can get along.”
“I know, I just feel bad about abandoning you.”
“You’re not.” He crossed the room and carefully took her forearms in his.
It was still so strange to do this after he’d seen her naked, teased those little gasps and moans out of her—to treat her as if they were near-strangers just beginning to casually date.
But it also brought a strange intensity.
If they could only touch fully clothed, then he couldn’t help but be aware of her strong, lithe body beneath her clothes, the luscious curves that not even her shapeless sweaters and stained barn coat could disguise.
Drawing her nearer by her arms alone no longer felt like enough. He put his hand on her face, ran his thumb across her chin and the full corner of her mouth. Her lips parted a little; her eyelashes flickered, wide-open gold-flecked eyes gazing up at him.
If he gave in to the temptation to kiss her, with just the two of them in Mistletoe Manor, there was no telling where it could lead.
And he didn’t dare go there yet.
Not to mention the doll under the seat cushion, which was going to be next to impossible to explain without giving the whole surprise away.
So he took a step back. Holly sighed a little and raised her hand to touch her face where his fingers had brushed her soft skin.
“Okay,” she whispered. “See you later.” And she turned and nearly fled.
He hoped he hadn’t hurt her feelings. He was afraid that he had.
“True to form, Jace,” he muttered to himself.
The food under the plastic cover was still hot, sliced pot roast and green beans, mashed potatoes drowning in butter, and herbed toast. He wolfed down a few bites and then made a quick-and-dirty sandwich that he could eat while he walked.
Then he stuffed the doll and sewing kit under the capacious brown coat, which had inner pockets so huge that you could probably fit a baby goat in here, or at least an entire lunch and some farm supplies with room left over. And he headed down to the barn to look for glue.
He had forgotten how much stuff there was in the barn.
He had also forgotten about the chickens, but they didn’t wake up much, just clucked sleepily at him and shuffled around on their perches when he turned on the barn lights.
Realizing that all anyone would have to do was look over from the house to see someone was out here, he quickly turned off most of the lights again, leaving a dim light in the back that he hoped was located so that it wouldn’t be terribly visible from the house or the tree farm.
Which of course made his search even harder. After tripping on a few things, he found a flashlight, and that helped.
The barn was full and a bit cluttered, but it wasn’t messy.
In fact, the tool areas were ruthlessly well organized.
He found a workbench that looked like it was used for woodworking, with a bunch of hand tools: saws, files, sandpaper.
There was a smell of varnish and paint. Aha!
Glue. He picked up a tube of woodworking glue—
The lights came on overhead. Jace froze like a startled burglar.
A moment later, Rocket bounded up to nose at his leg, her fur frosty and a halo of cool air washing along with her. The Colonel clomped up behind her, giving Jace a look that was hard to read.
“Wheeler.”
“Colonel, sir.”
“Hope you put everything back exactly where you found it.”
Jace was increasingly hoping he had, too. He hastily put down the woodworking glue. The Colonel reached out and moved the bottle back in line with a couple of other bottles.
“Now how about you tell me what you’re doing, son.”
Jace swallowed. “I was ... looking for glue, sir.”
“Well, that depends on what you plan on gluing together. How about you tell me what the heck you need it for, and I’ll tell you where the glue you need is.”
Jace braced himself. He reached into the coat’s inner pocket, carefully took out the doll, and laid it on the workbench. “I was going to fix this, sir.”
The Colonel jerked in recognition and reached for it. “You break this?” His voice was guarded and cold.
“No,” Jace said quickly. “No, I—” He wouldn’t break Holly’s confidence. He refused. “I don’t know the whole story, but I know Holly was really upset about it. I wanted to surprise her.”
“She would be,” the Colonel said softly, holding the doll gently. “This belonged to her grandmother. My ma. My parents didn’t have any girls, and Ma had a lot of antique dolls that she passed down to my girls. Holly was the one who really took to it.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jace said quietly. “I just knew she was upset about it, and I can’t afford a Christmas present for her, but I thought I could fix this and give it back to her. I’ve started working on sewing up the dress, but I’m going to have to glue the head and face and hands.”
“That’s not going to go back together exactly like it was,” the Colonel said, turning over the doll in his big, callused hands. “You’ll still see the cracks. You might repaint it, but it won’t have the same finish as the original china.”
“Maybe it won’t be exactly the same. I still want to try.”
The Colonel nodded and got off his stool. “Well, you don’t want wood glue for it. Let me see what kinds of epoxy I’ve got.”
Fifteen minutes later, Jace had the doll glued, clamped, and drying.
The Colonel had handed over the epoxy and then stood back, watch with his arms crossed as Jace quietly and efficiently glued the doll back together.
He’d never worked with anything quite like this, but it wasn’t too different from other things he’d fixed.
“You’ve a fine touch with your hands,” the Colonel said. “I know you’ve fixed up a lot of things for us.”
Jace looked down at his hands with reflexive self-consciousness. Perfectly human hands right now, with just a little extra hair on the backs. But he couldn’t rely on them to stay that way, and that was the crux of the problem.
“I can fix things,” he said. “People are harder.”
There was the faintest twitch of a smile at one corner of the craggy mouth. “Isn’t that the truth.” The Colonel fingered one of the halfway sewn-up slashes in the doll’s dress. “You don’t know what happened to it?”
“I found Holly with it, sir.”
If he had to choose, keeping faith with Holly was what he would always do. Forever.
The Colonel made a grunting noise. “You know,” he said, “I think you might be able to help me with something.”
“If I can, I’d like to,” Jace said cautiously.
They went back to the woodworking table. Rocket got up off the floor and trotted slowly after them.
“Guess you’ve noticed I spend a lot of time out here,” the Colonel said.
He crouched down with a grunt of effort and began pulling a few items out from under the worktable: a large bin with drawers full of screws, a couple of old wooden apple crates containing tools and other items, an old-fashioned tin milk can . ..
“Can I help you with any of that, sir?”
“Don’t trouble yourself, son. What I need is here.”
He opened the top of an apple crate and pulled something out. It looked like a tangled mess of yarn in different colors, with sticks poking out of it.
“What’s that?” Jace asked.
“You know anything about knitting?”
Jace blinked. It took him a moment to muster a reply. “Uh, no.”
“Me neither,” the Colonel grumbled. “What it’s supposed to be is a sweater for that ridiculous little dog of hers. What it’s turning into is a mess.”
Well, the mystery of who had been rummaging around in Noelle’s sewing supplies was solved, Jace thought as he stared at the tangled snarl of yarn, which now that he thought about it, did look like part of it was forming into some kind of tube. Sort of.
“Got a book on it,” the Colonel added, pulling out something else and slapping it down on the woodworking table.
“That’s more than I have for the sewing. Actually ...” Jace pulled the book toward himself. “Is that just knitting, or does it have anything on sewing in there?”
Jace flipped through the book, finding sections on different sorts of needlecraft—cross stitch, crochet, knitting, and yes, sewing.
“Holly’s not gonna be up at the tree farm tonight,” the Colonel remarked casually. “You want to take that book with you, she won’t know.”
Jace gave him a swift glance.
“She won’t know if you have your knitting with you either, sir.”
“I was thinking that.” The Colonel jammed the wad of yarn and knitting needles into his pocket. “Still got two evenings ‘til Christmas. We can get it done.”
We. Jace swallowed.
“I appreciate you trusting me enough to show this to me, sir,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, well, it’s just about done and Christmas is the day after tomorrow, so there’s not much of a surprise to spoil,” the Colonel said gruffly. “Anyway, seems like you know how to keep a secret.”
Jace looked at him sharply, but the Colonel’s face was perfectly deadpan.
“Guess we’d better get back up to the tree farm and hold down the fort.”
Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. As they stepped out into the crystalline winter evening, Jace took a bracing inhale of the sharp, cold air. He’d have to work all night once the glue dried, but he thought he could get the doll done in time. And Holly’s face would be worth it.
“Feels like it might snow again before Christmas,” the Colonel remarked, looking up at the sky.
“I hope so, sir.” And he meant it. Snow would have been nothing but inconvenience and misery if he’d left, but it was starting to look like he was truly going to have a white Christmas on the farm, if nothing happened to ruin it.
He still had trouble believing everything could work out. But he was starting to convince himself that some things might.