Eighty-hour weeks.
Law firm partnership.
New York’s rat race.
High pressure situations.
The demand of it all crashed down on me.
I pressed my forehead against the cool stall wall, which—bonus—had charming doodles of dicks wearing Santa hats that swam before my blurry vision. Perfect. Even bathroom vandals were feeling festive while they were having a shit, adding to my existential crisis in a coffee shop toilet.
Breathe, Hayes. Just fucking breathe.
Richard’s words bounced around my skull like a Christmas jingle you can’t escape. Partnership track! High-visibility! Bonus potential! The corporate equivalent of “fa-la-la-la-la,” except instead of holiday cheer, it filled me with holiday dread.
And then there was Holly, probably wondering why I’d sprinted to the bathroom like I’d chugged ten peppermint mochas. Holly with her color-coded lists and that smile that made my knees wobble more than a poorly constructed gingerbread house. What would she think if she knew the guy who’d kissed her under the mistletoe was currently having a meltdown between the urinal and the hand dryer, surrounded by festive dicks?
Lunging out of the stall, I bent over the basin and splashed water on my face before staring at my reflection. “You’ve got this,” I told myself, the same line I’d said a hundred times. The mirror-me looked unconvinced.
With disgust at my lack of conviction in just upping sticks and moving back here after I quit New York in a spectacular fashion that would be worthy of a Hallmark movie, I returned to Holly with that same grimace-y grin that made my face ache.
“You okay?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“The shits,” I blurted out.
Her eyes went wide.
Mine were like saucers, and my breath practically shot out of my ass as the words hung in the air between us like a foul stink. Of all the possible excuses I could have conjured from the depths of my panicked mind, I had chosen the most graphically un-romantic one imaginable. I could practically see the mistletoe from last night shriveling up and dying in protest.
Holly’s wide-eyed stare lasted for another beat before her lips twitched. She tried to fight it, pressing them together in a firm line, but a small snort escaped. “Oh,” she finally managed, her voice tight with suppressed laughter. “Well. That’s… a lot of information for nine a.m. I’m sorry you’re feeling unwell. Do you want to reschedule?”
My face burned with a heat that had nothing to do with the coffee shop’s heating system. “Sorry,” I mumbled, wishing a sinkhole would open up right under my chair and swallow me whole. “I’m good now.”
I sat down to prove I was staying. She moved back slightly; an action I don’t blame her for. She probably thought I had a raging stomach flu bug. “What were you saying about volunteer scheduling?”
“Right,” Holly said, returning to her checklist. “We need to make sure we have adequate coverage for all the activitystations, and Sandra is concerned about the hot chocolate demand exceeding supply.”
As Holly walked me through the volunteer coordination, I found myself watching her lips move instead of hearing a damn word. She tucked her hair behind her ear, revealing her neck, which would look better with a bite mark from me on it. When she mentioned community engagement, my brain short-circuited into imagining very different kinds of engagement involving considerably fewer clothes and considerably more heavy breathing.
She was a Christmas miracle in human form. The way she commanded that color-coded spreadsheet made my heart race faster than when I’d caught her checking out my ass at the tree lighting. My body temperature rose three degrees when she leaned forward to point at something on her list, her vanilla scent hitting me like a seasonal aphrodisiac.
“Declan?” Holly’s voice snapped me back to reality. “Did you hear anything I just said about the setup timeline?”
“Sorry,” I said, forcing my eyes up from where they’d drifted to the soft cashmere covering her collarbone. “I was distracted by... logistics. Very important logistics. What about the setup timeline?”
“We need to start at six AM on festival day to have everything ready by ten,” Holly said, studying my face with the kind of careful attention that suggested she was trying to figure out if my distraction was personal or professional. “That means volunteers need to arrive in shifts, and we need to coordinate equipment delivery with vendor arrival times.”
The day Richard needed my answer about the partnership opportunity. The same day I’d either be committing to a high-pressure legal career in New York or admitting that I wanted something different entirely.
“That works,” I said, though what I was thinking was that in a few days I might be preparing to leave Everdale Falls for New York City, and the thought made something twist uncomfortably in my chest.
But then her phone rang, and she answered it with the kind of relief that suggested she was grateful for any interruption that kept her from talking to me.
“Holly Winters,” she said. “Yes, Mrs. Hall, we can absolutely discuss the final decorating details. No, I don’t think we need additional mistletoe—the current placement should be sufficient.”
Additional mistletoe. Mrs. Hall was apparently not content with the romantic chaos she’d already created through strategic hedge trimmings placement.
As Holly coordinated final decorating details with Mrs. Hall, I sat in the coffee shop surrounded by the warm sounds of community life and tried to figure out why a partnership opportunity that should have been exciting felt like a threat to something I wasn’t ready to lose.
