“The entire town has been hoping for this since you were teenagers,” Matt said matter-of-factly. “My mom’s been taking bets on how long it would take you two to figure it out.”
“Your mom’s been taking bets?”
“She had Christmas Eve,” Matt said cheerfully. “Though Mrs. Brooks apparently had more faith in your timing—she picked the tree lighting ceremony.”
Mrs. Brooks had picked the tree lighting ceremony. Which meant our mistletoe kiss had won someone money, which was both embarrassing and oddly endearing.
“This is insane,” I muttered.
“This is small-town romance,” Matt corrected. “And honestly, it’s about time.”
Before I could figure out how to respond to that, Holly approached with her clipboard and the kind of focused expression that meant she was about to assign us tasks that would keep everyone too busy for personal conversation.
“Okay,” she said briskly, “vendor booths are almost ready, the caroling schedule is confirmed, and the hot chocolate station is operational. We just need to do final sound checks and make sure the tree lighting system is working properly.”
“I can handle the sound system and tree lighting,” Matt offered.
“So you should. This is your thing that you dumped on us at the last minute,” Holly said, making a note on her clipboard. “Dec, can you help me with the final vendor confirmations? A few people are concerned about the weather affecting attendance.”
The way she shortened my name was both efficient and hot as fuck.
“Sure,” I said, though what I was thinking was that spending more time alone with Holly while her brother conducted romantic surveillance was probably going to test my ability to maintain appropriate boundaries.
As we walked toward the vendor area, I could feel Matt’s eyes on us, and I was fairly certain I heard him chuckling to himself.
“Your brother knows,” I said quietly to Holly as we checked in with the craft vendors.
“My brother always knows,” Holly said with resignation. “It’s like his superpower. That and making inappropriate comments at exactly the wrong moment.”
“Has he said anything to you about... us?”
“He doesn’t need to say anything,” Holly said, waving at Mrs. Johnson from the baked goods booth. “He just gives me these looks like he’s planning to give some kind of embarrassing best man speech at our wedding.”
Our wedding. The casual way she said it made something flutter in my chest that had nothing to do with the anxiety that had been plaguing me for months.
“Is that a problem?” I asked carefully.
“The wedding or the embarrassing speech?” Holly asked, and when I looked at her, she was smiling in a way that suggested she wasn’t entirely opposed to either possibility.
“Either. Both.”
“The speech will definitely be a problem,” Holly said. “But the wedding... we’d have to survive the festival first.”
The way she said it made me think she wasn’t just talking about logistical survival, but emotional survival. Like getting through the next few days without admitting how we felt about each other, or what the future held in other cities for us, was going to require the kind of strength usually reserved for natural disasters.
“Holly,” I started, but before I could figure out how to tell her that I was rapidly running out of interest in surviving anything that didn’t include her, the sound system crackled to life with Matt’s voice.
“Testing, testing,” he said, his voice echoing across the town square. “Can everyone hear me?”
A chorus of confirmations rose from the assembled volunteers, and Matt’s voice came through again with obvious satisfaction.
“Perfect. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks to some truly heroic setup work in absolutely terrible weather, the Everdale Falls Christmas Festival is officially ready to open!”
Cheers erupted from the volunteers, and I looked around the town square with amazement. Despite the blizzard, despite the complications, despite everything, we’d actually pulled it off. The vendor booths were standing, the Christmas lights were twinkling, the hot chocolate station was operational, and the whole square looked like something out of a holiday movie, and mercifully, the snow started to abate.
“We did it,” Holly said, looking around with obvious pride and disbelief.
“We did,” I agreed, though what I was thinking was that the festival was the least impressive thing we’d accomplished. Somehow, despite our best efforts to maintain professional distance, we’d created something between us that felt more real than anything I’d experienced in years.
