Julie blew out a breath. That was two days after the party. “Yes. I can make it.”
Though, if she had been honest, she hadn’t been planning on rushing awaythatquickly. Her family would be here. Gram, Mom, Dad. Possibly a few aunts and cousins. She had to clean up after the party, and it was the Christmas season.
But she’d already answered, and numbly she took the information for her interview. The time, where she needed to be. She jotted it all down on her to-do list before she forgot.
It didn’t help. It didn’t feel right to bail so soon after the party and leave it to her parents to clean up. She’d have to work doubly hard to get most of it done before she left. She should be excited about this interview, but all she felt was a queasy sort of wish that she had a few more days of vacation before she returned to her real life.
As if sensing her unease, Kringle climbed into her lap for the first time. He rolled himself into a little ball and tucked his nose under his tail, purring.
It helped.
Chapter 25
“She isn’t staying,” Nolan told himself for the twentieth time. This time, it was as he was picking his way through the storage area over the stable. It was the furthest place on the property for Gramps to hide the box of mementos. Nolan, of course, had pretended he hadn’t noticed Gramps box up the rest of his mom’s Christmas decorations and put them out of sight. But Gramps didn’t move as stealthily as he used to.
Up here, the air was cold. The insulation in this part of the barn was nonexistent. It smelled like stale hay, too, with wisps of it crunching underfoot. Nolan had to crouch in order to move through the space without hitting his head. The rafters were low. Mostly, these boxes held old tack. The sorts of things that were too sentimental to throw out, like the halter embroidered with the name of Gramps’s favorite horse who had died when Nolan was a teenager. And there, tucked out of sight, was the box of decorations. With a huff, Nolan kneeled to pull the box closer to the flashlight on his phone.
He wasn’t stupid enough to take out Mom’s decorations a second time. He was lucky Gramps hadn’t thrown them all out. But they meant something. They meant just as much as that smelly, faded old halter. Maybe more. And in the box was one particular ornament he needed to find.
Unlike Julie, when Gramps had put up a tree, he and Mary had bickered over whose tree topper to put up. When she’d gotten sick, rather than giving in, Gramps had allowed for a compromise: one year, they would put up the star Gramps liked so much, the next, it would be Mom’s angel. The reason Nolan had recognized the angel Julie had pulled from the box hadn’t been because of old Christmas photos he’d half-forgotten or a hazy childhood memory of the party. No, he’d seen that very same angel tucked away in the box of his mom’s old things.
With gentle precision, he teased the angel out of the box. To his eye, it looked the same. Maybe in slightly better condition than Julie’s—she’d confessed that the angel had been handed down in her family, a Christmas heirloom. It had had the scuffed, much-loved look of an heirloom to him. This didn’t have the same scratches along the base, and the glass seemed brighter to his eye. His mom had picked this out of an antique shop when he was a kid. She’d loved it, but it didn’t mean as much to his family as the one his dog had accidentally broken meant to Julie’s.
Still, he didn’t get up right away. He held a little piece of his mom in his hands, and he had so few of those left. Julie was going to leave in a few days and forget all about him. He wanted that, didn’t he? He had been adamant that he wasn’t looking for a relationship.
But there had been that moment in front of the tree with Julie before disaster had struck, and she’d been catapulted into his arms. She was funny. She was warm. She couldn’t cook to save her life—even her hot chocolate, which he was pretty sure she’d made out of a packet, had been slightly too sweet. He liked her. He felt he owed her.
No. That wasn’t exactly true. He could make amends for Snowball’s rowdiness, but that wasn’t the reason he was up in the rafters of this freezing-cold barn on the thin planks of wood that served as a floor. He wanted to see Julie smile. He wanted to feel her in his arms again.
He wanted to take a chance. She hadn’t left Pinecone Falls yet.
Chapter 26
Julie was getting used to people recognizing her and stopping to chat. This time, instead of awkwardly answering their questions in monosyllables and rushing to continue on her way, she stopped long enough to ask their names and after their families, to pass along the news to Gram. She might not remember these people from her summer visits, but Gram had lived all of her life in Pinecone Falls. They were practically family.
She was famished by the time she reached the table Ivy had claimed at the back of the café. Her friend didn’t seem to mind the delay but sipped at her coffee and scrolled through her phone while she waited. Julie dropped into the seat across from her with a sigh.
“You couldn’t find a table closer to the door?” Julie joked.
Ivy laughed. “You’d only get bombarded by people walking in. You’re new in town. Not much happens around here that’s new.”
With a half shrug, Julie raised her hand to snag Lucy’s attention. She didn’t even have to look at the menu this time to know what she wanted to order. When Lucy waved back to indicate that she’d seen her, Julie turned back to her friend. “The only interesting thing about me is the party I’m planning.”
“Uh-huh.” Ivy sounded unconvinced. She leaned her elbows on the table. “And maybe one tall, dark, and handsome neighbor who finds his way onto your property an awful lot…”
Julie had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from showing her embarrassment. She was still pretty sure she was blushing. “There’s nothing between Nolan and me.”
Nothing, except for that moment in front of the tree when she’d almost leaned forward and kissed him. Nothing, except for the feel of his arms around her when he’d caught her as she’d fallen. Right. Nothing at all.
But there couldn’t be. She didn’t do flings, and she was due back in Boston in only a couple more days.
“Right.” Ivy drew out the word. She looked like a cat who had learned how to open the cat food tins.
Trying not to fidget, Julie looked away. Lucy was bustling her way toward them, luckily, so she had an excuse. Before the owner of the café reached them, Julie muttered, “There isn’t. There can’t be. I have a job interview back in Boston on the twenty-seventh.”
“What? So soon?” Ivy sounded dismayed.
Lucy was well within earshot by now. “What’s soon?”
