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I’m in number eight.
She stared at his response. They’d be alone in a room with a bed filling most of the space?
The image of her bare limbs entwined with his popped into her mind out of nowhere, yanking her back into a sitting position. “Okay…nope!” she said aloud, trying to dam the sudden flood of hormones. It’d obviously been far too long since she’d made love. But now was not the time for that kind of craving to come up. Sex was what had gotten her into trouble in the first place.
But she’d been seventeen the last time. She was much more responsible now. And if Kanon wasn’t going to stay in Hard Luck, did it really matter if something like that happened between them? It might actually be the perfect opportunity…
Frightened that she would even consider it, she hesitated before responding. She should come up with an excuse and meet him somewhere in public tomorrow. But that wasn’t what she did.
See you in ten minutes, she wrote. Then she told her father and Ari that she was going out to take care of a few details for the festival.
* * *
Patience could hear a TV as soon as she stepped up to number eight. After she knocked, it went silent before Kanon swung open the door. “Hi.”
He’d just showered. A cloud of warm steam filled the room, and his dark hair was wet and curled slightly at the nape of his neck and around his ears. She tried not to notice how good he looked in his fresh Lucky Day Motor Inn T-shirt and faded blue jeans. She also tried not to acknowledge how good he smelled as she stepped past him when he motioned her inside. “The motel looks great.”
“It’s getting there,” he conceded. “I still have a lot of work to do.”
“I was referring to all the Christmas decorations.”
“Even there. The kid Kelsey hired to string the lights didn’t know what the hell he was doing. I’m going to have to redo it to get everything straight and spaced the way I want. Right now, it looks sort of shoddy, and that isn’t the impression we want to give. But I’ll get to it this week. I have some basic repairs I need to focus on first.”
Feeling a little nervous and self-conscious, given her reaction to this meeting before she left home, she hefted her computer bag higher on her shoulder. “You’ve been busy since you’ve been back.”
“There’s a lot of deferred maintenance around here.”
“I think Kelsey had some trouble with a handyman she hired to keep up the place. He was supposed to work every Saturday, but something happened. I can’t remember what.”
“Are you talking about the bastard who stole our tools?” When he closed the door, it suddenly felt as if they were standing in a space the size of a closet, even though that wasn’t technically true.
“I guess. I didn’t know that part. What a bummer.”
“No kidding.” He gestured at his laptop, which was open on the bed. “Since this is the festival’s first year, I was thinking we should come up with some way to get the word out.”
“I’ve been trying. I’ve posted numerous times on Facebook and Instagram. I’ve listed it on a website for Christmas festivals. We’ve purchased two months of advertising on a big billboard along Interstate 80 near Reno. And I’ve put flyers in every business around town. I don’t know what more we can do.”
“We could run some online ads with Facebook and Google.”
“I considered that, but I didn’t know how to get started, and I didn’t dare spend the money to hire someone to help me, especially once I looked into it and saw how expensive it was.”
“I’ve designed quite a few ads for my author clients, so I have the specs. If I do the creative, we should be able to figure out how to run them ourselves.”
“Isn’t there a science to doing it effectively?” she asked.
“I get the impression it’s mostly trial and error,” he replied. “We’ll start with a very small budget, see what kind of reaction we get, then determine what to do from there.”
“How will we know if the ads are working?”
“We give people an incentive to click—like offering them a free cookie card. Then we’ll be able to tell how many have at least some interest by the number of cards requested.”
“They get a free cookie card just for showing up,” she reminded him. “Then they get a free cookie for filling it out.”
“That’s if they actually come. I’m trying to get them here in the first place. And I want to give them a reason to provide their name and address. Getting something in the mail that feels like a ticket might make them more likely to show up.”
“I agree. But mailing the cards will cost more money.”
“Just an envelope and a stamp for each person,” he said with a shrug. “And maybe we’ll have to order more postcards than we were originally planning to. But it’ll allow us to gather email addresses and phone numbers, which means we’ll be able to build a mailing list we can use to send out digital reminders—not only for this year but in subsequent years.”
