Page 12 of Hers for the Weekend

Holly didn’t mean to make a noise in her throat, but she must have, because Tara looked over quickly.

“What?” she asked.

Holly hmmed. “Did you… tell… people? That you wanted to be called Sloane?”

“Yes!” Tara said. “I mean, I didn’t push. You can’t push nicknames, or it’s not organic!”

Holly just watched her, until Tara started to squirm.

“I obviously support anyone’s right to change their name to anything that fits them best and feels good but I… resent that easy collegiality and how none of them seem to have to work at it. They all make friends like it’s simple. I have Cole, and I’m not sure I can call Cole a friend. He’s mostly my brother, and I don’t even know if he likes me.”

Tara’s phone, connected to the car’s Bluetooth, heard “Call Cole.”

The car announced, “Calling Cole.”

Tara looked at Holly with an Oh Shit face, and Holly mouthed, Oops!

“Tara Sloane Chadwick, as I live and breathe,” Cole drawled over the speaker. “I was fixing to call you to make sure you got on the road okay.”

“She was extremely punctual,” Holly told him.

“Of course she was.” His voice was thick with both amusement and affection. While his accent was the same as Tara’s—they’d grown up attached at the hip, after all—somehow his invoked long, slow summer days on the water with a bourbon and a cigar, whereas hers brought to mind sweet tea so cold it crackled. “And how are you? Ready to experience the magic and splendor of a Jewish-owned Christmas tourist extravaganza?”

Even when she couldn’t see him, she could see his spirit fingers.

“Surely we’ll be focusing on wedding prep and will not be subjected to the full onslaught of a Carrigan’s Christmas?” Tara protested, alarm in her voice.

Cole’s laugh filled the car, bubbling like the tide coming in. “Oh, honey, there’s no escaping Christmas at Carrigan’s. The season started November first. People have been coming here for their winter vacations for generations. We couldn’t tell them to go somewhere else! Miriam and Noelle invited them all to the wedding!”

Tara’s eyes became huge. “Where are they sleeping?!” she demanded. “Where are we sleeping?”

“You are sleeping in the Christmasland Inn,” Cole said, and Holly thought she detected a hint of smugness in his voice. What was he up to? “I booked you myself. Everyone else, you let us worry about.”

“Us? Since when do you work at Carrigan’s?” Holly teased.

“Once you’re here, you’re on the team!” he singsonged back.

“See, I told you they were in a cult,” Tara grumbled.

“A very glittery cult,” Cole agreed. Part of Miriam’s artistic vision was to cover everything around her in glitter glue. If she were going to start a cult, it would be shiny. “It’s good to hear your voice, darlin’, but what did you call for?”

Holly expected Tara to seem panicked, since she hadn’t meant to call him at all, but she’d obviously used the beginning of the conversation to come up with a reason.

It was weirdly hot, how smooth she was at dissembling. Holly would unpack why that was, later.

Chapter 7

Tara

Tara had not come up with a reason for calling Cole that he would believe, but she didn’t want to tell him that she’d essentially butt-dialed him.

Despite her suspicion that he didn’t actually like her so much as put up with her, he was sensitive, and his feelings would be hurt. He needed to know that people thought about him, that he was taking up space in other people’s heads.

She couldn’t ask him what he wanted for Christmas. It was mid-December and he knew she always finished her Christmas shopping by Labor Day. She’d bought him a bottle of his outrageously expensive custom Italian cologne, because he was currently low on funds since his parents had disowned him for being gay and he was not, technically, supposed to get his trust fund until he was forty. She’d also bought him a wool fisherman’s sweater embroidered with crabs in sunglasses riding surfboards. (He notoriously collected clothes covered in lobsters, dressed in beach clothes even in the dead of winter, and sailed instead of surfed. He was going to hate it so much that he’d love it.)

He’d already told them he had their rooms booked, so that was out as a conversational gambit. She could tease him about Sawyer, the hot bartender he was definitely fooling around with, but he would turn around and tease her about Holly.

While on speakerphone. With Holly in the car.

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