Page 40 of The Holiday Honeymoon Switch
“Who’s getting cookies on the house?”
A second woman bustles through the swinging kitchen doors, a forest green and red plaid kerchief covering her brown hair. Her eyes are vibrant blue, just like Aiden’s. She’s carrying a tray of sandwich buns.
“You must be Alexa, Aiden’s sister. You look so much alike.”
“I guess. And you are…?”
“This is Aiden’s high school friend,” Sidra says. “The one I was telling you about, staying out at the cabin on the North Service Road?”
“Holly Beech, nice to meet you,” Holly says with a smile—but Alexa doesn’t smile back.
“The one who loved the peppermint snowdrifts,” Sidra prompts, hands on hips, her smile now full of good-natured teasing. “Which Itoldyou were perfect.” She turns back to Holly. “Alex is a cookie perfectionist, and she was worried Friday’s snowdrift batch wasn’t up to her usual standards. She forgot to add the green and red jimmies to the icing, you see. A travesty, according to her.”
“The jimmies are very important for color and texture,” Alexa explains, like she’s talking about a lifesaving brain-surgery technique and not holiday cookies. “It’s a key step in the peppermint snowdrift baking process, and I forgot.”
“It was the best cookie I’ve ever had, I swear,” Holly says. “Jimmies or no jimmies.”
“Thank you,” Alexa says curtly, picking up a bread knife and beginning the work of splitting the buns on the tray she has just put down. “So, you know Aiden,” she says as she cuts. Holly nods. “You went to that snobby private school he got the scholarship to?” She looks up as Holly stops nodding. “Where no one would give him the time of day orinvite him to any parties and so he kicked every single one of their asses academically and proved he really did belong there?”
“Oh, well…”
Sidra puts her hand on Alexa’s shoulder and gives it a gentle rub. “Holly, my wife has zero filter. It’s normally a cute quirk—but honey, we are dealing with a new customer, not someone who already knows and adores you.” She says this last bit out of the side of her mouth. Alexa just rolls her eyes, but she does smile at Sidra. Her expression turns somewhat frosty again when she turns back to Holly, though.
“Well, sure, she’s a customer, but she also said she’s an old friend of Aiden’s, right? And you were just giving her cookies on the house, which is a practice reserved for close friends only—or we’d go out of business. So, she’s sort of a customer hybrid.” Alexa sets down the knife and tilts her head, thinking. “Wait.” She snaps her fingers. “HollyBeech. I do think he mentioned that name back in the day. Weren’t you the one whose grades and scores he was always chasing? He called you his pacesetter. But you barely knew he existed?”
“Alexa!” Sidra’s tone is sterner now. “Please accept my apology,” she says to Holly. “The local retirement home’s annual holiday luncheon is today, and then the Snowflake Dance, and we’re working double time to make sure we have enough cookies—”
“Which is why I don’t understand why we made it the specialandwhy you’re giving them away,” Alexa mutters as she sets back to work.
Sidra just slides another Lebkuchen into the bag and presses it into Holly’s hands. “We do hope you come back again soon.”
“No, really, I’ll pay,” Holly says, but neither Sidra nor Alexa makes a move toward the cash register, so she takes out a ten and shoves it in the tip jar.
“Phew,” she mutters as she exits. Alexa and Aiden might look similar, but they couldn’t be more different.
She heads back to the sports shop and is trying on the newly tuned skates when Aiden comes in.
“Nice socks,” he says by way of greeting, his blue eyes sparkling.
She laughs. “I honestly thought I was going to spend two weeks without seeing another human being, let alone showing off my fuzzy novelty Bumble the Yeti socks,” Holly says.
“Let me guess, a gift from your friend Ivy?”
“Correct!”
“I feel like I know her already,” he says as she takes the skates to the counter to pay.
Outside, Holly offers to drive to the river, and they walk toward her car. Inside it, she turns on the heaters and invites him to find a local radio station. He spins the old-fashioned radio dial and settles on a station playingChristmas music. As the car fills with the sound of Dolly Parton’s voice singing “With Bells On,” Holly pulls the paper bag of cookies out of the canvas bag she brought to town. “Hey, want a cookie? Pre-skating sustenance? I was in the café earlier, and Sidra gave me a few extra.”
Aiden takes the paper bag and looks inside. “Uh-oh. Sometimes Sidra has to launch a diplomatic mission with free cookies—and that’s a lot of Lebkuchen. Was Alexa in a mood?”
“It sounds like there are a lot of town events going on today. She was…a bit stressed?”
“You’re being kind. My sister is…” He pauses and considers his words, and Holly finds herself smiling as she pulls out of her parking spot, at his habit of mulling over everything he says so carefully. “When she and Sidra lived in San Francisco, Alexa worked for a multinational bank and finally admitted she’d become a workaholic about two years after we’d all figured that out already. She suffered severe burnout. This move to Krimbo was good for her mental and physical health—but she still acts like multimillion-dollar accounts are hanging in the balance on busy days at the café.”
Holly laughs. “Okay, that’s definitely the vibe I got. She was very serious about leaving the jimmies out of the peppermint snowdrifts yesterday.”
Aiden laughs. “Sounds accurate. You get used to Alexa, andthenyou love her. But it’s a process.”
