Page 20 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
“Well, Dad, have you scared him off yet?”
That was Holly’s voice, and Jace lit up at her approach; it felt as if the wan winter sun had brightened in her presence. She had her oversize, colorful knit hat pulled down over her hair, and her cheeks were pink. The sock-clad dog bounced along behind her. She was lugging two large insulated plastic jugs by their top handles, one in each hand. Jace hurried to help her.
“Thanks,” she said, handing one off to him. “This is cider, and that’s cocoa. It’s complimentary for the customers. We usually refresh these halfway through the day if it’s busy.”
Jace helped her put out the jugs and set up stacks of paper cups next to them. “Is it usually busy?” he asked.
“This close to Christmas, it comes in waves. We’re going to have some real dead times, and when I’m here alone, usually that’s when I head down to the house to grab asandwich or use the bathroom. The driveway to the tree farm goes right past the house, so you can see if someone’s coming. But other times we’ll be slammed. Hi, Dad! How are things going up here?”
She was way too cheery to be believable. Jace suspected she was forcing it. He also felt his hands curling in an attempt to turn into paws inside their gloves, and shoved them into his pockets. Wonderful.
Her dad frowned a little, as if he too noticed Holly’s unnatural brightness. “No problems,” he said, slinging the axe over his shoulder. “This fella’s a natural. We’re gonna have a steady hand with the trees this year.” He glanced at Holly, then at Jace with a more searching look. “I need to head over to the Carmody place for a hay delivery. You good here?”
There was just the slightest hesitation before Holly said, “We’re fine, yeah.” She picked up the small dog and held him out to her dad. “If you’re going back to the house, could you take Cupcake with you, please? It’s too cold for him out here.”
The Colonel sighed. He took the dog carefully, one-handed, and transferred him from Holly’s hands into one of the large pockets of his work coat. Holly looked a little worried about this, but the dog’s head popped up immediately. He didn’t seem to mind.
After the Colonel walked away, there was a brief, awkward silence.
“So, I gotta ask,” Jace said. “Why is that dog wearing a sock?”
HOLLY
“It’s a coat,”Holly said.
“Made from a ... sock?”
“Yes.” She poured herself a cup of hot cocoa that she didn’t really want to give herself something to do with her hands.
Down at the bottom of the side road to the tree farm, her dad was unfastening the chain. There was already a car waiting on the other side.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” Jace said stiffly.
“I’m not,” Holly announced briskly. “It’s fine. I’ve moved on completely.”
Her dreams had other ideas, of course. She couldn’t help remembering mental flashes from last night before she had been so rudely interrupted by Rob’s text. Jace’s powerful body against hers, his stubble prickling her face. It didn’t help that she had an all too vivid sense-memory of just exactly what his strong mouth and full lips would feel like on hers.
The car started towards them, and Holly turned to pour two more cups of cocoa. “Here,” she said, jamming them intoJace’s hands. “That looks like the same old blue Toyota that Mr. and Mrs. Borweski were driving a decade ago. I wonder if their kids are in college now.”
“Do you know everybody around here?” Jace asked. He stepped away, giving her space. She felt a highly confusing mix of ambivalent feelings about that.
“It’s hard not to when you grow up in a small town.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said quietly, and then the car arrived, and she didn’t have a chance to follow up on that.
As she had told Jace, working at the tree farm this close to Christmas was typically a series of rushes punctuated by long periods of boredom.
It had been five years since she had done more than fill in occasional shifts when she happened to be home at Christmastime, but she found that the regulars hadn’t changed a whole lot. The Yangs, who had been coming here to get their tree here since they were newlyweds, had three kids now. Old Mrs. Cooper, another of their longtime regulars, brought her long-haired dachshund Pickles, who turned out to be fast friends with Rocket; the two dogs ran around together while Jace cut and wrapped Mrs. Cooper’s Norway pine.
Unfortunately, working with Jace did not seem to be getting rid of her urge to plaster herself all over him like a cheap shirt. She had hoped her overactive libido would calm down with repeated exposure, like getting rid of an allergy by taking small doses of the substance you were allergic to.
Instead it seemed to be doing the opposite and sensitizing her. Not a prophylactic dose of an allergen, more like some almost-out-of-reach piece of clothing that was rubbinggently, now and then, not enough to cause pain, but like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
“Was that E4 or E6?” she asked, bending over the ledger and trying not to imagine Jace bending her over the table it was on. “The tree location.”
“E6,” Jace said promptly as he worked on lashing up the tree they’d just cut.
He was good at remembering things. Holly had worked with much less competent assistants—actually quite a lot of them, over the years, since the tree farm tended to use either college-age help or guests working off their free room and board. She had trained a lot of people, and fixed a lot of people’s mistakes. Jace was one of the best they’d ever had.
