Page 28 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
When her dad finally clomped in from the barn, smelling of hay and the outdoors with Rocket frisking around him, the house was filled with the pleasant smell of baking biscuits, and Christmas music was playing tinnily from Holly’s phone. She and Jace had fallen into a pleasant rhythm. After cleaning off the table, they had moved on to tidying up all around the dining room, putting to rights all of the many little sources of disorder that can so easily clutter up a family home.
Cupcake persistently got underfoot until Holly bribed him with one of Rocket’s rawhide bones, and then he took it under the table and lay chewing and slobbering, sounding five times larger than he actually was.
“I’m getting used to the lack of hair, I think,” Jace said. Cupcake was not currently wearing his sock. “It’s kind of endearing.”
“I know. He’s like a little warm tube. What are you doing?”
“The edge of your rug’s pulled up here. I can tack it down for you.”
He seemed to do this as easily as breathing—finding little points of wear and brokenness, putting them back together again. So far he had replaced a light bulb she hadn’t even noticed had burned out, reconnected a loose switch for the toy skating rink in the miniature village so it lit up again, and took down an old clock from the wall—stuck for years—to tinker with later.
Holly brushed dust off her hands. “Don’t worry about it now. Let me feed the dogs, if I can separate Cupcake from his new best friend, and then we’ll eat.”
Dinner with her dad and Jace was less horrendously awkward than Holly had been afraid of. Jace seemed to slip easily into quiet, polite manners that made her think formal table manners had been drilled into him as a kid, or maybe it was a military thing. He said please and yes ma’am, asked to pass the salt, and kept his elbows off the table. Her dad behaved himself, gruffly asked Jace a couple of questions about how he was finding the Christmas cottages, and mostly shoveled food into his mouth. Everyone was polite, well behaved, and just a little tense.She’d certainly had worse dinners when she’d brought a guy home?—
Okay. She needed to stop thinking like that.
But it was hard not to. Her nerves were still jangling from the clear evidence of home invasion. Had Rob done anything else in her room? Sniffed her pillow? Oh, ugh. She was going to have to wash all her sheets.
“—do for a living, son?” her dad was asking Jace.
Holly tuned back in.
“I don’t really have a career right now, sir,” Jace answered. “Odd jobs, I guess.”
Holly tensed up, and started opening her mouth to tell off her dad. This had been one of his big points of contention about Rob—that Rob, after his high school football career fizzled out, had no regular job, no ambitions, was going nowhere.
But her dad surprised her.
“Nothing wrong with good honest work,” her dad said. “Seems like you’re good with your hands, aren’t you?”
Jace reflexively looked down at his hands, one holding a fork and the other a bread roll, as if he expected to see something other than he did.
“Yeah, I like fixing things,” he said, a little bit bashfully.
“Dad, he’s great at it,” Holly put in. “He’s fixed things all over the place today. You know that light in the Mistletoe cabin that never worked right? Fixed. And he fixed the furnace, and the broken chainsaw, and you remember that old cider jug, the one that sometimes spurts and tries to drench people? It’s working like new, and it only took him a minute.”
“It just needed a valve tightened,” Jace murmured.
“Yeah, well, we could sure use someone like that around the farm,” her dad said. “I bet the neighbors could too. I know the Ramseys might be looking for some help refencingtheir pasture after the holiday season, before spring lambing season. You ever work in construction?”
“I’ve done a little roofing.” Jace said it in the way of someone admitting a shameful secret. He really didn’t like talking about himself, Holly thought.
“Pretty sure the Olesons are putting on a new barn roof this year. Might want to talk to them about that.”
After dinner, Jace offered to wash the dishes, but Holly said she’d take care of it; she wanted to talk to her dad. She didn’t say so, but Jace seemed to catch on. Either that, or he was still desperately looking for something useful to do.
“How about I take the dogs out for an evening run, then?”
“You really mean run?” Holly asked dubiously.
“I do.” Jace gave her a quick grin that tingled through her down to her toes. “I’m out of the habit of jogging. Really need to get back into it.”
Holly snorted, trying to shake off the wave of—somethingthat went through her when he looked at her like that. “Rocket will run you around the farm twelve times and still want to go herd some sheep, but you might have to carry Cupcake back.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
She still couldn’t quite believe that he actually meant to jog around the farm, but when she looked out the window a minute later, she saw him loping easily up the hill, with Rocket trotting at his side and Cupcake, in his sock, scampering behind.
