Page 62 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Does your dad know?”
“No, he thinks you’re up at the Christmas cottages.” Holly sighed and removed Cupcake from her coat, setting him on the ground (SQUEAKA!), and began stacking their plates to return to the house. “This whole thing is starting to turn into a giant mess. I need to have it out with Dad, but?—”
“Not until after Christmas,” he said, making a fingers-crossed gesture.
“Yeah.”
But now that the topic had come up, he couldn’t stop thinking about Holly, and the fact that he had absolutely nothing to give her, not even a way to pay her back for his room and board at the farm, let alone anything special.
When he thought about it, though, he realized that he actually could think of something.
It involved getting into the house. He thought aboutsneaking in. Then he remembered the cold, ugly feeing of slipping away without talking to Holly, and the discomfort of creeping in and out of the house, even with her permission.
While Holly and her dad were busy at the tree farm, he went and knocked on the door.
Noelle opened the door. It let out a delicious waft of cinnamon and sugar smells, as well as Christmas carols blasting from the kitchen, in loud competition with the sound of children singing on a kids’ Christmas movie on the TV. Noelle was wearing an apron, with flour on her cheeks. Behind her, Kaden sprawled on a dog bed on the floor with Cupcake next to him, watching the Grinch on the TV screen.
“Oh, hello there,” Noelle said cheerfully. “You know, with everything going on, I don’t think I’ve properly introduced myself. I mean, you know who I am and I know who you are, but have I even said hi? Well, this is me saying hi.” She thrust out a hand, the knuckles decorated with flour, and clasped his. “What can I do for you?”
“Uh, hi. I actually wanted to do something for Holly,” Jace said. “Make a present for her. But it’s going to involve going upstairs and getting something of hers.”
Noelle’s cheerful face turned uncomfortable. “Um ...”
“I promise it’s nothing weird,” he said quickly. “She has a doll that was damaged. I want to fix it for her. That’s all.”
“Oh! Come on in.” She opened the door for him. “That’d be wonderful. Holly won’t admit it, she thinks she’s too grown-up for it, but she loves those dolls. Do you know where it is?”
“I think so.” Having spent a couple of nights in the room next to hers, he’d seen the doll on a shelf, among the sewing supplies. He just wasn’t sure if it had been moved. “Which room are you staying in? I think it’s in the room with the sewing machine.”
“Kaden and I are in Ivy’s old room, the one that’s thelibrary now. It seemed easier to move some books around than to try to hide all the pointy things. C’mon upstairs.”
Although she seemed to believe him, she still accompanied him up the stairs, which he figured was reasonable. The doll was right where he remembered it, wrapped in a scarf on a shelf between two boxes of sewing supplies.
“Oh wow,” Noelle said, peering past his shoulder as he unwrapped it to check and make sure it was the right one. She was a lot taller than her sister, seeming to have gotten more of their dad’s height. “What happened to it? Did one of the dogs get hold of it?”
“I didn’t see,” he hedged. “But she was really upset.”
“How were you planning to fix it? You’re going to need sewing supplies to do the dress up again. Do you sew?”
“Uh,” he said helplessly. He had many handcrafting skills, but that wasn’t one of them.
Noelle smiled. “Let me get you some sewing supplies. I know where everything is.”
A few minutes later, she was frustrated, pulling things out of drawers. “Well, I used to know where everything is! Someone’s completely rearranged it. Look at this mess.” She held up a snarled tangle of yarn. “This looks like it’s been dropped in the mud. Who in the world has been in here?”
“Not me,” Jace said hastily. He wondered if this was more of Rob’s sabotage, though messing with sewing supplies, in a room Holly almost never went into, seemed a little far-fetched.
Noelle winced as something started beeping downstairs. “Look, let me go take the cookies out before they burn, and then I’ll help you collect some supplies up here. Want to come down and eat a cookie?”
He ended up being plied with cookies, and left the house with the scarf-wrapped doll and a plastic container full of sewing supplies selected by Noelle, with a few cookies stuckin on top. She cheerfully snuck him out the back just as he heard the front door slam. “It’s our secret,” Noelle whispered. “She’ll be really happy. What a sweet thing to do for her.”
Sewing was a lot harder than it looked.
He didn’t have internet access on his phone, and he hated to have to go down and see if Noelle could locate any books on it. It should be straightforward and simple.
It wasn’t.
Noelle, who as one of five sisters had presumably dealt with amateur sewing attempts before, had tucked some extra fabric into the box of sewing supplies. He started out thinking that using it was a waste of time, tried sewing up one of the slashes in the doll’s dress, and ended up picking out his puckered, uneven efforts and doing some test stitches on the fabric instead.
