“This is perfect.” She looped her arm through Carter’s and squeezed. “This was one of my secret Christmas wishes.”
“I figured it would do until I can get you up to Alaska for a real sleigh ride,” he said. “My dad still has his cabin up there, and I have friends who will loan us dogs. We could go winter camping next Christmas.”
“Sounds miserable,” Lula said cheerfully as Carter turned left on Mesquite Lane, the last road before the highway narrowed. “I’ve never felt air colder than thirty-one degrees and that’s just fine with me. I’ll be a Texas girl ’til the day I die.”
“Oh, come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?” He nudged her shoulder. “I know there’s a wild child inside of you, Lu. You may have everyone else fooled, but I see the real Lula Jo.”
She fought a smile. “Wild and ‘enjoys freezing to death in the Alaskan wilderness’ are not the same thing. Now pull over, mister. I have a mission to accomplish.”
“And what’s that?” Carter asked, grinning as he tugged on the reins.
“You’ll see,” Lula said mysteriously, pointing to the side of the road.
Carter pulled the reindeer to a stop in the middle of the residential street, where bungalows from the 1920s and larger mid-century homes threatened to overflow their tiny yards. Most of the windows were dark—nearly the entire town was at the carnival and getting settled for the parade—but Christmas lights twinkled merrily from rooftops, shrubs, and around the neck of the giant plastic armadillo the Grant family was famous for resurrecting every year.
The Grant family’s display was obnoxious, but nothing compared to the last yard on the block, where floodlights illuminated the nearly one hundred garden gnomes that filled the front lawn. Lula’s great-aunt Louise had been collecting holiday garden gnomes for twenty years. Lula had been stealing one from Louise’s lawn for ten, ever since she was twelve years old and her brother had dared her to smuggle a gnome home in her backpack.
By now, The Mystery of the Missing Gnome was a holiday tradition in Lonesome Point and many of the people who came into Lula’s tea shop waited breathlessly for the annual theft announcement—covered by the town reporter, complete with gnome pictures. It was harmless fun, and Lula didn’t really care if she was caught one day. But she still did her best to practice stealth and to grab the gnome on a different day every year, so there was no pattern to her crime against gnome-kind.
“What are we doing?” Carter asked as he tied the reindeer to a lamppost.
Lula held a finger to her lips and motioned for him to follow her. They moved soundlessly through the grass to the edge of Louise’s lawn. A glance at the windows revealed lights on in the family room, but the kitchen window that overlooked the front yard was dark.
“I’m going to go for the little elf gnome with the stocking on his head this year,” Lula whispered, pointing to the center of the display. “What do you think? Isn’t he a cutie?”
“You’re going to…” Carter’s words trailed off as he turned to her with a smile. “You’re the Gnome Bandit!”
Lula grinned. “Ten years running.”
Carter shook his head as his dark eyes skimmed her up and down, his heated look enough to make her skin tingle. “Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more irresistible. If you weren’t in the middle of a heist, I’d kiss you.”
“Come on,” she said, waving him forward with her. “You pick one out, too. I want everyone to know the bandit has an accomplice.”
A few minutes later, both she and Carter had their gnomes tucked under their arms and were creeping back into the shadows. They were nearly to safety, when Aunt Louise’s porch light flicked on.
“I see you,” her aunt’s shrill voice screeched into the night. “I see you mister! And I’ve already called the police.”
“Shit,” Carter cursed, breaking into a run beside Lula.
“Don’t worry, she didn’t see us. She’s half blind,” Lula said, sprinting for the sleigh. “We just need to get out of here before the police arrive. I don’t think she’d press charges once she knew it was me, but Aunt Louise hasn’t been all the way on her rocker the past few years.”
“Getting arrested wasn’t on my Christmas wish list,” Carter said, handing her his gnome as he untied the reindeer. “But I guess as long as we get booked together it could be fun.”
Lula giggled as he jumped up beside her and set the reindeer into motion, turning left into the alley behind the abandoned Blue Plate Cafe as a siren sounded in the distance. “I can’t even imagine,” she said. “My parents would kill me.”
“You’re twenty-two years old, babe,” Carter said. “You don’t have to be afraid of your parents anymore.”