With a final glance around her apartment, making sure the stove and lights were off, and the miniature Christmas tree was twinkling in the living room window, assuring passersby that no Scrooges were in residence here, she started downstairs to finish her last minute preparations for the party.
By the time the guests began to arrive, Lula had cider warming in the Crock-Pot, carafes of hot chocolate and coffee on every table, old-time Christmas music piping through Tea for Two’s speakers, and a smile fixed on her face. No one would ever guess that she secretly loathed this event with a passion she usually reserved for people who let their dogs poo on the sidewalk.
“Lula, so good to see you!” Her cousin Mia set down her overflowing duffle bag and pulled Lula into a hug.
Lula went stiffly, embracing her shorter cousin efficiently, trying not to cringe at the feel of Mia’s softly rounded stomach pressing against hers.
Of course, Mia would get pregnant within a few months of getting married to a man she’d met barely six months ago before she had any idea if this romance was going to last. Her cousin had more enthusiasm than sense, but Lula didn’t try to reason with Mia anymore. Some people were a lost cause, and all you could do was include them in your prayers before you went to sleep.
“Merry Christmas, and thank you again for hosting the exchange,” Mia said, brown eyes shining as she took off her coat and hung it on the coat tree. “I look forward to it every year, but especially this year. My sweet tooth is as out of control as my hormones.” She broke off with a wide grin and waved at someone over Lula’s shoulder. “Betty! How are you, sugar?”
Mia moved deeper into the room, red curls bobbing as she hurried to embrace another guest.
Lula was left to move Mia’s duffle bag full of cookies out of the way before another guest tripped over them on their way inside. With a sigh, she lugged the bag to the cookie table, wrinkling her nose in distaste when she saw that Mia had tied up the cellophane on her cookie packages with red and green G-string panties. Her cousin did run a lingerie shop, but it was disgusting to put panties and food so close together, even if the panties had never been worn.
She was considering accidentally losing Mia’s bag of peanut butter fudge cookies behind one of the Christmas trees, when the delivery door buzzer rang. She frowned. She never scheduled deliveries on Saturday, but maybe one of the guests had decided to come in through the back door.
Leaving Mia’s embarrassing offering on the table—it was her cousin who would have to deal with the raised eyebrows after all—she hurried through the stockroom toward the rear of the shop.
She plastered a welcoming smile on her face, but on the inside she was mentally counting down how many minutes she would have to wait before starting the games. She wasn’t thinking about long-forgotten hurts or men with broad shoulders and melted chocolate eyes. She wasn’t thinking about dreams placed on a shelf or love letters locked away in a box with no key. She wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary, but that’s why unexpected things are called surprises.
Though surprised was a pale word to describe the way Lula felt when she opened her door to find one of Aunt Louise’s holiday garden gnomes sitting on her back stoop, with a sticky note on its chest that simply read, “For L.J.”
Lula’s stomach bottomed out and her mouth filled with a sour, bitter taste like a lemon drop dipped in battery acid.
No one had ever called her L.J. but him, the man she’d never expected to see again. Carter was part of her past, as dead and buried as Aunt Louise and her favorite gnome, “Santa’s Little Helper,” who had gone into her casket with her.
Now, Lula felt like she was being pulled from her own grave, kicking and screaming, begging to be allowed to rest in peace. She didn’t want this to be real. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have him back in town after eleven long years.
It was too much, so overwhelming she couldn’t seem to draw in a deep breath, couldn’t stop her heart from slamming frantically against her ribs or her head from spinning.
Tallulah Josephine Watson was not the sort of woman who swooned, but on that bright and sunny day in December, she did just that, crumpling to the ground outside her back door, one long arm coming to rest inches from a Christmas gnome’s feet.
2
Carter
Carter Bryce wasn’t the man he’d been eleven years ago—the boy he’d been, a stupid kid who thought he had the world figured out.
After the hell he’d been through in Somalia, the sickness that had almost killed him, and the last year and a half in Alaska—burning through the last of his savings to cover his dying father’s medical bills—Carter was smart enough to realize he didn’t know shit. The world was a big, complicated, sad, and beautiful place and he was never going to get the best of it. The most he could hope for was to come to peace with it, to make the most of the life he’d been given, and to have the strength to admit when he was wrong.