“I can’t wait to see how this looks when they flip the switch and light it all up tonight,” Corrie said. “Want to bring your little sister and we’ll all watch it together?”
“I’d like that,” he said softly. But…
“Please say yes. It would be so sad to have to come down here tonight alone.”
She had no father, issues with her mother, she was an outsider here. Corrie didn’t just rattle Andy, she needed him.
Andy was a man who had made his life’s work restoring things ravaged by time and neglect. He made things whole and right whenever he could. He couldn’t change that about himself, but he had to be smart about it. Keep it under control. “Okay, stars this morning, lights tonight. But after that I have to get back on track.”
“Okay, but just bear this in mind—if you stick to the tracks, you may miss some of the best scenery.”
ANNIE JONES
Winner of a Holt Medallion for Southern-themed fiction, and the Houston Chronicle’s Best Christian Fiction Author of 1999, Annie Jones grew up in a family that loved to laugh, eat and talk—often all at the same time. They instilled in her the gift of sharing through words and humor, and the confidence to go after her heart’s desire (and to act fast if she wanted the last chicken leg). A former social worker, she feels called to be a “voice for the voiceless” and has carried that calling into her writing by creating characters often overlooked in our fast-paced culture—from seventysomethings who still have a zest for life to women over thirty with big mouths and hearts to match. Having moved thirteen times during her marriage, she is currently living in rural Kentucky with her husband and two children.
Their First Noel
Chapter One
“I’m out of time, nearly out of money, and if you look at what I’m trying to accomplish—completely out of my mind.” Andy McFarland, his heart so heavy he could hardly breathe, stood in front of the two-story picture window in the old Snowy Eaves Inn and began a prayer that he had no idea how to finish. What did he want, really? What did he need?
If he had the answers to those questions then he’d do as he always did, collect the pieces, analyze the situation and do what had to be done. But at this point…
He looked around the nearly sixty-year-old inn where he was living as he restored it to its former charm and character. The lobby was rough but in good shape. So were the parts of the inn unseen from where he stood—the upstairs bedrooms and completely remodeled kitchen. But the dining room, currently little more than a large, lodge-like gathering room, stood in several stages of disarray. The old water-warped hardwood floors had been pried up leaving recently smoothed-over concrete in their place. The walls that had been harboring mold, poor insulation and potentially unsafe wiring—a fun little surprise they didn’t find until deep into the renovation—had been demolished. Now only the wooden framework remained, leaving the room looking skeletal, almost desolate. It was…
Hopeless? A lost cause? Impossible? He turned again to the large windows that overlooked the secluded woods of his beloved and familiar Mt. Piney, Vermont. He shook his head, unable to find the right words.
A brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the abandoned tools left earlier in the day when the weather had gone foul and his workers left because they couldn’t get anything done with electricity going in and out. A gust of wind rattled the windows. Andy felt the power of that gust through every inch of his six-foot-two-inch frame, but knew it was his predicament, not the weather, that had him shaken to the core.
The place that he had thought would be a showcase for his work and provide for his family for years to come had taken all his time, talent, a handful of construction loans and most of his savings. Two weeks after it was supposed to have opened for the season, the Snowy Eaves Inn and his life seemed stuck in an unfixable fix.
He shut his eyes and whispered the only kind of prayer he had left within him, “Please…help me.”
Lightning tore across the winter sky. The flash illuminated the huge windows, casting his reflection back at him. Gone was the boyish twenty-seven-year-old with the cocky I-can-handle-whatever-life-throws-me attitude that he wore in his ready smile, the angle of his shoulders and his eagerness to take on tasks that others backed away from. Looking back at him was the image of a man who had planned so well, promised so much and now stood on the brink of failure.
The lights flickered and the expansive lobby went pitch dark.
“Great,” he groaned and rubbed the heels of his calloused hands into his weary eyes. “I ask for help and get—”
“Andy? I don’t like this, make it better!”
The power came back with a rumble and a hum. Andy turned to find his ten-year-old sister wearing pink pajamas and clutching her beloved sock monkey running down the sweeping stairway that emptied into the space designed to welcome guests into the inn. Her coal black braids flew behind her and her bare feet slapped over the polished concrete floor.
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” he told the child his mom had adopted from China as a toddler when Andy was nearly seventeen years old.
“Can’t sleep. I’m scared.” She threw her arms open wide and came sliding in to grab him around the waist and bury her face in his side. The dangling arms, legs and tail of the old stuffed toy that Andy had given her, one of his own childhood favorites, batted against his leg. “Buddy Mon-Kay is scared, too.”
“Scared? Are you kidding me?” He cupped her delicate chin and cheek in his palm to protect her freshly washed face from his work-dirtied flannel shirt. “Greer McFarland, you’re the bravest kid I know. You can’t make me believe a little storm—”
“It’s not the storm. It’s this place.” Her tiny, worried voice rose and echoed slightly against the vaulted ceiling. “It’s all echo-y down here and upstairs in my room, my night-light is going off and on by itself. Besides that, we’re all alone out here in the woods. Something could get us!”
“First, we’re never all alone,” he reminded her. “God’s always with us. And as an added bonus, you have me here to protect you.”
“And pray with me?”
His chest ached at the thought of the desperate prayer he had just uttered. He was in this mess deep and that had him more scared than anything this sweet, sheltered child might dream up, even in a half-finished old landmark inn, deep in the Vermont woods. Still, he had just prayed for help to keep his commitments, what greater commitment could he have than to care for his family? He would not fail at that.
He exhaled slowly then knelt beside her. “And pray with you.”
She grinned and held her hand out for him to take.
His large hand engulfed her small one.
She gave a sideways glance toward the limp sock monkey slumped over her arm.
Andy hesitated a moment. He shook his head then placed his other hand on the head of his old pal, Buddy Mon-Kay. That completed the prayer circle.
In her innocent way, Greer asked the heavenly Father to watch over them and to keep them safe. When she finished each sentence she gave Andy’s hand a squeeze, and he repeated after her in his own fashion.
“And also bless Mommy and bring her home as soon as possible,” Greer said.
“Bless Mom, bring her home safe.” He avoided mentioning just how soon, or how long it might be before his mother could return from her latest overseas trip helping fellow adopting parents. He loved his mom with all his heart and he really believed in her cause, but her timing left something to be desired. Just thinking of that made him huff out an agitated sigh.
“And make Andy less grouchy,” Greer added.
“Make…” The kid got him. He’d been standing in prayer with her and thinking, not about her needs or about submitting to the Lord, but about his own petty inconveniences. He managed to dredge up a smile, even as he kept his eyes closed and head bent and repeated the request, “Help me be less grouchy.”
“By giving him a girlfriend before Christmas!”
“By…hey!” That far he wouldn’t go. He could hardly cope with his responsibilities as they stood right now, adding a romantic interest?
Greer giggled. “Amen.”
“Amen.” He gave her nose a tweak then stood. “Now back to bed. The storm is almost over.”
As if to defy him, the whole sky exploded with a light as bright as day followed immediately by a booming roll of thunder.
Greer hugged Buddy close to her chest.
Andy reached out to take her by the shoulder but before he made contact, the lights went out again. She whimpered.
Another slash of lightning and then another sent long, eerie shadows dancing over the front desk and the furniture draped in canvas drop cloths. Thunder shook the windows. The front doors rattled as if someone was trying to break them down.
Only maybe that wasn’t from the thunder, Andy realized, when he looked that way and the door swung open.
A dark figure loomed in the frame.
Greer screamed.
The lights came on again.
“Story of my life, I tell you. I came all the way to Vermont in December to see a real, honest-to-goodness snow for the first time in my life and I get a thunder storm.” A small woman in clunky fur-trimmed boots and a well-padded hot pink coat staggered over the threshold into the lobby proper. “And there go my glasses fogging up.”
She whisked off a pair of trendy cherry red glasses and gave them a shake, flinging droplets of cold rain as far as Andy’s cheek.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Excuse me, miss, but—”
She parted her wind-blown, chin-length chocolate brown hair down the middle like a curtain and looked up. Mascara smudged her cheeks. She squinted in his direction. She tried furiously, and pointlessly, to dry her glasses on her sopping wet, lime green polka-dot scarf.
Andy would have offered his shirttail or sleeve but he was covered with drywall dust and only would have made matters worse. At this point, not making matters worse seemed like a giant step forward, so he held his ground and asked, “Excuse me, miss, I know the article in the Vermont Travel Monthly said we expected the inn to be open the week after Thanksgiving, but we’ve had some…setbacks. I’m afraid we can’t take guests yet.”
“Oh. I thought…” She slid her glasses back on and peered at him. “Your website hasn’t been updated. According to that, I should be able to get a quiet cozy room with the best view in Vermont.”
“Web site?” Was she trying to lay the groundwork to argue her way into getting a room for the night? Coming from anyone else, he probably would have found that pushy. From this girl? He liked pushy. Pushy? Wrong word. Spunky. That was better. The difference, he decided instantly, was the unabashed optimism of her approach. “Yeah, well, I’ve been kind of busy and…wait a minute, doesn’t my website say to check back for an official opening date?”
“Can’t blame a girl for trying.” She gave him the most sincerely sheepish grin he had ever seen.
“Are you a robber?” Greer shifted her weight behind Andy but when he looked down he saw she had stuck the sock monkey out as though he were asking the question.
The woman did not hesitate. She bent down and addressed the toy as if it were the most natural thing in her world to carry on conversations with monkeys made from socks. “No, I’m not a robber. I’m a baker. And you are…?”
“Buddy Mon-Kay,” Greer answered for the toy.
“Nice to meet you Buddy, can I call you Buddy?” She actually shook the monkey’s hand.
Andy smiled. It shocked him a little, given the way the night had been going that anything could get that kind of response from him. Shocked him and sent up a signal flare. If he didn’t act quickly, this baker in boots might just convince him to let her stay in the inn overnight. Not a good idea.
“Look, I hate to sound, uh, grumpy, but you can’t stay the night here.” He took a step toward the door. “There are two hotels in Hadleyville—”
“Are there? Do they have websites? I wonder if I have cell service out here.” She fumbled around in her purse and pulled out a sleek new phone. “I could just look them up on the web and…if you’re sure you’re not open?”
“If she’s not a robber, then maybe—” Greer whispered.
“We are not open,” Andy reiterated.
The young woman chewed her lip, clutched her phone close then smiled in a way of someone used to adapting her plans on a moment’s notice, of making the best of a bad situation. “Okay. So I’ll find a place in Hadleyville. No harm. I just thought since the door was open, I would stop in and see…whatever.”
“I’m staying here, getting work done, guarding against—”
“People like me?” She cocked her head and held her hands out as if presenting herself as exhibit A.
“I was going to say guarding against construction theft. I don’t see how I could have planned for meeting someone like you.” He laughed and shook his head, his mood suddenly lightened. No, Andy knew for sure he didn’t know anyone like this. And her soft, southern accent reaffirmed that to him. “Just who are you and what brought you to the Snowy Eaves Inn?”
“I was gonna tell you that.” Greer tugged at the hem of his flannel shirt and whispered, “I think she’s the answer to your prayer.”
Andy looked down at his sister, a little embarrassed by her remark and the subject of the prayer she was thinking of, and whispered, “That’s not how prayer works. Her showing up now doesn’t have anything to do with me or that prayer.”
“Maybe it does this time. You don’t know God’s business,” Greer shot back.
“My name is Corrina Bennington. But everyone calls me Corrie.” The water-logged waif stepped forward, extending her right hand. “I came all the way from South Carolina to Vermont to find my father. But I came here to this inn tonight to find you, Mr. McFarland.”
“Me?” Andy couldn’t begin to imagine what this woman was talking about. Had he done something wrong? Was more trouble headed his way? Prayer was not a wish list, but he had submitted himself to the Lord and now this new wrinkle had appeared. He couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Even as his stomach tightened into a sickening knot, he found himself sort of smiling as he looked at the bright face of the young woman and asked, “Why me?”
“Because I have a unique problem that I believe only you can help me put right.”
If she had used any other term, he might have told her he didn’t have the time or energy. But putting things right was Andy’s calling in life. To a man on the brink of total failure, a chance to do what he did best and for someone clearly in a lot of need, how could he turn her away? “If that’s the case, well, I can’t rent you a room, but I can offer you a place to dry off and warm up while you tell me what you have in mind.”
Chapter Two
Corrie would have thought that things were going exactly as planned. Except that Corrie never planned anything. What good would it do? Life was not a recipe that followed prescribed steps to create a picture-perfect result every time. She had learned this from helping her mom in the bakery and watching her cope with what the world had dealt her.
Life was messy and sometimes painful. It was improvised, fly by the seat of your pants, make do and know things wouldn’t always work out the way you hoped. You had to rely on your wits to get by because you never knew when life would throw you a curve. You never knew when someone, even someone you loved, someone you believed loved you, would let you down. That’s how Corrie’s mother had raised her. Be prepared for the worst and you won’t be caught off guard by the bad stuff.
But what about the good stuff? Wasn’t it also possible that if you were open and not too set in your ways that you could sometimes be caught off guard by things like opportunity, joy and love? Corrie had always wondered that when her mother tried to teach her yet another lesson about the harsh realities of life. Unlike her mom, Corrie wanted to believe life was also full of wonderful discoveries if you were brave enough to go after them. Though until this little adventure, in her whole twenty-three years, Corrie had never been quite this bold.
She followed the man she knew from his postings on the inn’s website into the lobby and took a long, sweeping look at the surroundings, then at the man she had come specifically to see. Talk about caught off guard.
Her pulse raced. She hadn’t expected this Andy McFarland guy to be so big. Or so cute. Or young. Or to have his adorable daughter with him. But then she hadn’t planned much except to come to Vermont and pray she could find her answers here.
But most of all, she hadn’t prepared herself for the overwhelming awe she would feel at just coming through the doors of… “The Snowy Eaves Inn. I’m really here.”
“Yeah, but why are you here?” The man stopped in a huge, darkened room with exposed framework and wiring where walls should have been. He stood there like a wall himself, only in faded jeans and a dusty flannel shirt. Big as life. Bigger, actually, in contrast to the huge windows with rain pounding against them. The occasional lightning flash in the distance highlighted the breadth of his wide shoulders. “You said something about a problem?”
Be bold. There is no recipe. If she gave him the chance, he would find a reason to rush her away and Corrie wasn’t ready to leave yet. So she gripped the oversized bag tucked under her arm and met his question with one of her own. “You said something about drying off and warming up?”
“I haven’t said anything yet but if I did…” interjected the little girl in pink jammies and jet black pigtails clutching the sock monkey tugging at Corrie’s thick coat, “I’d say, can you make hot chocolate?”
“Are you kidding?” Carrie whooshed out one long, relieved sigh. This was perfect. Cooking always cleared her head and now having met Andy McFarland and finding him just a bit intimidating, she needed a clear head more than ever. “I grew up in my mom’s bakery making every kind of sweet concoction you can imagine. Just point me to a kitchen and—”
“This way.” The child clamped both hands around Corrie’s wrist and tried to drag her across the spacious lobby toward a closed door.
“Wait!” Andy made a lunge. He caught Corrie by the coat sleeve.
That was perfect because Corrie needed to get out of the cumbersome outerwear. She happily slid her arm free from the heavy, wet sleeve then gave a twirl to slip the rest of the way out.
She felt lighter already, just not because of the coat. She was in the place she had dreamt of seeing for most of her life, she had a pretty good idea what she wanted to do and she had just made an ally. “Thanks. Once you hang that up why don’t you join me and your daughter in the kitchen and we’ll discuss the details of the job I have for you?”
“She’s not my daughter!” he called after her.
That news shouldn’t have made one bit of difference to Corrie, but it did. It made her heart and her footsteps instantly lighter.
“I’m his sister, silly,” the child said with a giggle as if it were perfectly obvious that the big lumberjack-looking, auburn-haired man and the delicate Chinese girl were siblings. “My name is Greer.”
Corrie’s clunky fur-lined boots—the ones she had had to order special since the stores in her tiny town in the southern most part of South Carolina didn’t usually sell snow boots—scuffed over the grit-sprinkled concrete floors of the lobby and hallway. When they stepped into a large, totally dark room, the floor beneath her soles changed.
Greer hit the light switch and the room flooded with brightness.
Corrie gasped. Unlike what she had seen of the rest of the place, the kitchen was not just finished, it was gorgeous. Though totally updated, careful attention had been paid to getting the ambiance right, the way it must have felt from the time it opened sixty years earlier until the place suffered a fire more than a decade ago. “This must be almost how it looked when they walked in here all those years ago.”
Corrie settled her bag gently on the butcher-block countertop as she swept her gaze over every inch of the expansive, immaculate room.
Greer skidded across the shiny, red-tile floor toward the huge double-doored stainless steel refrigerator, asking as she went, “How it looked when who walked in?”
“My parents.” Corrie paused. She so rarely had a reason to use that term. Corrie’s father had abandoned them both before Corrie was actually born and she had been raised by her mom who had never married. The concept of parents was, well, just that, a concept to her. “They worked here twenty-four years ago. It’s where they met.”
A lump rose in her throat to think of two sweethearts filled with hope and possibilities and love. They had been young. She knew that much. Right out of high school and they had planned to marry, promised each other they would be together for the rest of their lives. But things did not always go according to plans.
If she let herself, she could become a stew pot of conflicting emotions. Years of heartache, of wanting to please her mom and longing to know her father could clash with romantic sentiment then throw in a dash of excitement over what she had come here hoping to accomplish. To combat that, Corrie did what she always did when she didn’t know what else to do. She got busy in the kitchen. “When I read online about this place reopening… I didn’t even tell my mom about it. I just felt like I had to come…and now…did you see the look on your brother’s face?”
Corrie spotted what was clearly the pantry and in it found a tin of cocoa, a bag of sugar and a bottle of vanilla. “I’m beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea, my coming to Mt. Piney without making more definite arrangements. I don’t know why I did it, really.”
She spun around to find Greer staring at her.
The young girl had set the gallon of milk next to the gleaming new professional-style stove then tucked both of her hands behind her back.
Practically bouncing up and down in place, she whispered, “I know why you’re here.”
“You do?” Corrie set the ingredients down, not sure what to make of that claim.
“Well, I don’t.” The deep, masculine voice came from the doorway.
Corrie startled but recovered quickly. Her years of training as a baker served her well. Food didn’t wait for you, you had to keep on task and moving smoothly. She didn’t miss a beat in the prep process, lining up the ingredients in the order they would be used. “Right now, I’m here to make hot chocolate. To do that I need…”
She began opening and closing cabinet doors, looking for the perfect pan.
“This?” Suddenly, Andy McFarland stood over her, his arms raised as he retrieved the perfect sized blue-and-white enamel pan from an overhead cabinet.
Corrie looked from the pan to Andy’s face. What a good face. Steady, thoughtful, no nonsense. Whereas, what she was about to ask him? Wobbly at best. Totally impulsive. Maybe even a little nutty.
He lowered the pan slowly, circling her in his arms as he did. Just when he got into a position that was almost an embrace, he pushed the pan toward her, stepped back and cleared his throat. “You said something about needing me to find your father?”
“Actually, no.” Corrie slid the pan from his large hands then turned toward the stove and got to work. “I said I came to Vermont to find my father. However, that isn’t the only reason I came. The other reason I came, and why I came out to the inn tonight, that’s why I want to hire you.”
She poured the milk into the pan, set it on the unlit burner then went to her bag on the counter. She couldn’t help playing up the drama a bit, so she paused long enough to give both Greer and Andy her best enigmatic look, which must have worked because they each leaned in with their eyes on her. She sank her teeth into her lower lip, took a breath and pulled out a box and from that, the only family heirloom she actually owned. “I want you to help me recreate this.”
“Wow!” Greer moved in to get a closer look at the old snow globe that Corrie held up. “Where’d you get that?”
“My father gave it to my mother when they worked here twenty-four years ago.” The water had gone cloudy. An air bubble had formed at the top and exposed the galloping horse weather vane on the high ridge of the peaked roof of the small plastic replica of the charming Swiss chalet-style inn. She brushed her thumb over the raised words: Snowy Eaves Inn, Mt. Piney, Vermont. The movement jostled it just enough to cause the first few notes of a Christmas song to chime out from the tiny music box inside the stand. “It plays ‘The First Noel.’ He gave it to her as a promise that he’d come for her in South Carolina and they’d spend their first Christmas together.”
“You want me to build another inn?” Andy held his hands out to his side to indicate the building where they now stood. “I’d like to help you, Ms. Bennington, but I can’t even seem to get this one finished. Sorry, but you came all this way for nothing.”
“Don’t say that,” Corrie whispered, fighting back the tears.
Even though she knew he didn’t mean she wouldn’t find her father, the very words tapped into her biggest fear. She had come so far, worked so hard. She just couldn’t let it all fall apart now.
She set the globe down on the countertop and turned back to the hot chocolate fixings. She dumped in the cocoa and sugar then realized she needed something to stir it up with. She opened a drawer and on the first try found a wooden spoon. She gripped it tightly and finally turned back to him, refocused on her first task, getting the man’s help. “But you don’t have the whole picture. I’ve been working for almost a year to be accepted into the Hadleyville Holiday Gingerbread House Showcase with an entry titled Christmas at Snowy Eaves Inn. I’ve got the aesthetics down, but it’s the steep eaves, the way the second floor hangs over the first. It has those balconies on three sides, which don’t balance well. It may work with wood and stone but… I can’t keep the roof from sliding off, or the top from being, well, top heavy and tumbling over. I think your expertise could—”
“Whoa, wait. You want to hire me to build a gingerbread house?” He held his hands up, his expression caught between a scowl and a smile. “Are you kidding me? I’m up to my eyeballs in real renovations and you want me to just up and—”
“Yeah!” Greer went on tiptoe then sprang upward, clapping. “Do it, Andy! That would be so—”
The girl flung her arms wide midjump. Her hand hit the handle of the enamel pan. She gasped. The pan flipped. Milk and clumps of cocoa went sailing in a high arch upward.
Corrie dove for the pan, not sure if the milk might have gotten hot enough to scald the child. “Be careful, Greer.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll save the snow globe!” Greer’s small fingers stretched for the object but instead of grabbing it, bumped it and sent the treasured keepsake skidding to the edge of the counter.
Corrie gasped.
The globe seemed to teeter for a split second before it flipped over the edge, somersaulting downward.
Corrie’s heart plummeted with it. She took a hurried step forward to try to save it. Her boot hit a puddle of milk and she lost her footing.
Andy lunged forward to catch her.
She’d have rather he’d tried to catch the snow globe. She pushed off Andy’s attempt at a rescue and thrust both hands forward to make a sort of safety net to catch the keepsake.
The glass of the globe went slipping through her fingertips. It hit the hard tile floor, base first, did a sort of hop then came down hard with a sickening crash.
Greer squealed and leapt backward, her hands on her flushed cheeks. “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it, honest.”
Just before Corrie’s knees would have hit the unforgiving glass-cluttered tile, Andy bent down and caught her. She fell nose first against his muscular shoulder.
The dust on the flannel made her sneeze.
“Remember what I always say about there being accidents and there being consequences, Greer?” he asked firmly even as he steadied Corrie back on her feet. “The globe breaking was an accident. The milk spilling was a consequence of your actions.”
Corrie covered her eyes with one hand. Consequence or accident, she just couldn’t look.
Greer said something so softly that Corrie couldn’t make it out but the forlorn sound of it made her heart ache. She had been raised by a mother who often made her feel as if everything she did was wrong, or at least not quite good enough. Corrie understood her mother’s drive to create a sense of self-reliance in her only child and she loved her mom, but she didn’t want Greer to feel the way her mother had unintentionally made Corrie feel.
She rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger then turned toward the little girl. Rally, she told herself. You can’t change what happened, only the way you respond to it. “Sweetie, you’re barefoot and there’s glass everywhere, maybe you should skedaddle.”
“Yeah. Why don’t you head back to bed?” Andy suggested, giving her a tender nudge. “I’ll take care of this.”
Greer sniffled and looked up at the big man bending down to lend her comfort. She managed a wavering smile and gave him a nod that seemed to say she believed he could take care of the mess and whatever consequences came with it.
Corrie wished that even once in her lifetime she had known that kind of trust in another human being. Her mother had always pushed her to be strong, be self-sufficient… “Be careful,” she called out to the girl. “And don’t feel bad. Things happen.”
Greer picked her way across the floor and out of the room.
Corrie sighed. She still couldn’t stand to look at the broken bits and pieces of the only memento she had ever had of her father.
“Leave this with me. I’ll do what I can.” He put his hand lightly on her shoulder.
She shrugged it off, not to be rude but to let him know that she didn’t need his sympathy. “Things happen that you don’t see coming,” she said softly again. “What you do after that, that’s what matters.”
“I know the owner of Maple Leaf Manor in Hadleyville. Let me call and make sure they have a room for you.” He went to the phone hanging on the wall. “That’s not too far a drive. I grew up there. My mom and Greer live there. That’s where my office is. With the rain letting up you can make it over there in twenty minutes or so.”
He pressed in some numbers as he spoke to her, then quickly made the arrangements. After he hung up he told her, “You’ll have a room waiting.”
“Okay. I actually was on my way to Hadleyville when I saw the sign pointing the way here and…well, the rest is history.” She pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and sighed, adding, “Just like my snow globe.”
“I meant it when I said I’ll take care of this. I’ll put this right.” His hand cupped her shoulder again, this time firmly enough to let her know he wasn’t going to be dissuaded from offering comfort. “That’s what I do, you can count on me.”
Corrie looked back and up, deep into his searching brown eyes. She wanted to count on him. On someone. Her whole life she had wanted to feel like she had someone besides herself to fall back on. “Does that mean you’ll help me assemble the gingerbread version of the Snowy Eaves Inn?”
He looked at the ceiling, groaned and then finally met her gaze. “Okay. I’ll do what I can. Meet me in my office tomorrow morning at nine and I’ll give you some pointers, if I can. But do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t tell anyone I’m acting as a consultant for a cooking contest. I’m having enough trouble keeping my reputation intact with all the setbacks and complications of this renovation without throwing that into the mix.”
Chapter Three
Andy dropped Greer off at school at 7:30 a.m. then turned his big black pickup truck toward his office just off Hadleyville’s town square. The trip wouldn’t take more than two minutes. So why had he told Corrie Bennington he’d meet her at his office at nine?
It wasn’t like he needed a lot of prep time to discuss the best way to keep a gingerbread house from falling apart. Use better support. End of story, goodbye.
He really needed to be back at the worksite if he hoped to get the place done in time for the newly rescheduled grand opening party slated for the evening of Christmas Eve. And yet, when he had hurried her to the door last night, trying to get her on her way so he could get back to the mess in the kitchen and try to sort that out, he had blurted out his office address and told her he’d be there at nine. Why?
The simple answer? The woman had rattled him.
“Some simple answer,” he muttered sarcastically as he pulled up to a stop sign around the corner from his destination.
He was twenty-seven years old, a business owner, the man of his family since his dad died eight years ago. He spent his days on construction sites, or negotiating with customers and suppliers. He had helped raise his little sister when his mother’s work took her out of town for weeks at a time. He had once taken over for his mom teaching Vacation Bible School to five-year-olds! He did not get rattled.
Especially not by a girl with wild brown hair and trendy glasses, bursting into his business bundled up in a bright pink coat and boots better suited to an arctic expedition than a rainy Vermont evening. He smiled at that memory. Then he turned the corner and busted out laughing.
There she was. Corrie Bennington—trudging down the sidewalk in that unforgettable coat and those clunky boots.
He pulled up alongside of her and hit the button to roll down the passenger window and called out, “You know, the weather forecast says no chance of snow whatsoever for today.”
“Oh, hey!” She broke into a warm, genuine smile but didn’t slow her pace. Her breath made moist little clouds in the nippy morning air as she said, “What’s with that? I talked to my mom this morning and it’s colder in the Carolinas than it is in Vermont!”
“My office is right up ahead. If you want to—”
“Can’t stop and chat now.” She gave him a wave and kept moving. “On the trail of a hot popover. Don’t want it to get cold.”
Get cold? The trail or the popover? Neither one made any sense to him. He pulled forward and took his preferred spot in front of McFarland Construction and Restoration. He got out and caught up with her, his long legs easily matching her hurried stride. “You’re out and about awfully early.”
“Ha! You call this early?” She was walking so fast that the heat rising from inside her coat steamed up her glasses slightly. “Back home I’d have already put in more than a couple hours of work by now.”
The bright coat, the determination, the puff, puff of her breath put Andy in mind of the little steam shovel determined to dig a cellar for the new town hall right out of a children’s book. Never in his life had he ever thought of a woman in that way and to his surprise, it made Corrie Bennington all the more interesting to him. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of the khaki-colored down vest he wore over his red-and-black flannel shirt and cheerfully kept up with her. “You said something about a popover?”
“Word around the free continental breakfast at the motel this morning was that anyone who helps the First Friday Christian Fellowship Club string up Christmas lights this morning for the big Light Up Hadleyville tonight is entitled to real homemade popovers made by honest to goodness Vermont church ladies.” She pointed toward a crowd of people shuffling around town square a half a block away. “Yum!”
“You’re going to crash a service project for a popover?” He paused.
“What crash?” She didn’t hesitate as he fell out of step with her, just kept her eyes on the prize and went full steam ahead, calling back to him. “It’s the first Friday of the month. I’m a Christian. I like fellowship. And I have a great eye for decorating, me being—”
“I know, I know, a baker.” He had to jog a couple steps to catch up with her again. “You’ve mentioned that before.”
“Besides…” This time she did stop, even did a half turn toward him.
He had to pull up short to keep from slamming into her and probably knocking her to the ground.
“Besides…” she began again more softly as she looked up at him, all innocence and expectations. “I came here to find my father. I don’t have to tell you that any records from the inn, particularly from before I was even born, are long gone. I think it’s time I got out and asked around a bit. Somebody might remember him. Somebody might even know what happened to him. Maybe he’s even a local.”
“Your mom didn’t tell you if he was or not?”
“My mom doesn’t talk about him. I forced the issue once, when I was thirteen. She tried to find him. I overheard her trying and when it didn’t work out, then I overheard her crying…for days and days. I never talked about finding him to her again.” She looked away for a moment then turned her face upward and gave him a hopeful smile, nodded toward the group gathering in the park and started to walk again. “I got a name from that, though. James Wallace. Did some looking around on the internet. Didn’t find him, but I did find out about the gingerbread house competition.”
“So you’re using the competition as a kind of cover to come to the area and see if you can find out more about your father?” For something so simple, she seemed to have made it awfully complicated. Andy’s lips twitched as he tried to rein in a grin. That, he decided, was Corrie’s biggest obstacle and one of her most endearing charms—a confounding mix of complex simplicity and simple complexity.
He should run from that, of course. She didn’t really have a big problem with her gingerbread house. He could call out his advice right now and be done with it. Done with her.
He watched her striding purposefully toward the park full of unsuspecting strangers, hung his head for a moment, then took off after her, asking, “Does your mother know that’s what you’re doing?”
“I can’t tell you she doesn’t suspect I might try to find out about him. The truth is, I have been struggling between finding my own way back in South Carolina. I tried finding a way to fit into her business, but it’s really small, just getting by and she doesn’t need me there. Two years ago, I entered a local gingerbread contest and got the bakery some good PR. So when I found one in a small town just a short drive from the Snow Eaves Inn…” Corrie stopped again, blinked and tears pooled above her lower lashes. “Mom encouraged me to go. But she didn’t offer any help looking for my father and I didn’t ask. I couldn’t ask. That’s just the way it is.”
Andy gazed into her sweet, fresh-scrubbed face. The openness and longing to have answers, the weight of her strained relationship with her mother, her longing to find herself, her place in the world and where she came from, it all cut through him. “Okay. You got me. I’ll help.”
She sniffled and her expression brightened. “You’re going to string Christmas lights, too?”
He’d been talking about helping her with the competition but he realized she hadn’t even considered that he hadn’t planned to do that all along. He shook his head. She was so vulnerable. So fragile and didn’t even realize it.
There was a chance that what this girl was undertaking could leave her shattered. He thought of the pieces of the broken snow globe that he had gathered in a box but could not quite bring himself to throw away.
“Yeah, I’ll help string lights and then we’ll go to my office and I’ll see what all I can do to help you stabilize your gingerbread house.” He winced a little as he said it. “But that’s it. I have so much on my plate and nobody to help me, so I can’t afford to vary my course any more than that, got it?”
She pantomimed crossing her heart. Then she grabbed his arm and headed for the crowd hovering around two long tables piled high with strand after strand of tiny lights in front of an oversized gazebo where, once upon a time, the town had held summer concerts and where, years ago, the town had put up an ice skating rink every winter.
It didn’t take long for Andy to realize he wasn’t the only person pleasantly rattled by the unruly energy of this southern belle of a baker. Almost as soon as he introduced her to them, she had the town’s grizzled old bench sitters, the fellows who would give you the shirt off their backs but grumbled about everything from the weather to the ways of the world, hanging on her every word. It would have been the perfect time to ask if any of them knew her father.
Instead, when the mayor, Ellie Walker, who had been in charge of deciding how and where to hang the lights in the park for the last eight years, threw up her hands to proclaim she had run out of new ideas and asked for input, Corrie rushed to the rescue. The two women put their heads together for a few minutes while the whole group shifted and huddled in the cold. The next thing Andy knew, the mayor ushered the pink-coated visitor onto the bandstand gazebo as a makeshift stage to make an announcement.
“We wanted the centerpiece of the town’s Christmas decor to look like a confection, so who better to trust with the job than a sweet young baker, Corrie Bennington?” Mrs. Walker, a sturdy, stalwart type that Andy had never seen without two pair of glasses, one always on her nose and the other always on a chain around her neck, threw out her arms as if offering the world, or at least their little piece of it, to Corrie. “Her coming here a whole week early for the contest is a very special sort of Christmas surprise, I’d say. Corrie give us some directions, or ask us anything, we’re ready for it.”
All eyes fixed on her.
“I just want to say that I’ve been in your town less than a day and I already love it. Honestly, I think I loved this part of the country long before I got in my car to come here two days ago. I loved the idea of it. I loved the history of it, what little I knew, and am honored to be here and happy to pitch in.”
The group applauded.
Her smile beamed brighter than a crystal and silver Christmas tree star.
Andy couldn’t take his eyes off her. His mind should be on his own work, on what needed to get done today but looking at Corrie, all he could think was how much he hoped things worked out for her.
“And I’d like to ask…” She seemed to scan the faces trained her way.
Andy shoved his hands into the pockets of his vest and concentrated on her, trying to let her know she had his support in asking the crowd about her father.
Her slender shoulders rose then fell as she exhaled, her warm breath visible in the cold air. She pressed her lips together. Cleared her throat. She started to say something, paused, tucked her hair behind her ear then pushed her glasses up on her nose. At last she smiled. “I’d like to ask if anyone knows this song?”
She broke out singing.
The crowd laughed. Some scratched their heads. Some chimed in. But when Corrie came down the steps and began giving orders, all of them began to work together to get the job done.
Andy shook his head as he watched the dark-haired young woman move from the tables of workers to the grand bandstand. Her hands flitted delicately as she described how to drape and wind the strands, making Andy smile. Despite being a poorly outfitted little steam shovel of a person, she had style and graciousness that he hadn’t found in any other woman he’d met, he had to admit that.
And that worried him. He had so much work to do that he didn’t see how he could accomplish it all. He had a budding reputation as a master renovator to uphold and an inn that he had promised to open two weeks from today. Nothing Corrie was asking of him would further that goal. He really needed to hurry her along, give her his advice and then…
“I really did get here at the right time. They had two strings of twinkle lights with green wire instead of white.” She tucked the coils of lights into her purse presumably to keep the decorating group from mixing them in the decor again. Then she grabbed Andy by the hand and began trying to pull him toward the grand bandstand. “And speaking of right time—time to hang the big light-up star shapes. We need someone tall and strong who won’t try to override the plan. I told them I had the perfect man in mind.”
He resisted. At least he had intended to resist. But when she grasped his big old work-roughened hand in her soft, supple fingers and she smiled up at him, he was done in all over again.
“C’mon.” She tipped her head toward the waiting workers, her eyes sparkling with joy in what she was doing.
It was a temporary thing, he told himself.
He dragged his feet and feigned a protest.
Just this morning, he laid out a clear boundary in his mind.
She walked backward, laughing at his feeble show of reluctance.
When she left his office later this morning with whatever solutions he could provide, that would be it. He reinforced his decision silently. No more Corrie. Bye-bye, baker. He’d do what he could to help her, of course, but then…
“I can’t wait to see how this looks when they flip the switch and light it all up tonight.” She stepped up into the bandstand and did a twirl, her arms extended. When she spun around to face him again, she laughed lightly. “What do you say? Want to bring Greer out and we’ll all watch it together?”
“I’d like that,” he said softly. But…
“Please say yes. It would be so sad to have to come down here tonight alone.”
She had no father, issues with her mother, she was an outsider here. Corrie didn’t just rattle Andy, she needed him.
Andy was a man who had made his life’s work restoring things ravaged by time and neglect. He made things whole and right whenever he could. He couldn’t change that about himself but he had to be smart about it. Keep it under control. “Okay, stars this morning, lights tonight. But after that I have to get back on track.”
“Okay, but just bear this in mind, if you stick to the tracks, you may miss some of the best scenery.” She handed him a star.
He looked down at her as he accepted it and said softly, “That’s over-simplifying the way of the world a bit for me, but I can tell you that I am enjoying the view right now.”
“Thanks,” she whispered just before she turned on her heel and pointed to the rafters. “Start hanging the decorations there and I’ll supply the music to work by.”
Chapter Four
Corrie went marching over the threshold of Andy’s office singing the song she had launched into at the park—a bellowing parody of “Jingle Bells”—at the top of her lungs.
The brisk winter wind snagged the door and blew it shut with a wham.
She gasped in surprise and halted her song, midlyric.
Andy eased his way around her to the other side of the large desk that dominated the small room. He chuckled under his breath as he slid off his down vest and hung it on a brass hook on the back wall. “I can’t believe you got that group of stalwart New England stoics to join in singing that song!”
“It’s a reliable old way of getting a team to work together, sing an upbeat song.” Every little object in Andy’s office vied for Corrie’s attention.
“It was also a pretty sneaky way of making it impossible to ask people about your dad.”
She whipped her head around. Heat flooded her cheeks. “I…it wasn’t…how’d you know?”
“The minute you put your foot on that gazebo you had everyone on your side, Corrie. They would have done anything you asked, and you asked them to sing.” He turned toward her and leaned forward with both hands braced against his desk. “You didn’t ask about your dad.”
She dropped her gaze downward, staring at the toes of her boots. “I dreamed about doing this for most of my life and now that I had the chance…”
“Dreaming about something is not the same as preparing for it,” he said softly.
If that same sentence had come from her mother’s lips, Corrie would have felt scolded, like the world’s biggest disappointment. Her mom would have meant well, but Corrie would not have taken it that way. Mother and daughter relationships were so complicated. The only relationships more complicated, Corrie figured, were between men and women. She met Andy’s eyes and felt comforted instead of confounded by his words.
“I’ve had a lot of experience with dreams not measuring up to reality in restoring the inn, and in watching my mom help people get ready to become parents to their adopted children.”
“I don’t know if it was spending time with them, or because we’d talked about how badly my first attempt at finding my dad had gone, but I looked at those people and suddenly realized that while one of them might have some answers for me, this wasn’t just about me.” She fidgeted with the fringe on her green-and-white scarf. “These good people had their own lives. My father has a life. Maybe he has a wife and other kids around the area. I needed more time. I needed to find a better way so once I had everyone’s attention, I had to think fast.”
“You do that a lot, don’t you? Shift gears.” He held his hand out to take her coat next. “You think fast.”
“I guess so.” She didn’t know if he meant that as a compliment or a criticism, or both. Or maybe neither. She was usually pretty good at reading people, but she just couldn’t get a handle on this guy. Probably because he’d gotten tangled up in her feelings about finding her father and his ties to the inn where her parents had met. That was it. That was all.
She wriggled to free herself from her heavy coat, but her arm got twisted. Her scarf snagged across her throat. She couldn’t quite reach it with her arms pinned at awkward angles by her sleeves.
“Here, let me help.” Andy stepped up and unwound the scarf, then with one gentle upward tug he set her coat right and slipped it from her shoulders. “You really don’t have a lot of practice with winter clothing, do you?”
Corrie felt immediately cooler and infinitely uncooler at the same time. “If it counts for anything, I almost never get that snarled up in my flip-flops.”
He laughed.
She liked his laugh. It didn’t just put her at ease, it put things right. She stepped away from her coat and thanked him as he hung it on the hook next to his.
“Okay. We came here to talk gingerbread, so let’s talk gingerbread.” He swept out his arm to offer her the brown leather chair across from his desk.
She turned away, more interested in the books and photos on his bookcase than in sitting down. “I think better when I’m moving, if that’s okay.”
“Okay.” The wheels on the stiff-backed black chair on Andy’s side of the unadorned metal desk creaked as Andy dropped into it. Paper crackled. His boots scuffed over the industrial-grade gray carpet. “I’ve gone over the drawings you gave me of what you want the finished building to look like.”
“Uh-huh.” In contrast with the unremarkable decor of his dingy office, the books and objects on his bookshelf presented an intriguing mosaic of business, cultures, faith and family history. She peered closer at a photo in a handmade frame of a red-haired woman hugging Greer. “Is this your mom?”
“Yeah.” He barely looked up then went straight back analyzing her notes and sketches. He thumped the paper laid out on his desk. “I think the issue with the roof and keeping the second story stable can be solved with one pretty basic change.”
“Really? Great!” She dragged her fingertips along the spines of his books. The topics ranged from architecture to vintage designs to a collection of works by C.S. Lewis. “Were you able to figure that out by comparing what I came up with to your actual blueprints of the inn?”
“I don’t have blueprints of the inn.” He folded his arms over his chest. “The old place has been worked on and passed from owner to owner over the last six decades. No blueprints exist anymore, as far as I know.”
“Oh.” She turned to face him. He looked so substantial standing there. “Then how are you doing all the renovations on the place to make it like it was before the fire?”
He cocked his head. “The fire didn’t actually destroy the inn. The fire started in one of the little guest cottages and took out all six of them. The embers from that reached the back of the inn to the kitchen and office and they burned. The dining room suffered a lot of water damage but everything else was saved.”
“That’s how all the records were lost and why the kitchen is in such great shape.”
“Yep. The cost of that and of cleaning up forced the original owner to sell and since then four different people have tried to get it up and running. They were able to fill enough rooms to get by, but they didn’t get good word of mouth. I think that’s because no one did anything but cheap cosmetic repairs, no one…” He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead obviously trying to find the right word.
“Loved it the way you did,” Corrie offered.
His eyes practically popped open. “I was going to say no one else had my vision for the place, but yeah, you pretty much summed it up. I have a special place in my heart for that old inn.”
“So, let’s do it justice with my contest entry.” She slapped her hands together and rubbed them as she finally came to the desk, ready to get down to work. “What can we do to get my version of the place to hold together?”
“Easy. It’s all about what we call the bones of the structure, and about your foundation.” He stabbed his finger here and there on the page. “Looks to me like you’re relying on fitting pieces of gingerbread together and gluing them in place with frosting when what you should do is use a wooden framework or maybe a Styrofoam model.”
“That would be perfect!” She angled her shoulders back and rolled her eyes. “If I wanted to get disqualified before I even got the entry in the door.”
“Disqualified?”
“According to the rules—”
“There are rules?”
“Of course there are rules.” She scrunched up her nose. “It’s a contest, silly.”
“No, I mean there are rules and you didn’t bother to share them with me? Where are they?”
“I don’t know. On the website?”
“You didn’t print them out?”
“Don’t freak out, Andy. They’re pretty much the same basic rules all these contests have. You have to keep a record of yourself making your gingerbread house by dated photos or video. No kits. No electrical lights or motors. Every part of the entry must be edible. I have the basics in my head, that’s all I need.”
“But…” His face actually went a little red at the thought of her not being a stickler for the rules.
She laughed and stretched across the desk to put her hand on his arm. She gave the strong muscle in soft flannel a squeeze. “It’s okay. I’m not in it to win it. I just want to do my best and to honor the inn.”
That last part got to him. She could tell by the way his pinched expression relaxed. No, not just relaxed, actually seemed to warm to the idea, or was it to her way of doing things?
“Hey, if you can restore the inn without blueprints or records of how it used to look, then you can help me figure out how to make a gingerbread replica of it without Styrofoam.” She looked around her at the contrast of the businesslike office and the mementos of the not always all-business business man before her. “I know you can fix this, Andy. I believe in you.”
She let her hand slip from his arm. Instantly, her fingers felt chilled.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий