He shook his head. “Don’t even start. You pull at one and they all start coming loose, and the next thing you know, I’ve spilled out my every confession. It wouldn’t be pretty.”
“I’ll bet you’re one of those lawyers that holds the jury captivated.”
At this, he let out a short bout of laughter. “Let me tell you. When I get to talking about insurance fraud and claims, they are riveted.”
“Twenty-four hours a day?”
He gave her a mirthful smile. “Give or take.”
“Sounds more brutal than a doctor’s schedule.”
“With less money and humanitarian reward,” he added. “But I do get to go prematurely gray, so it’s not all bad.”
She bit her lip as she smiled and shook her head. She could tell that Donovan was one of those people who didn’t take things too seriously, but she had no doubt behind his joking persona that he worked hard. There were the telltale shadows under his eyes from someone who was definitely not getting enough sleep.
“What?” he asked, and she realized she’d been staring at him.
“Don’t work yourself too hard, or you’ll become one of my patients,” she warned him.
He took a sip of his drink. “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”
She shook her head at his flirting, but they fell into an easy conversation while he told her story after story about cases he’d seen. On the surface, stories about insurance fraud did seem as though they had potential to be extremely boring, but with Donovan’s flair for storytelling, they had Holly laughing harder than she had in a while.
“You guys about done?” Jack stood at their table, holding her camera and tripod in front of him. Donovan was in the middle of telling her about a man who had switched his cast from one leg to the other in the span of a week between his hearing and trial. She wanted to hear what happened next, but she knew Jack well enough to sense that he was ready to be done.
“Where’s Megan?” she asked.
“Restroom,” he responded.
“That’s not a bad idea,” she said. “Can you hold on to that for me for another minute?”
He grunted, which she took as an affirmative, and she went into the bathroom, bumping into Megan on her way out.
“How’s it going?” Holly asked Megan.
“Good,” she said, her eyes bright. “He’s the best, isn’t he?”
“He is,” Holly agreed. She peered back into the restaurant to see the two men had sat at their respective tables, both of them on their phones. Men. “Your brother is nice,” she said. “Funny.”
“Oh, gosh. Please tell me he hasn’t been bending your ear with his fraud stories all night.”
“They’re hilarious.”
Megan rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “He loves a new listener. A lot of his stories are actually pretty sad, so he loves to revel in the ones that are ridiculous.”
Holly could imagine, having to deal with insurance issues in her daily practice as well. Lack of good insurance, and Dallon’s constant frustration with it, was part of the reason he’d started the foundation. “I’ll meet you guys back out here and we’ll head to the carolers. Sound good?”
Megan agreed and went back to sit with Jack.
Chapter 23
Jack listened to Holly and Donovan talking a few steps behind him and Megan, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Whatever it was, it had Holly in constant stitches.
“Where exactly are we going?” Jack asked once they’d been walking for a while.
“You guys are going on a ride in a horse-drawn carriage,” Holly said.
“Really?” Megan’s face was wide with a bright smile. “I’ve never been on one.”
Neither had Jack, and he hadn’t necessarily wanted that to change.
They walked up to the street-side stand where a man in an old-fashioned suit and hat stood beside a white carriage. The horse was festooned in Christmas colors as well. A light snow began to fall as Holly walked over to the man and showed him something on her phone.
“One horse-drawn carriage for two,” the man said, his English accent almost sounding legit.
“Wait, two?” Jack said as the man’s words caught up to him. He turned to Holly. “You’re not coming?”
“I’m going to get some film of you guys getting on and driving away, and then I’ll be here when you get back.”
“You don’t want any of us actually on the carriage?”
She shrugged and looked over his shoulder. “I think having me there will only confuse viewers.”
He frowned. He couldn’t care less about confusing her viewers.
“Is something the matter?” Megan asked.
“No.” Holly turned to her with a bright smile. “There should be cups of hot chocolate for you on the cart as well as a blanket to keep you warm. And if you two could look back and wave for me, I think that would go well on camera.”
Jack had several things he wanted to say, but none that wouldn’t make Megan potentially feel bad. And it turned out that he actually liked Megan. She was pretty funny. She had terrible taste in brothers, but that couldn’t be helped.
“Are you ready?” the driver asked.
He looked at Megan, who looked a little less excited now that his lack of enthusiasm was so clear. “Let’s do this,” he said.
They got on the carriage and on cue, they turned to wave at Holly as it drove off.
“So how long have you been in love with her?” Megan asked casually as she spread a plaid wool blanket across their laps.
Jack nearly choked on the burning hot chocolate. “Excuse me?”
She smiled softly. “I got caught up on the show this week. And if seeing that hadn’t made it clear enough, watching you tonight has definitely confirmed it.”
He shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings for Holly, especially not with Megan, whom he was supposed to be on a date with for this infernal show.
Megan leaned forward, her eyes shining with interest. “Why not tell her?”
Jack shifted his hot chocolate from one hand to the other. All around them, the bright, colorful Christmas lights shone on the rooftops of the shops and around the streetlamps. With the light misting of snow, it was the perfect Christmas date—if only he was with the right woman.
Megan might not be the right woman, but she was easy to talk to. It wouldn’t kill him to get a different perspective. “You’ve watched the show, right?”
She nodded.
“Holly believes that everyone gets one great love in their life. Her parents met when they were in high school, and she grew up hearing their epic love story.” He didn’t tell Megan about how Holly’s mom had died when Holly was in college, how since then her dad had remarried six times, and how he knew she was determined not to make the same mistakes he did. “Then she met Dallon, her late husband, and experienced her own epic love story.” He stared down at the lid of his cup, his thoughts swirling around Dallon and Holly in equal turns. What right did he have to come between that? Maybe Holly was right. “I think telling her would ruin our friendship, which I’m not willing to do.”
“You don’t think she’d want to be with you?”
Jack shifted, uncomfortable with how personal this was getting. “I don’t know.” If she was going to fall in love with him organically, it would have happened by now. “She doesn’t look at me as anything other than a friend—and until very recently, she didn’t look at me as anything other than her late husband’s best friend. There’s a wall there, and I don’t know if there’s any way to get past it.”
“If you tell her, you might be surprised.”
He shook his head. “She came up with these elaborate episodes to get me to fall in love … with someone else. So forgive me if I’m not feeling all that confident that if I tell her I love her, she’ll all of a sudden throw out the principles she’s had her whole life. You can thank your stupid brother for all of this, by the way.”
She w
inced, but it was the good-natured kind. “Well, you have me to thank, since it was my idea in the first place.”
“But if he had said yes to going on the show, I wouldn’t be in this position.”
They were both quiet as the carriage stopped at a corner where a choir sung a medley of upbeat Christmas songs.
“They seemed pretty chummy,” he said finally.
“Who?”
He gave her a sideways glance. “Donovan and Holly.”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s more closed off to love than you are.”
“I am not closed off to love,” he said, at which she leveled a skeptical look at him. “Fine. I am not a huge believer in this ‘one great love’ business that Holly talks about, but with Holly, I do feel different. I’m not sure if true love exists, but I hope it does.”
They were silent for a beat before Megan let out a long breath. “I know I don’t know either of you very well,” she began, “but I really think you need to go for it. Someone like Holly can get stuck in her ways and set in her beliefs. But Jack, I watched those videos, and it wasn’t just you who had very clear feelings.”
Her words sank in, and hope trickled in as well. Jack had watched the videos himself, and he thought he’d seen things, but they were all so easily explained away.
Except their almost kiss in the kitchen. Holly might have wanted to pretend that never happened, but he knew something had changed in their relationship since then. Something was more charged between them now, and Holly was more desperate to find someone else for him to love.
Was that a good sign or a bad sign? Was she foisting him off onto someone else so she wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore?
And also, why was he analyzing everything to death? This was the problem with love: there was no peace in it. Hadn’t he learned that from his ex-wife?
But was he content to go back to the way things were with Holly, be there with her as a friend only, keep pushing his feelings down? He didn’t know how much longer he could do that, and the job at Denver Central looked more and more appealing to him, the deadline to let them know looming.
“Well, that’s enough of digging deep into my personal life,” Jack said, with a sigh. He turned to Megan. “Why don’t we talk about you for a while?”
“Because I’m not very interesting,” she said with a laugh.
For the rest of the drive, she told him about her childhood in Southern California and how she and Donovan had moved to Denver as teenagers after their parents died, so their grandparents raised them.
“My brother comes across as arrogant, but he’s the best brother I could have ever asked for after everything we went through together.” She paused. “You know, it’s interesting. You two are similar in a lot of ways. You’re afraid to love after the heartbreak you had after your ex-wife left you. And he’s afraid to love because he knows how much it hurts to lose someone you love. He keeps everyone at a distance—except for me, but that’s pretty much because I come into his life like a bulldozer every now and then to remind him that I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”
Jack didn’t love being compared to Donovan—or being told that he was afraid to love. That wasn’t it at all. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
Their conversation drifted to more casual topics for the rest of the ride, and Jack had to admit that under the right circumstances, it would have been an extremely romantic date. He had to hand it to Holly for throwing her all into planning this. He wasn’t sure if he should be flattered or dismayed that she was working so hard to pawn him off on someone.
They got to the drop-off station, where Holly stood with Donovan, her camera pointed in their direction. Donovan said something to her that made her smile, and he smiled in return. The carriage stopped, and Jack stepped down, then held up his hand for Megan to take.
She slowly stepped down, then paused, leaned up on her tiptoes, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “That was wonderful. Thank you,” she said.
Jack lifted both of his eyebrows at her in surprise, and she gave him a subtle wink.
When he glanced at Holly, her brows were furrowed in a scowl, and even though it shouldn’t have, it lifted Jack’s heart. Was she jealous of Megan? And if she was, maybe she had more feelings for him than maybe she was willing to admit.
“Did you get some good footage?” Jack asked, falling in step beside her while Megan told her brother about something their grandma had said last time she’d stopped by their house.
“Hopefully,” she said. “The lighting is a little dull, so I won’t know for sure until I get home and edit.” She hesitated and then asked, “Did you have a good time, then?”
He paused to think about it. “You know, I did.” Megan might not be his one great love, but she might turn out to be one great friend.
“Good,” Holly said, but from the faintness in her tone and the pink in her cheeks as she turned to look at Megan, he didn’t believe her.
Chapter 24
Holly was afraid to look at the comments after she posted the latest video of Jack and Megan’s date. The lighting had actually turned out fabulous—the white lights added an almost ethereal glow to the entire thing. As they’d driven away in the carriage, they’d turned to wave at her, and then they’d looked at each other, something like fire in their eyes. It gave Holly a burning in her stomach.
She held her breath and opened the comments section:
Move over, #JollyForChristmas; looks like there’s another lady in town.
Similar comments followed, and Holly was dismayed to feel her heart sink. This was good. This was exactly what she wanted: for Jack to find true love. And she liked Megan a lot. She couldn’t think of a better person for him.
Many #JollyForChristmas supporters stood up for her and Jack, which also unsettled her stomach, but in a completely different way.
With a groan, she turned off her phone screen and rested her head on her desk. No matter what the result was, she just wasn’t happy.
At the end of the night, Donovan had ended up asking her if she wanted to get together again, and it hadn’t been hard to tell him that she’d love to hang out as friends, but that she wasn’t available for anything more. He’d taken it well and gotten her number anyway, saying he’d call her if he was ever in the mood for the most romantic, yet non-romantic date of his life. That had made her laugh and wish so hard that he had agreed to go on her show and that she’d never asked Jack to do this.
Holly’s midnight-blue dress skimmed her knees as she walked into the lobby of the hotel. She was a couple hours early for the Bridger Cares Christmas dinner, but she wanted to make sure that everything was all ready for everyone to come.
She walked into the ballroom and caught her breath. It was gorgeous. The room had been transformed from a standard ballroom you’d find in any hotel to a stunning and elegant winter wonderland. Silver, three-dimensional flakes hung from the ceiling on clear string, so they appeared to float on air. White lights also fell from the ceiling like icicles and matched the light-up icicle centerpieces on every table. The trees she’d ordered flanked the room like the soldiers from The Nutcracker, and silver and blue bulbs hung from the tender branches. She’d asked the tree lot to pick out an assortment of sizes, and they were arranged artfully to make one feel as though they were stepping into a clearing of a Christmas forest.
“Dallon, you would have loved this,” she breathed.
An orchestral quartet was setting up beside a grand piano near the platform that would serve as their stage. Their stands clacked as they arranged them, and then the welcoming sound of tuning strings filled the room.
“I am officially in awe,” Jack said, his mouth near her ear, sending goose bumps down her bare arms.
She swiveled around to face him, taking him in. He wore a charcoal tuxedo with a navy vest underneath. “We match,” she said, indicating his vest and her dress.
He looked at her, his gaze turning intense. He took a step closer, and Holly’s heart
pounded wildly when he opened his mouth to say something.
“Good, you’re both here!” Dr. Danforth clamped a hand down on Jack’s shoulder and held out his other hand for Holly to shake. She tore her gaze away from Jack’s and took his hand. “I knew I could count on you two to get it taken care of. Holly, the keynote speaker is here and would like a few minutes with you, if possible. And Jack, can we have a word?”
“Sure.” Holly rushed off to go talk to Jared Jennings, the pro basketball player she’d been able to recruit to come speak about his own experiences using a free clinic as a child.
She glanced back at where Jack and Dr. Danforth were talking, both looking more serious than the occasion warranted. She rushed to the front of the room, where Jared was working with the sound technicians to make sure his mic was placed correctly. “Hi, Jared. I’m Dr. Holly Whitacre. Thank you so much for coming to speak with us today.”
“My pleasure,” Jared said. He tucked the battery box for the wireless mic into his suit pocket. “I think what you guys are doing here is great.”
“It was my late husband’s pet project, and I want to make sure it continues to carry out his legacy.”
“I got some of the guys to donate to the cause. There’s a lot of us rooting for you.” He handed her a check with a lot of zeroes. Her heart nearly stopped. “Keep doing good, doc.”
Impulsively, she gave him a huge hug, which he returned with a laugh.
“I take it that’ll be enough?”
“More than enough.” With this donation, anything they received from the event tonight, or from her MyHeartChannel proceeds, could go toward the newer equipment they so desperately needed.
One of her assistants, Peter, interrupted. “Holly, do you have a moment? One of the hotel’s event coordinators has a question.”
“Sure.” She turned to Jared. “Thank you again.”
From there, she spent the last hour before the event running around, answering last-minute questions and setting up the final details. But through her mind buzzed the stunning amount on the check. A Nutcracker suite played in the background, one of her very favorites.
One Great Christmas Love Story Page 14