She should be nervous. He was feeling particularly… predatory right about now.
“This is tons better than the things I expected we might have to do, don’t you think? I mean, putting up Christmas decorations is fun. I thought I might have to, I don’t know, help with therapy or something.”
She tended to chatter when she was nervous. Under normal circumstances, that would have set his teeth on edge, but with Gen, he actually found it…endearing, though he wasn’t quite sure why.
“Have you ever put up a Christmas tree before?” he asked gruffly.
She looked at the long box with the tree label. “Um. No. You?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t spent a Christmas stateside in seven years—except for last year, when I was in the hospital.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to be in trouble. I’ve never needed a tree of my own. I came home from Paris for Christmas the past few years and never wanted to go to all the trouble to put one up since I was coming home anyway. Before that, my sorority mother or roommates always took care of it.”
“Well, we’re both obviously underqualified for this job. We’d better let Eden know she’ll have to find some other criminals to help her out.”
He supposed it had been a while since he had felt like joking about much of anything, and apparently he was out of practice, at least judging by the uncertain look Genevieve was sending him.
“Oh. We’ll figure it out. Don’t you think?”
Sure, they could figure it out. How hard could it be? But he had only one hand that worked and he couldn’t imagine that would make the process easier.
After much debate that morning, he had ended up wearing one of his prosthetics. He didn’t like either of them but this one was slightly less annoying than the other. He had also packed his Leatherman multitool, invaluable when driving in changeable Colorado weather situations, where a guy never knew what might happen.
Now in resignation, he pulled out the Leatherman and used it to rip the tape on the Christmas-tree box. Once open, the contents just looked like a big pile of green bristly branches.
Genevieve peered over his shoulder. “Is that the way it’s supposed to look? It seems kind of…smushed. That can’t be right.”
“Let’s hope it bushes out after we pull it out. Give me a hand here.”
Together, they lifted the pieces out, power cords trailing, and set them side by side on the wood flooring of the kitchen.
Genevieve studied the sections then nudged one with her foot. “This looks like the biggest one. Don’t you think it goes on the bottom?”
He fought a smile at her serious contemplation of the task at hand. “Good guess.”
After struggling to figure what went where for a few more moments, Gen discovered a sheet of directions concealed under packaging in the box. The rest of the assembly went off without a hitch.
He maneuvered the tree into the corner where Charlotte had indicated, which had a conveniently located outlet. He crouched down and plugged it in and the seven hundred white lights lit up the small space.
“Oh. Look!” she exclaimed softly. “It’s beautiful!”
He was looking, but not at the tree. The flickering lights reflected in her eyes and she seemed to glow from the inside out, with all that blond hair and the deliciously soft sweater that clung to her.
He was staring, he realized with dismay.
“Even for a cheap department-store tree?” he asked, his voice more caustic than teasing.
He was sorry for the words when her expression of joy seeped away and her features closed.
“I’m not saying a designer tree wouldn’t look more real but this one will do for here.”
He fought the ridiculous urge to apologize for shattering the magic like a cheap glass ornament. “Great. One down, five more to go.”
An hour later, each of the cabins had a Christmas tree in the corner. They had developed a certain rhythm to it. He would open the box, she would separate the pieces and they would work together to assemble them. By the last one, she didn’t clap her hands with glee when he tested the lights, only fluffed out a few of the crinkled branches.
“Now we can decorate them,” she said. “What a relief they’re already prelit. My dad used to complain so much about his struggles to string lights on the tree.”
He had a tough time picturing the starchy mayor with his hands covered in sap, trying to twist Christmas lights around tree branches.
“I would have thought the Beaumont family hired somebody to do that kind of menial labor.”
She leaned back against the kitchen counter, a pensive, almost sad look in her eyes. “We hired a decorator after we moved into the new house in the canyon when I was ten. In the early days when we lived over near Miner’s Park, we always decorated it ourselves. It used to be a wonderful family time. The first Saturday afternoon in December, we would go up to Snowflake Canyon and cut down our Christmas tree. My mom would make hot chocolate and we would all bundle up and set out. Charlie was always so cute in his snowsuit.”
It matched a lot of his own memories and he was aware of a familiar, hollow pain. His mother had died of cancer when he was a teenager, and he still sometimes fiercely missed her softness and warmth.
“After my dad would wrestle with the lights for a couple of hours, we would spend all evening hanging the decorations, making sure each strand of tinsel hung just so.”
His mom hadn’t been nearly as fastidious. Their tree had always been one big haphazard jumble of keepsakes, photographs, sloppy ornaments made by little hands. A glorious, magical shambles.
The Christmas after Margaret died, none of them had felt much like celebrating. A few days before Christmas, Charlotte had begged Pop to get a tree. He remembered finding her in the living room in tears with boxes of ornaments open around her.
Teenage boys weren’t always the most emotionally sensitive creatures, but he had done his best to comfort her and had ended up helping her decorate the tree the best they could.
Come to think of it, that had probably been the last ornament he had hung.
“Yeah, I’m afraid tree decorating isn’t really my thing,” he said. “Since you seem to be all over it like sugar on a doughnut, maybe I’ll go search out Eden and see if she wants to put me to work doing something else.”
Anything else.
“You’ll do no such thing.” She frowned at him. “I can’t decorate six trees by myself! They have to be done today and they have to be perfect.”
“I really think this is a job you can handle better by yourself.”
She narrowed her gaze. “Now who’s being, er, chickenshit?”
He didn’t want to do this. The very idea of spending even five minutes hanging Christmas decorations just about made his toes curl. But he was no coward.
He looked at the sprawl of boxes, at the bare Christmas tree, at the lovely woman standing in front of him with a barely suppressed crackle of excited energy at the prospect ahead of her.
He sighed and accepted his fate. “Fine. Where do we start?”
Genevieve could thInk of far worse things than decorating six cute little cabins for the holidays.
As they started opening boxes to see what she had to work with, she wondered if adding a few festive touches to Grandma Pearl’s house might brighten up the place.
Her grandmother had adored Christmas. Every year, she had turned the outside of her house into a blinking, tacky wonderland. Plastic Santas, snowmen, polar bears. Gen hadn’t wandered into the storage room in the basement yet, but she could only guess that it would probably still be stacked high with boxes containing Pearl’s huge crèche collection.
Her grandmother probably had a hundred different manger scenes. The Holy Family in a shelled-out coconut she had bought on a trip to Hawaii, a teak-carved set a friend carried home on her lap from Australia, chiseled ebony from Ghana dressed in tribal clothing.
A few were elegant, even artful, but most were tacky, brought home
from Pearl’s extensive travels to Branson, Mount Rushmore, Florida, Las Vegas.
And her grandmother hadn’t been content to collect alone. From the time Gen was a little girl, her grandmother would give her a new Nativity set each year. She used to love decorating her bedroom with them, touching each figure, setting them around her bedroom. After she became a teenager, she had gotten tired of the hassle of it.
Maybe she would pick a few of her favorite sets from Pearl’s collection—not the one that featured Homer and Marge Simpson, certainly—and set them out while she was living in her grandmother’s house.
The garland for the tree in this cabin was made of red wooden beads strung together. It probably wouldn’t have been her choice, but it fit the cozy setting.
She draped it carefully then stood back to gauge the results. “Does that look good?” she asked Dylan.
Her dour companion gave a cursory look. “Sure. Fine.”
She sighed. They had been doing this for only twenty minutes and it felt like forever, especially with this uncomfortably awkward silence between them.
She would far rather be doing this with someone else. Eden, Charlotte. Even Mac.
“We ought to have some kind of Christmas music,” she said suddenly.
“I won’t sing, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
She wouldn’t be surprised if he sang beautifully, judging by his low, melodious speaking voice. At least when he wasn’t grumping and grousing at her.
“I wouldn’t dare ask,” she retorted, stepping away from the tree and heading toward the well-outfitted entertainment center against the wall. She turned on the TV and found, as she suspected from the dish she had seen on the roof, that the cabin was connected to a satellite system. She flipped through channels until she found a station streaming Christmas music. A jazzy version of “Jingle Bells” filled the small space.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Dylan said after a moment, “but isn’t Christmas music what got us in this mess in the first place?”
“It’s all about the venue, right? It wasn’t appropriate at The Speckled Lizard on a night when I wanted to get sloppy drunk and stupid, but for decorating a Christmas tree, it’s perfect.”
He started indiscriminately tossing green and red balls on the tree. All her aesthetic senses recoiled from such haphazard decorating, but she forced herself to bite her tongue. She wasn’t in charge here. He could decorate however he wanted. At least he was helping.
“Why did you want to get sloppy drunk the other night?” he asked after another silence that somehow didn’t seem as uncomfortable with the Christmas music in the background.
“It’s a long story.”
He gestured to the tree and the overflowing boxes. “We’ve got nothing but time, sweetheart.”
She knew he meant nothing by the endearment. Still, it helped her answer without the customary bitterness that ate away at her whenever she thought about her father’s ultimatum.
“I’m not exactly thrilled about being back in Hope’s Crossing.”
He chuckled. “No kidding?”
“That afternoon, my parents gave me an ultimatum. I have to stay here until I manage to flip my grandmother’s house, which is a complete nightmare. It’s going to take me forever. Pearl had absolutely no design sense whatsoever.”
“What do you mean? When we were kids, we always begged Mom and Dad to drive us past your grandmother’s house to see her Christmas light display.”
She shuddered. “Her hideous Christmas light display, you mean.”
“Kids don’t care about things like that. The bigger and brighter the better as far as the younger set is concerned.”
“And some in the older set. Grandma Pearl, anyway. Her house is…well, something to behold. I packed my suitcase and moved in after my little chat with my dear parents. After just an hour, the magnitude of the task at hand sort of…smacked me in the face and I needed the escape.”
“Ah. That explains a lot. In other words, it was an interior-design crisis. You should have explained that to the judge. ‘Yes, I punched that woman, Your Honor, but there were extenuating circumstances. Two words— shag carpeting.’”
She laughed, amazed at further evidence that Dylan Caine had a sense of humor. “You can joke about it, but you wouldn’t be laughing if you saw the place. Every time I walk through the door, I feel like I’m entering a time warp, discoing back to the seventies.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“Oh, it is.”
She told him about some of the low points—the layers after layers of wallpaper, the tile in the bathroom, the blue carpet in a couple of the bedrooms.
“Where are you going to start?”
He seemed genuinely interested—either that or he was only trying to stave off boredom while they decorated the tree.
“I should really gut the place and start over, especially the bathrooms and the kitchen, but I don’t have any kind of budget. I’m going to focus on fixes that are cheap. I’m renting a steamer to take off the wallpaper. I figure I can paint for the cost of a couple buckets.”
“You ever painted a room?”
She made a face. “I have a degree in interior design. I know how to paint a room.”
“You know how, but have you ever actually done it?” “For your information, we had to as part of our course work.” She didn’t add that four of her fellow students had worked together on the assigned project, redecorating a few rooms at a group home in Denver for people with developmental disabilities.
She had mostly cleaned brushes and picked up lunch for the other three, but she figured she had absorbed enough information through the experience that she could pick things up as she went along.
“I’m a long way from painting, anyway. It’s going to take me weeks to steam off the wallpaper.”
“Weeks, huh?”
“I’m not kidding. I counted six layers of wallpaper. I think every time Pearl was in a mood, she would slap up another design on top of what was already there.”
She went on about her plans for the house, and before she realized it, the tree was finished. She had jabbered the entire time, barely aware of it.
He was going to think she was the brainless debutante everyone else did.
“Sorry to ramble.” To her astonished horror, she could feel heat soak her cheeks and knew she must be blushing. “I tend to get carried away.”
“I didn’t mind,” he said gruffly. She had the strangest feeling he wasn’t only saying the words to be nice. Dylan Caine was many things but she wasn’t sure nice was among them.
“Well, I’m sorry anyway. See what being alone in that house for only a few days is doing for me? I’m turning into my grandma Pearl, ready to talk anybody’s ear off.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ve got two of those for now and I’d like to keep it that way, all things considered.”
How could he joke about his missing parts? She did not understand this man.
Needing a little distance, she took a look around the cabin and decided on a whim what else was needed.
“I’m going to go outside and cut some evergreens to arrange on the mantel, along with the lights your sister was talking about. That will make it perfect in here.”
He looked wary. “Fresh pine boughs weren’t on Charlotte’s list.”
“This is what you call improvisation,” she said with a smile.
His gaze shifted to her mouth and stayed there for just an instant, long enough for heat to bloom inside her and her thoughts to tangle like strings of Grandma Pearl’s Christmas lights.
She grabbed the pair of scissors Charlotte had provided them for cutting ribbons and hurried outside into the December afternoon.
The cold mountain air slapped more than a little sense back into her.
Any attraction to Dylan Caine was absolutely ridiculous. Two people could not be more opposite. He was gruff, rough-edged, slightly dangerous. He had seen things, probably done things she could
n’t even imagine, and he had the battle scars to prove it.
She was, in his words, a cream puff. Why would a man like him ever be interested in her?
What had she done in her life that had any meaning? Beyond the project to help that group home where she had made only a halfhearted effort, what had she ever done for someone else?
Oh, her family donated to various charities. Her mother sat on some philanthropic boards in town and helped out with a few causes.
Those were her parents’ efforts, desultory as they might be.
The past two years, Genevieve had spent in selfindulgence and self-pity. She was really rather tired of it. Even if her parents hadn’t reined her in, she wanted to think she soon would have come to that realization on her own—but she would have done it in her lovely little flat in Le Marais, not stuck here.
She sighed as she clipped another pine branch. She didn’t have any business being attracted to the compelling, dangerous Dylan Caine, but they could at least be friends. She might be as crazy as Grandma Pearl but she thought he had enjoyed listening to her talk about the house.
She had a feeling maybe he needed a friend as badly as she did.
As much as he loved his baby sister, right now he wanted to wring her neck.
Was this what he had come to? Of all the assignments she might have found for him, why the hell would she put him to work hanging Christmas decorations with Genevieve Beaumont? Did she think he wasn’t capable of anything more?
He glowered as he carried a couple of the empty boxes outside to the porch to be hauled away later.
It didn’t help anything that when he looked at Gen, all he could see was someone beautiful and perfect, with a whole world of possibilities ahead of her. She might be going through a tough time right now—though, really, did she think dealing with her grandmother’s ugly house was the worst thing that could happen to a person?—but life would even out for her. Her parents would probably come around and she would return to Paris to her life of frivolity and fun.
He shoved a smaller box into another one a little harder than he’d intended and it ripped just as Genevieve returned to the porch with her arms full of evergreens.
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