Twelve Dates of Christmas: The Ballad of Lula Jo (Lonesome Point)

by Jessie Evans

  “What happened?” Carter asked. “Lula, I can’t make this better if you don’t talk to me.”

  “Why should I talk to you when you’re on the next plane out?” she asked, fighting a fresh wave of tears. His words had turned the perfect Christmas Eve into a sequel of that horrible night, eleven years ago.

  But instead of ducking his head in shame, Carter let out a relieved sigh. “God, is that all? It’s nothing, L.J. Just a ten day trip, two weeks at most, and then I’ll be heading straight back here to you.”

  Lula frowned, her forehead furrowing as she looked from him to the gnomes watching their quarrel from the shadows and back to Carter again. “I don’t believe you. You said you were here to stay, you promised. And now, just when I thought everything was wonderful—”

  “Everything is wonderful, babe! Please, listen! I can explain.”

  “I don’t want to listen,” she said with a sniff. “I can’t live through this again! If you’re going, then just go. Leave and never come back.”

  “Does this look like I planned on leaving and never coming back?” Carter reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small box, opening it before he held it up between them.

  Lula’s mouth fell open and her angry words drifted away as Carter dropped to one knee on the sticky concrete beside the Dumpsters.

  “Tallulah Josephine Watson, I didn’t intend to propose in a place like this, but all I want in the world is standing right in front of me,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “You are my biggest dream and my greatest adventure. I need to go to London to settle some unexpected business, but as soon as I’m done, I’m coming right back to you. There is nowhere else I want to be.” He took a deep breath. “I know this is fast, and I’ll wait as long as you want, so you can be sure you’re making the right choice. But you’re the only woman I’ll ever love, and I would be so honored if you’d agree to be my wife.”

  Lula blinked so fast that, for a moment, it felt like the world had become one of her grandfather’s old 8mm movies. “This is crazy,” she whispered, even as a voice deep inside her insisted the only crazy thing would be to tell Carter no.

  “What’s crazy is that we’ve already wasted so much time, Lu,” Carter said. “I don’t want to waste another minute. If I thought I could get you to close the shop, I’d ask you to come to London with me. We could book two round trip tickets and see the sights before coming back here and settling down for good.”

  Lula swallowed hard, beginning to feel like a fool. “So I overreacted? And ran through town like a lunatic for nothing?”

  “Not for nothing,” Carter insisted in a gentle voice. “I hurt you when I left, and what we’ve found is so new. I understand why you’d take what you heard as a sign that I’m the same fool I used to be. But I’m not, L.J. I swear I’m not.”

  Lula nodded as fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. “I know. I do, deep down. I’m just afraid. I meant what I said, Carter. I don’t think I could live through losing you again.”

  He reached out, taking her hand in his and squeezing tight. “Then let’s make sure you never have to. Please take this ring as a symbol of my love and know I’ll spend every day from now on proving you can put your faith in me.”

  Lula’s lips trembled, but her smile finally found its way across her face. “All right.”

  He gripped her hand tighter. “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes,” Lula said softly. “And,” she hesitated, “I’ll go to London. I think it’s time I embraced a little more adventure in my life.”

  Carter surged to his feet, wrapping her in his arms and hugging so tight her feet left the ground. “Thank you,” he whispered in her ear. “You won’t regret it. I swear.”

  Lula clung to his neck, holding him close for several long moments before she pulled away and held up her left hand.

  “I’m going to get you something better,” Carter said, hands shaking as he slipped the ring on her finger. “But I hope this will do for now.”

  “It will do for always,” Lula said, admiring the simple, elegant ring that fit perfectly on her hand. “I don’t need a big ring or hidden treasure. I told you the first time, all I need is you.”

  “And now I’m smart enough to believe you,” he said, leaning in to seal the words with a kiss before murmuring against her lips. “What do you say we take this somewhere that smells less like rotten cabbage?”

  Lula giggled. “That sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all night.” She slipped her hand in Carter’s.

  “So what made you scream?” he asked as they started through the gate.

  “The Christmas gnomes,” Lula said, laughing again as she motioned over her shoulder. “It was so strange to see them all lined up like that after I’d…” She trailed off, her mouth going dry as she saw the place where the gnomes had been standing was empty.

  “I swear they were there a minute ago. I was upset, but I’ve never hallucinated a day in my life.” She let go of Carter’s hand and crossed the small space, peeking behind the Dumpsters. But there was still no sign of the gnomes, a fact that sent a shiver working down her spine as she spun back to face Carter. “What could have happened? They didn’t just walk off on their own.”

  “Maybe it’s a Christmas miracle,” Carter said with a crooked grin. “Sent by Aunt Louise to show she forgives us for pranking her all those years ago.”

  Lula frowned, “Be serious.”

  “I am serious.” He recaptured her hand and led the way through the gate. “If you hadn’t screamed, I wouldn’t have found you, and you wouldn’t be wearing my ring right now. I’m going to call it the Miracle of Gnomes.”

  Lula shook her head with a sigh. “I’m pretty sure that’s sacrilegious.”

  “If people can celebrate seeing Jesus’s face on a piece of toast, I can celebrate the Miracle of the Gnomes,” Carter said. “Toast goes stale, but my love for you is going to stay daisy fresh.”

  Lula laughed, relaxing as they stepped onto the sidewalk, despite the strangeness of the night’s events. She couldn’t explain what had happened. Maybe her eyes had been playing tricks on her. All she knew was that she was grateful things had worked out the way they did. She would much rather be walking back to her shop on Carter’s arm than hiding by a Dumpster.

  They arrived at her truck, and Carter offered to push while she steered to the side of the road. But when she turned the key in the ignition one last time, the truck sparked to life as if it had never died in the first place, raising the hairs on Lula’s arms.

  “The Miracle of the Dead Truck and the Miracle of the Gnomes,” Carter said as he slid into the passenger seat beside her. “Seems like someone up there wanted to see us together pretty badly.”

  “There are children starving in Africa,” Lula said as she turned the truck around and started for home. “Why would the Powers that Be waste one miracle on fools like us, let alone two?”

  “I don’t know,” Carter said, letting his hand rest lightly on her thigh. “But I’m grateful. I don’t ever want to spend another night without you.”

  Lula covered his hand with hers, her heart melting at the simple gratitude she heard in his voice. “I love you, Carter Bryce.”

  “And I love you L.J. For keeps.”

  They returned to the store, and Carter cleaned up the shattered gnome remains while Lula went back to manning the tables out front. By the time the parade started, Lula had sold all her dolls and given away the last of the cookies. She and Carter put the tables back in the store room, grabbed blankets from upstairs, and snuggled on her front steps as the marching band shuffled past, playing holiday songs, cowboys and cowgirls rode down the street on horses decked out for the season, and brightly lit floats rolled slowly by.

  And later, they went upstairs and made love as the moon rose above Lonesome Point. Outside, the first snowfall in four years dusted the desert like powdered sugar, making every ordinary thing seem a little bit magical, but inside Lula’s cozy apartment, two people who
were meant to be were making their own magic.

  Lula and Carter had found their happy beginning, and for them, every day to come would be a place for more everyday miracles.

  The End

  Keep Reading for a free sample chapter of LEATHER AND LACE, Mia and Sawyer’s story.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Jessie Evans, gave up a career as an international woman of mystery to write the sexy, contemporary romances she loves to read.

  She's married to the man of her dreams, and together they're raising a few adorable, mischievous children in a cottage in the jungle. She grew up in rural Arkansas, spending summers running wild, being chewed by chiggers, and now appreciates her home in a chigger-free part of the world even more.

  When she's not writing, Jessie enjoys playing her dulcimer (badly), sewing the worlds ugliest quilts to give to her friends, going for bike rides with her house full of boys, and drifting in and out on the waves, feeling thankful for sun, surf, and lovely people to share them with.

  More sexy, contemporary novels by Jessie Evans:

  Lonesome Point, Texas

  LEATHER AND LACE

  SADDLES AND SIN

  DIAMONDS AND DUST

  12 Dates of Christmas: A Lonesome Point Holiday Novella

  GLITTER AND GRIT

  Always a Bridesmaid

  BETTING ON YOU (Book One)

  KEEPING YOU (Book Two)

  WILD FOR YOU (Book Three)

  TAKING YOU (Four-Novella/Short Novel)

  Fire and Icing

  MELT WITH YOU (Book One)

  HOT FOR YOU (Book Two)

  SWEET TO YOU (Book Three)

  SAVING YOU (Four-Novella/Short Novel)

  Escape to You Novellas

  AUDITIONING YOU (Book 1)

  DARING YOU (Book 2)

  Edgy, New Adult Reads written as J. Evans

  ONE WILD NIGHT-Wild Rush One

  THIS WICKED RUSH-Wild Rush Two

  ONE PERFECT LOVE- Wild Rush Three

  THIS SWEET ESCAPE-Wild Rush Four (Danny and Sam’s story)

  ONE BEAUTIFUL REVENGE-Wild Rush Five

  THE PROTECTOR

  A Kindle Worlds novella set in the world of

  H.M. Ward’s The Arrangement

  CHAPTER ONE

  When you grew up in a place as small as Lonesome Point, Texas—a bend in the road, sustained by tourism to a ghost town, barely clinging to its dusty spot on the map—you learned to make your own fun.

  Mia Sherman had lived in Lonesome Point almost her entire life, and knew how to take a sleepy Saturday night, and turn it into the stuff legends were made of. As the only twenty-something in town who could trace her lineage back to the Wild West days when the town was settled, Mia felt practically obligated to cause trouble. Someone had to liven up Lonesome Point, and in addition to being related to half the town, her uncle was the chief of police, and her grandmother had been mayor for as long as anyone could remember. Mia was an old hat at wiggling her way out of trouble when she was unlucky enough to get caught filling the fountain in the square with bubble bath, or “borrowing” Becky Lynn Barrett’s new car for the night so Becky’s little sister could replace it with a toy Mustang and film Becky’s reaction the next morning.

  Getting caught wasn’t a deal breaker, but it was much preferable to escape unseen from the scene of the crime, and one couldn’t underestimate the importance of a solid pranking plan…

  “I’ll take the south side of Main Street, and the square,” Mia whispered, sinking down behind the shrubs at the edge of The Blue Saloon Hotel parking lot. Her two best drinking buddies, Bubba, and Ugly Ross—so nicknamed, not because he was ugly, but because he had the misfortune to be uglier than the only other Ross in town—squatted beside her. “You boys take the north, up around the bend headed toward Old Town.”

  “All right,” Bubba said in his well-deep voice, the one that made all the girls swoon when the burly, brown-eyed hottie sang “Would You Go with Me” at karaoke night at The Ticklish Iguana. “We’ll take the bin with the bras in it.”

  “No way.” Mia wagged a finger in front of his shadowed face. “I’m taking the bras, they’ll look better up the flag pole.”

  “Oh come on.” Ugly Ross gouged her in the side with his bony elbow. “At least give us a couple.”

  “Huh-uh. My sale bins, my rules.”

  Ross frowned. “What if I gave you five bucks?”

  Mia shook her head, sending her red curls flying and making the world spin…just a little. Maybe that third shot of whiskey as the hotel bar was closing hadn’t been such a great idea, after all.

  But hell, it was Saturday night. When she’d first moved back to town after grad school, Mia had kept Lavender and Lace open on Sundays, but after a few weeks, it had become clear that no one wanted to shop for panties on the Lord’s Day. She also sold homemade lotions, soaps, and an assortment of quirky, ghost town souvenirs for the out-of-towners who wandered into her shop. But panties were her stock-in-trade, and apparently not Sunday-friendly, which meant she got to sleep in tomorrow, and she intended to make the most of her small town Saturday night.

  “We’ll work with the panties,” Bubba said, nudging her shoulder with his much larger one. “But you take some too, Mia. Put ‘em on the garden gnomes in front of the tea shop.”

  “Brilliant,” Mia said, admiring Bubba’s pranking genius. “But I can’t. Lula would catch me.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Bubba said. “She’s got to be sleeping.”

  Mia peeked over the top of the shrubs, not surprised to see a light on in Lula’s second floor window. “I doubt it,” she mumbled.

  Both Mia, and Miss Tallulah Watson—Mia’s third cousin, on her mama’s side—lived in the apartments above their shops. But whereas Mia took advantage of her prime location to sleep until the last possible moment before rolling out of her bed to open Lavender and Lace, Tallulah used her proximity to Tea for Two as an excuse to work twenty-four seven. If she wasn’t actively serving customers, she was cooking cakes and scones, knitting lace doilies to sell in her retail store, or painting faces on the ceramic dolls she entered in craft fairs.

  Her cousin didn’t condone wasting time or cutting up—or have any discernible sense of humor, so far as Mia could tell—and Lula would not find waking up to discover lace panties on the heads of her thirty-seven garden gnomes amusing.

  Which made the temptation nearly irresistible…

  Mia wasn’t as wild as the mean-spirited soccer moms of Lonesome Point would have people believe. She didn’t have a single tattoo, had never smuggled horse tranquilizers across the border, and hadn’t so much as kissed Bubba or Ugly Ross, let alone gone to bed with both of them—at the same time, according to Regina Simpson. Sure, Mia drank a little too much on Saturday nights, and kept forgetting not to cuss in front of her grandmother, but overall, she led a relatively boring life. She worked hard and played hard, but she spent as much time babysitting her best friend Tulsi’s daughter, as she did getting into trouble.

  But when it came to pranks…

  Damn, if she didn’t have a hard time saying no.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” she said, waving off the high five a well-lubricated Ross aimed at her shoulder. “Congratulate me after the mission is complete. Rendezvous in twenty minutes at my place for beer.”

  “Good luck, soldier.” Bubba chucked her on the shoulder, before grabbing one large canvas bin full of sale panties and heading north, Ross hot on his heels.

  Mia snatched her own bin full of underpants and the few reduced price bras she hadn’t been able to sell—sale bras always did better than panties, especially panties that were the color of radioactive vomit—and hustled down the street in the opposite direction.

  She had purchased the hideous undies at a deep discount, thinking she could move lime green underpants as long as they were cheap enough, but when the lingerie had arrived, the color was even more obnoxious than it
had looked on the website. The shipment was non-returnable, so she’d done her best hard sell—advertising the underpants as Shock ‘Em Dead Knickers, guaranteed to catch your man’s eye in the bedroom—but in six months she’d only sold two pairs.

  It was time for the panties to go to a better place.

  Mia circled the square, draping underpants from the decorative metal curlicues at the base of the antique gas lamps the Lonesome Point Betterment Society had put in a few years back, before clipping all four bras to the flagpole in the middle of the square, and running them up to the top. The rope squeaked a bit as it slid through the pulleys, but Mia’s footsteps as she hurried out of the square and down the street, were completely silent.

  When she was in prank mode, Mia moved like a ninja warrior, at one with the sidewalk, the warm summer breeze, and the parking meters she graced with extra-small neon thongs as she swept by. She pantied the barbershop pole at Justin’s Cuts, the front porch of Harmon and Harmon, Attorneys at Law, and the swinging wooden plaque advertising ghost town walking tours before reaching the delicate white picket fence surrounding Tea for Two’s front garden.

  With catlike grace, Mia jumped the fence—the latch on the gate creaked when it opened—landing with only a slight crunch in the gravel, and tiptoed through the rose bed to the stone path that wound through the impeccably maintained yard. In just a few minutes, she had blessed each of Lula’s Takes One to Gnome One Collector’s Edition garden gnomes with a bright green panty hat, before emptying the rest of her bin into the bone-dry birdbath.

  She took a moment to admire the way the puddle of panties glowed in the moonlight like the mucus of a diseased alien before turning back toward the fence—

  And running right into Lula’s gardening stool, knocking it to the ground.

  Mia froze, silently praying that the falling stool hadn’t been as loud as she thought, but then she heard it—the scrape of chair legs against a hardwood floor, coming from the second floor of Tea for Two.