Bertha was another of Evergreen’s “white-hair brigade”, as Eve and a few of the younger women referred to the town mothers, as it were. It wasn’t a term of disrespect but a comment on the startlingly severe beauty of the women and their most notable shared feature. In the secretary’s case, though, her skin was so pale that it made her hair seem more silver than snowy by comparison. Instead of the updo favored by Mrs. Holden, Bertha preferred to braid her long silver hair into a thick, gleaming cord over one shoulder.
“Thank you, Bertha,” the elder teacher said as she accepted the paper. “I’ll send these home with my homeroom students tonight. You’ve let the other teachers know to do the same?”
The secretary nodded matter-of-factly. “I have.”
Rina’s nod was more animated and eager. “Oh, she has.”
Eve frowned down hard over a groan before she agreed. “Oh, yes, she certainly has.” Bertha had made it clear to Eve earlier that no one—no one—in Evergreen missed the Winter Carnival in the courtyard green at the center of town.
Bertha glanced sidelong and pointedly at Eve before looking at Mrs. Holdan. “Pay no mind to the girl’s mood. She’ll be there. She’ll miss the point, but she’ll be there.”
A strange look of surprise and then knowing lit Mrs. Holden’s eyes. “Will she? Then I’ll look forward to seeing everyone there.” And with that, the classroom door closed, and Bertha marched back down the hall with long skirt swirling and footsteps ringing briefly in her wake.
“I’m not….,” Eve started to say with a pout, meaning to insist she had a prior engagement that evening with Netflix and her crockpot. She couldn’t seem to quite get the statement out of her mouth, though. Like it didn’t feel true anymore.
“Oh, you’ll be there,” Rina said as she shouldered Eve again to get them both moving down the hallway.
“Because Bertha says I have to go?”
“No, because Bertha’s never wrong. If she says you’re going to the carnival tonight, that’s where you’ll end up. She just knows.”
“Oh, come on, give me a—.”
“Shh.” Rina shushed Eve with a mischievous grin and a wink as they reached a particular door, and Rina opened it for her.
Eve didn’t ask how Rina knew she was taking the paperwork to Mr. Destry’s class. It was bad enough the woman was right. They slipped inside along the wall in the back of the room as he was wrapping up the final lecture of the day with what sounded like a holiday-themed lesson on comparative mythology.
At the front of the classroom, the implausibly handsome instructor sat on the edge of his desk with his arms and ankles crossed as he talked and gestured to his students. Eve had never—ever—had a teacher who looked like Tristan Destry. Oh, sure, Hollywood had dreamed him up long ago, a tawny-haired, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered intellectual with the sultry-sulky manner of a hedonistic British poet and the ass of a fucking racehorse in those Casual Day blue jeans. The bookish glasses played well off the way the taut, sculpted muscles of his arms flexed under the rolled-up sleeves of his chambray shirt. Mm, and the bright gleam of his topaz blue eyes as he tilted his head to one side and looked over the top of his glasses, out from under the fringe of his wavy hair.
Was it Eve’s imagination, when she realized he was peering right at her and she thought she saw a flirtatious rogue of a smile crook one corner of his sensually full lips? Rina shouldering her again with a breathy chuckle made Eve think not.
“So, what have we learned?” Tristan asked his class of sophomores in a voice at once deeply masculine and buttered rum smooth, that added an awful lot of substance to the man behind those pretty eyes and lips. “When your parents insist you put out cookies for Santa, what older traditions are they playing on?”
At fifteen or so, most of the kids in the sophomore class were still awkward and lanky from growing into long arms and legs. Eve recognized Willow Klauson, raising her hand, from the number of times the strawberry blond had been into the office for band-aids and ice packs after bumping desks and walking into locker doors.
“Thanking the faeries who watch over the homesteads and animals,” Willow answered, “so they won’t get mad and play tricks instead.”
“Feeding the Yule Buck,” another girl said. “For fertility.” The mention brought out naughty laughter from the hormonal teens.
A boy sitting off to one side added, “Leaving the White Lady food so she’ll leave money in its place.”
Tristan nodded adamantly, tousled golden brown hair falling just long enough to brush his bulging, defined shoulders as his body shifted so enticingly beneath the soft-worn material of his shirt. “All of the above, “ he told his class. “So before this time of year was about Christmas, it was about what?”
“Keeping the faeries from playing tricks.”
“The dark of the year and rebirth of the sun.”
“The world of the living and the dead overlapping.”
“The Wild Hunt.”
Eve leaned toward Rina to whisper. “The wild what?”
Before Rina could answer, another deep, rolling male voice that was all sex and musk growled from behind them.
“A daughter is birthed by Elf-Splendor, the Sun Goddess, after she is swallowed by the wolf. She, the New Sun, shall ride as the gods are dying the old paths of her mother,” he recited. Eve and Rina both caught their breath listening to Cal Lovell as the black-haired, muscular history and physical education teacher prowled forward from the back of the room. “The Poetic Edda,” he cited, “on the reborn sun after the dark winter.”
Rina was giddy, cheeks glowing pink. “He recites Norse poetry from memory,” she trilled in Eve’s ear.
Luckily, the hoots and hollers from the students at the sight of the popular coach and teacher covered the two women as they tittered to one another as awkwardly and as obviously as Willow and her friends might have carried on in the corridor after one of the senior class boys.
“Okay, okay,” Destry called out to his class over their din. “That’s it for today. Enjoy your holiday recess, and I’ll see you back here after New Years. And….” He waited for the crackling of paper and jostling of desks to subside. “I’ll see you and all your families tonight at the Winter Carnival.”
Eve groaned at the reference. The thought of hanging out alone in a crowd waiting to see who Tristan Destry’s date would be, finding out he liked the gothy girl from the bookstore or the tall, athletic botany professor from the forest studies institute connected to the university down in the valley, was not Eve’s idea of a good time.
Tristan ambled toward the back of the room shaking his head at Lovell. “Fifteen years after we graduated, and you’re still interrupting class.”
Cal chuckled low, and Eve felt Rina shiver. “Someone has to keep the class on point. You didn’t even remember to have the kids fill out their course evaluations.” The back-haired teacher nodded toward the papers still tucked against Eve’s chest, holding back the profusion of garland threatening to explode from her arms.
“Oh, my god, I’m sorry,” Eve said, feeling a wash of embarrassment drain the blood and heat from her skin. Too busy drooling over the man to do your job, Eve, she chastised herself.
“Bertha is going to chew you up one end for this and let Mrs. Holdan chew down the other when we get back for the first staff meeting after the vacation,” Cal warned his friend, and Destry visibly winced.
After a second, though, Tristan’s startling blue eyes focused hopefully on Eve’s face. “Mrs. Holden won’t be nearly so mad at me if I can manage to get you to go to the Winter Carnival.”
“Oh, no, I’m not….,” Eve breathed and started to shake her head no.
“You won’t go with me?”
It took Eve a second to stop and go over that question in her head. Had he just asked to take her to the event?
“I mean after all….,” he said cajolingly as he stepped forward until he stood so close that Eve could smell the cedar and citrus of the light cologne he
wore. Or maybe it was body spray or guy soap. Or maybe his skin just smelled that damn good. Tristan reached forward to finger the shiny garland wadded between Eve’s constricted chest and her meager shield of class evaluations. One fingertip grazed the edge of a button on her shirt, and electrical shivers rippled out from the barest pressure on her skin. “You do seem to be getting into the holiday spirit. And you’d be getting me out of trouble with the Evergreen Queens.” Eve tilted her head quizzically. “Bertha and Mrs. Holdan. That’s what Cal and I have been calling them since we grew up here.”
“Yep,” Lovell agreed. “We both left for awhile, then came back and ended up teaching. Those two never change, though. They’ll be here as long as there’s an Evergreen.”
Rina, Tristan, Cal Lovell all three stood looking expectantly at Eve as she sorted through the last few moments in her head. She was sure Tristan Destry, for all his smiles and playful remarks over the last few months, was not actually asking her out on a date. It wasn’t just that she was the odd girl out, new in town when most everyone in Evergreen had grown up there, or that men as impossibly good looking as Destry did not ask out girls that probably outweighed them.
Yes, it was all that. It was all that and a lot of disappointment. Like any girl, Eve had made the mistake too many times of reading too much into what a man said or didn’t say, a kindness or an off-the-cuff remark. Unlike most women, Eve had learned to cut her losses and stop believing in the faerie tales of a knight riding in on a white horse to sweep her off her feet.
Feet on the ground, Eve reminded herself even as Tristan Destry stood there waiting for her response.
Eve shrugged. “I guess I could meet—.”
“No,” Tristan said, “let’s do this right. I’ll pick you up at your house at six, yeah? It’s a date.”
Out in the hallway, Rina did have the grace to wait until she and Eve were two classrooms away before she squealed. “It’s a date.”
“Not that kind of date, Rina.”
“It’s. A. Date,” the redhead said again with annoyingly pronounced enunciation.
Eve rolled her eyes. “You heard him. He’s trying to get in good with Bertha and Mrs. Holdan. I’m doing him a favor.”
“He likes you. He likes you. He likes you.” After five years of teaching elementary school children, Rina had learned all too well that irritating sing-song cadence they used to tease each other.
“Right,” Eve agreed caustically. “And there’s really a Santa Claus, too.”
Chapter Two
Eve spent so much time flip-flopping between ‘I don’t care, this isn’t a date’ casual and lace-and-silk ‘I can’t walk farther than the car in these heels’ formal that by the time her doorbell rang, she was still in the striped button-front and slacks she’d worn to work. She had just enough time, or not really quite the time, to change into a pair of jeans, throw on a sweater, and stuff her legs into the only pair of wide-calf boots she’d ever found that she could half-ass walk in. Thank god it hadn’t snowed yet, because she’d never gotten the hang of walking on the stuff more than a few feet before landing on her butt.
On the way out of her bedroom, Eve caught her reflection in the mirror on the back of the door and realized she’d picked the jeans that were frayed at the knees and the gray sweater with the horizontal white stripes fat girls were never supposed to wear, least of all at hip level. The doorbell sounded again. No time to change. So maybe it was a good thing, she thought, that this wasn’t a date. Why didn’t that make her feel better about looking like crap in front of Tristan Destry?
Maybe because he showed up looking like an Irish Spring commercial—in a nice cable knit sweater in that cream color that made him appear just a little bit tanned even in December and that made his eyes seem even bluer. Like that was fair. That sandy color only ever made Eve look like she was coming down with the flu. But for Tristan, it was the perfect compliment to his boots and the navy blue overcoat and scarf. His jeans weren’t torn. And he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Without that little bit of distortion… his eyes were an even more gorgeous, penetrating blue.
And he was holding flowers, a small bundle of purple shooting star wildflowers mixed with the brilliant winter white of mariposa lilies and pearly everlasting with the gold of marsh marigolds, and none of them in season. Tristan bundled them into Eve’s arms as soon as she opened the door.
“Where did you find—?” she started to ask, but the thought shattered like an icicle on pavement when Destry leaned down over her.
With wide eyes, Eve looked up into his sculpted face, angles softened by the suggestion of a smile on his loose lips. The man didn’t hurry, taking a good long moment skimming his mouth down along her hairline of wispy platinum waves, past her temple and the pulse beating wildly there, to finally press a soft, warm kiss high on Eve’s cheek by her ear. His breath and the mouthwatering scent of his skin sent tingles in hot and cold cascades over Eve’s chest, down her arms, and along her spine. She got goose bumps in places she didn’t know it was possible.
“Sorry I’m late.” Was he? Eve hadn’t realized. “Ready to go?”
“Uh-huh,” she agreed and grabbed her coat. A glance at the clock on the way out showed the time as 6:04 P.M., making the man tardy by less than five minutes. And he was apologizing. If he kept that kind of consideration up, Eve was going to start believing this was a date.
In the car, Tristan quipped, “The Evergreen Queens are serious about everyone being in the square when the music starts playing at 6:30. We’ll be in deep with them if we’re late.”
Ah, Eve thought, that was it. This really was just about making points with the town matriarchs, even if that kiss hadn’t quite felt as dull and rote as the social obligation it must have been. Eve actually tried to cultivate that sense of disappointment as she rode beside Tristan along the twisting road through the forest. She tried to use it to steel herself against how good it felt to sit beside him in the warmth as the night closed in dark and cold around them and Tristan drove on with attentive glances Eve’s way every so often.
“Wow, town is lit up tonight,” Eve said, marveling despite herself as Tristan’s 4x4 came around a stand of trees and a final corner and the road lined up straight for its approach of the square. The shops that usually closed before dark instead glowed with gold or rose light from within, and most had arrayed samples out on sidewalk displays stocked with hot cider and cocoa. Every lamppost wore green, red, or gold garland. Every tree was crowned in white string lights that likewise crisscrossed the street from post to post and awning to awning in a twinkling canopy.
Staring at all the colors and lights, wreaths and hanging baubles, Eve didn’t notice for at least a couple of blocks that the 4x4 was rolling along slowly behind a wagon filled with hay and mitten-fisted children. From her throne atop one bale, Mrs. Holden sat facing the car and peering right down through the windshield. Eve felt the strangest tingle along the apples of her cheeks, a creeping sense of self-consciousness, as her gaze met Mrs. Holdan’s. Then the lady smiled at Eve and then Tristan and then Eve again, and the girl’s anxiety broke in favor of inexplicable relief and… joy. It was actually an effort for Eve not to look at Tristan and giggle.
She failed outright to restrain a mew of delight, in fact, when Tristan helped her out of the car and took her by the hand to lead her into the festival. Straining to focus, Eve barely heard the opening remarks to the carnival—from Mrs. Holdan and Bertha, of course—or the start of the live music that got the crowd twisting and bobbing as people scurried past or danced around her. She only knew for sure that Tristan Destry’s hand was so much bigger and warmer closed around hers than she had imagined, that he never gave the slightest indication he wanted it back, and that he kept her drawn up tight to his firm body, so much taller than hers. And she wasn’t a short woman.
It took Destry leaning over her again, murmuring onto her long hair along the curl of her ear, to bring Eve back to the moment. He was pointing to a knot of musicians
. “Did you see Old Tom there?” Tristan pointed out the town handyman and caretaker, a fixture among Evergreen who took care of the homestead outbuildings and animals, mostly horses and fowl, while residents worked jobs mostly for the forest service, the school, or the university annex.
Eve nodded, impressed. “I didn’t know Tom played the fiddle.” The figure in his ever-present brown corduroy jacket and green ball cap was short and square with a blunt nose and fingers to match. His hands were as deft as a concert pianist’s, though, as he manipulated the strings and bow to the delight of dancing, romping children.
Tristan nodded in answer to Eve’s question. “At every town event—the candlelight festival in February, Spring Feast, May Day, Fourth of July, Summer’s Eve, Fall Festival, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and this, the height of Yule season, December 21. You really ought to give Evergreen a chance and get to know us.”
Eve squinted at Destry. “Of course I’m giving it a chance. I moved here, got a job here once my grandparents passed away and left me the house.”
“Glad you didn’t just sell it.”
She very nearly had and still couldn’t quite say why she hadn’t.
“Still,” Tristan insisted, and he looked directly down into Eve’s flushed face as he spoke, “you moved here, but you have yet to start living here. You might like us if you tried.” He gave the girl a wink that made her stomach flutter. “Traditions, superstitions, and all.”
Eve reared back a bit, to look at Tristan’s face instead of just losing her train of thought staring into his eyes. “You go in for all this? Dressing up as Santa for the kids on Christmas and hiding eggs and telling them to leave cookies out for faeries?”
“It’s a good way for a community to bond. Keeps the wild hearts among us from getting too restless, me and Cal included. Had our rough patches, the both of us. All said, there are worse things for kids and adults to believe in.” Whispering into her ear again, Tristan said, “Like nothing at all. A world without magic or love or soul-rending sex.”
Shifter Wonderland: Twelve BBW Paranormal Holiday Shape Shifter Romances Page 42