by Deb Kastner
“It wasn’t the first time we’d ever fought over the same girl, but our friendship was rock solid and always came before any buckle bunny. I don’t know what was different, but for some reason that night things got out of hand and neither one of us backed off. Maybe because Sharee was stoking the fire. Maybe it was because we’d both had way too much to drink, or else we would have realized how stupid we were acting.”
“A fistfight? As in you punched each other?”
“Not all of the face wounds found on Aaron came from the car accident. To be fair, I had a split lip and a black eye.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she spat.
He nodded. He couldn’t disagree with her. She was disgusted with him, but no more so than he was with himself.
“When it was clear that Sharee was going to go home with me, Aaron flipped out. Our competition had always been good-natured. Win some, lose some. And it had never come to exchanging blows. But that night, something was different. I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, and I just don’t know.”
He blew out a breath, lifted his hat and jammed his fingers through his hair, roughly combing the messy strands back from his forehead, not caring when his fingers caught in the tangles.
Alyssa didn’t speak. She pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. Not surprisingly, she wouldn’t look at him anymore.
“I guess I was winning the fight, although to look at us both you probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Before I knew what was happening, Aaron shoved me out of his way, grabbed his jean jacket from his chair and stalked off.”
He squeezed his eyes closed and swallowed hard, the emotion burning like lava in his throat cutting off all his air.
“I should have gone after him, but I didn’t.”
Alyssa made a tiny squeaking noise. Cash desperately wanted to reach out to her but knew she would push him away.
“I didn’t know he was going to get behind the wheel,” he insisted. “If I had, I promise I would have made sure that never happened. But it didn’t even occur to me that he was so wound up about our fight that he would drink and drive.”
“So instead, you just went home with Sharee and left Aaron alone,” she accused. “Some friend you turned out to be. You didn’t even give him a second thought, did you?”
He groaned.
What else could he say? She was right.
It was enough of an answer to get Alyssa back on her feet, either purposefully or inadvertently kicking loose gravel into his face.
Whether she meant to or not didn’t matter. He deserved it.
“You abandoned my brother.” Her voice cracked as tears streamed from her eyes.
Cash’s breath came in ragged gasps. It broke him to see her cry, and it was even worse knowing he was the one who had caused her tears.
He might not have been the one to put a drink into Aaron’s hand or push him behind the wheel to drive, but he was still culpable for the death of his best friend.
He had killed Aaron.
And now, Alyssa knew it.
* * *
Alyssa gingerly stepped from one box to the next, using one palm against the inside wall of the shed to keep her balance. Some of the boxes had seen better days and her footing was precarious at best. She was thankful she’d decided to wear sneakers today and not the boots she usually wore.
One of these days she was going to organize this shed, replacing all the old cardboard boxes that now held Christmas ornaments and the like with plastic bins. It had been years since she’d given the shed a thorough cleaning and it had been on her to-do list forever.
But today was not that day.
Today, she had to pull all the Christmas decorations for the shop out from the back of the shed where they’d been stored since last Christmas and get everything set up in one day.
She hadn’t meant to leave decorating the store to the last minute, but life had gotten the best out of her. Her emotions had slowed her down, pulling her into a mire she had trouble crawling out of, and despite her best efforts, it was all she’d been able to do just to finish arranging the cases and shelves for the Kickfire products that would soon be on display.
She’d probably be here until midnight at least, and then after Thanksgiving with her family, it would be an early, early Black Friday morning for her. The shops in Serendipity didn’t do any of those ridiculous overnight specials the way big cities did, but it would take her a couple of hours at least, maybe more, to set up the front window Kickfire display.
There were at least a dozen boxes, and some of them were heavy. Which was her own fault. Every year she added more and more embellishments to the Christmas theme. By the time the holiday had come and gone, she always felt the shop was too busy for her to spend time properly packing the ornaments. Instead, she threw everything into old boxes without giving any consideration to how she was organizing them.
Which meant she had a big mess to deal with when she pulled out the decorations the week before Black Friday. She usually didn’t mind so much this time of year. Christmas was in the air and excitement bubbled over in her heart.
In her opinion, it was not possible to go overboard when preparing for her favorite time of the year. There was no such thing as too many Christmas decorations.
Except for the issue of hauling out all the boxes. And except that she’d waited too long to get started.
She sighed and brushed her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Despite the moderate temperature outside, it was hot inside the shed and beads of sweat clung to her brow.
She wondered briefly if maybe she ought to cut back on decorations this year. With the way things were now, her life appeared to be on an unending downswing. This Christmas might very well be the worst one ever.
Her brother had recently passed away, her mom was MIA, her father was ill and now, thanks to Cash, she would once again be running Emerson’s on her own during the busiest season of the year. Even worse, the renovations weren’t quite finished, and a quarter of her store was still a mess of empty shelves and display cases where the Kickfire products were supposed to be. It would be all she could do to get all of the Kickfire products out on time. She’d wanted them to be couched in the best Christmas display ever. Now there wouldn’t be a single twinkling light.
And forget having a face for the store. That ship had sailed right along with Cash’s admission that he’d been fighting with Aaron the night her brother had died.
She wasn’t certain she’d be able to find peace on Earth and goodwill toward men.
Not this year.
Especially when it came to goodwill toward one man in particular.
At the moment, she was feeling anything but goodwill toward Cash Coble. He had ruined her life in so many ways, she couldn’t begin to count and didn’t really want to. Like today, for example. The one day she really could have used Cash’s muscle to help her and he was gone.
Permanently.
And good riddance to him.
Just thinking about him made her heart beat faster—and not in a good way. Fury flamed through her with sparks of betrayal painfully tailgating behind it.
She didn’t need Cash. She didn’t even want him here. Not in Serendipity, and most certainly not at Emerson’s.
And she would keep telling herself that until she believed it. Because there was still a tiny niggle of doubt inside her heart telling her there might be more to the story than what he had admitted to.
Honestly, she didn’t know what to think.
At first, she’d been so angry she’d been literally seeing red. If steam could have escaped from her ears, it would have. All she could see when she closed her eyes was Aaron, beaten both physically and emotionally, lurching behind the wheel of his car, his only thought to get away from the man he’d called
his best friend.
But after she’d calmed down, she’d realized there was more to it than that. Cash had presented her with the truth as he saw it, from his perspective, and there was no doubt in her mind that he was carrying a heavy load of guilt on his shoulders.
But even as furious with him as she had been, she could still see how much Cash loved Aaron. It was right there in his eyes.
What had happened to Aaron wasn’t a cut-and-dried story from anyone’s lips. Rather, it was a convoluted mess, and it would take her time to sort out her thoughts and feelings.
But right now, she had a store to decorate.
By herself.
She sniffed her emotions away and mentally straightened her shoulders. It might take more effort on her part, but she was perfectly capable of doing this task on her own. She could do anything she put her mind to.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to carry large, heavy boxes by herself. Ever since her father got sick and Eddie had decided that riding a horse off into the distant sunset was more fun than fronting shelves and sweeping floors, Alyssa had been doing virtually everything in the store herself.
That is, until Cash had come barreling into her life with his handsome face, strong arms and reliable work ethic. She couldn’t deny, even to herself, that nothing, including going about her daily work, would ever be the same.
Cash had ruined everything.
She was beyond furious at how he’d weaseled his way into her life and how much she’d come to depend on him.
That was, perhaps, what hurt her the most.
All this time he’d been carrying around this big secret and he’d never even hinted at it. He’d had the audacity to let her believe he was her brother’s best friend, and as if that wasn’t duplicitous enough, she’d thought he was her friend. That he’d genuinely cared for her, as she did him—even when tender feelings had begun to bloom.
He’d even had the nerve to kiss her.
It might have started out innocently enough. There was no way he could have orchestrated the events that led them to spending time together originally.
After all, she had bid on him at the auction, not the other way around. He’d balked at the thought of working with her when he’d first started. But later on, after they’d become reacquainted, she couldn’t help but think that he had purposefully engaged her feelings.
Toyed with her.
Betrayed her.
And she’d been betrayed one too many times in her life to let this time slide.
She huffed loudly. She needed to get out of her own head and get this job done instead of balancing precariously in the middle of a project, both literally and metaphorically, ruminating over things she had no control over.
She shifted forward to grab the next box from the pile. Directly in front of her, a stack of four old Christmas boxes rocked unstably. She yelped as the top box tipped over, falling straight toward her.
With a growl of dismay, she punched back at it, her fist going clean through the weakened cardboard and slicing into her wrist with the jagged edges formed by the hole made by her hand.
She cried out in surprise. She could already see rivulets of deep red blood forming on her skin.
The odd thing was, she knew this should hurt. Paper cuts were bad enough, but cardboard paper cuts were the worst.
And yet she felt nothing as the box rapidly became saturated with her blood. Apparently, the inward pain she was toiling with mentally overrode anything she might encounter physically.
Groaning, she pressed her other hand to the side of the box for support and removed her injured fist, the cardboard scraping against her already scratched skin and deepening the wound.
It might not hurt yet, but it was going to. She didn’t relish the thought.
Great.
Now she was going to have to climb out of the shed and go clean out the wound and bandage herself up before she would be able to finish this not-so-fun part of this project. It was hard to tell how badly she’d been hurt because of all the blood covering her skin.
Hopefully there weren’t any cuts deep enough to require stitches. If that happened, she’d lose the whole afternoon taking an unexpected excursion to see Dr. Delia.
With an irritated sigh, she cradled her bloody hand against her pastel-blue sweatshirt—which would no doubt have to be tossed in the Dumpster now that it was stained a dark crimson—and turned to pick her way back out of the shed.
She’d almost made it to the door when she stepped on a box filled with old papers that needed to be burned—yet another project Alyssa never had time to get to. The top flap was open because the box was overloaded and papers stuck out at random angles.
Her sneaker hit dead center on a stack of flyers and the sheets slipped out from underneath her, soaring every which direction. She immediately lost her balance and fell backward, spiraling her arms in an attempt to regain her equilibrium.
Stepping back with her other foot onto a different box, she pushed herself forward, hoping she could use the momentum to clear the rest of the cartons and jump out of the shed. Even if she didn’t land on her feet, skinned knees would beat the potential of smacking the back of her head on something hard if she continued her backward fall.
The move worked, and she catapulted out of the shed headfirst. She instantly realized there was no way she would be able to land on her feet at this angle. The best she could hope for was to protect her head with her arms and tuck and roll.
Maybe falling backward would have been the better choice.
She wrapped one arm around her neck and reached out with the already injured one to try to catch the brunt of her fall, but instead of her palm meeting gravel, it was wrapped in a large, steady hand, pulling her up and changing her trajectory as a strong arm wrapped around her waist, stabilizing her.
Instead of falling to the earth in an inglorious heap, she was able to regain her balance and land on her feet.
And end up held tightly in a man’s embrace.
She didn’t have to look up to know who had just rescued her.
“Cash,” she whispered through a dry throat.
He was the last person on Earth she expected to see today, much less to be in exactly the right place at the right time to save her from what was sure to have been a painful fall.
He dropped her hand but continued to hold her around the waist, steadying her. She hoped he couldn’t feel her quivering, a byproduct of the adrenaline coursing through her and not because of her proximity to him.
“You’re bleeding,” he exclaimed.
She would have been bleeding head to toe, had he not caught her.
He lifted her left hand, turning it over and carefully examining her wrist, his face set in a grim frown.
She’d been so shaken by almost taking a serious nosedive, she’d completely forgotten about punching the box.
She glanced down and surveyed the damage. Her wrist still didn’t hurt, but there was a lot of blood. It was impossible to gauge how deep the cuts were until she washed the wound.
“Let’s get you into the shop,” he murmured.
She jerked her hand away. “It’s no big deal.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m not leaving until I know for sure I don’t need to call Dr. Delia.”
She ignored him as she paced back to the shop and let herself in the back door. She had too much to do today to deal with injuries, and way too much to do to deal with Cash. Her mind was racing as fast as her heart.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice was terse, and he pressed his lips into a hard, straight line.
“Just here to pick up my final paycheck. I won’t be sticking around, so you don’t have to worry about running into me on the street or in church.”
She’d expected to feel relieved by his words. Seeing him was its own form of torture. An
d yet, the thought of never seeing him again caused an equal amount of agony.
“You don’t have to leave because of me.”
He stared at her for a long moment.
“Yeah, I think I do. But not until I’m sure your wrist is okay. You’ve got bad cuts and your sweatshirt is covered in blood.”
She scoffed, ignoring him as she grabbed a washcloth and her first aid kit from a shelf in the back room and then moved to the sink to rinse off her hand with cool water.
She didn’t need Cash here to help her.
It just figured that now it stung, and she winced despite her best intentions not to. And, of course, Cash saw her flinch as the cold water bathed her wound.
“Give me the washcloth,” he murmured, taking the cloth and rinsing the blood out of it. With surprising tenderness, he held her hand and gently dabbed at the cuts on her wrist.
“How did this happen?” he asked, his gaze still on the cuts he was wiping clean.
“I punched a box.”
“You did what? Why?”
I was thinking about you.
“To keep it from falling on top of me.”
“What were you doing in the shed?”
“Pulling out the Christmas decorations. I am way behind where I need to be in order to have the Kickfire collection ready by this Friday.”
“Why are you doing this alone?” he asked, and then faltered. “Oh. Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah. That would be why.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and Alyssa could tell he meant more than just that he hadn’t been here to help her with the boxes today.
But words simply weren’t enough. Not for Alyssa. Not yet.
“Some of these cuts are pretty deep,” he said in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
“Not really.” She pulled a roll of gauze and some antibiotic cream from the first aid kit. The cuts on her heart were much deeper than those on her wrist.
It would help if Cash would wrap her wrist for her. Doing it herself one-handed was a hassle. But he was busy fishing his cell phone from his back pocket.