by Debbie Mason
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Debbie Mazzuca
One Night in Christmas copyright © 2019 by Debbie Mazzuca
Cover illustration and design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
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One Night in Christmas first published as an ebook in May 2019.
First Edition of Christmas in Harmony Harbor: October 2019
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ISBNs: 978-1-5387-3171-0 (mass market); 978-1-5387-3169-7 (ebook)
E3-20190801-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
One Night in Christmas
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Discover More
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This book is dedicated with much love to my daughter Jess for reading my first drafts, answering my endless questions, heading up Team Mason, and for loving the holidays and happily-ever-afters as much as me.
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to my editor, Alex Logan, who works tirelessly on behalf of my books, whether it’s searching out a new promo opportunity or editing when she’s supposed to be on holidays. Her dedication is much appreciated, as is her attention to detail. She never fails to make each book better.
To Beth DeGuzman, Amy Pierpont, Leah Hultenschmidt, Madeleine Colavita, Cristina Lupo, Jodi Rosoff, Estelle Hallick, Monisha Lakhotia, Tareth Mitch, Penina Lopez, Elizabeth Turner Stokes, and the dedicated sales, marketing, production, and art departments at Grand Central/Forever, thank you so much for everything you do on behalf of my books.
Many thanks to Pamela Harty for always being there for me. Thanks also to the members of Pamela’s team at the Knight Agency: Deidre Knight, Eileen Spencer, and Jamie Pritchett.
To Perry, April, Jess, Nick, Shariffe, Sara, Lilianna, and Gabriella, thank you for all your love and support. I couldn’t do what I do without you guys. I wouldn’t want to. You are my world.
Many thanks to all the wonderful and supportive writers I’ve met through ORWA (Ottawa Romance Writer Association), especially: Ludvica Boota, Cynthia Boyko, Ellen Bruce, Christine Enta, Lucy Farago, Vanessa Kelly, Joyce Sullivan, Randy Sykes, Allison Van Diepen, and Teresa Wilde.
And last but not least, a very big thank-you to the readers and reviewers who take time out of their busy lives to hang out with me in Harmony Harbor and Christmas, Colorado, and on social media. Your messages, FB comments, tweets, and reviews mean the world to me. Thank you for sharing your love of the Gallaghers and McBrides with your family, friends, and followers.
An extra special thanks to members of my readers group, Robin Whitaker and Cindy Hetherington LeMay, who named Max.
Chapter One
A power outage on Black Friday was the last thing Evangeline Christmas needed. As the owner of Holiday House, a year-round Christmas store located in the town of Harmony Harbor, Massachusetts, Evie had been planning for this day for months.
She’d scrimped and she’d saved and she’d begged and she’d borrowed (from her tight-fisted mother), pouring every nickel and dime into making this the biggest kickoff to the Christmas season yet. She’d spent more on advertising for this weekend than she had for the past year’s holidays combined.
She wasn’t alone. Her fellow shop owners along Main Street were also pulling out all the stops to get customers through their doors and turning over their credit cards once they had them there. Although Evie more than anyone needed those customers today. Her entire future hung in the balance. She wasn’t being a drama queen or a Negative Nancy.
Evie was a thirty-year-old woman who typically saw her glass as half-full rather than half-empty. But after the week she’d had, her optimism was flagging. Now, as she stood in the dark an hour before customers should be clamoring to get into her store, that glass was bone-dry.
If only she could pick up the phone and call her dad. He’d had a way of making everything better. She could practically hear him in her head. There’s always tomorrow, Snugglebug.
“I wish that were true, Daddy,” she murmured, her fear of the dark causing her heart to race as she blindly edged her way past the display tables to the sales counter with only the light on her cell phone to guide her. She caught movement near the front window and whipped around to confront the shadow in the corner.
Show no fear. Show no fear, she repeated in her head with more force, as if that would vanquish the panicked emotion freezing her to the floor. She pictured herself in combat boots instead of the Naughty and Nice knitted booties she wore and with a fierce, don’t-mess-with-me expression on her face. She held up her cell phone. “You better get out of here. You’ve got two minutes before the police arrive.”
Hoping to blind her would-be assailant, she aimed the light where she guessed his eyes would be. It hit him dead-on, right in his painted black eyes that didn’t blink. A small, mortified groan escaped from her. She had nothing to fear from the blow
-up Santa Claus.
She wished her fears for Holiday House’s future were also in her head, but they weren’t. Three days before, her circumstances had become as dire as George Bailey’s in It’s a Wonderful Life. Just like poor old George and the savings and loan, she had a conniving schemer trying to bring her down—billionaire developer Caine Elliot.
His glass-and-steel office tower would not only destroy the seafaring charm of Main Street, but the national discount chains destined to be housed in the tower’s street level would put the future of Harmony Harbor’s mom-and-pop shops at risk.
With some help from Harmony Harbor’s Business Association and some really good friends, Evie had managed to stall the development of the three empty lots beside hers for more than a year. But this past Tuesday, she’d learned Holiday House was in imminent danger.
Harmony Harbor’s town council would vote on Monday whether or not to take her land to accommodate the parking spaces required by a long-forgotten bylaw for a development the size of the office tower. A bylaw she herself had brought to the town council’s attention in a last-ditch effort to quash the development.
“And look how that worked out for you,” she said as she tried first the landline and then the credit-debit machine on the counter, neither of which worked.
Turn your frown upside down and sit a spell, Snugglebug. Let those endorphins do their work. You’ll have your answer in no time.
Despite feeling like the dark cloud hanging over her was about to burst and bury her under a mountain of debt, Evie couldn’t help but smile at her dad’s favorite refrain. Taking his advice, she lowered herself onto the stool behind the counter, once again wishing he was a phone call away. He’d know what to do. He always had.
If wishes were horses…The cell phone’s light glinted off the tarnished gold cash register. It was almost as old as Holiday House. At least she’d be able to ring sales through and accept cash, she thought, giving the antique register a grateful pat and her dad a silent thank-you.
She glanced over her shoulder at the three generations of her father’s family looking at her from the framed photos on the wall. Each of them had successfully run the store before her. She wondered what they would have done had they found themselves in her position.
“They wouldn’t have been in your position. The three stores beside you wouldn’t have burned down, leaving the lots ripe for development. And Caine Elliot wouldn’t have been born.” The reminder helped, she decided, getting up from the stool on a wave of determination. It wasn’t entirely her fault she was days away from losing a business that had been in the Christmas family for a century.
Chewing the peppermint-flavored ChapStick off her bottom lip, she moved the light on her cell phone to the stairs leading to the second level. A redbrick three-story with classic wood beams and plaster interior, Holiday House had been the family home before her great-great-grandparents had turned the front rooms on the main floor into a Christmas store. The wooden Christmas ornaments her great-great-grandfather made back then had been the biggest draw.
Last year Evie had taken up residence in the attic, converting three of the second-floor bedrooms into showrooms for the other popular holidays. If she roped off the stairs and found a way to light up the main floor, at least customers could shop in relative safety.
She bent to open the cupboard under the sales counter, moved aside two boxes of bags, and found a flashlight. It wouldn’t provide enough light until the sun peeked through the window by mid-afternoon, but the fieldstone fireplace across the room would help. Candles too. Lots of them. She’d have time to make more to fill the orders, especially if…No, she wouldn’t lose hope.
All she had to do was walk into Monday’s town council meeting with a sack full of this weekend’s sales receipts and the testimonials she hoped to wrangle from customers to prove that Holiday House was an integral part of the community, a much-loved piece of their history that they couldn’t allow Caine Elliot to destroy for his modern-day eyesore.
She forced her lips into another smile in hopes the action would release a bunch of stress-reducing endorphins. Then again, there probably weren’t enough endorphins in all of Harmony Harbor to reduce her level of stress. It was Caine Elliot’s fault.
Almost a year ago to the day, she’d picked up the phone and a velvet-smooth deep voice had come over the line. As annoying as it was to admit now, she’d initially been seduced by his dreamy Irish accent. She’d even begun to fantasize about the man behind the voice. A lovely, mildly erotic fantasy that had been rudely interrupted as soon as Caine Elliot got the social niceties out of the way.
She didn’t care about his statistics and facts, his company’s success, or his many business degrees. No matter that he presented his development as the best thing to happen to Harmony Harbor since the advent of electric lights, she knew exactly what would happen to the small town she loved if no one stood up to him.
At the time of that first call from the Ogre of Wicklow Developments, Evie had been running Holiday House for only two months. But she had a long history with the small town. Every year, she and her dad would leave her mom and the sweltering heat of New York to stay with Evie’s great-aunt Noelle and help out at Holiday House for the entire month of August.
They’d visit in the fall and winter too, but it was the month-long summer stays that Evie treasured most as they readied the store for the holiday season. Some of her best memories had taken place in Holiday House.
She’d felt safest here, happiest here, and no way was she letting some hotshot developer steal that from her or anyone else, which she’d told him that day. And he’d told her she was allowing her emotions to color her decision and that sentimentality had no place in business. The call had devolved after that as emotions got heated. Her emotions at least. As far as she could tell, Caine Elliot didn’t have any. The man was coolly unflappable and arrogant. Their conversations over the last year had only served to validate her initial opinion of the man.
“Okay, enough. Time to get this show on the road.” Her voice sounded odd, higher-pitched than usual. She kept talking to herself anyway. She needed the distraction as she made her way around the tables and out of the shop, heading for the storage room and boxes of candles. “Only an hour until the doors open and all those Christmas-loving customers pile…” She trailed off as the darkness swallowed her whole.
Her It’s okay. You’re okay. There’s no one here but you and Santa Claus was interrupted by a rap on glass from the front of the store and her friend Mackenzie’s voice calling to her through the door. Evie ran from the back hall into the main room, almost knocking over a display table.
Relieved to hear dull thuds and not the sound of shattering glass as several items fell to the wood-planked floor, she held on to the edge of the pedestal table until it stopped wobbling. Once it had, she rubbed what felt like a bruised thigh and limped her way to the front of the store. Thanks to her trembling fingers and sweaty palms, it took longer than it should to unlock the three dead bolts and open the door. Evie smiled as she stepped aside to let Mackenzie in, hiding her hands in the pockets of her knitted green-and-red sweaterdress.
“Are you all right?” Mackenzie asked, looking around the shop with a frown while closing the door behind her. Gorgeous, with long caramel-colored hair, the owner of Truly Scrumptious handed Evie a bakery box.
“Other than the power being out, I’m fine, and these gingerbread cookies smell amazing. They’re still warm,” she said, praying Mackenzie didn’t notice the box trembling in her hands. “Isn’t your power off too?”
“No.” Mackenzie glanced out the window. “It looks like everyone has power but you. The streetlights are still on.”
Something Evie had failed to notice. Clearly nerves had messed with her powers of observation. Of course they had. She’d thought Santa was about to run across the store and attack her.
“Right. I…” She trailed off as the consequences of Holiday House being the only business without
power hit her. What if Tuesday’s payment to the electric company had bounced? Could she have forgotten to make it after learning Holiday House might very well be bulldozed into the ground to create a parking lot? She checked her banking app for a notice or payment receipt.
“Evie, are you sure you’re all—”
She smiled. “My payment went through.”
“Oh, okay, that’s good,” Mackenzie said in a halting tone that seemed to indicate Evie’s smile appeared more manic than relieved. “You probably just have to change a couple of fuses.”
And there went her profound relief, right out the front door. The fuse box was in the basement. A basement that hadn’t been updated since the early 1900s and could be a stand-in for the basement in The Evil Dead. The closest Evie had come to going down there since she’d taken over the store was opening the basement door for the furnace repairman.
At the thought of descending the wooden stairs into the dark, unfinished cave-like space with only the flashlight to guide her, she cleared the ball of terror from her throat. “You know, I think I’ll leave the lights off. The customers will feel like they’ve been transported back in time. I’ll light the fire, put candles all around. I even have an oil lamp I can use. I’ll put it over here.” She gestured to a table that held a collection of Fitz and Floyd tea sets and Christmas dinnerware. Behind the table sat an artificial fir tree decorated in antique ornaments of red and gold. “I’ll set out your cookies on one of the platters. Did you bring me more business cards?”
Not only was Evie showcasing Mackenzie’s gingerbread cookies, each of her tables displayed items from the shops on Main Street. The other stores were doing the same for her. Mackenzie had two of her Fitz and Floyd Christmas cookie jars on display at the bakery.
“I do, and I need more cookie jars. I sold yours yesterday.” She pulled an envelope from her jacket pocket, handing it to Evie.
“You didn’t buy them, did you?”
Less than an hour after Evie had been informed about Monday’s vote, her friends had begun arriving at the store, declaring they absolutely had to have whatever their eyes landed upon. Their gazes had landed on a lot, but Evie was more grateful for their friendship than the sales. She didn’t want them buying her merchandise just to help her out. She had a special connection with nearly every piece in the store, and she wanted her customers to feel the same.