THE DOORBELL RANG, and Lila jumped. She squeezed her eyes shut and counted to ten before getting out of her chair, where she was staring at a binder, resolutely not making a list, and walked cautiously to the door. She quickly looked out the lace curtains to the side and saw a small woman with graying black hair standing there holding a plate of some kind of baked good.
Another bribe.
They been stacking up for days. Food, doilies, tea towels. It never seemed to end. She had been hoping to... Well, she had been hoping to lie around, read, plan the Red Sled Holiday Bazaar and mostly enjoy a little bit of the vacation away from her job, but no. She had spent the past days entertaining all of June’s old friends.
She hadn’t seen Everett since that day in town when they hung up flyers, and she had the feeling that he was avoiding her. It was too bad she couldn’t avoid her current visitor. She jerked the door open, a determined smile on her face, and she looked down at the tiny woman standing there.
“I brought cookies,” she said.
“Hi,” Lila said.
“I’m Mrs. Kim,” she said.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs. Kim.”
“I just wanted to bring these cookies by,” she said, “and remind you that—”
“You always have booth number seven,” Lila finished. “The most coveted booth in the entire space. Positioned handily just next to the kettle corn and the spiced cider, and directly across from the entry.”
She had questioned what prime booth space was. She had since been educated.
Thoroughly.
“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”
“This is not the first sales pitch I’ve had. And I’ll tell you what I told everyone else. You may officially reserve the booth October 5. The first phone call gets the booth. But I will take your cookies. And it was very nice to see you again.”
Lila took the plate and Mrs. Kim gave her a scowl, turning and walking down the front steps, just as a faded old Volvo pulled up the drive.
Lila blinked in total disbelief. The lady that got out of that car was even smaller and more shrunken than the one that had come before. As if they were little pushy matryoshka dolls. One tiny cute one appeared, then a tinier cuter one.
This lady did not have a plate. She had a little woolen bag that was clearly stuffed full.
It was not—she didn’t think—Lila’s imagination that Mrs. Kim shot her new visitor a death glare from her car as she pulled away.
“Hello,” she said, smiling widely, patting her salt-and-pepper hair, dark eyes glowing. “I’m Ms. Jones.”
“Hi, Ms. Jones,” Lila said from her position in the doorway.
“I just wanted to bring you by some of the items that I sell in my booth.” And from her bag she produced two of the smallest, cutest felted mice that Lila had ever seen.
“Oh,” she said.
She itched to take the mice. She didn’t know what she would do with small felted mice. All she knew was that she wanted them.
“I just wanted to make sure that you knew also,” she said, “that I have my heart set on booth number seven. It’s just—”
“The best booth,” Lila finished.
“Yes, dear,” she said.
Lila was suddenly sorely tempted to offer the booth in exchange for all of the felted creatures. No one would ever know. Someone had to have booth seven. Why couldn’t it be Ms. Jones?
No. Everyone expected her to do things like bend rules.
Bend rules and be disorganized and give in to bribes that involved small animals. But she wasn’t going to.
She was going to do this right.
Grandma June believed in her. She wasn’t sure anyone else ever had.
“That is very kind of you,” she said. “But booth rental does not open until October 5 and I cannot guarantee anyone a particular booth. You just have to be the first to call on that date.”
“Why is that, dear?” the other woman asked, her tone as sweet as her brown-sugar skin.
“Because Grandma June said so. And if that’s how she wants it run, then that’s how I’m going to run it.”
The older woman snapped her fingers. “Darn. I was hoping you might be a softer touch than June was.”
“I’m not,” she said, privately thinking she absolutely was.
“You can expect a call from me very early.”
“I welcome it,” she said. The older woman turned to go. “I don’t get the mice?”
“I didn’t get the booth,” the woman said, putting the creatures back in her bag and striding down the porch steps.
Lila could only stand there and stare, shocked. She had no idea the women of Jasper Creek were so cutthroat.
She was ruminating about that when there was yet another knock on the door. She threw her hands up over her head in a silent entreaty to the sky to deliver her from the hell of booth number seven.
“What would they do if I changed booth number seven to booth number...? Booth number twelve. What if I just moved them? And then, they didn’t even know where they were going to end up, they just ended up where I put them.”
She jerked the door open and was completely surprised to see not a tiny old woman, but a very large cowboy.
She did her best to calm the sudden uptick in her heartbeat. “Are you here about booth number seven?”
“I am not,” he said.
She growled and stepped to the side, allowing him entry.
“I take it you had visitors.” His gaze was behind her, on the side table full of goodies.
“I did. And I want you to know, I nearly sold my scruples for a couple of felted mice.”
He stared at her blankly. He was handsome even when blank. “I don’t understand any of the words in that sentence, and I’m not asking you to help me.”
She growled and stamped into the kitchen.
“I had some questions for you.”
“You know,” she said, “there is a thing called a phone, and it means that you don’t have to suddenly materialize in the middle of someone’s house every time you have to tell them something.”
“I don’t have your number.”
“June’s landline?”
“Well, she used to yell at me. Tell me I lived not fifty paces down the way, and there was no reason for me to startle her to death with a telephone call when I could easily pay her a visit in person.”
“Different times,” Lila said. “I would prefer someone send me a text so that I don’t even have to be startled by the sound of their voice.”
“See,” he said, “this is the kind of thing I don’t get. People think I’m antiquated, but they can’t even have a conversation anymore.”
“Do you consider yourself a sparkling conversationalist, Everett McCall?”
“Hell, no. But I sure as hell know how to speak with someone face-to-face.”
“A realist without a smartphone,” she said in fake lament.
“I never said I didn’t have a smartphone.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. It’s a practical way to keep tabs on potential buyers for my horses. And to update listings and the like.”
“Right. The practical soul of reason. How quickly I forget. Would you like cookies? I am drowning in them.”
“Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact I would love some cookies.”
“Now, why are you here?” she asked, traipsing over to the side table and picking up a plate.
“I have some questions for you about vendors. I’m going to need to figure out exactly what I have to provide. Sometimes there’s a requirement for power supplies and the like. If Ace Thompson is coming over with beer from Copper Ridge, then I’m going to need to help with that setup, because it gets pretty complicated.”
“Beer?” She affected mock shock. “What kind of wholesome family fun is this?”
“The redneck kind,” he said.
“Well, I’m not sure. I know that I talked to... I did write it down.” Frustration bubbled up inside of her. She wanted to do this on her terms. Grandma June had asked her to do it, and she knew she could. She hated that she was forgetting now. It was Everett’s fault, anyway. Standing there being distracting.
“You have a list?”
“I don’t need a list,” she insisted.
“I think you need a list.”
“I don’t want to need a list,” she said. She huffed into the kitchen and went back to the binder. “I have some notes. That’s not the same.”
“Why, exactly, don’t you want a list?”
“Because I’m not JJ,” she said. She was overreacting, and she knew it, but she wasn’t sure how to stop it. “I’m not organized, practical JJ. And that’s why my father took her instead of me. Because I am a disaster. An explosive, messy disaster, and I have been since I was a little girl. I had the temerity to cry when I fell and scraped my knee. My room was always a mess. I left stuffed animals and dolls everywhere. And I never cleaned up after my tea parties.”
Her issues felt so perilously close to the surface here. In this farmhouse, doing this task that was frankly so far out of her comfort zone it made her want to run back to the safety of Portland and Burnside Blooms, where she was never asked to be anything but creative and where she didn’t have to try to stretch herself.
Didn’t have to try to be something or someone she knew she could never measure up to.
A person her father might want.
“I knew you when you were a kid,” he said, his voice even. “You were not like that.”
“I was. But it’s fine. I don’t care. I’m me. I can’t do anything about it. I am who I am. And I’m sorry if everyone seems to think that I should be something else. Except Grandma June.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Grandma June is the only one who believed I could do this. No one else would have ever assigned this to me. They would have thought that I would mess it up. But I’m not going to. I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to do it with my whole chicken-tea-party-giving self. Grandma June knew me. And she loved me. My dad didn’t want me. I drive my mom insane. I’m still not sure how she lost the draw to get JJ. I bet you they fought over her. If they’d been thinking, they would have traded weeks off with JJ and shunted me off somewhere else altogether.”
Everett didn’t say anything, and now that her temper was cooling slightly, Lila felt silly.
“I kind of proved my own point,” she said.
“You know, there’s a lot of ground between being asked to change and keeping a list to make your own life easier.”
“Is there?”
“Yeah. I would say there’s all the ground in the world between those two things,” he said.
“Says the man who already told me his marriage fell apart because he didn’t want to change.”
He regarded her for a moment, his eyes stormy. “So you’re telling me that nothing in your life has been made harder because you refuse to do something an easier way out of sheer stubbornness?”
“I’m an idealist,” she said. “Another ist for you, to go with your grand self-claims.”
“You’re really going to stand there and lecture me,” he said. “You. The girl—yes, girl—who confessed her love for a man at his engagement party.”
Something inside of Lila snapped. “Well, I was right. Wasn’t I? I mean, let’s face it, Everett, you certainly shouldn’t have married Tonya.”
“Couldn’t have married you, either,” he said. “Given that it would’ve been against a few different laws. And I’m into women.”
“Well, you still made a marriage mistake, didn’t you? You were wrong. Maybe that was it. Maybe I was your sign, and you were supposed to listen to it.”
“Or maybe you were just some silly little girl, and I took what you said as the word of a silly little girl.”
She walked forward and slapped her hand against the center of his chest. Damn. That was a lot more rock-solid than she had expected. “Well, I’m not a little girl,” she said. “In case it had escaped your notice, I’m a woman now. And my observation is still that you’re a stiff-necked stubborn asshole who has no right to stand around and judge what I do or don’t do given the state of your own existence.”
Suddenly, she found herself trapped against that rock-hard chest, his arm wrapped around her. And she didn’t know what was happening. Her heart was thundering hard, the pulse between her legs pounding heavily. He was angry at her, and she should probably shout about him manhandling her, all things considered. Except...it didn’t feel scary. It didn’t feel like manhandling.
It didn’t even feel anything like dangerous.
It felt like something else altogether, and she wasn’t sure she had a word for it.
Except...
The heat in her belly felt familiar. When she was young, it had bloomed in her chest, like a bright white hope that seemed to guide her to Everett, whatever the situation.
It had burned the hottest in her chest at his engagement party, when she had been so desperate to stop him from making a terrible mistake.
She had never known such an injustice.
That Everett McCall hadn’t even been able to wait one more year for her to be a grown-up so that they could have a chance. Just a chance.
That was all she had wanted. But she had always been racing against some kind of clock, given that he was a decade her senior. And, of course... Of course, some woman had fallen in love with him. Lila had fallen in love with him when she’d been a girl, but the least that Everett could have done, the very damn least, was wait until she could compete on a level playing field.
Just one more year. Just until she was eighteen.
And then she could have kissed him.
But now, that feeling was situated lower. Her belly, and blooming outward, blooming down.
You could kiss him now.
Angry, grumpy Everett McCall, who had now been married and divorced and had given up on love, with her still a blushing virgin.
But maybe that was it.
He wasn’t the one. He couldn’t be.
If he was the one, they wouldn’t want to kill each other on sight after all this time. If he was the one, it would feel sweet and airy and glorious, and not like this dark, gnawing desire that nearly hurt.
But he was...a something.
She didn’t need to be with only one man, but she needed it to be significant.
And for her, Everett McCall was significant in every way.
Somehow, as she rose up on her toes just then, she felt like she was tipping forward. Off the edge of something. And when her lips met his, it was like an explosion.