Emily glared at the fresh cup of coffee on the counter at Harmony Skeins. Ordinarily, she limited herself to drinking water around the store’s stock; she couldn’t afford an accident with coffee or soda. But desperate times called for desperate measures. She hadn’t slept at all the night before. She’d finally given up trying at five a.m., crawling out of bed to pull on clean jeans and a silk blouse, the green one that set off the color of her eyes.
When she caught herself checking her silhouette in the mirror, she screamed in frustration and ripped off the shirt. A sweater would do. A regular, lambswool sweater. Because she worked at a knitting store, dammit. She dug to the back of her closet and chose one she hadn’t worn in over a year. Baby-puke brown, Rachel described it. Emily had originally knit it for Anne before she’d decided it was too ugly to give as a gift, so it was short in the sleeves and baggy in the chest.
Distraction. That’s what she needed. At least until she got rid of the jacket hung carefully over the chair in her kitchen. She seized the offending garment and galloped downstairs to the shop.
An hour later, Emily had straightened all of the stock. She’d unpacked a dozen boxes of new yarn, adding handwritten signs to point out the amazing autumn colors. She’d gone through the patterns, filing away some for summer-weight sweaters. And all the while, she’d been painfully aware of the jacket slung across her counter.
She fought the urge to scratch her neck and to pull at the impossibly short sleeves of the itchy brown sweater. Instead, she ordered herself to focus on the next matter at hand, the latest flyer she’d designed.
Save Our Stores, the paper said in an arch of letters across the top. The O was a grinning jack-o’-lantern. Beneath it, Emily had drawn a simple ghost and a witch, two children hidden by masks. And the core message was typed across the bottom of the page. “Come to the Central Business District and celebrate Halloween the traditional way. Candy, costumes, spooky decorations—we’ve got it all! Thirty-one stores to send a shiver down your spine! Show this flyer to any member of Save Our Stores and get a 5% discount on all purchases made on Halloween.”
The paper was neon orange, of course, and the letters were a hearty black. Jackson Printing had followed through on the rush job, delivering two boxes of flyers to her doorstep some time during the night.
Now, the door opened, ushering in a gust of freezing air. Emily looked up with an expectant pang before she reminded herself she was being an idiot. It only took a moment for her to smile at her brother. “Good morning,” she said brightly.
“Branwell and Noah, reporting for duty.” Bran clicked his heels together smartly. Noah lined himself up directly behind his father, swaying dangerously as he attempted the same maneuver.
“You guys are lifesavers,” she said, passing over the boxes.
“I’m candy?” Noah asked, screwing up his face in confusion.
“You’re sweet as candy,” Emily said. “I meant you and your dad are really helping me out.” She came around the counter and gave him a hug.
“Ouch,” Noah complained, rubbing his cheek where it had brushed against her sleeve. The wooly itch flared again across her own neck. She shoved down her discomfort, purposely listening for the Purr at the back of her mind. Yep, there it was. Ready to jump into some new fray against the American Discount. Ready to make her forget the ugly, itchy sweater she’d insisted on wearing like a penance.
“Okay, you two. One of these goes on the windshield of every car on Main Street, all the way up to Tenth.”
“We’ve got it,” Bran said.
“A couple go on the bulletin boards at the library and City Hall, and one on the board at the park.”
“All under control.”
“If there are any left, you can leave them on cars on Oak Street—”
“Hey!” Bran said. “I’m a certified PhD here. And they even let me post announcements on the English Department board without permission. We’ve got this.”
“Yeah, Aunt Emily. We’ve got this.” From another kid, that might have been back-talk. But Noah was so earnest as he made his boast that Emily had to laugh.
“Okay,” she said. “I trust you. When you’re done, come back here. I’ll need some help choosing which candy to hand out for the Halloween Parade.”
“I’m good at helping,” Noah said.
“I’m sure you are.”
“I can start helping right now,” he wheedled.
“Come on, buddy.” Bran interrupted. “Work first. Candy later.” Emily snatched back one of the flyers, just before her two best guys headed out in the October chill.
She centered the paper on the counter, not even lying to herself about why she was putting it there. She wanted Matt to know what SOS was doing. She wanted him to realize they weren’t going down without a fight.
Speaking of which… She turned to the main display table at the front of the store. The giant flower had been a great idea. But she could do better than that. The store’s yarn had been spun by some of the finest artisans in the world. Harmony Skeins knitting needles were hand-made by skilled craftsmen. The shop’s patterns had been created by world-famous artists. And they all deserved the most creative display Emily could fashion.
No one would ever confuse Harmony Skeins stock with the cheap acrylic yarn and plastic needles piled up at American Discount. She hadn’t seen Matt’s mockery of her presentation, but she knew the quality of his goods had to suffer at the store’s discount prices.
It was time to up the ante here at on Main Street. Time to create a design worthy of the yarn she got to sell in Theresa’s boutique. She stared at the table until the colors began to blur together, dancing like flames as her eyes started to water. That was it! A bonfire!
She collected an armful of knitting needles, the biggest bamboo ones in stock. Stacking them carefully, she sketched out a loose log cabin. When the base of her “fire” was set, she angled in “flames.” She placed heavy yarn at the bottom, super bulky lengths of crimson and orange, chunky skeins of persimmon and lemon. She layered on the worsted weight, factored in the DK, then the sport-weight. She finished the design with wisps of lace-weight yarn, delicate skeins that required needles as fine as toothpicks.
She was good at this, good at creating attractive displays for Harmony Skeins. After a year and a half, of course, she should be. That’s why it was time to move on. Time to find a new challenge.
She took her time walking around the design when she was finished. She reached out and shifted a skein here, a hank there. She traded off a couple of colors, brightening the representation of fire. And just as she was satisfied, the bells at St. Ann’s started tolling out the hour. Ten o’clock.
She wasn’t surprised when the front door opened, just as the final bell rang. Of course Matt was on time. Matt followed all the rules.
“Good morning,” she said, almost wincing when she heard her fake good cheer overcompensating for her fatigue.
“Good morning.” Something about that tight greeting made her look more closely at his face. The skin was pulled tight around his eyes. His lips were dry, almost chapped. He hadn’t shaved. He looked as if he’d slept as poorly as she had.
The thought of his discomfort should have made her happy. Instead, she found herself shoving away an image of Matt tangled in his sheets. In her mind, he wore flannel pajama bottoms, Black Watch plaid. But his chest was bare, the muscles still hard from his years of playing baseball. She could trace the lean lines down his belly, follow the angle to his hips—
Crap. She snapped her eyes back to his face. “Good morning,” she said again. Yeah. She was a lot more tired than she’d thought.
“I think we’ve agreed on that.”
He wasn’t supposed to smile that way. Wasn’t supposed to treat her like they were sharing some secret joke. She curled her fingers to tug at her sleeves, but her stupid excuse for a sweater was too short.
“Nice display,” he said, nodding toward the yarn fire.
“I can sketch out a plan for you, if you want to recreate it at your store.”
He shook his head. “Nope. I’m all set.”
“Good.”
“Great.” He glanced over at her register. Of course his gaze caught on the flyer. That’s why she’d left it there. He read it in a flash. “The traditional way. Nice.”
“I’ve got to use all my assets.”
“You’re good at that.”
She heard the potential beneath his words. He was offering her a compliment. An invitation. All she had to do was step forward, to close the distance between them. If she kissed him, he’d reward her with his palm against the back of her neck, with the tease of his tongue against hers.
But she wasn’t going to step forward. The cost was just too high.
“Look,” she said. “Last night… I should have told you… I wanted to say… ”
His lips curled into an amused smile. She didn’t want to think about his lips. She crossed her arms over her chest, making her rough sweater rasp against her sensitive skin.
“Relax,” Matt said. “We’re not kids anymore. Now we get to set the rules.”
“I just meant I should have said thank you!” Coward. That wasn’t what she’d meant at all. The Purr rattled at the back of her brain, complaining about her rolling over in such easy defeat.
And he called her on it. “I think you said that. Loud and clear. At least you were going to say that, before our Good Samaritan stopped to make sure we were all right.”
Before she could craft another lie, the shop door opened. Emily leaped back, banging her elbow against the counter, hard. She swung around the corner and ducked beneath the surface, rummaging around as if the most important thing in the world was to find an over-size shopping bag for an imaginary customer.
“Fraternizing with the enemy, I see,” Rachel Lacey said. She had a smile on her lips and an evil glint in her eyes.
“No enemies here,” Matt said easily. “How are things at The Herald?”
“Our boiler died, and we’re wearing triple layers till Ricky can get over to fix it.” She blew on her hands, as if to demonstrate the chill at the newspaper. “It looks like things are a lot warmer this end of Main Street.”
“What to do you want, Rachel?” Emily couldn’t decide if she was angry with her best friend for interrupting or angry with herself for nearly giving Rachel something to interrupt.
“We need your ad by noon, if it’s going to run in tomorrow’s paper.”
Ad. Noon. Right.
This time, Emily had a legitimate reason to dig beneath the counter. She found the paper on her fourth try. It was a black and white version of the same page Bran and Noah were distributing. She shoved it into Rachel’s waiting hands. “Here you go!”
Another one of those canary-eating smiles. Emily wanted to mouth something, to tell Rachel to drop it, but Matt would see whatever she said.
Instead, Emily walked to a mannequin in the middle of the store, the one posed in the middle of the worsted-weight cashmere. “Here you go,” she said, plucking off a double brioche scarf that had taken her almost a month to knit. The complicated pattern shimmered with burgundy and contrasting amber yarn. “This should keep you warm until the heat’s back on.”
“All right, all right.” Rachel wrapped the scarf around the neck. “I know when I’m not wanted.”
Emily didn’t fall for the line. Instead, she gestured toward the door. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I just want you to finish up at The Herald. I know how much Troy hates it when you work on weekends.”
Rachel’s chuckle came from deep in her throat. “Have fun, kids. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She settled a hand on her belly as she opened the door. But then she turned back to a seething Emily and pinned her with a perfect smile. As Emily braced for yet another goad, Rachel held up two fingers and quirked her eyebrows into a question.
Second date?
Not exactly.
Rachel laughed and slipped out the door.
And Emily did the only thing she could do. She seized Matt’s jacket from the back of her chair and shoved it at him. Hard.
“Thank you,” she said as she planted her palm on the bright orange flyer. “Don’t let me keep you from your work.”
~~~
Don’t let me keep you from your work.
They hadn’t been working. Not when Rachel interrupted. And what the hell had she meant, holding up two fingers? Rachel Little didn’t seem the type to flash peace signs without a reason.
Whatever the meaning, that’s what had shut Emily down. That’s why she’d sent him packing.
Matt turned back to the computer in his cramped office at the back of the store. Ads for Monday’s paper were due by noon. That was fine. He had templates from Corporate. All he had to do was call up a screen and add a few details.
There. That one was perfect. The American Discount logo, bold in its usual font. A gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern. “One stop shopping!” shouted the page. “All your Halloween needs in one easy place, at prices so low they’re scary!”
A field at the bottom waited for him to type in details. He hesitated for just a moment, and then he added a line: 10% Off All Purchases!
He hit print and collected the page from the printer. He glanced at his watch. It was already 11:45. He stepped to the door of his office and called out, “Caden!”
The boy appeared at the end of the far aisle. His hands were draped in a tangle of necklaces made out of orange and black plastic. A massive purple spider crawled over his wrist. “Yes, sir?”
“You can finish sorting the new stock later. Right now, we have an emergency.”
“An emergency?” The kid was already stripping off the crappy Halloween garbage. He looked like he was ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
“This is an ad for The Herald. It has to get there by noon.”
“That’s okay, sir. I have my bike.”
“Hop to it!”
Caden hit the door at a dead run. After watching him peel out of the parking lot, Matt headed toward the Halloween stock. He’d better get it wrestled into order before the next wave of customers hit the store. He had one week to sell every orange and black trinket in the shop.