5 Mischief in Christmas River (3 page)

Good old Kara. She was in prime linebacker mode. That’s the name I’d given to this particular aggressive and ferocious attitude that she occasionally had lately. I was fairly certain it was a side effect of her pregnancy.

“Well, I would, except she seems nicer than a warm Georgia breeze,” I said, echoing Tobias’s turn of the phrase.

Kara furrowed her brow.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, sighing and taking another bite of the cookie.

“Well, whatever that means. Cin? You need to cut the bull. You need to be prepared to take off the kiddy gloves when it comes down to it. Because let me tell you, a lady who sets up a pie shop right across the street from another pie shop is
not
a nice person. No matter if she comes from Georgia or whatever the heck you’re talking about.”

I didn’t correct her and tell her that Pepper was from Portland, not Georgia, for fear that Kara might turn that linebacker energy on me.

She slipped a white painter’s mask over her head and secured it over her mouth. Then she picked up the wood-burning tool, and grabbed one of the strips of wood. She began engraving it, a thin stream of smoke rising up from the burning wood.

“So, uh, those are going to be place cards, then? For the reception tables?” I asked, looking at her slow and steady movements.

She nodded, a deep crease of concentration cutting down between her brows.

“Do you think you’ve got enough time to do all that?” I said, trying to put it as delicately as I could.

Kara was getting married to John Billings in what was supposed to be a small, intimate, and non-stressful wedding on New Year’s Eve. She had said she didn’t want anything to be too fancy, given that she didn’t have a lot of time to plan the event. The baby was due in May, and Kara had wanted to get married before she was too large to fit into a wedding dress.

But while Kara had said the wedding was going to be low-key and not much more dressed up than a shotgun wedding, in reality, I could see that it was slowly snowballing into a massive undertaking. Part of the reason for this was because Kara was such a detail-oriented, crafty, and controlling person that everything, from the place cards to the chandeliers in the reception lodge, had to be specially made or embellished by her.

It was a lovely idea, but she’d been looking quite under the weather lately with all the work she’d been putting into the wedding decorations. And that was something that worried me a little, what with her being pregnant and all.

As the maid of honor, I’d been doing my utmost to help where I could. But I lacked the crafty touch that Kara was blessed with. When I tried to make things, they usually turned out lopsided and crooked. The only thing I was good at was making gingerbread houses, and that had very little to do with wedding decorations.

She glanced up at me from behind her safety mask.  

“
Of course
I’ve got enough time to do this,” she said. “These place cards are crucial to the wedding.”

“I know, but wouldn’t it be easier just to write the names out instead of burning them onto wood? I mean, since you’re so busy and everything?”

She looked up again, giving me a sharp look that was one step away from full-on linebacker mode.   

“Cinnamon, I’m already giving up my dream wedding gown because of… well, you know,” she said, looking down at her protruding gut. “But I won’t, for the life of me, give up my vision for the wedding. Okay? Now, I’ve got it under control. Don’t worry a hair on that pretty head of yours over it.”

She went back to her wood-burning. She was still carving the second letter in her mom’s name on the place card.

Her mother’s name was
Genevieve
.

I tried to do the math, wondering just how many letters she had left to burn for the wedding guests. Just the thought of it made my hands ache.

But Kara was headstrong. And I could tell she wasn’t going to be talked out of anything.  

“Well, okay then,” I said, reluctantly. “But you’re sure you can’t assign me any tasks or anything like that?”

She shook her head.

After last week’s vase-shattering incident, where I accidently broke one of her centerpiece vases after she asked me to drill a hole in one of the sides, Kara has stopped assigning me “wedding craft tasks” as she called them.

“You’re already doing plenty, Cin,” she said.

I scanned her face.

Part of me felt like I was being a poor maid of honor by not knowing how to do any of this stuff. Kara, had after all, done so much for me and my wedding the year before.

“Are you sure?” I said. “I mean, I could help you with decorating the chandeliers later maybe?”

She pulled off her mask.

“Thanks, but you don’t have to worry yourself, Cin,” she said. “I’m on schedule. Everything will be
just
fine.”

I probably would have felt a little worse about my crafting inability, if I hadn’t been planning her surprise wedding shower for weeks now. I figured whatever I lacked in wood burning and drilling I could more than make up for in thoughtfulness and several rounds of the meanest virgin cocktails there ever were.

She absently reached for another one of the cookies in the carton.

I leaned back and crossed my arms as she lifted her mask and stuffed the macaron into her mouth.

She reached for another one and was about to cram that one in her mouth too, but stopped when she noticed me looking at her.

“
What
?”  she said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Not so bland, are they?”

She laughed nervously.

“Oh, Cin,” she said. “You put dog biscuits in front of me right now, I’d do the same thing. I mean, I think this baby is going to be the next Mario Batali. He just loves his food.”

She patted her gut and cracked a grin.

But I knew that she was lying.

She wasn’t eating Pepper’s cookies because she had low standards lately when it came to food.

She was eating them because they were nothing short of delicious.

I stifled a sigh, and tried not to let on how glum I was feeling.

Chapter 5

The wind was howling hard through the woods, sending the long, bony branches of nearby trees scraping against the back window. A large December moon rose high through fast-moving, silvery clouds, spilling its milky light across the snowy landscape.

Luckily, it was warm and cozy inside the pie shop. Much of it having to do with the sugary air and the dancing Christmas lights that circled the room. The small Christmas tree in the corner, covered to the hilt in tinsel and lights and Kara’s handmade ornaments, didn’t hurt the cozy atmosphere either.

Christmas was a little less than three weeks away. And while this Christmas was supposed to be more low key than other years – it was going to be just Daniel and me – I still felt behind in the preparations. I had Daniel’s gift, having purchased a new pair of his beloved work boots right after Thanksgiving. We had agreed earlier this month that because cash flow was a little tight, as Christmas was coming on the heels of our honeymoon, that the two of us wouldn’t exchange gifts this year. I, of course, had already broken this promise before even making it, using my Thanksgiving pie funds to purchase his boots.

But I was pretty certain that once he saw those boots under the Christmas tree, he’d forget all about the pact that we had made.

When it came to everybody else on my Christmas list, though, I had fallen sorely behind. I was short on ideas, and inspiration was hard to find between the hours I spent slaving away in the kitchen and the time I spent walking the dogs at the Humane Society.

Let alone the time it would take to build a masterpiece gingerbread house for the annual Gingerbread Junction Competition this year.

I took a sip of my blueberry pomegranate tea, and smiled.

Despite being so busy, there had been no question in my mind about entering the Gingerbread Junction this year. I had missed it the year before because I had my wedding to plan, and it was one of the rare times that I skipped the annual competition. Subsequently, I’d been having the itch to build a gingerbread house all year long. I’d been waiting for the month of December for what felt like ages, just so I could once again have an excuse to create an elaborate, over-the-top, sensational cookie house. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say this year’s $500 top prize wasn’t a pretty sweet incentive, too.   

In the past, the top prize had been two plane tickets to Hawaii. But after the Mason Barstow scandal three years ago, the committee had been slowly scaling back the prize amount. They stopped giving away plane tickets, and instead, switched to cool, hard cash. Which this year, suited me just fine.

The oven timer beeped. I pulled on a pair of mitts and then brought out a pan of freshly baked gingerbread cookie, cut precisely in the angles I needed to build the first two stories of the ice palace I planned to sweep the competition with.

I let the gingerbread cool while I whipped up some frosting and set up the baseboard. This year, I was making a gingerbread house based on my love for the movie
Dr. Zhivago
. I was going to call it “The Ice Palace of Varykino,” and I was planning to go to town on it, creating Russian-style domed cookie rooftops, sugar ice encrusted spires, marzipan trees and woodland creatures, and even a cookie sleigh outside of the structure itself. The ice palace was going to be my largest endeavor to date, and since Kara was busy with her own New Year’s wedding plans this year, I was building it entirely on my own.

When the cookie cutouts were cool, I carefully slid a spatula under the gingerbread, loosening it from the parchment paper. I carefully transferred the pieces to another baking pan, stacking them carefully on top of one another.

I was so excited about my idea, that I could hardly wait to get started.

The competition was always stiff at the Gingerbread Junction. But with over 15 years of experience in the contest, I was going into it feeling relatively confident.

I could almost hear the judges call my name. I could almost hear the noise of the crowd as I walked up on stage to collect my winnings. I could almost feel the smooth crispness of that $500 in my hands. I could almost—

Just then, there was a loud crashing sound outside the window, coming from the back deck of the pie shop.

My heart sped up and I froze in place, holding the whisk I’d been using to whip up the frosting tightly in one hand.

It wasn’t that late, but it might as well have been midnight as far as downtown Christmas River was concerned. The streets were abandoned as a graveyard here at this hour, and as Tiana and Tobias had left for the evening, I was all by myself in the shop.

And I had, somewhat stupidly, left all the blinds open to watch the beautiful December moon rise up through the trees. Meaning anybody out there in those woods could have been watching me all this time.

I pressed pause on the stereo, putting an abrupt end to Johnny Mathis singing
Silver Bells
. I strained to listen for more and peered out the window, seeing little beyond my own frightened expression in the reflection.

It could have just been the wind knocking something over. Or a deer, I told myself. There were plenty of them out in these woods. Plenty of other wildlife too. It could have been—

There was another loud sound out there. And this one was easy enough to identify: it was the sound of a boot against hollow wood.

The sound of a
large
boot against hollow wood.

Someone was out there on my deck.

I reached for my cell phone in my apron pocket, and began dialing Daniel’s number.

Just then, there was a loud rap at the window.    

I could make out the figure of a tall man standing there, but couldn’t see his face.

My heart jumped up in my throat. I backed away, listening to the ringing.

“Please pick up,” I muttered desperately. “Please pick u—”

Just then, I noticed a faint, familiar jingle coming from the other side of the glass.

I placed the phone down on the kitchen island, and listened.

There was another loud rap at the window.

I let out a great big ol’ sigh of relief, and rushed for the back door.

Chapter 6

Huckleberry brushed past me, bounding into the kitchen on a mission for some leftover pie, no doubt.   

The man with the beard stayed in the doorway, grinning sunnily. 

“Daniel Brightman, what in the world are you doing creeping around out here? Don’t you know that you just scared me half to dea—”

I stopped talking when I noticed what he was holding in his hands.

A giant, beautiful bouquet of pearly pink roses.

My mouth dropped open in surprise.

“What’s… what’s this all about?”

He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.  

“You know what today is, don’t you?” he said.

I furrowed my brow, my stomach tightening as I tried to figure out what important event I was missing.

Our wedding anniversary wasn’t until Christmas Eve.

“Uh…” I stammered.

He laughed.

“Cin, I thought it was women who remembered anniversaries better than men,” he said, handing me the bouquet. “Okay, I’ll jog your memory. It was three years ago, to this very night, that I followed a certain little dog into these here woods. And it was three years ago, to this very night, that I saw the most beautiful girl I’d ever set eyes on working in the kitchen here. Sadly making her gingerbread fortress, all alone. Looking like an angel in the snowstorm.”

I looked up at him as a feeling of guilt over forgetting the importance of tonight settled in my gut.

I’d completely forgotten about what today was.

“Oh, honey,” I said, looking up at him. “I’m so sorry. I should have—”

“Shh,” he said.

He pulled me close to him, planting a long passionate kiss on my lips that made my knees buckle with its intensity. His trimmed beard felt rough and pleasant at the same time as it brushed up against my face.