Three Nights before Christmas (5 page)

L
acey’s eyelids popped
open at 5:45 a.m. She glared at the red numbers glowing from the alarm clock on the bedside table before pulling her plush pillow over her face to muffle her frustrated groan. She’d expected sleep to come fast and hard once she was in her own bed. Instead, over the past week she’d been plagued by fitful, dreamlike visions that had left her sweatier than anyone should be in Montana in early December.

And she knew exactly who to blame—herself. Her own stupid subconscious had taken years of real-life frustrations and subverted them into dirty dreams.

Kicking off the down comforter that Sawyer had kept in storage for her all these years, she rolled to the side of the bed and sat up, dropping her face into her hands until she could get control of her ragged breathing.

“Screw you, Austin Wilder,” she muttered into her palms. Unfortunately, the words contained the wrong kind of heat, the kind that would get her in trouble if she didn’t control it. The kind that had driven her back into Dave’s manipulative, drug-dealing arms over and over, urging her to believe his lies because he’d been funny, cute, easy and so damn good in bed.

She’d had three years to learn not to trust her body’s urges. Three years of witnessing what toll an imbalance of power could take on a person’s soul.

But a week of almost daily interactions with Austin had the power to overwhelm every single lesson prison had taught her.

She rubbed her cold nose and forced herself out of bed. Austin may have invaded her dreams in ways she couldn’t explain, but
she
got to control how she reacted to him during daylight hours. And she would
not
let him worm his way into her conscious brain.

The scent of freshly brewing coffee reached her and gave her the extra kick she needed to get dressed and leave her room. She’d adopted her brother’s habit of showering at night to get rid of all the sap and grime she brought home from the forest. Slipping into her double bed with its feather mattress and fluffy pillows was a luxury she would never take for granted, and she liked to show her bed the respect it deserved by showing up clean. Showering at night saved time first thing in the morning, too.

When she got to the kitchen, Sawyer was pouring coffee into two mugs. He quirked his lips in a way she took as a smile. “Morning.”

Or at least that was how she interpreted his grunt.

“Morning,” she replied, injecting her voice with extra sunshine. “You know, normal people don’t get up this early.”

“Normal people don’t take over a family business that requires them to be outside all day in December, either.”

“So we’ve established you’re not normal, then.”

He snorted. “Fun game. You next?”

“We’ll be here too long.” She opened the fridge and pulled out a carton of cream, pouring it liberally into her coffee. After sliding the cream back onto the shelf, she dug a heaping teaspoon of sugar from their grandma’s porcelain sugar bowl, dumped the sugar into her coffee, stirred and paused for a moment of reverent silence before taking that first, life-affirming sip of the day.

Her sigh of satisfaction hit the hot brew and sent wafts of sweet, coffee-scented steam into her face. “Damn. This is good.”

“Making bacon and eggs. Want some?”

“Bacon. No eggs.” Even though he used real eggs from a neighboring farm, instead of powder, she couldn’t bring herself to even look at them.

“How ’bout sausage instead of eggs? Fridge. Second shelf down.” He heated two skillets and got to work on their breakfast. “Oh, and I packed up last night’s leftover meatloaf for your lunch.”

She got the packet of sausage out and handed it to him. “Are you giving me clogged arteries for Christmas?”

“Nope. I’m giving you a high-protein, low-carb diet. It’ll help you get back to normal.”

She propped her hip against the counter and crossed her arms. “Thanks for calling me fat, Sawyer. I needed that little self-esteem boost today.”

He turned away from the stove long enough to tug her earlobe and make a big show of peering into her ear. “Weird, I don’t
see
anything blocking my words and turning them into bullshit. Must be a problem deeper in here.” He tapped her head and she swatted him away. “You’re working your butt off.” He held up a finger when she opened her mouth. “Not that you have a big butt to work off. I know I’m your brother and it’s my job to keep your ego in check, but I wouldn’t give a crap about your weight as long as you’re healthy. And we both know your lifestyle in the past three years was anything but healthy. You’re working for me, and I need you in good shape to do manual labor. That means food that gives you lots of long-lasting energy, not cheap shit that fills you up but slows you down. So eat your cavewoman breakfast and grab your meatloaf so we can get to work.”

He plunked five bacon slices and three sausages onto a plate and pushed it toward her.

Shaking her head in mock exasperation, she muttered, “You should work in a prison. You obviously missed having someone to boss around.”

He pretended to think about it before shaking his head. “Bossing you around is no fun. I have better chance of getting the trees to listen to my wisdom.”

Throughout breakfast, they limited their chitchat to work-related topics. She grabbed a notepad and blue Bic, and took a few notes as Sawyer described what he wanted her to do today. Nervous energy sizzled to life in Lacey’s gut. Today would be different from the past ten days. Today, she wasn’t heading up the mountain to the national forest but would instead get dropped off in town with thirty trees to sell during the Marietta Stroll.

The stroll was an annual event to boost local business in the run-up to the holidays. Dozens of business owners along Main Street decorated their shop fronts and chipped in to light up the town, including a giant tree in the main square. Businesses like Gallagher’s that didn’t have stores in the center of town set up kiosks and stands to promote their wares. Today, Lacey would be managing Gallagher’s at the stroll, trying to entice customers to buy right then or to drive out to Gallagher’s to view the rest of their stock.

She hadn’t been into town since she’d gotten home. She’d wanted to minimize the stares and gossip, and there was something weirdly comforting about the isolation of working up in the forest. Very few customers came up to cut their own, so she mostly spent her days helping the guys cut and bale trees. Of course, she had to deal with Austin, which meant an almost daily call to her parole officer to let him know she’d had contact with law enforcement. But those encounters had stopped being a surprise. Town was an environment beyond her control. Anyone would be able to sneak up on her, and she’d learned over the past few years that wasn’t a good thing. Sure, Mariettans weren’t likely to shank her, but words could cut, too.

Sawyer’s hand covered hers. “You okay?”

She blinked at him. “Yeah. Just taking notes. Why?”

His brows rose slowly and he nodded toward her notepad without uttering a word. She glanced down at it and dropped her pen. “Crap.”

At some point in her mental wanderings, her notes had turned into a doodle. She’d drawn a woman with fiery, hate-filled eyes and a tongue shaped like a jagged dagger.

Sawyer turned the notepad to face him. “She looks familiar.”

Yeah, she did. “Dave’s mom. I’m Satan’s handmaiden, you know. I tempted her angelic baby boy into a life of crime.”

Sawyer’s face turned grim. “Here, give me the pen.”

She slid it across to him, and he went to work on the paper. Although he’d excelled in his English and creative writing classes in high school, he’d never been good at art—heck, neither had she, but she’d picked up some drawing skills in prison. So when he passed the notepad back to her, it took her a second to understand his rudimentary design. Next to her drawing of Mrs. Dugger, he’d drawn an equal sign and a bat hovering over something that looked like a steaming pile of crap.

“She’s batshit crazy,” he explained. “You drew the
crazy;
I drew the
batshit
.”

Lacey’s heart filled so full of gratitude for her big brother her eyes welled up with it. It took a few seconds to blink it away. “You have a magical way with words, Sawyer.”

“Thanks, munch.”

She shook her head with a chuckle. “We should probably start loading up.”

He didn’t take her cue to stand, just sat there with his arms crossed and leveled her with a frank stare. “You don’t have to do this, if you’re not ready. You could stay here and oversee the farm, and I can take care of the stroll.”

“Not gonna happen. I can’t live my life hiding away here and in the forest. The longer I put it off, the less ready I’ll be. At least this way, I’ll be going into town when everyone’s happy and full of holiday spirit and generosity, right?”

“And tanked up on eggnog.”

She shrugged. “I survived having my arm sliced open with a rusty nail file and the wound spat in by the germiest woman I’ve ever met. How bad can the stroll be?”

*

Holy nightmare before
Christmas.
Austin stared, dumbfounded, at the woman setting up a stand right next to the pitch his brother Gabriel had selected as their spot for selling tickets to Santa’s Wonderland.

Of all the fucking bad luck.

Lacey’s back was to him, so she hadn’t noticed him yet. She bent over to yank up the metal legs of a folding table that was lying upside down. Just beyond her, a couple of guys were unloading a truck full of trees. Pine and freshly cut wood filled the crisp air, two scents Austin had never considered annoying but, right now, they were twisting him up inside.

He wished he could fool himself into thinking he didn’t recognize her and could just ignore her, but he was an honest man, even with himself. For one thing, she wore the same black jeans, green shirt, and puffy yellow jacket every day, making him wonder whether it was the only outfit she owned. Plus, there was the fact that she almost never stood still. Over the past week, he’d seen her wielding a chainsaw to fell a spruce. Hoisting a cut tree onto her shoulder and trudging through the snow. Only once did he find her at rest, sitting on the branch of a sturdy, old bur oak, at least ten feet in the air with her legs dangling as she munched on an apple peacefully—at least, till she spotted him watching her. Then her face had shuttered faster than a shop at closing time.

Pretty much the same way it did now, as she straightened and turned with her hands pressed against her lower back. She froze momentarily, but not before he caught the exasperation written all over her face.

She waved her arm over the upside-down table. “No soil, so pretty difficult to plant marijuana seeds.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Copying her gesture, he waved his arm over his jeans and thick jacket. “Off duty. But I’ve seen drugs stashed in stranger places than that.”

Voice dripping with irony, she said, “Me, too.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I bet you have.” Nodding at the table, he said, “Can I help?”

“Nope.” She turned and bent again, long enough to stick her toes under the table, grab the opposite edge, lift, and flip it over with a little grunt. He didn’t know why he was impressed by her strength. She wasn’t a slight woman, and he’d seen her manhandling full-grown trees. He didn’t know much about her old career—the engineering one, not the drug smuggling one—but working on trains wasn’t for the fainthearted, something he’d been learning recently. She kept her back to him as she covered the table with a dark red cloth and a string of battery-operated twinkle lights.

What was he sticking around and staring at her for? He had work of his own to do here, and he knew better than to expect anything approaching a conversation. Something held him captive, though. Maybe it was the efficiency of her movements as she decorated her table with a mini tree and a display of ornaments that caught the morning sun and reflected it back at him. Maybe it was the self-possessed way she seemed to block out his presence completely, making him all the more eager for acknowledgment that he was standing right here. Maybe—

A hand clasped his shoulder and he jumped, his hand instinctively flying to his hip till he noticed his brother.

Gabriel threw his hands up in surrender and took a step back. “Whoa, sorry, man.”

“Jesus, Gabriel, it’s a good thing I wasn’t wearing my sidearm.”

His younger brother laughed, a sound that had lost its rustiness in the ten months since he’d fallen for his fiancée. “As if I’ve never faced one of those before.”

True, that. Gabriel’s air force career had had an explosive ending, and his deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq had no doubt pitted him against other dangers Austin could only imagine.

“Anyway, I’ve been trying to get your attention for a couple minutes. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re not Gallaghers, and we don’t sell trees. Our stand’s the one with the picture of Santa and his elves, and we’ll be selling a magical experience to last a lifetime, not a tree that dies and sheds needles all over the living room floor.”

“Ha ha.” Austin chanced one last glance at Lacey, whose jerky head movement convinced him she’d been eavesdropping. Not that it would be difficult to do, given that he and Gabriel were just a couple feet away. Partly out of politeness and partly to annoy her, he said, “Ms. Gallagher, good luck with sales today.”