“So …” He took her cue and changed the subject, all business. “A real tree fetches a pretty good price in the city?”
Hanna nodded. “A king’s ransom. Mistletoe is even more dear.”
Oh, gee, did she have to bring up mistletoe? Around him, of all people?
“Oh, I know mistletoe is pricey,” he said. “I bought some once.”
“You have never bought a tree but you bought mistletoe?” Crazy to be curious, but she was. “Why?”
He looked off into the distance. “I think I had this cheesy idea that if I carried it around in my pocket I could haul it out and hold it over my head and collect lots of free Christmas kisses.”
She felt a shiver along her spine at the thought of meeting Sam Chisholm under the mistletoe.
Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
Cara Colter
CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is the recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the ‘Love and Laughter’ category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com.
To all my incredible new friends in New Zealand: the Browns, the Burtons, the Emmersons, the Pilkingtons and the Kalinowskis. Thank you. Your genuine kindness and generosity humbles and amazes.
Contents
“I QUIT!”
Hanna Merrifield held the phone away from her ear, and then tucked it in close again so her coworkers at the upscale accounting firm of Banks and Banks would not be disturbed by the loud, belligerent voice of her caller.
“Now, now, Mr. Dewey,” she said, her tone conciliatory, “you can’t just quit.”
“Can’t?” Mr. Dewey shouted, outraged. “Can’t?”
“It’s just that,” Hanna said soothingly, resisting the temptation to hold the phone away again, “you would be leaving me in quite a pinch.” Her eyes slid to her desktop calendar. “It’s November thirtieth. Christmas is only weeks away.”
“Hang Christmas.”
That sentiment expressed how she had felt herself a million times or so. Hanna closed her eyes against the work, piled in neat stacks on her desk, each screaming its urgent deadline. Not now, she wanted to shout at Mr. Dewey, the manager of Christmas Valley Farm.
The farm had been in her family since the late 1800s. But Hanna had become the sole, and reluctant, owner of it upon the death of her mother six months ago.
Christmas Valley Farm. The place that she never wanted to go back to.
And it really, until this phone call, had looked like she might never have to.
“Isn’t someone coming to look at it tomorrow?” she reminded Mr. Dewey. “A potential buyer?” She didn’t add finally. “If you could just hang on until the showing, give me a chance to find someone else to manage it, I would be most appreciative—”
“Have a listen to this.” A terrible noise came over the phone line: the screeching of tires and blaring of horns.
“What on earth?”
“It’s that damn pony. Evil, she is. She’s out on the road again. I’m done. I’m done with the midget horse, I’m done with people knocking on my cottage door day and night demanding trees and wreaths and sleigh rides. I’m done with all the ho-ho-ho and merriment. I hate it all, and the dwarf horse, Molly, the most.”
Really, he was summing up the way Hanna herself had often felt growing up on the Christmas tree farm. But that feeling of being exhausted and fed up and one hundred percent done with all things Christmas didn’t come at the beginning.
Her resentments—about all the work, and all the demands, and the elf costume, and her father’s new and inventive gimmicks to sell trees and wreaths—piled up by the end of the frantic weeks leading to Christmas.
“Mr. Dewey,” Hanna said tentatively, “Have you been drinking?”
“I