What She Wants for Christmas

Nicole wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t tell Jayne her mother had thought the logger was a hunk. No, that wasn’t true; she did know why. She was embarrassed. Her own mother, for crying out loud!

“Listen,” Jayne said, “I gotta go. Maddy and Kelly and I are going to a film festival tonight. They’re running a bunch of foreign films. I don’t like subtitles, but Maddy says some of the guys are going, including—get this—Russell Harlan, so I’m wearing that red dress—you know, that one you helped me pick out—and my hair on top of my head in a scrunchy, and he can’t miss me, right?”

Talking to her best friend hadn’t helped, Nicole thought a moment later, hanging up. Now she was more depressed. She was the one who’d liked Russ Harlan, not Jayne. He had these really dark eyes and he wore an earring and he was super intense about things. She’d wanted him intense about her. She was the one he was supposed to be noticing, not Jayne.

“I feel like I’ve been sent to prison,” she said aloud to her empty room. Her room. Yeah, right. Her bedroom had had blue plush carpet and a cushioned window seat and its own bathroom. This room had peeling wallpaper, which her mother said they’d replace, and bare wood floors. Her gilt-trimmed bedroom set looked about as out of place as Nicole felt.

They couldn’t stay in this dump. They just couldn’t. Things were great in Bellevue. Nicole wished she’d paid more attention to all Mom’s talk about buying into a veterinary practice somewhere. She’d been looking for so long Nicole quit listening when Mom talked about why she liked or didn’t like this town or that vet or whatever. Big mistake. She should have listened carefully. Instead, first thing she knew, her mother had gone ahead and done it. A For Sale sign appeared in their front yard, and they all drove up here one Saturday to look at houses.

The sight of White Horse had put Nicole in shock. It had a whole two streets of businesses. One pizza parlor that she could see. One! The movie theater was this run-down little place that played a single movie at a time, a month or more after it’d opened in Seattle and Bellevue and even Everett. The high school was this huge ugly stucco building that must have been built fifty years ago. Mom thought it was great that you could walk anywhere in town. Great. Where were you supposed to go? The library? The bowling alley? Who bowled?

And she had to register for school tomorrow and start the next day. Mom insisted that moving during the summer was easiest, so she wouldn’t be the only kid whose first day it was. Nicole had believed her then, but that was before she’d seen White Horse. How many new kids were there likely to be in the high school? Two? Three? She could just see it now: heads turning as she walked into each class, the stares as she went down the hall.

Well, she didn’t care what a bunch of farmers thought, anyway. What she had to do was figure out how to get her mother to change her mind and move back to Bellevue.

At first she’d thought it was hopeless, but lately she’d begun to wonder. The farmers around here didn’t want a woman vet, which Nicole thought sucked, except for the fact that her mom was looking more discouraged every day. Her mom had figured White Horse was some kind of rural paradise; she’d given Nicole and Mark all these lectures about how the move was as much for them as for her, because in a small town like this they were getting away from drugs and crime and gangs. So everything was supposed to be perfect, right?

The first glimmerings of an idea brought creases to Nicole’s brow. Wait a minute—Mom was catching the drift, but too slowly. Dr. Craig would hire someone to take her place at the animal hospital in Bellevue; then, even if they left White Horse, they might have to go somewhere else. What if Nicole could speed up the process? Show her mother all the crummy parts of life in this cow town? She could mount a campaign. She wouldn’t want to be obvious; that would make Mom mad. No, she could be really subtle, just sort of coax Mom to really look around.

Surely that was all it would take.

By this time, Nicole was sitting bolt upright, legs crossed. Like tomorrow. She wouldn’t let her mother stop at the school office. No, she’d insist that someone give them a tour, show them the lab facilities—did this school know what a lab was?—and the library. Another of the things Mom went on and on about was how important a good education was. Nicole smiled. If her mother thought they wouldn’t get a good education here, they were gone.

Back to Bellevue. Yes.

JOE GLANCED at his watch. Noon. “Take an hour,” he called, and the two men he’d brought out on this job nodded and carried their chain saws to the open back of his pickup.

They consulted briefly and then Brad Mauser said, “We’re going to run into town and get some burgers. Want to come?”

Joe’s glance strayed to the kitchen window of the farmhouse, where he could see the blur of a white face and dark hair. “Nah.” He shrugged. “I brought a sandwich.”

Though he was used to the scream of chain saws and the thunder of falling trees, the silence after the men left was welcome. Autumn sunshine warm on his back, he looked around at their morning’s work.

A dozen trees lay on the ground between the house and fence, lined up as neatly as pick-up sticks pulled from the pile. Most of the downed trees had already been shaved of their limbs and were ready for loading. If all went well, they’d have the other half down this afternoon. Come morning, they could get the timber out of here and clean up. Give the slash a few weeks to dry and he’d come back and burn it. If he was smart, he’d come back on a day when Dr. Teresa Burkett was working and therefore not home.

The jolt he’d felt in his gut when she opened the door that day last week had scared him a little. She was out of his league. He was lucky to have a high-school diploma. She’d finished God knows how many years of college. He was a small-town boy with no ambition to leave his home. She was a big-city professional woman who probably thought White Horse was pretty and peaceful. It was. But, unlike him, she’d be heading for Seattle every time she got bored.

He couldn’t afford to acknowledge his attraction to her or the spark of interest he’d seen in her dark eyes.

Sandwich, he reminded himself, before his glance strayed again to her kitchen window. He grunted and turned toward the driveway where his pickup was parked. Rounding the house, he walked right into her.

Joe reached out and grabbed her before she went tumbling. Eyes wide, she looked up at him. “I’m sorry! That was dumb. I wasn’t watching—”

“I don’t know who was dumb,” he interrupted. “I’m the one who almost ran you down.” Reluctantly he let her go. Her shoulders felt as fragile under his hands as she’d declared her psyche to be. “Did you come out to see our progress?”

“Well, actually—” her tongue touched her lips “—I came out to invite you and your men in for lunch.”

He had trouble not staring at her mouth. “They went into town.”

Damn, she was beautiful, tiny, with these huge brown eyes and delicate features emphasized by the severity of the French braid that confined her dark hair. But it was neither the tiny nor the beautiful that got to him; it was the defiance in her eyes, coupled with the smile that played most of the time at one corner of her mouth.

“Well, then.” She met his gaze boldly, though now her cheeks were touched with pink. “Can I talk you into lunch?”

“You don’t need to cook—”

“I already did. Homemade minestrone soup and fresh-baked bread.”

“I’m too dirty to come in.”

“You can take your boots off.”

What could he say? A moment later he padded in stocking feet into her bathroom to wash his hands. Waiting for the water to warm up, he frowned at his image in the mirror. What the hell did she see in him? All that met his eyes were dirty denim, callused hands and a haircut that was long on function and short on style. She’d discover soon enough that his conversation could be summed up about the same way.

But, by God, at least he was clean when he returned to the kitchen. She’d set the table there: two quilted place mats, a glass jar of spiky asters and late daisies, stemmed water glasses, silverware laid out properly, with an extra fork for some unseen dessert. It was pretty—and made him feel awkward. Only the sight of her black Labrador lying under the table belied the formality.

Her eyes touched his face and shied away. “You’re my first guest in this house. I thought I’d celebrate.”

He nodded and sat down while she ladled steaming fragrant soup into his bowl and offered him slices of crusty warm bread.

“Would you like a beer?” she asked, and he relaxed a little. At least she wasn’t pouring French wine.

“No, thanks. I don’t drink when I’m going to operate a chain saw or heavy equipment.”

“Oh. No, of course not.”

“I haven’t seen a woman blush in a long time,” he heard himself say.

That did it. Her cheeks were now as rosy as though a winter freeze were biting at them. But she also laughed.

“I don’t usually blush. I think it must be you.”

Him? What was she saying? If she’d been any other woman, he would have known, but her? Why him?

“I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” he said clumsily.

He almost thought he heard her sigh. “Are you married?” she asked.

His heart did a peculiar heavy-footed dance in his chest. “No.”

Her cheeks hadn’t faded one iota. “Engaged or…or…”

He helped her out. “No.”

“Oh.”

A slow smile was growing on his face. “Are you going somewhere with this, ma’am?”

“I’m just curious,” she said with dignity.