A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 6

six

JACK

Jack knocked on the door of what he was pretty sure was Noelle’s parents’ house in Mountain Springs. The address seemed right. So did the decorations. Although most homes in the neighborhood had Christmas lights on their houses and a tree or two, this house was, by far, the one decorated the most. Noelle had said that her family was enthusiastic about celebrating Christmas, but he still hadn’t imagined it to this extent.

Lights outlined the house and windows and covered the dozen trees and shrubs in the front yard. The decorations rivaled the ones that had been in Downtown Park during the snow sculpture competition—the nativity and Santa’s village both included.

Aiden ran through the snow and wrapped his arms around one of a set of three giant Christmas tree bulbs that were nearly as tall as him like he was giving it a hug. “Look at how big they are!”

Aiden stomped the snow off his feet as they walked to the front door and then knocked. A girl who looked like she was about seven years old answered and invited them inside. A black lab was at her side and gave a single bark of a welcome, and Aiden immediately reached out and pet his head.

The girl pointed to a living room that was just off the entryway and said, “You can put your coats in there.”

They both shrugged off their coats and added them to the pile on the couch. Jack asked the girl for Noelle, and she said she was in the kitchen before skipping past a living room and into a family room he could see from the doorway.

They followed her and the dog and entered an area filled with people and Christmas decorations, Christmas music playing overhead. They were at the back of a family room that was open to a kitchen, with the most enormous dining room table he’d ever seen separating the two rooms. A twelve-foot tree rose to the ceiling in the family room, and about ten little kids played with toys in the open area in front of it.

A few adults were in the family room area, too, sitting on the couches holding a toddler or on the floor with the kids or standing, bouncing a baby. The rest of them were in the kitchen area, which was a hive of activity.

Aiden tugged on Jack’s shirt, not taking his wide eyes off the rooms full of people, so Jack leaned down.

“ All of these people are Noelle’s family?” he whispered.

“I think so. I know she has four sisters, and I think three of them are married and have kids.” There were definitely four people he could guess were her sisters in the kitchen, but six women were about the right age. And, taking a quick count as he looked around, there were enough spouses for five people. So maybe there were more than just siblings here. There were literally a dozen little kids, from babies to possibly seven years old, and he saw a couple who were an age that he could only assume meant they were her parents.

“How did they get so many?”

“I don’t know, buddy.”

A pack of three kids, all boys, two who looked Aiden’s age and one maybe a year younger, were building a tower out of something that looked like magnetic tiles. One of them got up and came over to Aiden. “Want to come play with us?”

Aiden looked up at Jack, and Jack nodded, so Aiden ran off to join them. One asked what his name was, and that was all it took for them to become friends. Aiden was helping them, a big grin on his face.

Noelle spotted Jack from where she stood in the kitchen and wiped her hands off on an apron she had tied around her waist as she made her way to him.

“Hi! I’m glad you could make it. Come on, let me introduce you to everyone.” Then she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him past the family room and the dining table to where the bulk of the people were working on getting all the gingerbread parts ready in the kitchen, and he tried to ignore how it felt to have Noelle’s hand in his.

“Hey, everyone, this is my boss, Jack. And that little guy over there playing with the boys is Aiden.” Then, rapid-fire, she introduced everyone to him. He quickly caught her sister’s names—Becca, Hope, Julianne, and Katie—since he’d heard them before, but the rest of the names were lost the moment she pointed to the next person and said their name. He did catch that two adult males were cousins, and two of the women she’d pointed at were their spouses. The names didn’t stick, but he did remember which ones were sisters, and he kind of caught which spouses were married to each other.

“Oh, and while we’re all here,” Noelle said, “does anyone know anything about who sent me the box of Christmas activity cards that Gran-gran painted?”

Everyone shook their heads, a few with eyebrows raised, but they all looked like they didn’t know what she was talking about.

“No? Come on. It had to be one of you. Sent to the post office in North Pole, Alaska first, to get the postmark?”

“Honey,” her mom said, “you might just have to accept that you’ll never find out how it got to you.”

But Noelle swung around and pointed at the guy who he was pretty sure was married to Noelle’s sister, Hope. “None of you are lying, right? Cory. You helped a lot in cleaning out Gran-gran’s painting room. It was you, wasn’t it?”

Cory held up both hands. “Noelle, I swear to you, if it had been me who had found a box she left with your name on it, I would’ve just handed it to you back in January when we cleaned everything—I wouldn’t have gone to the work of saving it for all these months and then shipping it to the North Pole first.”

“Yeah, you totally would’ve. It was no one? Really?” Noelle sighed.

“It sounds like the verdict is in,” Noelle’s dad said, grinning as he looked around the room at everyone. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

Everyone laughed, but Jack didn’t quite understand why.

Noelle leaned into Jack. “Every Christmas season, my dad declares at least one thing—but sometimes up to a dozen things—a ‘Christmas miracle.’ It has pretty much become its own tradition now.”

“All right,” Katie said, clapping her hands together, “now that that’s settled, who wants to be interviewed for our annual Christmas Eve video?”

One of Noelle’s brothers-in-law raised his hand, and Noelle nodded toward the kitchen counter. “Want to help me fill icing bags?”

He nodded and followed her through the crowd of people, who had all gone back to doing whatever jobs they had been doing before they paused for introductions. Noelle lifted a big mixing bowl from the stand, placed it on the counter, and then used a rubber spatula to scrape around the edges. Then she pulled toward them a stack of triangular-shaped bags that he could only guess were made of silicone and lifted the top one from the pile.

“We just need to drop in one of the tips and make sure it’s in the spot at the bottom just right, then we’ll fill them maybe half full. Do you want to hold or fill?”

“Hold.” Definitely. He didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

So he held the bag open as she scooped a bunch of the frosting onto the rubber spatula and put it into the bag, kind of wiping it off against the edge of the bag. Then she went for a second scoop.

It was awkward work, and it required them to stand close enough that the sides of their bodies were touching, their arms trying to occupy the same space. He kept things very professional at work, so there had never been a situation where he’d been this close to her before, and he found her presence intoxicating.

She took the bag from him and moved her hands around the outside, probably trying to get the frosting in the right place, then twisted the top and added a clip to it. He picked up the next bag and put the icing tip into it, just like she’d shown him.

“How is Rachel doing?”

He looked over to meet her eyes, which were definitely green and not hazel. This close, he could see the facets in her eyes and the darker rim around the outside that was almost a navy blue. He’d always thought that her eyes were bewitching, but they were even more so when he was this close.

“She’s doing okay. Much better than she was Saturday night or even yesterday.” It had touched him that she had sought him out at work this morning to ask how she was doing after her hospital visit.

“That’s good to hear. You must be worried about her all the time. I bet that’s stressful.”

It was. No one had ever really acknowledged that before. He hadn’t even really acknowledged that stress—he’d only ever thought about the worry he had.

They continued to work, filling bags. On one, he must not have been paying enough attention to the bag because one side folded in just as Noelle was putting the icing in, getting it on the part of the bag that was supposed to be on the outside. They both jerked forward to fix it, and the rubber spatula got knocked out of Noelle’s hand, which they both tried to catch. They managed to keep it from falling to the counter or the floor, but icing got on his hand, her arm, and a bit had taken to the air and landed on Noelle’s cheek.

Noelle laughed and reached for a roll of paper towels, and he found himself chuckling. She pulled one off the roll and handed it to him. He cleaned off his hand, then got a second paper towel and said, “Here, let me get the part on your cheek.”

He found himself holding his breath as he wiped the frosting from her skin, his face just inches from hers. And she seemed to be holding her breath, too, as whatever this was passed between them. A heat. A spark. A connection. Something. And he knew it wasn’t just him who was feeling it.

He dropped his hand and set the paper towel on the counter as she cleared her throat and turned back to the icing bags.

All of the adults who weren’t currently holding a child in their arms helped to get all the correct gingerbread pieces placed at each spot at the table, with the icing and candy for decorating spread evenly throughout. Then everyone started finding seats around the table. Jack and Noelle found a spot with Aiden right between them.

It was a bit overwhelming seeing so many family members around the big table. He was pretty sure his parents each had a sibling or two, but honestly, they had never talked about them. Neither of his parents had grown up with close families. It had only been the four of them until he was fifteen, and then it was just him and Rachel until Aiden was born. Aiden’s father had never even been in the picture. So all of this? It was a little too much.

“I don’t get how this makes a train car,” Aiden said, holding up two rectangle pieces of gingerbread. “There aren’t even any wheels.”

“See that table over there?” Noelle pointed at a large side table against the far wall with a Christmas village set up. “There’s a train track that goes all around it. The wheels are over there—what we’re making looks kind of like a box. We’ll put our gingerbread train cars on top of the wheels over there, and then the train can actually go around the track.”

“Cool! And does this gingerbread man go inside it?”

Noelle smiled. “No. That’s for you to decorate then take home and eat.”

Jack watched Noelle help Aiden as he worked on his own train car. He loved how patient she was with his nephew and how well she explained how to make the box and helped hold some pieces but let him do all the parts he could do on his own. It was sweet. He knew Rachel couldn’t give Aiden all the attention he needed right now and knew how happy it would make her to know her son was so well cared for. It made him happy, too.

Once they had their train cars made and were decorating them with the candy and icing, Aiden let out a long exhale. “I wish my mom was here making these, too.”

Noelle set down her icing bag. “How about we take lots of pictures? Then you can tell her about every single bit of it when you get home and show her the pictures, and she’ll feel like she was here.”

Aiden nodded his head enthusiastically. Jack probably should’ve thought about taking pictures on his own. Noelle pulled out her phone and took a few pictures, then Aiden turned to Jack and tapped his arm. “You get some on your phone, too. Get a selfie with me, you, and Noelle.”

Jack held his phone out to get all of them, but Aiden apparently wasn’t happy with Noelle being the furthest away from the camera, so Aiden turned to Noelle and said, “Come over here and squish your face right between mine and Uncle Jack’s.”

Noelle’s face reddened a bit, but she got out of her seat and positioned her face right between him and Aiden. Close enough that he could smell her peppermint shampoo and feel the buzz of energy that seemed to be fueled simply by their being so close.

When everyone finished their creations, they all headed over to the table with the Christmas village and placed their train cars on the mechanical wheel base set on the tracks. With his parents gone when he was fifteen, he’d always felt like he had to spend all of his extra time doing things that made money. Even after his company became profitable, he never slowed down to do something like this. He hadn’t even felt like he should come to this activity tonight because there was so much more work to do back at the office. Noelle had only said that he had to be at half of the activities, so this had been one he had definitely planned to skip.

But after missing half of the last event, he decided that he didn’t want Noelle thinking he couldn’t keep his word. At least he was pretty sure that was his entire reason for coming tonight. Or maybe he just hadn’t been willing to admit that other feelings about Noelle played a role in the decision. Regardless of the reason, tonight had felt refueling, somehow, which totally surprised him. He wouldn’t have guessed that would be what he’d be feeling at this point.

Once everyone’s train car was on the tracks, Noelle’s dad turned the train on, and Aiden watched in wonder as the train went all around the village, carrying the train cars that they had just made.

Jack looked at Noelle, and they both shared a smile. But he knew that his smile wasn’t just about seeing Aiden’s wonder. It was also about Noelle herself. He’d already felt attracted to her more than he was okay with, but now he felt a deepening attraction to her that scared him.

This woman was going to be the death of him. She was as off-limits as they came since not only was she his employee, but she was currently his employee times two.